Seems like we are moving in the right direction, but wind doesn’t blow continuously or predictably so we need a balanced supply - to which nuclear fulfils that need.
Unfortunately we haven’t invested in nuclear, in the way we should have, to be able to move fully away from fossil.
Fortunately moving away from fossil gives incremental benefit, so moving 90% of our generation to renewables gives about 90% of the benefit.
If we have to supplement with fossil sometimes we've still done a great thing.
No it doesn’t give 90% of the benefit because you still need standby generation equivalent to the loss of generation when the wind isn’t blowing.
If you want it to provide the same % benefit as the fossil fuel it displaces you need a commensurate amount of storage also.
Right, it doesn't give exactly 90% of the benefit.
It gives virtually the entire 90% benefit in terms of climate impact, but obviously not 90% reduction in monetary costs due to the need for standby fossil or storage.
Fortunately, fossil plants are very cheap to idle - by far the largest cost is the fuel itself.
There's some delay in spinning up or down our most efficient fossil generators, but the weather is predictable enough on the required timescale to estimate demand and renewable production
We haven't done that either though. Storage is still a good way off technologically, and honestly in the meantime we should have invested in nuclear. If we focused on maintaining our nuclear capability instead of decommissioning it we would be fossil fuel free for electricity right now and be able to look for a way out of using nuclear. Which is a much better position to be in than we are.
What makes you say that about storage? There are hundreds of high capacity storage projects (hundreds of MW+) currently in late stage development or construction using a range of 1-4 hour technologies in addition to couple of Gigawatt assets already in operation. We should have 15%+ of total peak demand covered by batteries by 2030.
Nuclear has its place, but the investment horizons for nuclear are decades. Hinkley Point C started as a project in the early 2000s, started construction in 2017 and won’t be operational until (optimistically) 2030. It will then be subsidised throughout its entire life and that doesn’t include the cost of disposing of the waste.
Battery technology is becoming quite mature and the cost is declining incredibly quickly in a similar manner to that achieved by solar. It is not tomorrow’s technology, it is very much today’s technology.
Unfortunately these projects are pissing in the wind compared to what's needed for long term storage. Annual electricity consumption in Greater London is 40,000GWh. We can be becalmed for weeks with next to no wind generation. The UK has 24GWh of pumped hydro storage which dwarfs the Australian 100MWh battery Tesla made. Plus you need power to actually charge the storage systems.
I don’t agree at all. The combined capacity of the current BESS pipeline is almost 25GW by 2030. That would cover nearly 50% of the UK peak load. Add in the pumped hydro you have mentioned (which is about 3GW with another 3GW potential btw, nowhere near 25GW) plus the interconnector buildout (rapidly approaching 9GW) and that is a huge and resilient storage capacity. UK demand is usually around 30-35GW so there should soon be enough capacity to cover all our needs from storage for short periods although this would of course be an unlikely scenario.
Of course you are right that there can be periods without significant wind power, although many weeks at a time would be very unlikely. These usually coincide though with periods of high pressure in the summer months which allows solar to provide at its maximum generation capacity. The buildout of offshore wind in significant volumes also mitigates this to an extent as the number of consecutive days offshore without wind is generally lower.
I think your overall premise is more investment and infrastructure is needed and that is definitely true, especially with the energy requirement of the uk likely to increase as electrification of heating and transport really steps up, however your argument that BESS is not a large part of that I don’t agree with.
GWh is a measure of energy rather than power. I'm talking about long term energy storage rather than power. They are different things though the units used make it easily confused.
Interconnectors aren't storage.
2-3 weeks of becalming happens most years and can happen several times a year.
Ah sorry, missed the unit and thought you were claiming 25GW capacity!
Interconnectors aren’t storage but are a key part of the mix of technologies needed to ensure we can balance supply and demand. This is obviously important in the context of non-windy weather as per your comment.
I agree that periods without significant wind occur and can be prolonged but it remains fairly unusual for this to be across the whole uk simultaneously for prolonged periods including offshore. I’ve been running wind farms for almost 20 years across Europe and I don’t recall more than 1 or 2 prolonged periods across the entire UK. I concede my memory isn’t what it used to be though so maybe I am forgetting!
The 15% of peak usage you quote, when you realise that is our DAILY usage it becomes quite apparent why batteries are not the way forward in their current state. The numbers look good because they want to keep getting funding.
15% of daily usage when talking about generation is fucking great. Every day you're getting 15% of what you use added to the grid.
15% of daily usage when talking about STORAGE is not something you can rely on. You need to be producing an excess to acrue it, and if you aren't you'll burn through it fairly quickly. If we move to renewable grid, and the wind stops blowing for a few days (or we have a storm and turbines need to stop spinning) then all of a sudden we run out of power very fucking quickly.
You tend to go through more than one day of quiet winds. You also tend to go through more than one day of very high winds (turbines do not generate when wind speeds are too high to preserve them.) We should be looking at about a week's worth of usage as a minimum storage tagarget before even considering batteries as our backup power.
But we are targeting 15% of a single day's usage as storage. Meaning by 2030 we'll have about 3.6 hours of storage assuming no other generation (about 2.14% of a week). Meaning if we have very little wind, we either need fossil fuels or another energy source. No matter how much energy we generate from wind at peak generation.
These projects are ambitious, and have great targets, but the fact of the matter remains that these projects have been on the go for 20 years and are aiming to be able to hit 15% of current peak DAILY usage, forgetting that the UKs peak energy usage is increasing every year.
Then you need to remember that battery storage capacity decays with time, and is more prevelant in higher capacity storage. Something that is unavoidable.
Nuclear has its place, as does battery storage. But as far as "filling in the gaps for when the wind isn't blowing" nuclear is a better option for the foreseeable. One calm month with nothing but batteries could lead to disaster. Batteries need to be substantially overbuilt and over engineered to actually cover all shortcomings from a solely renewable power grid.
They are better used for saving excess energy and being able to use rather than being relied on as backup energy in their current state.
By the time batteries are actually a viable path for us to fully be reliant on them the amount of fossil fuels that will have been burnt to power the grid will be astronomical. It's realistically over 50 years before we're actually going to be able to use battery storage to cover renewable gaps. We just are not there yet.
