The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain

[turbobloke]

wc98 said:

Gary C said:

Lol, bit more than that. £33, and we were happy to get it.

Wish we could access all the low carbon money.

maybe once the subsidies end wind will only get £33 as well .

It's heartwarming to ponder the 'low cost' of wind energy and what good value we get from 'nearly subsidy free' renewables. Without the nearly-not-subsidised 'low' prices our hearts would be warmer, as long as we could afford the green blob enhanced energy bills. Thank goodness that the true cost remains hidden

[Ali G]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

As I know you like to see these things......



http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/wind-turbine...

That is so last year that is.

Next year, this does not happen coz bigger and all at sea.

Am I doing this right?

[LongQ]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

V8:

According to EDF:

EDF estimates that the hidden cost of supporting wind power can add between £15 to £20 per MWh to their headline figures through the extra payments needed to back up wind farms when the wind drops, or pay developers to shut down their turbines when there is more wind power than the country needs.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/20/edf...


And you are no doubt fine with:

It will cost energy consumers around £50bn by guaranteeing EDF a price of £92.50 for every MWh

Quoting from a little further down the same article:

"But he insists nuclear power costs will drop, and will compete with wind power on a level playing field. EDF estimates that the hidden cost of supporting wind power can add between £15 to £20 per MWh to their headline figures through the extra payments needed to back up wind farms when the wind drops, or pay developers to shut down their turbines when there is more wind power than the country needs. EDF therefore needs to cut costs down at least to £80 per MWh to prove it can compete with wind power at today’s rates. Rossi is clear that nuclear needs to be competitive at future prices, too, so even bigger savings are necessary."

North Hoyle was the first major UK offshore installation of wind power and started up in 2003. I recall flying over it in 2004 not too long after it had started to operate.

Given a 25 year life expectancy means that it may be coming up to the point of replacement costing and planning at around the time that Hinckley Point is commissioned. So it will be interesting to see how long it takes to agree what it will be replaced with and to ascertain the cost and maybe extrapolate that and compare it with the final numbers for Hinckley point and what the nuclear developers would by then consider to be a viable price for any new proposals.


Secondly it seems that EDF, who presumably will have done the sums, sees the cost of back up and curtailment for wind as £15 to £20 per MWh.

This is the cost of non-delivery when it is required or not required.

Now it occurs to me that in a good competitive market this should not be a necessary overhead cost for delivery failure. Seating the assets to make them as a whole really ought to mean that over production should never be wasted at any great level and at the very least should be available to cover production outages. In electricity generation terms that means storage.

So wind (and solar) with storage needs to be able to continue to generate and store in overcapacity situations in order to level out the under and over production periods and so no longer require the overhead costs of backup and curtailment.

Presumably there is no realistic means of doing that in the UK at this time and so the generators will accept handouts for curtailment and leave others to pick up the costs of backup because they cannot make it pay in the financial regime and future plans of our administrators.

Either that are they are playing a "smart" game of having their cake and eating it. All at someone else's expense.

Now if you are EDF and operating throughout the electricity generating arena, to run some wind generation installations and get paid for curtailment on the one hand may be good business. To also get paid to provide services covering the shortfall of your renewable assets when conditions are not favourable is potentially optimal.

If the point ever arrives whereby "storage", in whatever form it might take, becomes viable with costs lower than alternative production and retained (if rather less than balanced) energy security of supply in worst case scenarios one might assume that the developers in the market will take advantage of the additional profits to be made.

My impression is that such a day is far away and at the moment it is much better business under the political rules of engagement to play for a partial strategy and a compo scheme than it could be operating a broader based generation business.

It would be interesting to see their numbers that point them in such a direction.

Edited by LongQ on Tuesday 23 January 23:56

[Ali G]

Fission - 100%

JFDI

Too Daily Wail?

[Cold]

Wind farm worker dies after being stranded by snow without power or heat.

Rather a sad tale from East Ayrshire that could almost be a prophecy of a larger issue.

[OldGermanHeaps]

Cold said:

Wind farm worker dies after being stranded by snow without power or heat.

Rather a sad tale from East Ayrshire that could almost be a prophecy of a larger issue.

