The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain
Discussion
Condi said:
Is it a good article? I don't think so. Its an article by a newspaper increasingly on the wrong side of hyperbole. There are some valid points, but the comments from Bosch might be because they don't have much expertise or product line in heat pumps.... if you got a comment from Mitsubishi then they might have a different opinion.
The argument that the UK is making a mess of Net Zero isn't true, we are doing considerably better than some countries, and given its all a step into the unknown we are managing quite well - your lights stayed on all winter despite your dire warnings! The comments about HS2 are also complete nonsense, we desperately need to upgrade our railways given the last new mainline was built 150 years ago, and yet train travel hit record highs pre-pandemic.
It's a valid point though that effectively choosing a solution which isn't mature enough for mass rollout at scale and isn't suitable for a lot of use cases isn't a good plan. The argument that the UK is making a mess of Net Zero isn't true, we are doing considerably better than some countries, and given its all a step into the unknown we are managing quite well - your lights stayed on all winter despite your dire warnings! The comments about HS2 are also complete nonsense, we desperately need to upgrade our railways given the last new mainline was built 150 years ago, and yet train travel hit record highs pre-pandemic.
Better to let people choose what actually works than to select a champion and try to blindly plow ahead.
Heat pumps arent the only thing where politicians have jumped straight to a specific solution rather than defining the problem to be solved, and finding it isn't that easy in reality.
As for the lights staying on, let's wait and see what happens between now & 2030.
Cobnapint said:
Building HS2 isn't 'upgrading our railways'.
It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
There is a different thread for this, but HS2 is considerably cheaper and faster than upgrading our existing lines, and adds a lot of capacity. Think of it like a bypass for trains. Faster/longer distance trains will go on HS2, hugely increasing the capacity for slower, more local and goods trains on the congested areas outside London and the Midlands. It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
Anyway, heat pumps. I tend to agree that the government have jumped a bit "all in" on them, but for a well insulated new build they do work well. The problem comes retrofitting to older homes and they don't work so well, especially at "house scale". At small scale they work better - an air con unit will do heating too at reasonable effectiveness.
Like everything, there is a time and a place for them, but the Telegraph article simply dismisses all heat pumps as the wrong solution, which isn't true. The best idea would be to try and insulate older properties, but the schemes which did exist years ago no longer do exist. Equally landlords should be forced to upgrade their properties, while the government are trying to get there, there are a lot of exemptions in the existing rules.
Condi said:
Cobnapint said:
Building HS2 isn't 'upgrading our railways'.
It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
There is a different thread for this, but HS2 is considerably cheaper and faster than upgrading our existing lines, and adds a lot of capacity. Think of it like a bypass for trains. Faster/longer distance trains will go on HS2, hugely increasing the capacity for slower, more local and goods trains on the congested areas outside London and the Midlands. It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
Anyway, heat pumps. I tend to agree that the government have jumped a bit "all in" on them, but for a well insulated new build they do work well. The problem comes retrofitting to older homes and they don't work so well, especially at "house scale". At small scale they work better - an air con unit will do heating too at reasonable effectiveness.
Like everything, there is a time and a place for them, but the Telegraph article simply dismisses all heat pumps as the wrong solution, which isn't true. The best idea would be to try and insulate older properties, but the schemes which did exist years ago no longer do exist. Equally landlords should be forced to upgrade their properties, while the government are trying to get there, there are a lot of exemptions in the existing rules.
Condi said:
Cobnapint said:
Building HS2 isn't 'upgrading our railways'.
It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
There is a different thread for this, but HS2 is considerably cheaper and faster than upgrading our existing lines, and adds a lot of capacity. Think of it like a bypass for trains. Faster/longer distance trains will go on HS2, hugely increasing the capacity for slower, more local and goods trains on the congested areas outside London and the Midlands. It's adding one or two new lines that only call at a handful of places at enormous cost and questionable need.
Anyway, heat pumps. I tend to agree that the government have jumped a bit "all in" on them, but for a well insulated new build they do work well. The problem comes retrofitting to older homes and they don't work so well, especially at "house scale". At small scale they work better - an air con unit will do heating too at reasonable effectiveness.
Like everything, there is a time and a place for them, but the Telegraph article simply dismisses all heat pumps as the wrong solution, which isn't true. The best idea would be to try and insulate older properties, but the schemes which did exist years ago no longer do exist. Equally landlords should be forced to upgrade their properties, while the government are trying to get there, there are a lot of exemptions in the existing rules.
Hydrogen in natural gas is a pretty worthless solution, converting electricity to hydrogen for the purpose of then burning is fully mental for a number of reasons.
1: Where do you get the hydrogen from? As a usage for electricity it is nearly an order of magnitude worse than heat pumps for generating heat, (you get 3-4x more heat than a KWh value of the electricity whereas if you convert electricity to hydrogen and distribute you loose nearly 50% of the energy) the idea that you can use "spare" electricity from renewables over generation is also b
ks for two reasons, 1: It would be better to find a variable usage for that electricity like charging cars. 2: If you run your hydrogen plant intermittently it's economics will be poor.2: The gas network can't handle hydrogen, it can handle about 20% by volume which equates to about 7% by energy but to go beyond that we are talking about changing all the pumps and seals and enormous cost to then achieve the economic disaster postulated above.
Unlike cost arguments basic efficiency is determined by physics and doesn't change with industrial scale.
For space heating I think you only really have three choices of heat input and one other variable. The three inputs are: 1: Electricity which is cheap to install and retro fit but expensive 2: Heat pumps and 3: District heating which basically needs to be nuclear (or maybe CSS) for it to be any thing other than a remote version of 1&2. The variable is insulation for which the degree to which it is necessary is lessened as you progress from 1-3.
The debate around heat pumps is basically where we were with electric cars about 10 years ago, your argument back then was that electric cars were expensive and not practical. Many of the arguments against EVs were of the "but what about my terraced house" variety. The answer being, it doesn't matter if it doesn't work for you it works for enough other people to scale up we'll solve your problems later.
So like EVs there are plenty of houses for which they would work adequately, the most basic of these in new builds where any cost delta in fitment costs is easily swallowed in the total cost of the house. As heat pumps work their way through the housing stock we get to the point where the kit won't cost that much more than a boiler (its not that much bigger) and installations are regularized and installed by experienced contractors.
The same goes for home insulation the more we do the better we will become at it and if we do this in a coordinated way we could build the design tools and products to make the cost of insulating older properties much lower. It just needs coordination and capacity building.
The other really big issue is affordability, this could I think be solved by forcing mortgage lenders to put insulation, heat pumps and solar panels onto mortgages (during the term without a fee) and house valuations. A £10k heat pump is less of hassle if it is a £50 per month cost.
Cobnapint said:
If the government go ahead with a new heat pump law they need removing.
We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
In areas of existing housing heat pumps will be installed in 1s & 2s over a 20 year period, plenty of time to schedule grid upgrades as maintenance activities. The existing grid was built on the back of increasing electricity demand. For new build estates the grid connection can be sized as appropriate and the costs spread over hundreds of houses.We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
At a grid scale heating could be a significant demand but some combination of hot water storage on the premises, grid interconnects and even just some peakers which hardly ever run is likely to be sufficient.
pquinn said:
Condi said:
Is it a good article? I don't think so. Its an article by a newspaper increasingly on the wrong side of hyperbole. There are some valid points, but the comments from Bosch might be because they don't have much expertise or product line in heat pumps.... if you got a comment from Mitsubishi then they might have a different opinion.
The argument that the UK is making a mess of Net Zero isn't true, we are doing considerably better than some countries, and given its all a step into the unknown we are managing quite well - your lights stayed on all winter despite your dire warnings! The comments about HS2 are also complete nonsense, we desperately need to upgrade our railways given the last new mainline was built 150 years ago, and yet train travel hit record highs pre-pandemic.
It's a valid point though that effectively choosing a solution which isn't mature enough for mass rollout at scale and isn't suitable for a lot of use cases isn't a good plan. The argument that the UK is making a mess of Net Zero isn't true, we are doing considerably better than some countries, and given its all a step into the unknown we are managing quite well - your lights stayed on all winter despite your dire warnings! The comments about HS2 are also complete nonsense, we desperately need to upgrade our railways given the last new mainline was built 150 years ago, and yet train travel hit record highs pre-pandemic.
Better to let people choose what actually works than to select a champion and try to blindly plow ahead.
Heat pumps arent the only thing where politicians have jumped straight to a specific solution rather than defining the problem to be solved, and finding it isn't that easy in reality.
As for the lights staying on, let's wait and see what happens between now & 2030.
See previous post about it not mattering that we don't have detailed plans for all houses, it is a valid pathway.
Cobnapint said:
If the government go ahead with a new heat pump law they need removing.
We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
You should let the national grid know that they will be struggling with EV load. They think differently.We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
Peak UK demand was in 2002, and since then demand is about 16% lower. If we all switched to EV's demand would increase by 10%, so still less than 2002.
Smart charging will actually benefit the grid with load balancing, as much of that 10% will be off peak.
Edited by 98elise on Saturday 18th March 12:11
Condi said:
Of course, a wind farm, once built, has a £0 cost of generation, and so will dispatch whenever the wind blows. For every GW of wind generation we need 1 GW less of gas generation, and it's always the most expensive gas generation which falls off first. The wholesale cost of power is undoubtedly cheaper as a result of the renewable generation of which wind is a part, albeit the volatility has gone up between days when there is lots of wind and no wind.
Against that, you need to consider the subsidies, but these are decreasing over time - the early ROC contracts are now finished, and the newer wind farms are on much cheaper CfDs which even without the "Russia/Ukraine effect" will pay back into the pot much more often then the earlier and more expensive CfDs. Even then, the lifespan of the windfarm is longer than the CfD and so in 15/20 years they will be generating without subsidy, and onshore wind is already being built without subsidy at all. Gas and coal will not generate at £10/MWh, but wind, subsidised or not, will.
Talking about economics while handily dismissing a major move of the market (the "Russia/Ukraine effect") is a bit odd though, it's very much like you're tilting the argument in your favour? Bit like saying "tell me about the F1 race if Red Bull were not involved" - well Red Bull are involved and are the dominant force at the moment, you can't just "ignore" them and get a proper understanding of what is going on.
Just catching up a little on this thread and I read a piece in The Economist that disputes the above and claims the real problem for renewables is that energy isn't expensive enough. An odd thing to say at the moment but apparently all the efforts going into keep energy prices at a vaguely sensible level for the end consumer means there is no profit in renewables. The article was basically arguing for doing away with energy price caps and other interventions.Against that, you need to consider the subsidies, but these are decreasing over time - the early ROC contracts are now finished, and the newer wind farms are on much cheaper CfDs which even without the "Russia/Ukraine effect" will pay back into the pot much more often then the earlier and more expensive CfDs. Even then, the lifespan of the windfarm is longer than the CfD and so in 15/20 years they will be generating without subsidy, and onshore wind is already being built without subsidy at all. Gas and coal will not generate at £10/MWh, but wind, subsidised or not, will.
Talking about economics while handily dismissing a major move of the market (the "Russia/Ukraine effect") is a bit odd though, it's very much like you're tilting the argument in your favour? Bit like saying "tell me about the F1 race if Red Bull were not involved" - well Red Bull are involved and are the dominant force at the moment, you can't just "ignore" them and get a proper understanding of what is going on.
The article will be pay-walled so I don't want to quote too much of it but it was published on February 16th and was called 'The world won’t decarbonise fast enough unless renewables make real money.'
The Economist said:
The bigger problem is that some renewables providers are now rethinking their investments altogether, because energy projects are becoming less attractive. Price caps and various taxes, together with rising costs, are putting them off.
It concluded with:The Economist said:
All this means that, if investing is to stay attractive, green power will need to be sold at higher prices than governments would like. If the energy transition is to happen fast, there must not be a race to the bottom.
xeny said:
Talksteer said:
A £10k heat pump is less of hassle if it is a £50 per month cost.
That raises something I've not much heard about - what is a heat pump's expected life? £10K@£50/month implies 200+ months.98elise said:
Cobnapint said:
If the government go ahead with a new heat pump law they need removing.
We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
You should let the national grid know that they will be struggling with EV load. They think differently.We're going to be struggling as it is with the onset of EVs around 2030, let alone another hair-brained idea plonking even more load on the grid.
Utter madness.
Peak UK demand was in 2002, and since then demand is about 16% lower. If we all switched to EV's demand would increase by 10%, so still less than 2002.
Smart charging will actually benefit the grid with load balancing, as much of that 10% will be off peak.
Edited by 98elise on Saturday 18th March 12:11
It's been done to death on here.
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