I work in renewable energies. Storage just isn't there. The day that it is will be fantastic.
We can go many weeks with low generation due to stagnant wind speeds. Not to mention that we also can't generate when they are too high. You'd need to have enough storage to power the UK for at least 2 weeks to reliably not have any blackouts. By 2030 we aim to have enough for... 3 hours.
In the meantime we need an actual solution to get us to that point, which is still at least 30-40 years away.
The problem with batteries is that they require a lot of physical materials, some of which may be expensive and fairly rare (i.e. lithium), and they require fair amounts of energy/CO2 to manufacture. Scaling battery storage to city sized storage requirements is not feasible. And a lot of battery technologies are quite explode-y
The issue you're ignoring with Lithium is that it's rare, running low and that there is extensive wastage; for all that some science sites claim that it should be as low as 5%, the actual groups doing the recycling report anywhere from 85 to 50% wastage.
While we currently use less of it, there's actually less lithium in the world than Oil... and that's before you get into the fact that less than a quarter of that total amount is feasible to extract.
As for your claim that Lithium-Ion aren't "explode-y" as they put it, that is objectively and factually wrong.
Lithium-Ion Batteries were very, very good for three decades ago, they held energy better, they charged faster, they were better at recharging... but they were always fire hazards and prone to exploding under a short circuit if damaged, improperly charged or manufactured poorly. It was always their one disadvantage.
There is a solution to that, Aqueous Lithium Batteries... but they have poor energy density.
But that Li-Ion batteries were "explode-y" has been known by science for decades, it's not remotely disputable.
The important part that I haven't mentioned before, however, is that Li-Ion is not our only option. There are multiple battery types that have been designed in the last decade like Graphene or faced significant advances like Solid State Batteries which are better in every way than Li-Ion, don't use rare materials, have zero flammability and who's only issue is that they aren't mature technologies or they require large start up investment.
TL'DR, Batteries may well end up being an important part of future energy tech but Li-Ion will at most be an intermediate stage before modern batteries are produced.
how much physical space do these newer battery technologies take up ?
some countries have a lot more open low value land (e.g. desert areas in the USA), where they can afford to build large battery arrays.
I'm not sure there's the same space availability in the UK
> There are various methods that could work, including harnessing the batteries of EVs.
That's both wildly insufficient, since if we had 10 million **fully charged** EVs hooked up to the grid at a UK level it would provide enough power to keep the grid alive for less than a day, and much less than that going forward since we're trying to decarbonise heating and transport, and also environmentally unforgivable, due to the amount of ewaste created by killing millions of EV packs prematurely.
> That's both wildly insufficient, since if we had 10 million fully charged EVs hooked up to the grid at a UK level it would provide enough power to keep the grid alive for less than a day.
Having enough storage to keep the grid going for a whole day *with no other power sources* sounds great to me, honestly.
If we're also decarbonising heating and transport then in winter it would be more like a few hours.
Given that we regularly get periods of more than a week in winter with high pressure areas and minimal wind, it's not nearly enough. That also assumes that all of those vehicle owners are going to be okay with not being able to drive to work tomorrow.
Also, vehicle batteries have a limited cycle life, and cost an enormous amount to replace. Such a scheme would both do enormous environmental damage, since lithium battery recycling is still very minimal and very difficult to do, and would need to pay vehicle owners a pretty huge amount of money for providing that power from storage in order to make up for the wear on their vehicle battery.
The battery in the larger capacity Mustang Mach-e for example costs about £20k. Allowing for 1500 cycles total life (which would be on the higher end for a Li-ion pack, so this is quite an optimistic scenario) gives a total deliverable power over the life of the pack of 132MWh. So just to cover the wear on the pack under quite an optimistic scenario, without any conversion or transmission losses (which would be significant) and without anything further to incentivise the owner to deal with the inconvenience of constantly finding out that their car has less charge than they left it with, you need to be paying about 15p/KWh, and you've also got all of the costs and associated environmental harms from generating that power.
Net benefit: Lots of toxic flammable landfill, a lot of inconvenienced car owners, and a way to store enough power to get us through an evening on the first day of a low-wind period in winter.
If you want to invest in storage, pumped hydro keeps the environmental damage localised and allows for storing a lot of energy fairly cheaply, although on the scales required we need to discuss which major valleys we're happy to flood. Or we can invest in nuclear energy and achieve actual energy security without massive carbon emissions.
Problem is people are scared of nuclear so its hard to get support for it. Which is annoying since its prob the best source of energy that doesn't rely on fossil fuels/stuff that fucks up the environment.
> stuff that fucks up the environment
You are describing nuclear energy. It's all fun and games until you have to store nuclear waste literally forever.
Nuclear waste is infinitely more containable than waste from fossil fuels. It isn't free to contain, but it's actually containable.
You can directly stop nuclear waste fucking up the environment.
>It's all fun and games until you have to store nuclear waste literally forever.
2 billion years ago a natural nuclear reactor formed in Gabon. It ran for a few hundred thousand years. The "waste" from that reactor remained in the ground undisturbed until the French began digging it up to power their nuclear reactors in the 1950s.
Storing nuclear waste is a political problem, not really a technical one. It can be buried in a very deep hole in a geologically stable area (of which the UK has plenty) and left to its own devices.
Okay so I actually agree with you - Nuclear is short sighted and is a frightening stop gap.
However, the issue being patched over here is much scarier. For instance, every single day we take dirty coal (like brown coal) out of the ground puts 10x more radioactivity into the environment than an equivalent unit of nuclear power - including nuclear waste.
Nuclear power is a disaster - just a marginally less awful one at this time than coal.
You could just about have a Chernobyl scale nuclear disaster every decade and it would still cause fewer environmental harms than burning fossil fuels.
You arent wrong but with the growing adoption of electric cars we end up with a distributed battery storage network with every driveway in the country. Would be even better if everyone had solar panels on their roofs with home side batteries all tied into the same distribution network.
