OT - Gridwatch - coal giving its all?

I have never seen that before.

Perhaps there has been an unexpected demand and the coal stations were already hot to trot.

The Natural Philosopher expressed precisely :

Or perhaps they were deliberately 'hot to trot', in anticipation of the coming freeze beginning tomorrow?

Nothing other then using allocated hours under the Industrial Emissions Directive, gas supplies in Europe being limited, selling into the market gas bought on forward contracts and storage being topped up.

Coal today and for the past 24 hours at 6.5 - 7GW is nowhere 'near the stops'

There is currently 12781 MW of coal capacity 2-14 days ahead (same as for today but that was declared Thursday)

Minimum margin for today was 14279MW at around 7pm

That gives me a great idea. If the Krauts get uppity over our Brexit deal, we should fire up all the old coal power stations and give 'em a reminder of good old 1970s style sulphurous pollution and its wonderful defoliant effects on their precious Black Forest. Anyone remember acid rain? :->

Solar's contribution showing as 4MW at 22.30 - is there a surprise full moon we don't know about?

They are doing this to themselves already, because they shut down a lot of their nukes and have now had to restart some lignite power stations. So we don't need to bother.

Indeed, but I was only joking of course.

that is not an alternbative to what I said.

Ah yes. Gas has gone expoensive hasn't it? I spotted that but didnt connect the two...

I am not sure how real that capacity reaslly is. When I have tried to tot up power stations I cant get much over 8...

I dont think so...

select timestamp,solar from day where timestamp like "2018-02-24 22:%";

Solar was being recorded as bugger all, correctly, at that time.

Make hay while the sun shines, or to put it another way, lets use it while we still can before its environmentally impossible.

Thing is that back in the old days of Tomorrows World there were stories of how to burn coal cleanly and here we are all these years later seeming to have given up.

Brian

Burning coal cleanly was never and never will be possible.

Have you considered putting the cooling towers on a colder planet?

Er, nope! It was being shown as 0.004GW to be precise, at precisely

Yup, same with diesel engines. A piss-poor decision IMV.

where?

I have double checked the software and I cant see how it could be possible

The same value gets written to the database as is used by gridwatch to drive the dials.

I can only assume you had a stale page cached in the browser.

at precisely

No, that may have been what your browser reported...

Have youi considered working out what 'clean' actually means?

All things are possible, but all the free lunches were eaten long ago, and clean coal burning* comes at a price which probably exceeds niclear power.

Of course try making 'renewable' energy with zero environmental impact! Quite apart from the massive structures, and the bird kills, every single MWh it produces has been taken from the environment it would otherwise have impacted.

There was a lot of talk about fluidised bed combustion. But I think that was mainly aimed at increased efficiency and the ability to remove sulphur dioxide because acid rain was the big environmental worry then.