It's odd all the right wingers on here haven't criticised the Tory governments we've had for many years now not having addressed the problem most saw coming. You'd think the Greens had been in power all this time.
Yeah, well I remember when that was the only thing British governments seemed to worry about. In those days our invisible exports were around
10%. These days we are an 80% service economy, a large chunk of that being financial services. Thank goodness for all those Russian and Chinese oligarchs. We still do OK out of the Gulf states too.
Guess what. Democracies have an effective legal system that *usually* takes the side of the oppressed. Neither Putins Russia or Xi's China do so, in fact in those two countries the legal system does what the Putin and Xi tell it to do, ditto their press and national broadcasters
Quite. For all the rubbish that's talked about the Chinese threat in the Pacific, they are basically following the generally successful American model. They flex a bit of muscle locally in Hong Kong and Taiwan, they will just trade their way into dominance further afield. They were occupied by the Japanese not so long ago, and they know how that turned out. They will have been quietly chuckling to themselves over the French and then the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians and then Americans in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Iraq. We might all wish for leaders as effective as Xi.
Back the 1980s I took a party of Russians round the BBC news Studios. They looked at the production control room and then asked "Where does the censor sit?" They couldn't believe we didn't have one.
Is that "effective at stealing every elses intellectual property ."?
The chinks have deep-rooted nasty character flaws. The cretins who ran riot in the 1960's waving their little red books, murdering people and destroying priceless artifacts are now the ruling China Communist Party. Leopards don't change their spots. I would trust a Greek before I would trust a chink.
The BBC doesn't need one though, because everyone that works there sings from the same approved hymn book.
Bill
In a massive grid with a LOT of hydro, you can use renewables without the backup issue.
So for example if you have plenty of hydro capacity, but tend to run out of water, adding windmills is good
Germany seems reliant on coal and worse lignite, and they intend to run (declining amounts of it) to 2038. I agree that coal+wind is a pretty terrible combination, unless you're basically running on coal and wind is for strongly intermittent uses (aluminium smelting, hydrogen production) where you can only afford to run when power is cheap.
*Although* I don't know to what extent you can predict your way out of that problem. In other words, the weather forecast will tell you the likely loading for the next week, so you know whether to fire up the coal. Short term fluctuations are handled by gas, and very short term by batteries. You obviously need quite some overprovisioning so you can afford to turn off the coal when others are generating, rather than sizing everything for running flat out, but that's possible.You can take the emissions of building and maintaining the things, and work out how long it takes to pay them back. Once that's done, the emissions of the rest are 'free'. All the sources I've seen say that that cost is the order of months, not years (eg the US study I cited, although that didn't cover maintenance).
There is obviously the dispatch cost - of ramping up backup sources when renewables aren't generating, and of building those in the first place.
For example, this study (2002, a bit old but I doubt there have been order of magnitude changes):
So, in emissions terms, it does pay to turn off the gas or coal whenever you can, because the vast contribution is from the fuel. Even if it costs something to ramp back up again later. And obviously the longer you can leave it off the lower the overheads of ramping.
For example, building onshore wind + gas backup costs 870k tonnes, which is roughly 4 months of runtime for the gas generator. So if the wind has a capacity factor of more than 1.7% you've won overall.
That's a fair point, but there is also demand side to consider. One is that grid-scale batteries can take some of the minute-by-minute load pressure (not currently on a massive scale, but it's getting there as more are built out). Another is that loads can be shed: if people are charging EVs, their chargers can be commanded to back off when the pressure is on. It's a lot faster and more efficient to tell a few hundred thousand EVs to stop charging for the next hour than it is to spin up a CCGT. That effect is temporary (the EVs still need charging before morning), but you can arrange to spin up the CCGT for longer to acheive that - plus the wind is something that, in aggregate, can be forecast, so you can plan for those events.
We're not there yet, but things will change.
That is a separate question than about carbon intensity, and those things are basically simple explanations because people don't know what a GW or a TWh actually means. (The nameplate capacity of thermal and nuclear power stations is similar - powering XXX thousand homes except when throttled back or shut down for maintenance, when they're powering 0 thousand homes)
If the wind isn't blowing it doesn't figure in the carbon intensity numbers. If we're generating 100% from gas and 0% of wind, the number is the intensity of gas.
Data is about the past, models are about the future. We can't get data about the future without a time machine, so predictions are all we have. With hindsight, we can know if the models are accurate or need improvement.
(I was watching the JWST launch this morning. It followed exactly the course of the model. Celestial mechanics is comparatively straightforward to model of course - but the model covered various actions of the spacecraft, so it wasn't just pure ballistics. And physical laws don't account for something going awry, which I'm sure was also covered by the model)
Apart from data, there is marketing. Unfortunately people who promote stuff tend to be sources of the latter rather than the former. (the fossil industries are great creators of false marketing, of course, just like tobacco and other industries before them)
Theo
And it doesnt cover other externalities.
Precisely - it forces fossil generators into highly suboptimal and carbon intensive modes of operation. The green response is 'we will fix it with storage' or we will 'fix it with interconnects' but thy wont because the overall cost and carbon footprint of whatever extra technology they try to bolt on to make it work juts drives the carbon cost of providing the tech up sky high.
The green way is tio simply state 'windmills work and every watt displaces a gas powered watt and reduces crabion. but that is a narrow and totally naive way to look at things - but that's ok since renewable energy is simply not about reducing emissions.
If the greens were really serious about reducing emissions they wouldn't stand in the way of fracking and nuclear. They are hypocrites . That's the ONLY thing Greta gor right,. They are doing nothing because there isn't a climate problem and renewable energy has nothing to do with reducing emissions and everything to do with making huge profits out of energy.,
It goes beyond that - again that is 'analysis by power station' not analysis by grid'
ADDING INTERMITTENT POWER CHANGES FOSSIL STATION EFFICIENCY.
So you cannot simply say "Coal: 90k construction / 90m tonnes fuel" because it entirely depends at what load profile the power station was running. They even say that in the PDF
No, you haven't.
At huge expense.
And a carbon cost of manufactire and decomissioning.
Another is that loads can be shed: if people are charging EVs, their
Oh great, so i cant use my car
That effect is
Yes, renewable energyy will be dumped and people will build nuclear, because it actually reduces emissions, reduces the need for fossil, reduces dependency on slender supply chains and obviates the need to store gas for peak loads
No, yoiu miss the point. The renewable lobby routinely lies and has always lied about windmill performance. I conclude that they are almost certainly lying about emissions reductions as well. IN fact I know they are, because they do not do overall holistic analysis, and the only way to do that is to look at the whole carbon intensity of the whole grid and everyone working on it to build maintain and demolish it.
Example. Your california puff piece wouldn't include for example, the carbon cost of a massive undersea DC cable to get the power ashore, and then grid extensions to get it down from scotland to England where the demand is.
So the renewable people then entirely escape te consequences of te wind not blowing on other operators of fossil plant
That is in term of carbon reductions, fraudulent.
More fraud. Data is about reality, models is about bullshit by and large.
The data tells you if your models are working, the data shows the renewable models are fundamentally fraudulent.
I say, d'ye mind? I've not even had my breakfast yet.
On the Today programme on BBC R4 this morning, there was an interview with a man from Renewables company Ecotricity.
The interview started well enough, talking about the coming £20bn rise in consumer energy bills, to which the interviewee made the interesting point that if the government lends the money to the energy companies to tide them over, it will be clawed back via higher bills, but that the North Sea suppliers have made that much from the huge spike in prices and therefore they could stump that up instead of the consumer.
The interviewer then changed tack and noted that we had recently placed more reliance on gas, and therefore increased the carbon intensity of our emissions, due to the unreliability of wind or nuclear - and so we haven't really cracked the idea of making this transition.
The interviewee than said that we have 20x more wind and solar available than we need, we just have to invest more in wind and solar, the price of which is doesn't fluctuate with demand.
There are so many things wrong with those statements, including the logical fallacy that as wind isn't producing enough energy, we need more wind (turbines), completely overlooks those times, such as the recent seven-day period, when the wind didn't blow and the sun didn't shine, and so the installed amount of wind and solar is totally irrelevant. The interview did have the off-message avoidance of the issue of where energy is to come from in the circumstances whereby the renewables had failed to meet demand.
I was left with the impression that neither party to the interview had Done Their Sums.
Oh I expect they had, and come to the right conclusion, but didn't want to talk about it because it reflected badly on the renewables industry which as a result may not get all the cash that's being sunk into it in the future!
I look forward to the proposal that squillions more solar farms are constructed, so that moonbeams and starlight can be usefully converted into electricity!
Hope you've got a method of manufacturing gas, then?
Sprouts!
Sorry for my flippant if topical reply, but I don't see what my tongue-in-cheek suggestion of squillions of solar farms to capture moonbeams and starlight (but no more stupid than yet more windmills to capture wind when there isn't any) has got to do with manufacturing gas.
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