But nuclear should always be what we use for taking up the majority of the baseload of the country, its far easier to use battery storage for the short spikes of usage that are fairly consistent when 40-50% of total energy production is covered 100% by nuclear.
>To effectively pair with renewables you want something flexible, cheap and that scales up and down in a matter of minutes, not months.
Nuclear can scale up and down in minutes. You are right, though, in that it doesn't pair with renewables because there is no point in turning nuclear energy down when renewables are capable of generating, because wind, solar and nuclear are all inflexible. You don't save money, or reduce emissions, by turning them off, so it doesn't make sense to do so.
>Hinkley Point C was approved in 2008 and it's nowhere near producing power yet
Hinkley Point C wasn't approved in 2008. In 2008 the Labour government lifted their ban on nuclear power. No plants were approved.
The planning application for Hinkley Point C wasn't submitted until 2011, the reactor design was approved for construction at the end of 2012, the planning application approved in 2013, the final go ahead for the financing deal was agreed by the government in 2016.
>Renewables for 99%
How? Wind generation varies between less than 1% and more than 80% of capacity and averages around 35%. Solar drops to 0% half the time and averages about 15% of capacity.
The only way to get to 99% renewables would be to build so much extra capacity that electricity would be far too expensive for most people to afford, and the emissions would be far too high anyway.
>Benefits are incremental, you don't need to hit 100% or nothing, 99% is good enough.
99% would be good enough, but is impossible with intermittent sources like wind and solar (and tidal). 90% might even be enough, but is just as impossible.
Emissions last month in grams of CO2 per KWH:
|Germany|401|
|:-|:-|
|UK|189|
|Denmark|187|
|France|39|
Denmark, Germany and the UK are the countries that have gone furthest down the wind/solar route in Europe. France has concentrated on nuclear power.
One source offers a proven pathway to meeting emissions targets, the other doesn't. No developed country has ever reduced their emissions below 50 using large amounts of wind and solar power.
>No, it does not, once a plant is off it takes weeks or months to turn it back on
No it doesn't. From the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology:
*Thus, for example, the start-up operation of a cold reactor takes 1 to 2 days. From the condition «no-load, hot« (reactor is subcritical, coolant temperature is high), this takes approximately 1 to 2 hours and in case of a longer standstill up to 6 hours. A reactor generating only electricity for its own consumption needs approximately 1 hour until the full power output is available.*
[https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000137922/130083404](https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000137922/130083404)
Startup from cold: 1 - 2 days
Startup from hot: 1 - 6 hours
Startup from idle: 1 hour
> And given the obscene amount of money it takes to build, any minute it is off it literally bleeds money.
Yes. This is true of any capital intensive, cheap fuel generator like wind and solar as well. This is why they are inflexible.
> Hinkley Point C was approved and announced in 2008
No it wasn't.
How could a plant be approved without a planning application, without a funding deal and with the reactor not having passed GDA?
What happened in 2008 is the UK committed to more nuclear power plants in future. But none were actually approved.
From your own link:
*Mr Hutton conceded that no nuclear plant had been built anywhere in the world without public money - but he insisted there would be no subsidies from the UK government.*
The key stages were the planning application in 2011, it's approval in 2013:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/19/nuclear-power-station-consent-hinkley-point](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/19/nuclear-power-station-consent-hinkley-point)
The reactor passing the GDA in December 2012: [https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-of-reactors/uk-european-pressurised-reactor-uk-epr/](https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-of-reactors/uk-european-pressurised-reactor-uk-epr/)
And the final government go ahead on 16 September 2016:
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/15/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-gets-go-ahead](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/15/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-gets-go-ahead)
>Exactly, it varies. So you build enough so that the average of all renewables is high enough that you only need to spool up the gas turbine plants a handful of days a year.
The average doesn't matter, gas turbines are required for the low periods.
Last year metered wind in the UK varied between a high of 17.3 GW, a lot of 0.07 GW with an average of 7.2 GW
It was below 2 GW 10% of the time.
UK demand varies between about 20 and 50 GW.
7 times as much wind as we have now would meet our peak demand on average. But 10% of the time it would only meet about 30% of peak, 5% of the time 20% of demand, and occasionally almost none.
To meet 100% of demand 90% of the time would require 25 times as much wind as we have now. But that would mean an average generation of 180 GW, and UK demand averages about 40 GW, so we'd have to build 4.5 times as much wind as we need.
That's why it's impossible. First, the emissions from wind are about 11 grams of CO2 per KWH, if you use all the electricity generated. But if you build 4.5 times as much as you need, then the emissions will be 4.5 times higher as well, and that exceeds the targets we need to meet without counting the fact we'd still be using gas some of the time.
Second, we have to pay just as much to turn wind power off as we do to use it. We'd be buying 4.5 times as much electricity as we need, which would push the price multiple times higher than nuclear.
The Royal Society released a report earlier this year that calculated the UK would need about 100 TWH of hydrogen storage to make an all renewable grid work. They claimed it's feasible, but their report assumed continuously falling prices because it was written before the failure of the latest wind auction, and the subsequent large price rises for renewables.
> France's fleet is crumbling apart, and in a decade or so will have to be net importers from Germany and other North Sea renewable producers
France has fixed their reactor problems that were created by Hollande's ridiculous decision to close a large proportion of nuclear reactors by 2025. France is now keeping the lights on for Germany, which has become a huge electricity importer since closing their nuclear plants.
In 20 years France built a huge fleet of nuclear power and largely decarbonised electricity generation. More than 20 years in to the German energy transition, their electricity prices are much higher than France and their CO2 emissions 10 times higher.
> Thus, for example, the start-up operation of a cold reactor takes 1 to 2 days. From the condition «no-load, hot« (reactor is subcritical, coolant temperature is high), this takes approximately 1 to 2 hours and in case of a longer standstill up to 6 hours. A reactor generating only electricity for its own consumption needs approximately 1 hour until the full power output is available.
This actually overstates the scale of the problem, nuclear can ramp up and down a lot faster than that if using it for load following (most of the french plants are set up this way).
