Day 7 of the renewables misery continues, relieved slightly due to a LP system pushing in from the west. Solar is, of course, pretty much zero, wind has picked up to a massive 11% of demand from a low of around 2%, and our highly-polluting mostly-imported biomass is flat out at 7.5%.
With non-renewables contributing 90% of an average 35GW over that time, it implies that any post-net-zero battery-based solution to the 'renewables gap' would have to supply
0.9 x 35 x 24 x 7 = 5300GWh in a similar non-solar, low-wind, multi-day scenario.
If an average EV battery is 60kWh, we would need
5300x10^9/60x10^3 = the equivalent of 88 million car batteries to cover the shortfall.
Recharging these batteries might be problematic.The SmartGrid idea isn't that smart.
In other news, Hornsea Two came on stream yesterday (plated at just over one point twenty-one GW, enough to power 1.3 million homes) to much fanfare on the radio news; it's just a pity the wind wasn't blowing and so it produced nothing. This feature wasn't mentioned.
In 2020 wind produced 75000GWh of energy from 11000 turbines with a total capacity of 24GW, or 8.6GW per hour throughout the year (8760 hours) for an efficiency of some 36%. What a waste of resources, especially the Hinckley-C amounts of highly-polluting concrete and the unrecyclable plastics that will be landfill in 20 years. Still, corporations make billions from it, ArtStudents rave over it, greenies think it's wonderful and we ought to have more, so it must be A Good Thing.
Spot prices for electricity in the EU yesterday were some 480 euro/MWh, or about 40p/kWh wholesale.
Now here's a green argument: "We got through this period of no wind, no sunshine without widespread blackouts. We even managed to export a bit of electricity to France. The amount of carbon saved by having renewables generating much of the time, even if not all the time, more than compensates for the short periods of a few days per year when coal, OCGT and smelly old diesel generators are called on, so it's worth doing".
They would have a point, I think, if reducing the UK CO2 output was the over-riding aim, regardless of cost (which it is for some), despite the fact that it will make little difference to global levels of CO2 and will put our industries at a disadvantage compared with the likes of Russia, China and even India, with resulting closures and job losses.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a couple of dozen large nukes spread around the country, and not have the views spoiled by acres of solar panels or wind mills.
Just keep spreading the word until the public get it, and than they can throw smart meters through politicians windows till they eventually get it too.
of course, they are only ArtStudents, so the fact that when you are building a power station that only gets used a few days a year and then when the electricity price is around £300/Mwh., you dont care how much diesel it burns, what you want is the cheapests most coal gas or diesel guzzling piece of crap that not very much money can buy.
So all the carbon you saved gets offset by all the carbon you throw at keeping the lights on when renewables stop working
The metric is moving as we talk, from 'low carbon because climate change' to 'keeping the lights on without busting all the energy companies;' which means in the end low carbon, because carbon fuel is very expensive, except for coal, and so that least they cant pretend to use gas backed renewables, they *have* to use nuclear, and as everyone knows, but no one dares admit, once you have sufficient nuclear/hydro/biomass to cover times of no wind, what the f*ck is the point of having windmills as well?
AS I keep saying we have windmills because the EU said we had to have windmills, because German windmill companies wanted their products to be mandatory.
That is the reason I voted Brexit. Corruption on that scale is unacceptable and dangerous.
Amen to that. Some years back I was walking along the beach at Dunwich taking pictures of Sizewell B and a family said 'what is that thing you are taking pictures of ? and I said 'its our biggest nuclear power station ' 'Oh' they said . 'Is it?' , and wandered off completely uninterested.
Are there any actual numbers available on that? It seems unlikely that keeping one or two coal fired power stations 'hot spinning' for say fifty weeks, plus say two weeks of OCGTs and banks of diesel generators going flat out, produces more carbon than is saved by fifty weeks of renewables, even if they are a bit variable.
I've been keeping an eye on the carbon intensity stats of late - via the National Grid ESO app, but also on:
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It's interesting in that, while things are bad, they aren't as bad as might be expected. National intensity at times like this is often ~250 gCO2/kWh, compared with a modern CCGT at 411 or hard coal at 1000 [1]. When the wind isn't blowing, what happens is that Scotland is low (<100) due to hydro and residual wind. East Midlands and south Wales are high (400) due to gas, coal and lack of offshore wind. The rest of the country is somewhere in between, no doubt helped by nuclear.
So while it isn't great to be '22% zero carbon' in the winter, it's better than you might expect. (Right now it's 39% zero carbon). The rest of the year the numbers are better, suggesting hot spinning is not a big contribution.
The data is available for download (post 2017) if anyone wants to look at it.
The irish grid who have windmills and reasonably old frame style CCGTs commissioned a study. They compared fuel usage on calm days and windy days. against the amount of wind power.
What they found was that even with reasonably decent CCGTs the amount of fuel 'saved' by the windmills was less than half what the electricity produced by them suggested.
