energy in UK

Rishi Sunak was a *perfectly good candidate* for PM.

If he had won in the first round then things could well have been very different. It was the Tory grass roots activists that destroyed the Tory party by electing Liz the Lettuce and resulting in total annihilation.

I take your point - and you may well be correct!

I found that pushy salesmen were the worst for that. Several of our bigger instruments were sold with performance specs that would require the repeal of one or more laws of physics. The guy who made the sale and got his bonus was of course long gone by the time the instrument was built. Acceptance tests involved complex negotiations and discounts.

I think we are going to need it. One seriously cold winter with a prolonged calm spell and there will be rolling blackouts in London. Then perhaps something will actually be done about UK electricity generation.

It took the "Great stink" to sort out sewers so there is a precedent.

Are you referring to energy poverty and de-industrialization in the UK?

That will improve somewhat. People who are unemployed and cold and hungry in the dark will vote in their interests.

There will never be enough batteries to power even a tiny country like the UK, to keep people alive through a few weeks of cold, dark, still weather.

People can keep warm by snuggling around burning lithium batteries.

And nobody is planning on doing that. Vanadium flow cells can store power for longer than lithium ion batteries - in vanadium flow cells you can store energy in the electrolyte, and pump if off into holding tanks, then pump it back into the battery to recover the energy.

It may be competitive with pumped water and pumped air storage.

The UK actually does have a bunch of nuclear reactor driven power plants. I don't know if there are enough of them to serve as a keep-alive backup. They've also got quite a few gas-turbine powered generators, but their massive gas storage centre got moth-balled a few years ago.

Not a particularly cheap source of heat. Somebody silly enough to take Trump seriously might go for it.

This is what the BBC has become, sadly.

Thst's not the point I was making: Ordinary members of the party who were not 'activists' (whatever that means), or in the elite few at the top, were only able to choose between candidates who had already been selected by a self-perpetuating clique. They had no say in who was offered to them.

I've noticed that my recent electricity bills have a 'Disconnection Rota" designator printed on them. I haven't agreed to anything like that, so I presume it is in anticipation of enforced power cuts.

The cap limits ordinary home users exposure to extreme market volatility. It became necessary after the invasion of Ukraine when gas prices spikes very high making it impossible for some elderly folk to heat their homes. Their choice was quite literally heating or eating.

Even a Tory government isn't quite that callous.

Time of use tariffs are still uncommon in the UK. It is possible with a smart meter (which I now have) but supplier offers are pretty poor. Previously I had a counter rotating dials mechanism dating from the

It is possible to have local domestic battery storage and exploit the overnight low rates - though to get the best deals you need to own an electric car (or at least convince your electricity supplier you do).

My supplier has just offered me half price electricity at the weekends. Only snag is their website won't allow me to accept their generous offer

- it keeps saying "something went wrong- try again later".

Aircon isn't really a thing in domestic UK buildings. The number of days a year when it would be needed can be counted on the fingers of one hand. My house manages it with Victoria technology - very thick walls and windows to open at night. Centres of major cities do get rather warm due to office buildings with air conditioning pumping out heat!

Having solar panels is another way to get onto a ToU tariff. Even that is gamed though. Much domestic PV electricity ends up heating domestic water as the feed in tariffs are also based on crazy sums. There is an aftermarket in diverters to exploit this loophole.

There are incentives to install solar PV but none for solar hot water.

We have a standing charge which covers distribution and all the bankruptcies of box shifter companies that got into selling electricity to consumers without having the first clue about what they were doing.

A large number went pop after the Ukraine war started because they had committed to selling at fixed price to end users at a price below the new wholesale prices.

UK allows up to 4kW solar generation on any domestic premises. More than that and you have to apply for a license. It confused the load shedding algorithms last time there was a serious power outage since it was about

Offgem's remit is supposed to protect consumers from exploitation but in fact it facilitates it. Also it failed to prevent clueless box shifter types from going into retail sale of electricity to consumers.

The standing charge per day (for being grid connected) has gone up enormously as a result to sort out the mess this caused.

Deaf and blind politicians determined to prevaricate and apply the odd sticking plaster now and then to avoid making serious investments that won't show any return inside their likely tenure in office.

Indeed. There is a lot of wind power in Scotland and the North Sea. It makes up about 40% of UK generation on a good day. The big weakness is that historically and today most power is made up north and used down south. The wires connecting the two are insufficient to cope.

You can see the grid supply in realtime here:

We also have a ridiculous amount of solar PV for such a high latitude. This is governed by the fact that in a good year a farmer can make around £200/acre by actively growing crops and £2k/acre by stuffing their land full of solar panels. Many are choosing the latter.

The developers are spivs and speculators in it for the immediate short term profit of getting a fixed success fee for obtaining planning permission. The cost of the land comes off their bottom line.

Not really - a lot of them have been sold off to foreign companies. Successive UK governments have been particularly good at selling off the family silver to make ends meet.

I'm inclined to agree. But provided that you use nuclear power generation for the base load you only need about 60GWhr of battery storage to time shift night time electricity to cover the daytime.