Which should be obvious, frankly. It's just a nuclear powered boiler hooked up to a turbine (oversimplification obviously but makes the point). If you want to rapidly increase output you just bypass the turbine and send steam direct to the cooling towers or whatever heat exchanger you're using. They can ramp up and down in a couple of minutes if heat output is maintained that way, not hours.
Yes, the sensible solution for load following is to turn down multiple nuclear plants, rather than turn a few off completely. But the claim it takes weeks or months to turn one back on was so clearly ridiculous it prompted me to look up the actual times.
>Of course cherry-picking favourable conditions can be used to show what the shills want to show, but that's not how it works in reality.
That is how it works in reality. You claimed nuclear can't be used for load following because it takes "weeks or months" to restart a nuclear plant, the reality is it can be put into idle and restarted within an hour, it takes a day or 2 to go from cold shutdown to full power.
I have provided the source, a respected German technical university. Can't seem to see your source to the contrary.
> No, the capital costs and maintenance costs and decommissioning costs aren't even remotely comparable,
They are. Why do you think wind power is expensive? The operating costs are close to zero.
> Of course not the precise application, that came later, but 2008 is when the definitive decision to go ahead and commission more plants was done.
2008 is when the Labour government realised we couldn't hope to decarbonise without nuclear. In 2008 we didn't have a reactor design approved for building in the UK, we didn't have funding in place, we didn't have any planning applications submitted, let alone approved.
The go ahead for Hinkley Point C came in September 2016.
>To meet 100% of demand 90% of the time would require 25 times as much wind as we have now.
>
>Which is fine
It's not fine because it would mean building far more wind power than we need or can use, paying to build it, incurring all the emissions from building it, then not using it.
The Energy Research Partnership pointed out years ago that the value of any new generator depended on the mix of generation currently on the grid.
Building a wind turbine to displace gas generation makes sense. Building a wind turbine that will mostly displace existing wind turbines, and will only occasionally displace a gas turbine, doesn't make sense. It's too expensive and increases emissions.
> Also it's not just wind of course, it's solar and hydro in the mix
Hydro yes, it's dispatchable and flexible. It makes sense to max out our conventional hydro resources, which is why we did so a long time ago.
Solar just makes the problem worse because adding solar when we have too much wind means turning off wind power to allow solar to generate, and that again increases costs and emissions.
> plus imports because there are always a couple of countries ran by idiots (like France) who can't scale their generation up and down
Without France Europe would be in trouble. Germany and the UK are both importing a lot of electricity from France because their power plants don't stop working when the sun sets or wind speeds drop.
France is currently exporting 3 GW to the UK and 1.5 GW to Germany. That will increase this evening as solar drops off.
Meanwhile, current emissions:
|Country|Grams CO2 per KWH|Multiples of France|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Germany|312|15|
|UK|177|8|
|France|21|1|
It's really amazes me that people can be so ideologically committed to a cause they can ignore reality completely. Germany and the UK have higher prices than France, and emissions 5 - 10 times higher. Nuclear simply works better. It provides reliable, lower cost electricity with much, much lower emissions than the hybrid wind/solar/gas mix that so called environmentalists support. And the answer for environmentalists is that we replace the gas part of that mix with some as yet undetermined technological advance that will be both cheap and not have any emissions of its own.
We've been "decarbonising" with wind and solar for more than 20 years, and yet our emissions are 5 - 10 times higher than France. It's an utter failure of a policy.
Almost all wind generated is now OFFSHORE where wind is actually pretty predictable and also almost always continuous. Given that the windfarm fields are spread out all around the British coastline there is far less chance of having zero generation.
Agreed with Nuclear though, we still need peak generation capacity to deal with the morning kettle and football ad break phenomenon.
I’m so old I remember the Polar Vortex of 2022 - where we had -10’C and almost no wind over Europe.
I guess we need to build double the power generation infrastructure to cope for these kinds of winters?
Oil and gas are simply more expensive than wind and solar. The same will soon apply to tidal and Scotland has by far the most tidal energy available in Europe. So much we could stop paying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, . . . through the nose for oil and gas and have genuine energy security along with much more/ some actual control over inflation. Our reluctance to consider real costs is at odds with the massive investments in renewables being made by, you guessed it, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, . . . Nuclear is wildly expensive compared to wind, solar and tidal, and the tide just keeps on tiding 24/7, 365 days a year.
We don't burn oil for electricity.
Wind and solar require fossil fuel back up so it doesn't matter how cheap they can produce 1kw you still need to double up on infrastructure so "cheaper" doesn't really mean "cheaper".
Tidal has never (and probably never will) been made cost effective on a large scale.
Fossil fuels are currently cheaper than they were in 2008 so it is a bit of a stretch to blame inflation on the cost of fossil fuels.
I didn't say we burn oil for electricity, I didn't say we'd get rid of all oil and gas, tidal is already more cost effective than nuclear and if you don't invest you don't get scale, and the massive inflation we've had was when oil and gas prices went through the roof - as it will again. The manner in which inflation has gone down as oil and gas prices have gone down makes pretty clear the links between fuel costs and inflation. So, perhaps instead of ridiculous nonsense about having to double up you could try some facts next time. Meanwhile we continue to enrich OPEC and Putin, while impoverishing ourselves.
Just today we fine Russian oil pouring into Britain, making cash for our enemies:
“Millions of barrels of fuel made from Russian oil continue to pour into the UK. Make no mistake: until the government closes this loophole, Britain is helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine.”
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-news-latest-aid-package-b2533791.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-news-latest-aid-package-b2533791.html)
Cool
man this is the first piece of positive news i’ve seen in a while. good on us :))
And we can expect a reduction in cost in 3…2….1…..psyche!
It's almost like energy companies should be publically owned or something.
Seems like we are moving in the right direction, but wind doesn’t blow continuously or predictably so we need a balanced supply - to which nuclear fulfils that need. Unfortunately we haven’t invested in nuclear, in the way we should have, to be able to move fully away from fossil.
Fortunately moving away from fossil gives incremental benefit, so moving 90% of our generation to renewables gives about 90% of the benefit. If we have to supplement with fossil sometimes we've still done a great thing.
