SOT Dunkelflaute

We need to triple electric generation capacity to cover heating, to replace transport and industrial use of carbon fuel. You could make some wiggle room by turning off non essential electrical use.

The real killer argument (from TNP), is that economic success and prosperity is built upon cheap power. While I can see that offshore wind might just be feasible, in the UK, I can't see it being dirt cheap. It seems likely that breeder nuclear technology could be technologically improved to become dirt cheap. More importantly, unlike offshore wind, it could be a solution for everywhere in the world, including places without wind or solar potential.

It’s possible to get cheap power, but that’s not how the market currently works.

Producers offer a price per unit for a 30-minute slot. The networks know how much energy they’ll need in that slot. So, they contract the cheapest supplier. But that isn’t enough, so they contract the next cheapest. And so on, and so on, until contracted supply equals expected demand, for that

So far, so good.

What happens next is that the price paid to *all* the suppliers, is the highest price per unit that the network had to pay!!! It’s insane.

So cheap wind gets paid a fortune if say OCGT or DSTOR has to come on line, all paid for by the Poor Bloody Consumer.

It’s just a mechanism for stuffing money into the pockets of renewables.

Whoever agreed to this should be first against the wall. Every contracted supplier is making a profit, so there is no need to pay every one the same.

In the end, like the Americans, the world can be relied upon to pick the right energy strategy, after exhausting every other alternative.

Trumps election will pretty much see the end of net zero in the USA. Which is probably good.

And America will to an extent prosper. But it has serious fossil reserves. I dont see Trump as a particular supporter of nuclear power - that will come from Europe and Asia, where the oil coal and gas has already been mostly used up.

Mad Red Ed Milliband and his band of Trotsykite carpetbaggers will attempt to destroy the UK electricity grid. How far the UK will allow him to go before demanding his resignation is hard to say.

Questions are already being asked about the nationalisation of the policy arm of the national grid, to produce reports that concur exactly with his political idiocy.

Engineering can only be politicised so far, but I have come across fully qualified engineers, totally au fait with their fields, who *take for granted* the whole climate change boondoggle and believe their job is to somehow 'make renewables work' even when they know it's futile.

They shrug their shoulders and say 'I have a wife (or husband) and family. Its not my decision'. And go along with it, keeping their heads down, until the whole scam collapses at the *political* level.

Trump will wreck renewables in the USA for all the wrong reasons, but it will be the right decisions and the USA will prosper.

Europe is slowly realising that following Germany into economic decline because they can no longer burn lignite or Russian gas, and have dumped their nuclear power in the green wastebin, is not ideal. And unlike us, they regard the EU as a bit like the pirate code.

More general guidelines, to be disobeyed as and when it suits.

I see the Beeb is reporting that renewables will need another 1000km of new grid and 4,800km of undersea cables in order to meet the green renewable targets. Millibrain is going to push through changes to the planning system to make it work, and it will be the consumer who ultimately pays for it all.

O)f course. People in towns would never tolerate wind turbines anywhere near them. So they get plonked in non labour voting rural communities and the sea. A long way away from where the power is need.

More cost not paid by renewable companies.

Millibrain is going to push through changes to the

I wonder how many engineers in the grid will quitely 'work to rule' and let the grid actually collapse as a way of informing people how insane Red Eds idiocy truly is

A couple of years ago I read a report about the noise level from large wind turbines and how far you would have to be away before they would be acceptable in the way of the noise. The report indicated that the noise level equivalent of someone whispering (inside of your house) was acceptable. Personally I would find that very annoying if it was constant. The distance that was quoted was something around 500 metres.

Around the same time the green party campaigning to place one of their members on the local council repeatedly posted almost on a daily basis on social media that the council had turned down every planning application for a wind turbine in the borough. They seemed to making the point that Tory controlled council was anti-green in their policy making. The council only controlled an uban highly built up area with a number of large parks. I replied to their posts on social media referencing the study and questioned where they would suggest that wind turbines could be situated, also adding that the only suitable place I could find was for a single turbine was dead in the centre of the football/cricket playing field in one of the parks. I got no response!

The problem is the subsonic thumping every time a blade wake crosses the tower or the boundary layer near the ground goes miles. And it wont show up on any weighted noise meter either.

But its been shown to make people feel extremely weird.

Greens are prime assholes and that's that. They simply don't do logic or science.

Seems that may not be the answer to some generation applications!

Here they state the case for internal combustion versus Gas turbine..

"Infrasonics" theres some stuff around that theres a lot of that on the London underground in some tunnels, that make people feel weird!..

simple gas turbine is internal combustion

CCGT is a bit of both

Your gas situation might be considered a potential single point failure.

I don't know the details of the Texas grid drop, but I believe at one point, there was no electricity to run a natural gas pump and pressurize a line, and then a fast start gas plant couldn't contribute electrons to keep the grid up.

It's not the details that matter. It's a design philosophy. You try to have two major sources of dispatch-able power, where the failure modes do not correlate.