I was lone working on lidar wind survey equipment on that site when we had the bad snow around 2010. It closes in fast there and there was no mobile signal, I was thankful for the capabilities of an xtrail on m+s tyres. I raised several safety issues with my employer but they ignored them all, they were a shower of dishonest scamming s, which the wind industry in scotland seems to attract in general. Best thing ever was to get away asap.

[LongQ]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

As always thoughtful and pragmatic-
I would only question the whole ‘curtailment’ in the real world on real sized projects.
I suspect not as exciting to the anti-renewable crowd as the Daily Mail type headliners

In what way would you question curtailment?

Or to look at it a different way - plant standing idle.

It doesn't matter what the plant is powered by it will have cost money to build and more money to maintain in operational condition whatever it is.

To build it and not use it is folly. Better to have used the investment in other ways.

The traditional FF powered grid was quite predictable in its way and the amount of over capacity required to be fairly certain of supplies be adequate when called on was quite small. Historically about +20% and more recently down to a margin of around 10% of maximum demand for the winter period.

A schedule of plant use could be agreed to that all units got a reasonable opportunity to run and run efficiently. Planned maintenance could be arrange for the summer months when demand would be lower (in the UK since Aircon is not a common need) and the only question was how much spare capacity would be really required in mid winter to cover a particularly cold spell or unexpected breakdowns.

That model is somewhat disrupted by solar generation but at least solar can be predicted to some extent as it is clearly not a night time generation option.

Let's say that political policy set a target for Wind development to cater for 50% of winter peak output at average outputs. I appreciate the numbers can get complicated to but this is just a thought exercise so let's keep it as simple as possible.

50% Wind
20% Solar
15% Nuclear
15% Biofuels and gas

Well, actually you can't assume that because we know that solar cannot deliver on long and relatively cold winter nights so we either need coverage for it or have to find some way of making storage of its output available and effective OR use excess to requirements output from the other systems.

Or we add the Solar capacity again using something we know will be able to generate - Nuclear, Biofuels or Gas - fully expecting and hoping that that spare plant will never be used. If was do want it to be used fficiently and economically with a good return on the investment there is no point to having the solar stuff at all.

However lets assume tha gives us 120% capability when everything is available and working at capacity.

Wind, for simplicity, might be assumed to put out around 30% of its plated capacity on average across all installations. Simplistic I know but at this point we are not considering fine tuning.

So 50% actual used supply from wind would be its 30% output level.

Worst case scenarios is we see nothing but, because we have 50% capacity from Nuclear, biomass and gas overnight we might just get away with things in many cases using demand management at night. With solar we might creep up to 70% of demand on a good day.

If there is virtually zero output from wind, and this phenomenon can be seen from time to time often more than once a year across the wide areas and potentially the whole of Europe, then we have lost 50% of the system's generating capacity.With interconnects and the hope that the problem is not spread across local electricity partners who can supply vie Interconnectors, we might just get away with it.

But realistically its. a bit too tight for comfort.

On the other hand on a good wind day the wind generation capacity might be twice the average. In which case that would give us 100% of demand from wind alone. So any output from Nuclear, Biomass or gas would be unusable and unwelcome. Solar too.

So what to do? Hope for a cloudy day and curtail whatever solar there may be? The solar people may not be happy.

The Nuclear people probably can't respond to that demand change under any circumstances. Biomass and gas might not be best pleased as investors.

But the output needs to be cut somewhere.

If we take all the output from Wind the entire investment in infrastructure for solar, biomass, nuclear and gas is fiscally compromised. We would have capital investment representing 70% of target capacity generation standing idle or dumping output.

If we force curtailment on wind than that investment is massively compromised.

To get any form of balanced reliable supply is likely to be incredibly expensive and wasteful compared to what would be possible without the obsession with wind.

More to the point the cost of the electricity produced, as bid, only really works as an estimate and basis for business when all output possible can be sold or paid for via curtailment if switched off. If other "lost generation time" factors beyond service and failure risks are built into the figures at any scale I wold be impressed.

So if you over-provision to cater for low output events the problem get worse with less opportunity to maximise the best performance conditions because there is no demand (and prices will be low or, possibly, negative.).