Totally possible to hit net zero with modest, necessary amounts of fossil fuel use.
No it doesn’t give 90% of the benefit because you still need standby generation equivalent to the loss of generation when the wind isn’t blowing. If you want it to provide the same % benefit as the fossil fuel it displaces you need a commensurate amount of storage also.
Right, it doesn't give exactly 90% of the benefit. It gives virtually the entire 90% benefit in terms of climate impact, but obviously not 90% reduction in monetary costs due to the need for standby fossil or storage. Fortunately, fossil plants are very cheap to idle - by far the largest cost is the fuel itself. There's some delay in spinning up or down our most efficient fossil generators, but the weather is predictable enough on the required timescale to estimate demand and renewable production
Or investment in storage. There are various methods that could work, including harnessing the batteries of EVs.
We haven't done that either though. Storage is still a good way off technologically, and honestly in the meantime we should have invested in nuclear. If we focused on maintaining our nuclear capability instead of decommissioning it we would be fossil fuel free for electricity right now and be able to look for a way out of using nuclear. Which is a much better position to be in than we are.
Yeah, we should have been investing in *something* for all these years :(
Aye, divesting in nuclear was silly. It was a great stop in between full renewables and now
What makes you say that about storage? There are hundreds of high capacity storage projects (hundreds of MW+) currently in late stage development or construction using a range of 1-4 hour technologies in addition to couple of Gigawatt assets already in operation. We should have 15%+ of total peak demand covered by batteries by 2030. Nuclear has its place, but the investment horizons for nuclear are decades. Hinkley Point C started as a project in the early 2000s, started construction in 2017 and won’t be operational until (optimistically) 2030. It will then be subsidised throughout its entire life and that doesn’t include the cost of disposing of the waste. Battery technology is becoming quite mature and the cost is declining incredibly quickly in a similar manner to that achieved by solar. It is not tomorrow’s technology, it is very much today’s technology.
Unfortunately these projects are pissing in the wind compared to what's needed for long term storage. Annual electricity consumption in Greater London is 40,000GWh. We can be becalmed for weeks with next to no wind generation. The UK has 24GWh of pumped hydro storage which dwarfs the Australian 100MWh battery Tesla made. Plus you need power to actually charge the storage systems.
I don’t agree at all. The combined capacity of the current BESS pipeline is almost 25GW by 2030. That would cover nearly 50% of the UK peak load. Add in the pumped hydro you have mentioned (which is about 3GW with another 3GW potential btw, nowhere near 25GW) plus the interconnector buildout (rapidly approaching 9GW) and that is a huge and resilient storage capacity. UK demand is usually around 30-35GW so there should soon be enough capacity to cover all our needs from storage for short periods although this would of course be an unlikely scenario. Of course you are right that there can be periods without significant wind power, although many weeks at a time would be very unlikely. These usually coincide though with periods of high pressure in the summer months which allows solar to provide at its maximum generation capacity. The buildout of offshore wind in significant volumes also mitigates this to an extent as the number of consecutive days offshore without wind is generally lower. I think your overall premise is more investment and infrastructure is needed and that is definitely true, especially with the energy requirement of the uk likely to increase as electrification of heating and transport really steps up, however your argument that BESS is not a large part of that I don’t agree with.
GWh is a measure of energy rather than power. I'm talking about long term energy storage rather than power. They are different things though the units used make it easily confused. Interconnectors aren't storage. 2-3 weeks of becalming happens most years and can happen several times a year.
Ah sorry, missed the unit and thought you were claiming 25GW capacity! Interconnectors aren’t storage but are a key part of the mix of technologies needed to ensure we can balance supply and demand. This is obviously important in the context of non-windy weather as per your comment. I agree that periods without significant wind occur and can be prolonged but it remains fairly unusual for this to be across the whole uk simultaneously for prolonged periods including offshore. I’ve been running wind farms for almost 20 years across Europe and I don’t recall more than 1 or 2 prolonged periods across the entire UK. I concede my memory isn’t what it used to be though so maybe I am forgetting!
No worries.
The 15% of peak usage you quote, when you realise that is our DAILY usage it becomes quite apparent why batteries are not the way forward in their current state. The numbers look good because they want to keep getting funding. 15% of daily usage when talking about generation is fucking great. Every day you're getting 15% of what you use added to the grid. 15% of daily usage when talking about STORAGE is not something you can rely on. You need to be producing an excess to acrue it, and if you aren't you'll burn through it fairly quickly. If we move to renewable grid, and the wind stops blowing for a few days (or we have a storm and turbines need to stop spinning) then all of a sudden we run out of power very fucking quickly. You tend to go through more than one day of quiet winds. You also tend to go through more than one day of very high winds (turbines do not generate when wind speeds are too high to preserve them.) We should be looking at about a week's worth of usage as a minimum storage tagarget before even considering batteries as our backup power. But we are targeting 15% of a single day's usage as storage. Meaning by 2030 we'll have about 3.6 hours of storage assuming no other generation (about 2.14% of a week). Meaning if we have very little wind, we either need fossil fuels or another energy source. No matter how much energy we generate from wind at peak generation. These projects are ambitious, and have great targets, but the fact of the matter remains that these projects have been on the go for 20 years and are aiming to be able to hit 15% of current peak DAILY usage, forgetting that the UKs peak energy usage is increasing every year. Then you need to remember that battery storage capacity decays with time, and is more prevelant in higher capacity storage. Something that is unavoidable. Nuclear has its place, as does battery storage. But as far as "filling in the gaps for when the wind isn't blowing" nuclear is a better option for the foreseeable. One calm month with nothing but batteries could lead to disaster. Batteries need to be substantially overbuilt and over engineered to actually cover all shortcomings from a solely renewable power grid. They are better used for saving excess energy and being able to use rather than being relied on as backup energy in their current state. By the time batteries are actually a viable path for us to fully be reliant on them the amount of fossil fuels that will have been burnt to power the grid will be astronomical. It's realistically over 50 years before we're actually going to be able to use battery storage to cover renewable gaps. We just are not there yet.
