Every year for it's 60 year life? No down time to refuel, maintain, repair? Make that 365, 350 and it's be a better guesstimate. The numbers are still huge though and won't make a great diffrence to the fuel cost.
In a few centuries time, it's going to be hard to explain to history students that we had developed the electric motor by the 1880s, and yet spent the next 120 years using internal combustion engines for cars.
UK produced coal? Where has the gas come from? The UK North Sea gas fields are depleted. Canadian wood chip in the wood burners?
Doesn't strike me as "completely self sufficent" by a long chalk.
When scotland leaves the UK we can scrap that one.
Not Dinorwig, then?
Stumbled across this the other day, yes it's mainly the same data that gridwatch uses, just presented differently, but it requires less squinting than some of the gridwatch graphs ...
There are some just offshore at Worthing
Sp all the pipework that was dug up and replaced when we moved from coal gas to natural gas, will have to be dug up again and the old pipes put back?
It might (or might not) be useful to make hydrogen for storage where the volts come ashore, and then use it in place to generate power when the wind doesn't blow. But then, as is usual with this renewable stuff, you've built two power stations to get the output of one.
Why not just build a nuke in the first place?
Not really.
The thing that has crippled electric propulsion for individual vehicles has been battery technology. 120 years ago NiFe cells would have been used, but apart from some desirable qualities they were poor on Wh/volume and Wh/weight.
Today's batteries are much better, but although EVs are being advertised with ~60kWh batteries, to prolong their working life they need to charged to only 80% capacity and not discharged below 20%. This effectively means that the 60 kWh battery carries in reality only 36 kWh of energy. At a typical 3.5 miles/kWh that is an effective range of a mere 126 miles, making even the latest cars, at >£30000 each, quite poor value. Then there's the charging issue - millions of homes have only kerbside parking, and one suspects that the solution to this will be to ban such cars instead.
I meant self sufficient in generating capacity, not in raw materials. When has Britain ever been self sufficient in those, since the 19th century?
Especially self sufficient with respect to the EU nations. Gas comes from Qatar and Norway, coal from Russia and the USA and we do still mine almost enough for what power stations we have left.
I made these points because there have been politically motivated claims that without our links to the EU zone, we cannot generate enough electricity.
Patently we can.
Coal in the UK - 2019 =====================
"The UK consumed 7.9 million tonnes of coal in 2019, including 3.0 million tonnes in the steel industry, 2.9 million tonnes in power stations and 1.5 million tonnes in other industry.
"Coal imports to the UK were 6.8 million tonnes, a reduction of 33% on the previous year. UK coal output was 16% less than the previous year at
2.2 million tonnes."Coal-fired power stations produced 2.1% of the UK's electricity generation"
....................
"The UK has identified hard coal resources of 3 910 million tonnes, although total resources could be as large as 187 billion tonnes. There are 33 million tonnes of economically recoverable reserves available at operational and permitted mines, plus a further 344 million tonnes at mines in planning. There are also about 1 000 million tonnes of lignite resources, mainly in Northern Ireland, although no lignite is mined. This significant coal resource base is, however, rendered largely irrelevant by policies designed to drive coal out of the energy mix and a hostile planning environment for surface mines.
The UK?s remaining surface coal mines are located in central and northern England, South Wales and southern Scotland. Important surface mine coal producers include BANKS GROUP, CELTIC ENERGY, HARGREAVES SERVICES and MERTHYR (SOUTH WALES). The last major underground coal mine closed at the end of 2015 and the four remaining underground mines in England and Wales produced just 25 thousand tonnes in 2018. In March
2019, WEST CUMBRIA MINING was granted planning permission for Woodhouse colliery, a new coking coal drift mine with a potential output of 3 million tonnes per annum.In 2018, hard coal supply totalled 12.7 million tonnes, with 2.6 million tonnes of indigenous production and 10.1 million tonnes of imports. Russia and the United States are the main sources, accounting for 81% of all imports. Indigenous production was almost entirely from surface mines. The UK exported 0.6 million tonnes of hard coal in 2018.
Coal consumption in 2018 was 11.9 million tonnes, of which 6.7 million tonnes were used for electricity generation, with the iron and steel industry being another large consumer. The residential heating market is now less than 0.5 million tonnes per year. Overall coal consumption has fallen by 75% since 2014, mainly as a result of government policies.
