[OT] Midnight electricity cost -£73/MWh

[Spike]

When will this nonsense of electricity prices end?

[jon]

When we build more Nuclear Power Stations, that Gummer killed.

[Brian Gaff]

I doubt if it ever will as long as profit is the aim. They cannot exactly know what it will be costing in the next hour, never mind next month. Basically in them old days, the costs may have gone up and down, but clever people could see that you win in the summer and we win in the winter, and still have a healthy profit, as the range of prices has been the same for many years. Now however its all a bit like the stock market with everyone attempting to make some money so you get swings all over the place and as we saw, a lot of the companies who used to be profitable, could not keep going as the costs to them were not predictable any more.

Its going to take a long time to find ways to keep a store of Electricity, and so you used to stock pile gas to get around the problems so you could generate you way out of the bad times, but since we seem to have let gas storage slide in favour of this just in time model and because policies on CO2 are making Gas a bad idea, then there is little you can do without screwing stuff up.

Its not just the UK though is it, and I fully recall the mess when Opec cut up rough and restricted production and all the fuel went up. Brian

[alan_m]

Do you mean the olden days of the 1960s and 1970s when the yearly inflation rates were between 1 and 24% and averaging double digit for a lot of this time?

I suggest that maybe you were not paying the bills at the time or perhaps you are a just a bit forgetful :)

[Tim Streater]

I think "never" is the word you're looking for.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why bother? You can keep enough energy stored up in a pair of containers to run britain for several months, and the batteries don't even need charging up, they come ready charged.

Its called 'plutonium'

[Tim Streater]

Well quite. But anyone working for the BBC would have a fit if you suggested that. (that's anyone living in Notting Hill, Camden, and Hampstead, isn't it?)

[Andrew]

Is the correct answer. Electricity is just the movement of electrons through a circuit. If no circuit exists (disconnected but charged battery) then no electricity exists.

[Tim Streater]

:-)

I wasn't quite going at it from that PoV but still. A means of converting a low-density form of energy (such as wind) into a high-density form is what we're after. Pumped storage? Twenty sites like Dinorwig could power the grid for 6 -8 hours. Or dam up a few Welsh/Scottish valleys and pump sea-water into 'em. That'd go down well. If you have £1,000,000,000,000 to spare, you could power the grid with today's batteries for several days. Take you a while (a long while) to charge em up, though.

[alan_m]

Isn't the latest idea to have pumped storage usingg

[alan_m]

I'll start that again.....

Isn't the latest idea to have pumped storage using something heavier than water (aka fracking mud) so that it can be more locally stored in large tanks on top of every English hillock?

[The Natural Philosopher]

ArtStudents™ have Ideas, Engineers have viable options.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

+1

[Tim Lamb]

Would the mass increase be offset by turbulence losses anyway?

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[The Natural Philosopher]

Not necessarily. Think of a rope a pulley and a big concrete block, bu that isn't the issue here.

Mud is largely water, and it isn't that much heavier than water.

The real point is to do the sums & work out how much stored energy we need, and then work out what technologies could do it..

I worked out that if in summer we pumped *out* all of loch Ness completely, then with around 45GW of seawater turbines, we could just about last the winter...running of wind turbines and solar panels. By flooding it all over again

The cost of course would far exceed the cost if not subsidising any renewables and building 45GW of nuclear power instead..

[alan_m]

The downside is also the increase of erosion of the turbine blades.

[Theo]

Oil well drilling mud has a density about 3x water, which I think is the idea. It's typically barium sulphate based which has a density of 4.49 of itself, or haematite (5.3), plus water and other stuff.

However, it has to be set against the costs. Water is cheap and abundant, drilling mud isn't. So using drilling mud gets you a 3x higher performance for a 100x (made up number) increase in costs. You'll only pay that if drilling mud makes something viable that water can't do. It's hard to think of a situation where that might make sense.

Yes, although once you've done that the 'nibbling' approach works too - if there are 100 methods and they each take 1% of the problem, we can get there. It doesn't need one method to solve the whole problem. But are there really 100 methods, and are we sure they can achieve 1% not 0.00001%?

Theo

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why dont yuou actually think about that and work it out? The reality is there are no solutions that are economically viable at this point in time, nor any promising technologies.

Its cheaper to build and all nuclear grid by a factor of ten.

[Tim Lamb]

How much would electricity bills go up if some/all of the nuclear build cost was added to our accounts? Borrowing from China or allowing EDF a monopoly seems a huge mistake to me.

Post Ukraine war might be a time to put something to oneside before we start turning on the patio heaters again.

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[Rod Speed]

That's never going to be viable.