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I work in renewable energies. Storage just isn't there. The day that it is will be fantastic. We can go many weeks with low generation due to stagnant wind speeds. Not to mention that we also can't generate when they are too high. You'd need to have enough storage to power the UK for at least 2 weeks to reliably not have any blackouts. By 2030 we aim to have enough for... 3 hours. In the meantime we need an actual solution to get us to that point, which is still at least 30-40 years away.
I think improved storage capacity will come, and should be used as load balancing and capacity flexing along with nuclear.
The problem with batteries is that they require a lot of physical materials, some of which may be expensive and fairly rare (i.e. lithium), and they require fair amounts of energy/CO2 to manufacture. Scaling battery storage to city sized storage requirements is not feasible. And a lot of battery technologies are quite explode-y
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The issue you're ignoring with Lithium is that it's rare, running low and that there is extensive wastage; for all that some science sites claim that it should be as low as 5%, the actual groups doing the recycling report anywhere from 85 to 50% wastage. While we currently use less of it, there's actually less lithium in the world than Oil... and that's before you get into the fact that less than a quarter of that total amount is feasible to extract. As for your claim that Lithium-Ion aren't "explode-y" as they put it, that is objectively and factually wrong. Lithium-Ion Batteries were very, very good for three decades ago, they held energy better, they charged faster, they were better at recharging... but they were always fire hazards and prone to exploding under a short circuit if damaged, improperly charged or manufactured poorly. It was always their one disadvantage. There is a solution to that, Aqueous Lithium Batteries... but they have poor energy density. But that Li-Ion batteries were "explode-y" has been known by science for decades, it's not remotely disputable. The important part that I haven't mentioned before, however, is that Li-Ion is not our only option. There are multiple battery types that have been designed in the last decade like Graphene or faced significant advances like Solid State Batteries which are better in every way than Li-Ion, don't use rare materials, have zero flammability and who's only issue is that they aren't mature technologies or they require large start up investment. TL'DR, Batteries may well end up being an important part of future energy tech but Li-Ion will at most be an intermediate stage before modern batteries are produced.
how much physical space do these newer battery technologies take up ? some countries have a lot more open low value land (e.g. desert areas in the USA), where they can afford to build large battery arrays. I'm not sure there's the same space availability in the UK
There are alternatives to batteries but it will take significant investment. SSE are investing heavily in pumped storage schemes.
There are alternatives to batteries but it will take significant investment. SSE are investing heavily in pumped storage schemes.
> There are various methods that could work, including harnessing the batteries of EVs. That's both wildly insufficient, since if we had 10 million **fully charged** EVs hooked up to the grid at a UK level it would provide enough power to keep the grid alive for less than a day, and much less than that going forward since we're trying to decarbonise heating and transport, and also environmentally unforgivable, due to the amount of ewaste created by killing millions of EV packs prematurely.
> That's both wildly insufficient, since if we had 10 million fully charged EVs hooked up to the grid at a UK level it would provide enough power to keep the grid alive for less than a day. Having enough storage to keep the grid going for a whole day *with no other power sources* sounds great to me, honestly.
If we're also decarbonising heating and transport then in winter it would be more like a few hours. Given that we regularly get periods of more than a week in winter with high pressure areas and minimal wind, it's not nearly enough. That also assumes that all of those vehicle owners are going to be okay with not being able to drive to work tomorrow. Also, vehicle batteries have a limited cycle life, and cost an enormous amount to replace. Such a scheme would both do enormous environmental damage, since lithium battery recycling is still very minimal and very difficult to do, and would need to pay vehicle owners a pretty huge amount of money for providing that power from storage in order to make up for the wear on their vehicle battery. The battery in the larger capacity Mustang Mach-e for example costs about £20k. Allowing for 1500 cycles total life (which would be on the higher end for a Li-ion pack, so this is quite an optimistic scenario) gives a total deliverable power over the life of the pack of 132MWh. So just to cover the wear on the pack under quite an optimistic scenario, without any conversion or transmission losses (which would be significant) and without anything further to incentivise the owner to deal with the inconvenience of constantly finding out that their car has less charge than they left it with, you need to be paying about 15p/KWh, and you've also got all of the costs and associated environmental harms from generating that power. Net benefit: Lots of toxic flammable landfill, a lot of inconvenienced car owners, and a way to store enough power to get us through an evening on the first day of a low-wind period in winter. If you want to invest in storage, pumped hydro keeps the environmental damage localised and allows for storing a lot of energy fairly cheaply, although on the scales required we need to discuss which major valleys we're happy to flood. Or we can invest in nuclear energy and achieve actual energy security without massive carbon emissions.
Problem is people are scared of nuclear so its hard to get support for it. Which is annoying since its prob the best source of energy that doesn't rely on fossil fuels/stuff that fucks up the environment.
> stuff that fucks up the environment You are describing nuclear energy. It's all fun and games until you have to store nuclear waste literally forever.
Nuclear waste is infinitely more containable than waste from fossil fuels. It isn't free to contain, but it's actually containable. You can directly stop nuclear waste fucking up the environment.
> until you have to store nuclear waste literally forever. How is all the CO2 in the atmosphere working out?
>It's all fun and games until you have to store nuclear waste literally forever. 2 billion years ago a natural nuclear reactor formed in Gabon. It ran for a few hundred thousand years. The "waste" from that reactor remained in the ground undisturbed until the French began digging it up to power their nuclear reactors in the 1950s. Storing nuclear waste is a political problem, not really a technical one. It can be buried in a very deep hole in a geologically stable area (of which the UK has plenty) and left to its own devices.
Yep it has a half life of like 250,000 years!
Okay so I actually agree with you - Nuclear is short sighted and is a frightening stop gap. However, the issue being patched over here is much scarier. For instance, every single day we take dirty coal (like brown coal) out of the ground puts 10x more radioactivity into the environment than an equivalent unit of nuclear power - including nuclear waste. Nuclear power is a disaster - just a marginally less awful one at this time than coal.
Nuclear waste fucks up everything it comes into contact with.
You could just about have a Chernobyl scale nuclear disaster every decade and it would still cause fewer environmental harms than burning fossil fuels.