UK BESS operators should be limited to having a substation capable of recharging their storage capacity at the C/8 rate so that they can recharge during the slack hours (2200-1800) in winter and then resupply at peak times (0900-2100) major evening peak is 1800-2100. In summer it is much less of a problem - the system really creaks in winter.

They like to charge at C/2 to exploit the pricing algorithm glitches and isn't all that good for the batteries.

It would take an impossibly large battery storage capacity to handle a long becalmed event in mid winter. The numbers that NESO bandy around for UK net zero by 2030/50 (delete as appropriate) are pure fantasy.

Our grid system will fail soon but I live in the northern region that will still have power (and mains water) when it all goes to pot. NESO's long term decadal master plan is for two or more very long DC cables in the North Sea for the Russians to sabotage as and when they like.

The big snag with Lithium batteries is their nasty tendency to catch fire spectacularly. A guy at nearby Newcastle University is an expert on such incidents - there isn't any good way to put such fires out either.

I'm fighting a plan to build the world's largest BESS on my doorstep. It would be hard to find a worse spot to put one. We are sat on the choke point where the 400kV lines are routinely overloaded in winter.

Anyone who was a *member* of the Tory party was entitled to vote for their choice of PM. They chose unwisely and must live with the result.

Liz the Lettuce was elected by and made PM by all the paid up *members* of the Conservative Party who voted for her rather than Sunak.

One thing about politicians is that anyone who actually wants to do their job should probably be debarred from doing it.

Why build insanely expensive and dangerous battery farms so you can run the nukes at 200% capacity half the time and 0% the rest?

We're lucky to have a good deal of hydro and lots of natural gas, both easily tunable to varying loads. Power is very reliable here.

Fine, let someone do that without subsidies.

Socialist and communist governments substitute politicians for engineers.

Cool. Not literally.

We had a pretty big lithium battery fire here recently.

Google auto-complete is great. All you have to type is

lithium b

to see the fires.

You can design the battery monitoring circuitry to prevent them doing it spontaneously. Electric bikes and the like may not be big enough to justify the expense, but electric cars and domestic solar panel back-up batteries certainly are.

Any event that physically damages the battery can also set it on fire if you are unlucky enough. The newspapers are great at reporting lithium battery fires, and much less good at reporting the stupidity that lit them.

Too true, but they shouldn't happen in the first place.

You don't. Nuclear reactors can't be run intermittently. You've got some leeway when they are first built, but as the fission products build up in the fuel rods the burn rate becomes less and less adjustable.

Renewable power (wind and solar) have been the cheapest sources since they got big enough to supply an appreciable proportion of national energy budget. They don't need subsidy. It took a lot of capital investment to get enough of them to get there, and its going to take more to provide the pumped hydro and batter storage to deal with the fact that they are intermittent sources, but that's investment - not subsidy.

Margaret Thatcher was actually trained as a chemist and she was neither socialist nor communist, but her energy policy was still remarkably daft.

Politicians of all stripes tend to believe what suits them and what they believe they can sell to the electorate. Donald Trump's ideas about tariffs are remarkably disconnected from reality.

You can't ramp nukes up and down fast enough daily to cope without causing other problems (and we have nowhere near enough of them). They are incredibly slow to build and UK lost most of its capable nuclear engineers over a decade or so ago. Efforts keeping the last remaining ones still operational are getting a bit scary.

When I was at school there was a big surplus of them (nuclear engineers) most of whom ended up as bad physics teachers. A product Harold Wilson's white heat of technology "electricity too cheap to meter" initiative.

Power in the UK for the moment is reliable, but they have been skating on *very* thin ice for a long time in winter (roughly two decades of prevarication).

The main damage was done by the Tories - a right wing party.

I know. The Moss landing fire in January got the attention of all our neighbouring parish councils out to a 5 mile radius. My friends who work in Silicon valley could smell it burning from about 20 miles away. A lot more help was forthcoming after that event.

Our BESS will be ~10% bigger than Moss Landing if it goes ahead. Vistra doesn't exactly have a stellar safety reputation but the company doing ours is a start-up with no track record at all on any scale!

Rather brave to try and do three of the worlds largest BESS within 20 miles of each other. The one on Teesside actually makes engineering sense - it can buffer the offshore windfarms that come ashore there...

Nightmare:

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the avarage voter. The current situation in the US is a blatant example of how a democracy can go awry.

Jeroen Belleman

I was recently reading a book about the common-sense collective wisdom of the unwashed deplorable masses. Turns out they make sense in the long term.

I know that democracy, popular elections by most of the adult citizens, is not a welcome concept among elite experts.

I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty

William F Buckley

On 4/16/25 3:49 PM, Don Y wrote: > On 4/16/2025 3:11 AM, Martin Brown wrote: <...>

That's a very large residential A/C. Our 4-Ton unit (48kBTU/Hr) takes about 5kW and suffices a 2,900 sq ft house in northern California. (Don't you like all these antiquated units!)

California encourages (and will soon require) heat pumps for domestic hot water, that gives you a threefold improvement in efficiency if running from solar generated electricity. They are pretty common.

Here in PG&E land around the SF bay we're allowed up to 10kW of solar generation without significant additional requirements.

kw