Even with the current, much smaller size of the UK coal market, indigenous production does not fulfil demand. Imports supplied virtually the whole of the coking coal market, as the UK no longer produces any significant quantities of coal suitable for use in coke ovens, a situation which would change if Woodhouse colliery opens. Nevertheless, UK steelmakers use locally produced coal for pulverised coal injection (PCI) at their blast furnaces.
In early 2018, an end date for unabated coal-fired power generation (i.e. without CCS) of 1 October 2025 was announced by the UK government. Implementation will be via an emissions intensity limit of 450 gCO2/kWh. This policy to phase out coal from the energy market has put pressure on the few remaining UK coal producers. The planning system also makes it extremely difficult to bring forward new mine projects, despite the demand for coal.
Total direct employment in the coal mining sector at the end of 2018 was
647 (130 at deep mines and 517 at surface mines). The industry?s sole trade association is the Association of UK Coal Importers and Producers (CoalImP)."
Not burning. Heating in an O2-free environment to drive off the volatiles which were then purified (tars etc removed), leaving coke behind. The tars etc removed from the gas became chemical feedstick.
On the other hand there will be no need whatsoever to explain it to the two *engineering* students who will be studying that year.
We had developed sails of stretched canvas attached to spars by the time of the Conquest, it took another thousand years to have a peterol engine capable of sustained flight...
..at the start of the electric model plane revolution in the noughties one of the pioneers remarked that compared with an IC engine, the electricitv motor was perhaps only the crankshaft - the rest of the IC motor was in fact analogous to the *battery*.
Human flight was power limited. Off grid electrical transport is battery limited. Batteries have been around longer than electric motors. That in itself should tell you something....
Not since the 19th century.Coke production did deliver a gas, but it was mainly hydocarbons and CO - no hydrogen,. Water gas is what we ended up with..
"In 1873, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe developed and patented the water gas process by which large amounts of hydrogen gas could be generated for residential and commercial use in heating and lighting. This gas provided a more efficient heating fuel than the common coal gas, or coke gas, which was used in municipal service. The process used the water-gas shift reaction:
CO + H 2 O ? CO 2 + H 2
The process was discovered by passing high-pressure steam over hot coal, the major source of coke gas. Lowe's process improved upon the chimney systems by which the coal could remain superheated, thereby maintaining a consistently high supply of the gas. The reaction produced carbon dioxide and hydrogen, which, after a process of cooling and "scrubbing", produced hydrogen gas. "
Nothing to do with coke production.
Dinorwig is classed as hydro.
Many of the scottish hydro plants also pump. Hard to tell which is which
why? the Uk buys electricity from France, etc. Why shouldn't England buy from Scotland?
ITYM get China to build a nuke for us. It's called self sufficiency.
No it won't, because batteries will not be much better in a few centuries' time that they are today. Just point these students at the elctric train, which works by picking its volts up as it goes along, not by having them on board.
This from Wnky:
In British usage, coal gas specifically means gas made by the destructive distillation of coal. It was more commonly known as town gas. Coal gas is not applied to other coal-derived gases, such as water gas, producer gas and syngas. United States usage may be different. Coal gas was introduced in the UK in the 1790s as an illuminating gas by the Scottish inventor William Murdoch and became very widely used for lighting, cooking, heating and powering gas engines.
Manufacture Coal was heated in a retort and the crude gas was passed through a condenser to remove tar and a scrubber to remove other impurities. The residue remaining in the retort was coke.
Composition[edit] The composition of coal gas varied according to the type of coal and the temperature of carbonisation. Typical figures were: hydrogen 50% methane 35% carbon monoxide 10% ethylene 5%
In a plain burner, only the ethylene produced a luminous flame but the light output could be greatly increased by using a gas mantle.
By-products The by-products of coal gas manufacture included coke, coal tar, sulfur and ammonia and these were all useful products. Dyes, medicines such as sulfa drugs, saccharine, and dozens of organic compounds are made from coal tar.
I read about how domestic gas was produced in 1953 or so from one of my brother's school prizes, which broadly matched the above. Of course, it was just called gas in the book as there was no other at the time. And as you've said, storage was in gas holders.
Another article in the same book was about how elections work, and yet another was about the Norwich Heat Pump, which I've mentioned before.
For a very simple reason. It wont be worth buying... The actual real cost of wind energy is around 20p a unit. Its value is
4p a unit.Scotland will not be able to afford to give its wind farms 16p a unit subsidy.
So they will go bust. As will Scotland, which depends on the rest of the UK for its standard of living
I only know of two
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