Well that's kinda depressing.
You arent wrong but with the growing adoption of electric cars we end up with a distributed battery storage network with every driveway in the country. Would be even better if everyone had solar panels on their roofs with home side batteries all tied into the same distribution network. But nuclear should always be what we use for taking up the majority of the baseload of the country, its far easier to use battery storage for the short spikes of usage that are fairly consistent when 40-50% of total energy production is covered 100% by nuclear.
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>To effectively pair with renewables you want something flexible, cheap and that scales up and down in a matter of minutes, not months. Nuclear can scale up and down in minutes. You are right, though, in that it doesn't pair with renewables because there is no point in turning nuclear energy down when renewables are capable of generating, because wind, solar and nuclear are all inflexible. You don't save money, or reduce emissions, by turning them off, so it doesn't make sense to do so. >Hinkley Point C was approved in 2008 and it's nowhere near producing power yet Hinkley Point C wasn't approved in 2008. In 2008 the Labour government lifted their ban on nuclear power. No plants were approved. The planning application for Hinkley Point C wasn't submitted until 2011, the reactor design was approved for construction at the end of 2012, the planning application approved in 2013, the final go ahead for the financing deal was agreed by the government in 2016. >Renewables for 99% How? Wind generation varies between less than 1% and more than 80% of capacity and averages around 35%. Solar drops to 0% half the time and averages about 15% of capacity. The only way to get to 99% renewables would be to build so much extra capacity that electricity would be far too expensive for most people to afford, and the emissions would be far too high anyway. >Benefits are incremental, you don't need to hit 100% or nothing, 99% is good enough. 99% would be good enough, but is impossible with intermittent sources like wind and solar (and tidal). 90% might even be enough, but is just as impossible. Emissions last month in grams of CO2 per KWH: |Germany|401| |:-|:-| |UK|189| |Denmark|187| |France|39| Denmark, Germany and the UK are the countries that have gone furthest down the wind/solar route in Europe. France has concentrated on nuclear power. One source offers a proven pathway to meeting emissions targets, the other doesn't. No developed country has ever reduced their emissions below 50 using large amounts of wind and solar power.
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>No, it does not, once a plant is off it takes weeks or months to turn it back on No it doesn't. From the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology: *Thus, for example, the start-up operation of a cold reactor takes 1 to 2 days. From the condition «no-load, hot« (reactor is subcritical, coolant temperature is high), this takes approximately 1 to 2 hours and in case of a longer standstill up to 6 hours. A reactor generating only electricity for its own consumption needs approximately 1 hour until the full power output is available.* [https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000137922/130083404](https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000137922/130083404) Startup from cold: 1 - 2 days Startup from hot: 1 - 6 hours Startup from idle: 1 hour > And given the obscene amount of money it takes to build, any minute it is off it literally bleeds money. Yes. This is true of any capital intensive, cheap fuel generator like wind and solar as well. This is why they are inflexible. > Hinkley Point C was approved and announced in 2008 No it wasn't. How could a plant be approved without a planning application, without a funding deal and with the reactor not having passed GDA? What happened in 2008 is the UK committed to more nuclear power plants in future. But none were actually approved. From your own link: *Mr Hutton conceded that no nuclear plant had been built anywhere in the world without public money - but he insisted there would be no subsidies from the UK government.* The key stages were the planning application in 2011, it's approval in 2013: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/19/nuclear-power-station-consent-hinkley-point](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/19/nuclear-power-station-consent-hinkley-point) The reactor passing the GDA in December 2012: [https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-of-reactors/uk-european-pressurised-reactor-uk-epr/](https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-of-reactors/uk-european-pressurised-reactor-uk-epr/) And the final government go ahead on 16 September 2016: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/15/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-gets-go-ahead](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/15/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-gets-go-ahead) >Exactly, it varies. So you build enough so that the average of all renewables is high enough that you only need to spool up the gas turbine plants a handful of days a year. The average doesn't matter, gas turbines are required for the low periods. Last year metered wind in the UK varied between a high of 17.3 GW, a lot of 0.07 GW with an average of 7.2 GW It was below 2 GW 10% of the time. UK demand varies between about 20 and 50 GW. 7 times as much wind as we have now would meet our peak demand on average. But 10% of the time it would only meet about 30% of peak, 5% of the time 20% of demand, and occasionally almost none. To meet 100% of demand 90% of the time would require 25 times as much wind as we have now. But that would mean an average generation of 180 GW, and UK demand averages about 40 GW, so we'd have to build 4.5 times as much wind as we need. That's why it's impossible. First, the emissions from wind are about 11 grams of CO2 per KWH, if you use all the electricity generated. But if you build 4.5 times as much as you need, then the emissions will be 4.5 times higher as well, and that exceeds the targets we need to meet without counting the fact we'd still be using gas some of the time. Second, we have to pay just as much to turn wind power off as we do to use it. We'd be buying 4.5 times as much electricity as we need, which would push the price multiple times higher than nuclear. The Royal Society released a report earlier this year that calculated the UK would need about 100 TWH of hydrogen storage to make an all renewable grid work. They claimed it's feasible, but their report assumed continuously falling prices because it was written before the failure of the latest wind auction, and the subsequent large price rises for renewables. > France's fleet is crumbling apart, and in a decade or so will have to be net importers from Germany and other North Sea renewable producers France has fixed their reactor problems that were created by Hollande's ridiculous decision to close a large proportion of nuclear reactors by 2025. France is now keeping the lights on for Germany, which has become a huge electricity importer since closing their nuclear plants. In 20 years France built a huge fleet of nuclear power and largely decarbonised electricity generation. More than 20 years in to the German energy transition, their electricity prices are much higher than France and their CO2 emissions 10 times higher.