The only evident option is to make use fo the excess storage as much and as often as possible. Unless something remarkable happens to battery prices or storage technology in general that looks both an incredible expensive way to go and more than a little inefficient to go through storage before use.

Plus, to cover the worse case demand would require another massively redundant system. But if you plan to cover less than the worst case demand ... how much less and where shout the shortfall cause failure in a world entirely reliant on electricity on demand for everything?

Then with a planned 25 year lifecycle you have to look at a 4% per annum replacement activity loss of capacity - possibly more for the battery systems in some scenarios.

As things stand and without some miracle discoveries that miraculously change the outlook, energy policies may be heading towards a very difficult period by the time the last of the coal plants disappears and the wind generation increases to attempt to fill that hole.

Once gas has gone too (likely in my opinion since they seem to be tying CCS to it for continued use and there are no signs of commercial scale operation of successful CCS despite decades of trying) the whole approach starts to look very precarious. Today's newborns may be very unimpressed when they finally enter the wider world twenty years from now.

[turbobloke]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

I suspect not as exciting to the anti-renewable crowd as the Daily Mail type headliners

EROEI calculations with or without storage have never featured in a DM headline unless you can provide a link to show this, nor has the RE<C study and reported outcomes, nor has the Prof Hughes report about turbines and the magnificent 11% of plated capacity finding (the latter was DT iirc and not as a headline) nor has the list of hidden costs that remain not only hidden but for the most part uncosted. Even though subsidies remain in place and there's significantly cheaper energy available, there's nothing but climate fairytales and political foolishness to prevent domestic and commercial energy bills being reduced, which is just what we need.

A realistic translation of your comment above is that you have no substantive response and resort repeatedly to smear tactics, this time involving DM headline fiction.

Keep on shooting the messengers, it's working really well.

[Toltec]

LongQ said:

Yes, I did read it all

I think there is another option.

The end customer can decide what type of supply they want to pay for, e.g.

Fully reliable supply on demand, fixed if not the cheapest rate , but you accept you will be getting power from nuclear, gas and renewable if required.

Best effort supply, variable rate and may get reduced, renewable prioritised and you get reliable if it is available and not being used by above. This may need a meter that can restrict or cut your supply, e.g. disable high power circuits such as car chargers, electric showers and hobs. You can of course add your own UPS backup.

I love renewables option, variable rate depending on availability, if the renewable output isn't there you don't get any with an option to pay for reliable if there is any spare, you can of course add your own backup system.

[Gary C]

Toltec said:

LongQ said:

Yes, I did read it all

I think there is another option.

The end customer can decide what type of supply they want to pay for, e.g.

Fully reliable supply on demand, fixed if not the cheapest rate , but you accept you will be getting power from nuclear, gas and renewable if required.

Best effort supply, variable rate and may get reduced, renewable prioritised and you get reliable if it is available and not being used by above. This may need a meter that can restrict or cut your supply, e.g. disable high power circuits such as car chargers, electric showers and hobs. You can of course add your own UPS backup.

I love renewables option, variable rate depending on availability, if the renewable output isn't there you don't get any with an option to pay for reliable if there is any spare, you can of course add your own backup system.

But almost everyone would choose the cheapest, apart from sandle wearing quiche eaters and if we are going to save the planet, we need to be forced/paid to use wind etc.

In other news, took our main boiler feed pump out of service last night. Big steam driven pump that supplies all the coolant to the 1.6GW reactor yet it still uses less power to run it than one fuel pump on one f1 engine of a Saturn V rocket

[LongQ]

Toltec said:

LongQ said:

Yes, I did read it all

I think there is another option.

The end customer can decide what type of supply they want to pay for, e.g.

Fully reliable supply on demand, fixed if not the cheapest rate , but you accept you will be getting power from nuclear, gas and renewable if required.

Best effort supply, variable rate and may get reduced, renewable prioritised and you get reliable if it is available and not being used by above. This may need a meter that can restrict or cut your supply, e.g. disable high power circuits such as car chargers, electric showers and hobs. You can of course add your own UPS backup.