We have a potential for a correlated failure. Our nuclear plants are not cooled by evaporative cooling. They're cooled by conduction. If the river levels fall, two things happen at the same time. Hydro generation facilities are shut down (because there is no water). And the nuclear generators have to be safed, if there is no cooling water for them. Within the last year, at least one hydro facility across the country, could not run at full power because of a water shortage. Whether this will get gradually worse, I couldn't guess. The river next to me, is currently plump with water, which is unusual compared to the trend over the last 10-15 years. It's normally dry in the fall, and the river recedes exposing sand banks large enough for flocks of birds to sit around on them. Usually the river has recovered by the time spring thaw comes (depends on snow pack and amount of snow fall, as to how much excess water is available to recharge the reservoir).

While in normal times, you could run a country off natural gas, you do want some resilience if that gas supply is ever compromised. Having no pump to pump the gas, in the Texas case, is a rather bland failure compared to some things that can happen to gas supplies.

One of the guys at work, he use to work in natural gas production out west. He used to ride around in a pickup truck, inspect pumping stations (self powered stations where the pump makes motive power from the gas) and he would contact base and order things that the station needed for repair or maintenance.

So something had happened to the line. No gas was flowing. He pulls up to the site that went off the radio network, and there is a large hole in the ground. And he tells me, he contacted base and ordered

(1) complete pumping station

which is a code word for "I have located a hole in the ground where the pump and shack used to be" :-) And that's why a valve upstream of the site had closed automatically, and isolated whatever was burning in that area. And more than one of those has blown. That's not an obscure failure. There could well be path diversity in that setup.

You probably already know this, but a government minister in one part of the country, let the cat out of the bag. He said when the time comes to switch over to the all-electric fleet, there would only be enough electricity to power half as many cars. So if you thought there would be two BEVs in the drive, the government thinks you will be sharing one BEV for the family instead. And that's how they don't have to build as much generating capacity. Wave a wand. Take some cars away from the picture.

And no matter how things go, eventually we run out of fossil fuels in any case. Doing something about it now, is merely being "pro-active". It would be human nature, to roll-coal until the vehicle stops because all the fuel is gone. None of us would be alive to see that, but that's the eventual result, no matter what we do.

Paul

Depends who you mean by 'green lobby', but current policy thinking is very much pro-nuclear.

And very much anti-gas. So that 25% of generation needs to be found from somewhere. I'm suggesting that renewables could easily plug that gap . . .

Simply not the case:

You're presenting a rather distorted version of reality. A few things you seem to assume now, and in the future:

1. Zero storage. Not much to say on this - you and others seem to assume that it's zero now, and always will be zero. That is demonstrably false. My home (and many 1000s more in the UK) has enough (non-heating) relatively cheap storage to be self sufficient (battery/solar). I'd never need to net import from the grid for non-heat energy, ever, with just a few small adjustments. And that's now, and me - hardly 'green'. The possibilities for storing 'excess' renewables is huge. Just look at Octopus' pricing feed-in-out tariffs for a sniff of what's possible.
2. Consumption will remain the same. This ignores potential changes in patterns of consumption, retrofit, energy efficient new build, and so on. Just takes imagination and will.
3. Redundancy is bad. Grid systems will *always* have redundancy. And until storage is improved it will be higher than carbon-based generation. Can't you get over it?! It's cheap and year-on-year reliable, after all.
4. Distribution infrastructure is a fundamental problem. Again, there seems to be an assumption that this is impossible to overcome. Even Labour's policy (above) seems to suggest otherwise. And again, given the will and imagination, it doesn't seem to be entirely improbable that electricity can be distributed across continents and hemispheres.
5. Renewables generation is unreliable. It is certainly less reliable than at a switch gas, coal, and nuclear. But there are ways at making it less patchy - the Labour document above suggests some thinking here.
6. Fossil fuel consumption is benign. I realise that there's a good deal of feeling in support of the notion that fossil fuel extraction and consumption to generate electricity has no ill effects on the climate, and the environment in general. I and a few others believe such an assumption to be false. Which makes change non-negotiable, and a need to challenge assumptions 1 to 5 with a bit more enthusiasm.

And that's just my distorted view of reality . . . it needn't be miserable :-)

The latest Dunkelflaute has just ended after 15 days.

Gas outperformed Wind by something like an average over those 360 hours of

I think the point most people are making is there doesn't appear to be a plan B especially in the UK where the wind doesn't blow for weeks at a time and the sun hardly comes out anywhere in the UK for months on end. Build more intermittent power generation such as wind and solar, induce more people to switch from the alternatives to electric so demand increases and politicians being morally bullied into making decisions about closing down our gas and biofuel (wood chip burning) generation in the near future. It's not so much about waiting until the gas and coal run out but adopting sensible solutions that a likely to give a reliable supply if fossil fuel generation is switched off and the unobtainium suggested by the green lobby is missing. Although reality may raise its head soon the timescales being talked about are 10 to 25 years!

I’ve seen warnings of 6 for the last 60 years. Perhaps one day they’ll be right. I’m still waiting for the 2015 submerging of the Maldives to happen.