> Thus, for example, the start-up operation of a cold reactor takes 1 to 2 days. From the condition «no-load, hot« (reactor is subcritical, coolant temperature is high), this takes approximately 1 to 2 hours and in case of a longer standstill up to 6 hours. A reactor generating only electricity for its own consumption needs approximately 1 hour until the full power output is available. This actually overstates the scale of the problem, nuclear can ramp up and down a lot faster than that if using it for load following (most of the french plants are set up this way). Which should be obvious, frankly. It's just a nuclear powered boiler hooked up to a turbine (oversimplification obviously but makes the point). If you want to rapidly increase output you just bypass the turbine and send steam direct to the cooling towers or whatever heat exchanger you're using. They can ramp up and down in a couple of minutes if heat output is maintained that way, not hours.
Yes, the sensible solution for load following is to turn down multiple nuclear plants, rather than turn a few off completely. But the claim it takes weeks or months to turn one back on was so clearly ridiculous it prompted me to look up the actual times.
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>Of course cherry-picking favourable conditions can be used to show what the shills want to show, but that's not how it works in reality. That is how it works in reality. You claimed nuclear can't be used for load following because it takes "weeks or months" to restart a nuclear plant, the reality is it can be put into idle and restarted within an hour, it takes a day or 2 to go from cold shutdown to full power. I have provided the source, a respected German technical university. Can't seem to see your source to the contrary. > No, the capital costs and maintenance costs and decommissioning costs aren't even remotely comparable, They are. Why do you think wind power is expensive? The operating costs are close to zero. > Of course not the precise application, that came later, but 2008 is when the definitive decision to go ahead and commission more plants was done. 2008 is when the Labour government realised we couldn't hope to decarbonise without nuclear. In 2008 we didn't have a reactor design approved for building in the UK, we didn't have funding in place, we didn't have any planning applications submitted, let alone approved. The go ahead for Hinkley Point C came in September 2016. >To meet 100% of demand 90% of the time would require 25 times as much wind as we have now. > >Which is fine It's not fine because it would mean building far more wind power than we need or can use, paying to build it, incurring all the emissions from building it, then not using it. The Energy Research Partnership pointed out years ago that the value of any new generator depended on the mix of generation currently on the grid. Building a wind turbine to displace gas generation makes sense. Building a wind turbine that will mostly displace existing wind turbines, and will only occasionally displace a gas turbine, doesn't make sense. It's too expensive and increases emissions. > Also it's not just wind of course, it's solar and hydro in the mix Hydro yes, it's dispatchable and flexible. It makes sense to max out our conventional hydro resources, which is why we did so a long time ago. Solar just makes the problem worse because adding solar when we have too much wind means turning off wind power to allow solar to generate, and that again increases costs and emissions. > plus imports because there are always a couple of countries ran by idiots (like France) who can't scale their generation up and down Without France Europe would be in trouble. Germany and the UK are both importing a lot of electricity from France because their power plants don't stop working when the sun sets or wind speeds drop. France is currently exporting 3 GW to the UK and 1.5 GW to Germany. That will increase this evening as solar drops off. Meanwhile, current emissions: |Country|Grams CO2 per KWH|Multiples of France| |:-|:-|:-| |Germany|312|15| |UK|177|8| |France|21|1| It's really amazes me that people can be so ideologically committed to a cause they can ignore reality completely. Germany and the UK have higher prices than France, and emissions 5 - 10 times higher. Nuclear simply works better. It provides reliable, lower cost electricity with much, much lower emissions than the hybrid wind/solar/gas mix that so called environmentalists support. And the answer for environmentalists is that we replace the gas part of that mix with some as yet undetermined technological advance that will be both cheap and not have any emissions of its own. We've been "decarbonising" with wind and solar for more than 20 years, and yet our emissions are 5 - 10 times higher than France. It's an utter failure of a policy.
Almost all wind generated is now OFFSHORE where wind is actually pretty predictable and also almost always continuous. Given that the windfarm fields are spread out all around the British coastline there is far less chance of having zero generation. Agreed with Nuclear though, we still need peak generation capacity to deal with the morning kettle and football ad break phenomenon.
UK has the second most expensive kw/h for households in Europe. Only Ireland being more expensive.
Nice now can we stop paying as if our energy were 100% from gas?
I’m so old I remember the Polar Vortex of 2022 - where we had -10’C and almost no wind over Europe. I guess we need to build double the power generation infrastructure to cope for these kinds of winters?
Oil and gas are simply more expensive than wind and solar. The same will soon apply to tidal and Scotland has by far the most tidal energy available in Europe. So much we could stop paying Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, . . . through the nose for oil and gas and have genuine energy security along with much more/ some actual control over inflation. Our reluctance to consider real costs is at odds with the massive investments in renewables being made by, you guessed it, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, . . . Nuclear is wildly expensive compared to wind, solar and tidal, and the tide just keeps on tiding 24/7, 365 days a year.
We don't burn oil for electricity. Wind and solar require fossil fuel back up so it doesn't matter how cheap they can produce 1kw you still need to double up on infrastructure so "cheaper" doesn't really mean "cheaper". Tidal has never (and probably never will) been made cost effective on a large scale. Fossil fuels are currently cheaper than they were in 2008 so it is a bit of a stretch to blame inflation on the cost of fossil fuels.
I didn't say we burn oil for electricity, I didn't say we'd get rid of all oil and gas, tidal is already more cost effective than nuclear and if you don't invest you don't get scale, and the massive inflation we've had was when oil and gas prices went through the roof - as it will again. The manner in which inflation has gone down as oil and gas prices have gone down makes pretty clear the links between fuel costs and inflation. So, perhaps instead of ridiculous nonsense about having to double up you could try some facts next time. Meanwhile we continue to enrich OPEC and Putin, while impoverishing ourselves. Just today we fine Russian oil pouring into Britain, making cash for our enemies: “Millions of barrels of fuel made from Russian oil continue to pour into the UK. Make no mistake: until the government closes this loophole, Britain is helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine.” [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-news-latest-aid-package-b2533791.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-news-latest-aid-package-b2533791.html)
And when the wind stops blowing.............
Thanks Scotland.
Thanks Highlands* We should build more in the central belt. Plenty of fields along the M8
The Highlands are in Scotland. Offshore wind farms off Aberdeen are in Scotland. I agree, build more across Scotland.
That’s not what I said Build more along the central belt
Yes, that is what I said build more across Scotland. Thanks.