I love renewables option, variable rate depending on availability, if the renewable output isn't there you don't get any with an option to pay for reliable if there is any spare, you can of course add your own backup system.

Quite how anyone can work out how to fund a major long life infrastructure on that basis (if widely adopted) is not easy to imagine.

I noted some time ago that people buying in to the supposed "Green" "Juice" contracts appeared to be prepared to pay over the going rate for electricity in order to fund the claimed "renewables" output. Presumably they never wonder too hard about where their TV power comes from at night on windless days.

My guess is that such a system,, if widely marketed and adopted, would indeed offer price incentives but fomr a much higher starting price than one would have to pay otherwise.

As an excuse for gouging by everyone in what sounds like it could be a rather complex supply chain.

As for adding your own backup system (FF powered generator?) the available option would need to change quite significantly in terms of price and storage capacity for the option to make sense to anyone but the most committed in need of a strong virtue signal. For many people the obvious first hurdle would be where to put the equipment to make or store the electricity generated. If renting accommodation the choice is probably not practical.

Having recently looked at the prices for UPS devices and the capacity they might offer I can't really foresee a major uptake - unless the power supply becomes so unreliable that the cost of buying and running a large UPS somehow becomes acceptable for most people.

I suspect that there would be a violent revolution long before we got to that point.

[Ali G]

Personally, I would not be averse to digging out a bit more coal (banned) or go fracking for gas (banned) have a bit more nuclear (banned) - so I am not sure how wind has become flavour of the month - unless it's going to get its act together and sort it's intermittency issues.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to provide dedicated wind sourced leccy to politicians the Beeb and greenpeas though.

[turbobloke]

Ali G said:

Personally, I would not be averse to digging out a bit more coal (banned) or go fracking for gas (banned) have a bit more nuclear (banned) - so I am not sure how wind has become flavour of the month - unless it's going to get its act together and sort it's intermittency issues.

There we have the unreliables Catch 22. Intermittency isn't amenable to a solution even with storage making EROEI even worse and fantasy technology on top including self-erecting turbines in robotic wind farms...even with wibble on full wib, wind and unreliables in general cannot fulfil the false promises politicians are offering with 'decarbonisation'.

Renewables Catch 22:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-...

As not seen on the cover of the Mail:
Weißbach et al., Energy 52, 210 (2013)

Britain not windy enough for wind:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/04/eng...

Ali G said:

It wouldn't be a bad idea to provide dedicated wind sourced leccy to politicians the Beeb and greenpeas though.

An excellent idea, include wind activists and adjust energy bills accordingly (theirs up, ours aka the rest down).

[rscott]

turbobloke said:

Ali G said:

Personally, I would not be averse to digging out a bit more coal (banned) or go fracking for gas (banned) have a bit more nuclear (banned) - so I am not sure how wind has become flavour of the month - unless it's going to get its act together and sort it's intermittency issues.

There we have the unreliables Catch 22. Intermittency isn't amenable to a solution even with storage making EROEI even worse and fantasy technology on top including self-erecting turbines in robotic wind farms...even with wibble on full wib, wind and unreliables in general cannot fulfil the false promises politicians are offering with 'decarbonisation'.

Renewables Catch 22:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-...

As not seen on the cover of the Mail:
Weißbach et al., Energy 52, 210 (2013)
[b]
Britain not windy enough for wind:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/04/eng...
[/b]

Ali G said:

It wouldn't be a bad idea to provide dedicated wind sourced leccy to politicians the Beeb and greenpeas though.

An excellent idea, include wind activists and adjust energy bills accordingly (theirs up, ours aka the rest down).

Reading problems today turbobloke? Or do you not know the difference between England and Britain? Try reading the article properly.

[Ali G]

rscott said:

Reading problems today turbobloke? Or do you not know the difference between England and Britain? Try reading the article properly.

The fishwife north of the border has more than enough wind to power the entire planet though.

[LongQ]

rscott said:

Reading problems today turbobloke? Or do you not know the difference between England and Britain? Try reading the article properly.

Odd that the article seems to focus on England without making a big thing about Scotland. What was going on back in June '16 to lead to an article with such a unusually narrow focus?

