OT: Fossil fuels fall to record low proportion of UK energy mix

"The wind power highs meant thousands of homes were paid to plug in their electric vehicles overnight and set their dishwashers on timers for the early hours of the morning to make use of the extra energy."

That's pretty interesting. I wish we had that problem here. I wonder why California doesn't do that with the PV solar they are generating during the day?

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  Rick C. 

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Why wouldn't the hard numbers be true?

OTOH this journalistic statement is manifestly inadequate: "Government figures showed the UK relied on renewables, such as wind and solar, for 38.9% of its electricity in the third quarter of this year, up from one-third in the same period in 2018. "

You can't *rely* on renewables.

It is for one quarter only; does the phrase "cherry picking" have any meaning to you.

Given the inadequacy of the other journalistic statements, I'm skeptical that (a very few) *households* were *paid* to do that.

I'd be interested to hear of the charging and accounting mechanisms that are used in conjunction with tariffs to achieve that.

It is more likely that the journalist is doing the equivalent of confusing "saving" with "spending less". There are far too many articles over here equating a

10% reduction in the price of something you buy means that you have more money in your account after the sale than before.

Some fools are happy too, though.

Indeed. For a more accurate view in real time, check this site out:

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"When constituencies are small their elected representatives must concern themselves with the local interests of their constituents. When political representatives are distant and faceless, on the other hand, and represent vast numbers of unknown constituents, they represent not their constituents, but special interest groups whose lobbyists are numerous and ever present. Typically in Europe a technocrat is an ex-politician or a civil servant. He is unelected, virtually impossible to dislodge during his term of employment and has been granted extensive executive and even legislative power without popular mandate and without being directly answerable to the people whose interests he falsely purports to represent."

- Sir James Goldsmith (Member of the European Parliament) 1933 - 1997

Since "renewables" include hydroelectric power, where the dams that store t he water incidentally store a lot of energy, the fool here is Cursitor Doom .

Tom Gardner hasn't expressed himself as clearly as he might have. If you ha d enough renewable generating capacity to supply your average power consump tion, and enough energy storage - pumped hydro and batteries are the curren t market leaders - you could rely on intermittent renewable sources.

At moment we haven't got nearly enough energy storage integrated into natio nal grids anywhere to let us rely exclusively on renewable energy storage.

Tasmania does come close - it usually gets a lot of rain and hasn't got a l ot of residents and routinely gets 90% of its electricity from renewable so urces.

They did have a drought a few years ago which did complicate life.

Imagining that where we are now is a good guide to the feasibility of getti ng to where we are going to have to get to isn't all that clever.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

If and when it looks like we can have sufficient storage, then I will be more than happy to revise my thoughts and statements. I hope I live to see that, but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't care about the type of storage either, only that sufficient is available. I'm skeptical about whether there can be sufficient pumped hydro in the UK (or Netherlands for that matter!).

That's an example of the many reasons why a diversity of sources is advisable.

It is worth downloading and post-processing info from that site.

I downloaded a year's worth of wind generation stats and generated the CDF graph. As a rule of thumb in the UK, if the peak wind generation power is X, then Y% of the time the wind power is Y*X. In other words, 50% of the time it is

The UK has too little hydro to have any chance of relying on it for power, and no accepted sites for new hydro.

but we don't, in both cases.

NT

... Here in Canada our electric company in British Columbia is called "BC Hydro". And, indeed, most of our power is from water...that doesn't work for places without mountains and LOTS of rain though.

We live in a rain forest climate. Unlike most places on the planet.

Some idiot is saying that our (just under) 5 million people are doing their part for 'climate change' is disingenuous at best as hydro power is cheap - for us - as was the norm long before the catastrophists came on board the Cry Wolf climate religion.

John

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Pumped hydro isn't the only option. It's the one with the longest track rec ord - because hydroelectric has been exploited for longer than we've had na tional grids - but there are grid scale batteries around, and more of them are being built. Not enough of them yet for the exponential ramp-up to anyt hing like obvious, but it seems likely that it is under way.

a lot of residents and routinely gets 90% of its electricity from renewabl e

As if that needs examples.

That isn't a a particularly useful statement. The previous paragraph was mo re useful. Any resource subject to more or less random variation has to be exploited in a way that lets the customers cope with those occasions when o utput is low.

The phone system relies on the Erlang equations.

published them between 1909 and 1920. It's high time some grid system engin eer did the same job for intermittent power sources.

etting to where we are going to have to get to isn't all that clever.

Constructive critics are useful. Criticism based on what we are actually do ing at the moment is less useful - useful critics do have to have some idea of how the system could be changed, even if they are sceptical of the chan ges that they are obliged to imagine.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

te:

re the water incidentally store a lot of energy, the fool here is Cursitor Doom.

u had enough renewable generating capacity to supply your average power con sumption, and enough energy storage - pumped hydro and batteries are the cu rrent market leaders - you could rely on intermittent renewable sources.

ational grids anywhere to let us rely exclusively on renewable energy stora ge.

a lot of residents and routinely gets 90% of its electricity from renewabl e sources.

John Robertson is a fan of the king log approach to climate change - if we do nothing about it, it might go away.

In practice this means that he is a gullible sucker for climate change deni al propaganda. He's less obvious about it than John Larkin and doesn't post links to the denialist propaganda websites that have clearly formed his op inions.