So now they keep gas running all the time and dump surplus windpower on the UK.
A study done by IIRC Latvia using coal to balance wind, estimated that adding wind power to their coal plant would *increase* carbon emissions.
Germany balances wind with coal. Germany is the highest. CO2 emitter in Europe by any metric.
And ultimately that is the only way you can get near the truth. The complexities of fusel usage for start-stop, part throttle and high slew rate ramping simply are not known, and it is to their credit that Eirgrid made their fuel consumption figures available to independent consultants to find out.
In the case of Germany its really a matter of seeing how much fossil fuel goes into their grid against penetration of wind power. Germany doesn't *want* there to be hard data on how much of a disaster energiewende really is.
Its not a simple question you see. In fact its almost impossible without really complex modelling of several different types of thermal plant to say just how much fuel is spent on getting thermal plant up to temperature and keeping it there whilst not producing any useful power.
One figure from Eirgrid was that it took 10,000 euros of gas just to get a CCGT power station running off cold standby, which needs to be done every evening with solar power.
Consider what happens when a depression comes in. wind power slews up rapidly, so CCGT plant must be shut down, and all the heat in them wasted. Gas is then burnt to get it going again as the wind drops. CCGT plant is not designed for rapid slewing, its designed to be efficient at a steady full output. In short you are forcing the efficient plant into a regime where it isn't efficient.
Then market forces dictate that below capacity factors of a certain amount, it is more cost effective to build OCGT, simply on account of the lower capital cost. You don't want expensive efficient power stations idle for half the time.
None of this is easy to calculate, but it would be easy to measure simply by looking at gas burn versus output of power stations on windy days versus calm days. No one has bothered, except the Irish. No one
*wants* to know whether or not renewable energy is working, because, it being an EU directive, it wouldn't change anything if it wasn't..
Complying with EU law and supporting German industry and raking in subsidy gouged out of the plebs is far far more important than actually saving the planet.
Add in the carbon footprint of all the concrete in a windmill base, and its steel, iron and copper, and the constant maintenance by boat and helicopter, and its fairly doubtful if - ex of balancing with hydro - windmills reduce emissions overall at all.
In the end you look at fuel consumption of the German grid of windmills, nuclear and coal and compare it with UKs windmills nuclear and gas, and then compare it with Frances nuclear and hydro, and the answer is that UK is 2/3rds German emissions, but France is one quarter Germany's emissions.
In short for whatever reason, balancing renewables with fossils doesn't really do much at all. Nuclear and hydro however really do work especially together.
I assume that the windmill lobby knew this when they ordered the EU to generate a 'renewable obligation'.
If they had generated a 'carbon reduction' directive everyone would have built nukes instead of windmills
Windmills make Germans feel green and virtuous, while the EU creates German jobs for German windmill companies. What's not to like? Who cares about emissions? Climate change is a commercial invention. Vattenfall and Siemens rake it in, Germans feel they are in important green jobs, middle class Germans look at the windmills and feel proud that once again Germany is leading the world, and the inconvenient truth that they are leading the world in carbon emissions, is simply hand waved away.
*shrug* in the end what will force low emissions is high fossil prices. Suddenly ' deprived of Russian gas, German electricity prices are skyrocketing. It may even prompt te average smug stupid kraut to ask 'but why, when we generate our electricity with windmills and don't have any gas plant at all, is this so?'
Merkel conned them but she knew she was. The new is left/green coalition is stupid enough to believe in its own bullshit. Germany is heading for a big crash. I think 2 or 3 nukes are closing next month...
Imagine if the UK were run by the Lib dems and the Greens....
"The actual value (orange line) is the *estimated* carbon intensity from metered generation. The 'forecast' value (blue line) is our forecast. The carbon intensity is sensitive to small changes in carbon intensive generation ....blah blah blah
Sponsored by the WWF."
See my post about how, in considering the issue for over ten years, I have been unable to come up with a reliable way to estimate anything near a reliable figure.
With respect, I have to consign that site to the bin marked 'greenwash'
Why? its entirely faked up from making simplistic assumptions such as 'the amount of CO2 generated is the amount of thermal power times some estimated efficiency' etc etc.
They don't have access to real fuel burn figures any more than I do, they just don't have the integrity to say so.
And there you go again. more green bullshit..
"One fuel is not like another - at least when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions. Burning lignite, for example, produces around twice as much carbon dioxide in relation to its energy content as burning natural gas. Natural fuels such as peat and wood also have very high specific emissions if they are not used sustainably. Deforestation therefore has a doubly negative effect on the climate. If the amount of wood burned is limited to the amount that can be regrown, its use is neutral, since wood binds just as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is later released during combustion.
If the fuels are used to generate electricity, carbon dioxide emissions increase opposite proportional with the Power plant efficiency. The worse the efficiency of electricity generation, the greater the electricity-specific emissions. For example, if lignite from "Lausitz"-region is burned in a power plant with an efficiency of 35 %,
1,17 kg of carbon dioxide is produced per kilowatt hour of electrical energy (kWhel). In a natural gas combined cycle power plant with an efficiency of 60 %, as another example, only 0,33 kg of carbon dioxide is emitted per kWhel. "
I mean its pure ArtStudent? stuff. He has identified ONE variable - steady state full power efficiency, which he then presumably applies with a giant brush to calculate meaningless estimates. With all the confidence and smugness that only someone who knows nothing about how a thermal engine actually works, could generate.
Hey eejit, your car engine is 27% efficient, how come the mpg is different in town from on the motorway?
Of course the point is that he is thinking along one dimension only. As an Artstudent? only can.
Efficiency is not *just* a function of fuel type and power station type, it is a massively complex map with power station type, fuel type, load, temperature, time from startup, time from closedown etc etc. Example, keeping a generator phase locked and spinning to help stabilise frequency it is actually running at 0% efficiency. As it is also when being brought up to speed to phase lock. In general a thermal plant has, as well as load dependent thermal losses , fixed losses due to friction, heat loss from the boiler and so on. The more power it generates, the less these fixed losses are, as a fraction of its output and so the more 'efficient' it is.
So CCGT when running flat out, fully warmed up, is maybe 57% efficient.
At part load it may be no better than 45%, and when starting up before the steam plant is warmed up, 27%-35%. It takes around 5 minutes to get anything at all out of a spooling up Rolls Royce Trent gas turbine, and it sure is burning fuel, then for the next 20-45 minutes its burning full fuel but only generating about 60% of its rated output, and then as the steam plant gets up to temp, that rises to 100% of rated.
Throttle it back to 50% power and the efficiency drops to what - probably 40%.
It's a long time since I looked at gas turbine heat rate curves, and I doubt that the author of that website even understands what they are.
CCGT and coal power stations are most efficient running flat out. Or switched off. Having to have more kit on the grid running at part load ready to ramp up or down to cover short term wind variations is throwing fuel away.
Does he understand that? Course not.
It's not just what fuel you burn, it's not just what nameplate efficiency is, it's also how you run the plant - steady state full load, versus part throttle, versus stop start.
And its also how much carbon intensity there is in maintenance. A drip of oil on a bearing from a man in a turbine hall in the warm and dry, or a helicopter in a north sea gale to change a bearing that has seized due to galvanic corrosion in the salt spray laden magnetic field of an offshore turbine..
ArtStudents? love to talk about 'externalities' and 'holistic approaches' but they never ever use them.
Green 'estimates' and 'models' = green bullshit.
The massive difference between what Renewable UK claim is the capacity factor of offshore turbines - 40%, and what Gridwatch's BMreports statistics reveal - 27%, has never been satisfactorily explained, and
40% is what the government says, and 40% is what they use to justify building more.
I heard precisely the same figure quoted by an 'expert' at a council planning meeting, for an *onshore* wind turbine, in a wind poor part of Suffolk, they wouldn't get 17% there. A company that DID put up a test anemometer on a tower declined to actually apply for planning claiming 'not windy enough' - although the massive negative PR we subjected them to may also have had an effect.
The site you linked to is actually pretty much in the category of fake news.
Its not exactly a farce, just typical lack of planning and foresight. I find this in many areas of society. Single point of failure never considered as likely until it happens, etc. I think the human race have a massive problem of only thinking in the short term, generally. Brian
It's down to politicians, who only look ahead a year or two to the next election and getting re-elected. It strikes me that communist countries, with in effect a dictator at the top and ten year plans, do it better. We need better politicians, not muddle-heads like Bojo or shear incompetents like Corbyn.
The precise figures are 75,610GWh and 11018 windmills for 2020, plus the little whimsy from a popular film of 'one point twenty-one GW' is actually 1.3GW; none of which alters the efficiency of wind by much at all.
The problem is that the EU is actually even worse, because the politicians and bureaucrats don't run the countries even for their own benefit - it's run primarily for German manufacturers and French farmers.
All they care is ensuring they get a lions share of any wealth generated to buy the EU with.
ensuring that the populations are happy and content and have money in their pockets and can afford energy is simply of no interest to them.
Ive known a fair few politicians and special advisors, and sons and daughters of same, and people with titles and the like. It is amazing how nice most of the kids are and how embarrassed they are of their parents.
And how unbelievably narrow bigoted and incompetent the political class really is.
Ther are simply no engineers at all in UK politics, and since David Mackay sadly died, no engineering qualified scientific advisors either. They listen to what the green blob says, and do it regardless of whether its advisable or not
When I wrote my critique of renewables ten years ago it was blindingly obvious, if you understood the logic, that only nuclear power would ever replace fossil. And we had to leave the EU to be allowed to do it. We should have had 5-10GW up by now.
Instead we have been footling around with renewables and are still in the EU as far as climate change policy and windmills goes.
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