That said, in today's context of Nikki S's Independence for Scotland (but still glued to the EU?) and the elimination of the Union flag from places over which she has some influence, Britain may well become, as in Greater Britain, may well be best thought of as England plus the area ceded to 100k (less now?) Welsh speakers. At least we share more in common with Wales than Scotland in terms of Law, for example.

[LongQ]

Whilst on the subject of wind speed and the potential it offers, this link may be of interest although quite what it might ultimately tell us may not be exactly clear without firther background information.

Offshore average wind speeds from around the world.

http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/windspeeds.asp...

[Ali G]

Being a simpleton, I would have thought that a plausible case for offshore wind could be made by presenting data sets of wind speeds by region such that intermittency in one region is offset by that in another, with a significant level of confidence.

[Toltec]

LongQ said:

Toltec said:

LongQ said:

Yes, I did read it all

I think there is another option.

The end customer can decide what type of supply they want to pay for, e.g.

Fully reliable supply on demand, fixed if not the cheapest rate , but you accept you will be getting power from nuclear, gas and renewable if required.

Best effort supply, variable rate and may get reduced, renewable prioritised and you get reliable if it is available and not being used by above. This may need a meter that can restrict or cut your supply, e.g. disable high power circuits such as car chargers, electric showers and hobs. You can of course add your own UPS backup.

I love renewables option, variable rate depending on availability, if the renewable output isn't there you don't get any with an option to pay for reliable if there is any spare, you can of course add your own backup system.

Quite how anyone can work out how to fund a major long life infrastructure on that basis (if widely adopted) is not easy to imagine.

I noted some time ago that people buying in to the supposed "Green" "Juice" contracts appeared to be prepared to pay over the going rate for electricity in order to fund the claimed "renewables" output. Presumably they never wonder too hard about where their TV power comes from at night on windless days.

My guess is that such a system,, if widely marketed and adopted, would indeed offer price incentives but fomr a much higher starting price than one would have to pay otherwise.

As an excuse for gouging by everyone in what sounds like it could be a rather complex supply chain.

As for adding your own backup system (FF powered generator?) the available option would need to change quite significantly in terms of price and storage capacity for the option to make sense to anyone but the most committed in need of a strong virtue signal. For many people the obvious first hurdle would be where to put the equipment to make or store the electricity generated. If renting accommodation the choice is probably not practical.

Having recently looked at the prices for UPS devices and the capacity they might offer I can't really foresee a major uptake - unless the power supply becomes so unreliable that the cost of buying and running a large UPS somehow becomes acceptable for most people.

I suspect that there would be a violent revolution long before we got to that point.

I never said it was a good option, however it neatly shifts the issue of intermittency on to the people that want to support renewable power. It would easily be the cheapest option, given wind is now apparently even cheaper than ccgt, providing you were prepared to do without power or at least have a minimal backup system to power LED lighting only when the was no renewable supply available.

I have just arrived at this as a logical extension of the idea, not your's, that what matters is renewable will be cheaper when it is working and someone else's problem when it isn't. This means the cheapest way to get electricity is to change your way of life so it fits around if it is available. If there is no power, you do not get to work unless you can cycle, walk or you still have charge in your EV, though as you obviously work for a power ethical company there is no point because there is no power at the office either.

A little more seriously the other way is to have industry that is designed to operate when power is available. That is rather a shift though where reducing costs an improving efficiency normally mean increasing utilisation of assets.

In some ways it reminds me of public transport, it is available when it is available not necessarily when you want it, if the service if offline due to breakdown or industrial action then you either have a backup or do not travel.

I think as you suggested a mix of partial backup to renewable supplies and some demand management might come out with an optimum cost. The more renewable in the system the more backup or demand management will be needed. There is the whole switch to EV vehicles which could allow for demand management, domestically you might have to decide if you want to charge the car, run a power shower or an induction hob.

[Toltec]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

Oh and the 2011 Daily Telegraph Article based on Turbines circa 0.5MW as the basis.

You keep saying that and while I can see how figures for new turbines may work out better the installed base has a working lifetime so their costs need to be included in the overall picture. Until the low output turbines have been removed or replaced they are still part of the system.