Anthropogenic global warming is a well tested scientific hypothesis. Imagin ing that it is any kind of religion is an ignorant delusion.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

te:

re the water incidentally store a lot of energy, the fool here is Cursitor Doom.

, and no accepted sites for new hydro.

Scotland gets 74% of its electricity from hydroelectric generators, and exp orted 29% of that in 2015.

As I seem to have to keep reminding Tom Gardner, pumped hydro isn't the onl y form of grid scale power storage. In Australia we've been frequently remi nded that South Australia bought 128 MW.hours of battery storage from Elon Musk.

seems to be a better solution, but Elon Musk had a production line churning out Lithium in batteries for his electric cars, and could deliver in less than 100 days. Somebody is probably building a vanadium redox battery prod uction line somewhere - most likely in China - but they don't seem to need new investors at this point, so we don't get to hear about it.

The price of vanadium did peak at the beginning of the year, so it looks as if the miners are now supplying the increased demand.

power consumption, and enough energy storage - pumped hydro and batteries a re the current market leaders - you could rely on intermittent renewable so urces.

But we can, and probably quite quickly. Modern manufacturing has a had lot of practice in tooling up to satisfy new demand.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Meanwhile the market doesn't really care about your thoughts and statements . It will continue to march ahead with renewable energy regardless.

See above...

a lot

Yes, that is what everyone I've heard has said, diversity. That includes g as turbines for the short term. I've seen some argue that it's not "fair" to calculate the cost of renewable without factoring in the cost of the rap id spin up gas turbines. But they are already in existence and the capital investment is a sunk cost. The marginal cost is largely the fuel cost whi ch is zero when not making energy. So they are a free backup as long as we need them.

Once there is enough storage in place we can ditch the fossil fuel generato rs completely. In the end this will be not just cleaner, but cheaper than nuclear and fossil fuels.

It's always struck me as strange that the UK doesn't connect more to it's n eighbors. I know there are power lines to France, but the total capacity i s still pretty small. Here in the US it seems there is a lot more intercon nectivity I assume because we are all one country. We are also highly conn ected to Canada, enough so that we sometimes share large blackouts.

etting

However, both need to respond to rational thought.

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  Rick C. 

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So what is your point? No one has said we do currently. That's why we still have nukes and fossil fuel generation... duh!

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  Rick C. 

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The question is how much you can rely on them.

This has a lot to do on the capacity factor of each method. For wind this is about 25-40 %, for solar 15-20 %, so you need to build three times wind peak power to the power level on which you can "rely" on. For solar you need to build six times the Wpeak capacity to get a specific "reliable" level.

Looking at the power sustainability curve (how many hours each year the production is X percent compared to cumulative installed capacity), both ends of the curve is problematic. At the high power end, the production can be many times the dependable power, which will lower available prices and force closing some of these renewable plants reducing the economy and the greenies jump on the wall,

On the other end of the curve in which the available power is below dependable level, either some dispatchable power sources are required or some load shreding is needed.

The situation in both ends of the curve can be helped, if it is possible to transfer economically a sufficient amount of power for

1000 - 3000 km from overproduction areas to underproduction areas.

Sufficiently large hydro dams will support other unreliable sources. This has been done e,g, between Norway (lots of hydro) and Denmark (lots of wind). When there is an overproduction in Denmark, excess power goes to the Norwegian market and they can save more water in their dams. When the wind doesn't produce enough in Denmark, the saved water goes through turbines in Norway.

In areas with long dry seasons, the dam capacity would need to be huge, to collect water from one season to an other.

Smaller dams with only one day storage capacity can support solar production during the night,

Battery storage or pumped storage is a good replacement to quick start emergency gas turbines, which are used when a big power plant (such as nuclear) fails. These turbines are used only for hours, until the production of other dispatchable sources has been increased so that the production of failed big unit has been replaced.

Pumped storage or batteries have far too little capacity to replace lost renewable production for days or a week.

Some fat HVDC cables to Norwegian hydro would help,

128 MWh is only capable to replace a failed big power plant for less than 10 minutes, so in reality it could replace quick start emergency gas turbines, but not much else.

It's strange that you posted that without checking.

4GW isn't all that small, and it's going to get pushed up to 14GW fairly soon.

Laying sub-sea cables seems to be a bit more of a performance than stringing up power lines.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Of course. But I've heard that incorrect statement on many occasions, usually from well-meaning idiots that confuse kW with kWh.

I would be gobsmacked if that hadn't been done. I expect they are published somewhere, but I haven't bothered to look.

The essential virtue of an ideas man is that they spit out plausible idea after idea. Their allowable weakness is that they don't spot the "gotcha".

The essential virtue of such a critic is that they should be able to spot flaws in an ideas man's ideas, thereby helping to avoid the problems. Their allowable weakness is that they don't spit out too many ideas.

You also need workers, finishers, communicators, adjudicators on a team.

Most people have a primary role, but can also take on a secondary role. All roles are needed in a well-balanced team.

What's currently installed certainly doesn't. If you need to compensate for whole days of last output, you have to install more, which means investing capital.

Scaling up manufacture typically halves the unit price for each factor of ten increase in production volume. It has certainly worked that way with solar cells. So the amount of capital you have to invest doesn't increase as fast as you might think.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney