The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain

[Condi]

rolando said:

Condi said:

1) They're gas, not diesel, and not that much less efficient than an older CCGT.

At least two around here which were planned were diesel, there being no nearby gas main.

Where are you? There arnt many places in the UK you would build a power station which doesnt have gas.

V8 Fettler said:

Set the tariffs to favour load control services.

Thats exactly what will happen. Then the customer can decide if they value cheaper power, or more flexible usage.

[rolando]

Condi said:

rolando said:

Condi said:

1) They're gas, not diesel, and not that much less efficient than an older CCGT.

At least two around here which were planned were diesel, there being no nearby gas main.

Where are you? There arnt (sic) many places in the UK you would build a power station which doesnt have gas.

9MW permitted in October 2015 at YELLAND BARNSTAPLE DEVON EX31 3HB. I presume this one has been built.

10MW at Woodford Farm, Witheridge, Devon. Refused at appeal.

[V8 Fettler]

Condi said:

V8 Fettler said:

Set the tariffs to favour load control services.

Thats exactly what will happen. Then the customer can decide if they value cheaper power, or more flexible usage.

Set the ratio at 10:1 and realistically there is no choice.

Would be interesting to set up a framework with - say - 5 million domestic customers and dictate terms to the suppliers.

[Condi]

rolando said:

9MW permitted in October 2015 at YELLAND BARNSTAPLE DEVON EX31 3HB. I presume this one has been built.

10MW at Woodford Farm, Witheridge, Devon. Refused at appeal.

Unless the Yelland one has changed, planning permisson was for a gas plant.

[Merry]

Condi said:

if it ever got to the stage that parts of the grid had to be disconnected that would be done at an area level, not someone going round turning off Mrs Miggins at number 31 because shes using 10kw, but leaving on Mr Smith at number 40 because he's only using 2kw.

And only after non essential industry, that probably already has some sort agreement to go off in the event of an incident where load shedding is required, has been taken off supply.

DNOs (or DSOs as they're increasingly becoming) earn their profit by minimising supply interruption, particularly of the unplanned variety. They're pretty good at it!

[rolando]

Condi said:

rolando said:

9MW permitted in October 2015 at YELLAND BARNSTAPLE DEVON EX31 3HB. I presume this one has been built.

10MW at Woodford Farm, Witheridge, Devon. Refused at appeal.

Unless the Yelland one has changed, planning permisson was for a gas plant.

See http://planning.northdevon.gov.uk/liveupload/Scann... 1 (b) para. 3

[wc98]

V8 Fettler said:

Set the ratio at 10:1 and realistically there is no choice.

Would be interesting to set up a framework with - say - 5 million domestic customers and dictate terms to the suppliers.

indeed. there is one customer, the british public.energy is a necessity of modern life, the suppliers should be not for profit. allows plenty room for investment without the variability in price.

[LongQ]

Condi said:

LongQ said:

Also, it would seem, quite a good investment despite the limited runtime opportunities expected and the constraint to operating hours suggested by the agreements, apparently.

Altogether that suggest a relatively expensive "insurance policy".

To justify that approach because well planned large scale generation has become deemed to be unacceptable for reasons that seem to be far removed from the basic premise of creating electrical energy is perverse, or would be were it not for a willingness to find way to make energy more expensive than it might need to be. Eventually one gets to a situation where the tail wags the dog and anything can be justified no matter how illogical it might be in basic terms here and now.

If one can throw enough money at a problem it is nearly always possible to make something look like it will work and maybe does work. That alone does no make it efficient, effective or sensible. There will always be strong attempts made to cover up the real costs or distract observers into looking in the wrong places when assessing results.

Make it complex enough and the smoke screen will be complete.

Dont agree with much of that.

1) They're gas, not diesel, and not that much less efficient than an older CCGT.

2) It is cheaper to have multiple smaller, more flexible units which will run for an hour or 2 a day, most weekdays, that one large inflexible unit which only runs at full load for a few days over winter. Large inflexible generation is very expensive to maintain and build to only run for limited hours. The smaller units could run baseload if required, so you dont lose anything by increasing the flexibility.

A quick search for information from previous years produced this.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/0...

Clearly there should be better sources than the Guardian but they are likely to be a little more complex to interpret.

There is no denying that diesel plant can be activated quite quickly for the sort of role envisaged since such installations are widely used as fast reacting on-site backup power sources and have been for years. (Sometimes they even work well enough to keep computers form crashing ... but not always.)

Relatively cheap and quick to deploy the diesel farms were rather popular around the time the article was written when the predicted generation capacity vs peak demand margin was considered, rightly or wrongly, somewhat tight.(Whether they are still popular investments has not been reported much recently as far as I can recall.)

Remarkably that margin seems to have improved dramatically in just a few years despite some significant large plant closures and not much evidence of large plant openings.

There is quite a lot more renewable generation on the mix and the way potential renewable generation is treated as part of the forecast for available generation may partly explain the more comfortable numbers.. However I have always felt that the numbers offered for renewables capacity in terms of margin prediction looked somewhat dubious based on the way they were explained.

There is the possibility that base load demand has been reduced greatly in a number of ways. More efficient night time lighting for example or the closure of businesses using large amounts of electricity on a constant basis.

A further change might be that significant amount of generation have been taken off grid resulting in reduced demand numbers under normal conditions but perhaps occasional bursts of demand if the off-grid generation fails and short term grid connection needs to be re-established? In which case one hopes the safety margin figures allow for that in some way.at a local level even if the effect would not be significant nationally.

Whatever has happened to the calculations the concern about potential imminent supply balance issues seems to be much less today than in was 3 or 4 years ago for reasons that are not readily ascertainable but seem to be based on reduced demand as far as the National Grid is concerned.

I may pick through the publicly available data to see if the information is provided but so far the details do not seem easy to gather.

If anyone already has this information I'm sure many would be interested to see it.

[Condi]

There is no denying that if we had a dry, cold, still week the system would be under a lot of stress, but thats exactly when it should be under stress, and tbh if its not then you have to argue that the government is paying too much in subsidies through cap-mech to keep uneconomic plant sat idle in reserve.

The whole reason cap-mech was halted by the EU was that the claimants successfully argued it prioritised generation over any kind of demand side response. The ability to reduce load is as important in the current system as the ability to increase generation and so the system can run at a much tighter margin because the models generally assume demand is inflexible. (ie - demand is 48gw and so supply must meet that. But in reality, when prices trade up high enough to buy 48gw, DSR has probably reduced the load by 1.5gw anyway, and actual generation only needs to be 46.5gw)


EDIT - Have a look at NG's winter outlook. Page 17 onwards shows their operating margins and expected demand peaks.

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/sites/eso/files/do...

Edited by Condi on Sunday 9th December 16:09

[Gary C]

Condi said:

Thats exactly what will happen. Then the customer can decide if they value cheaper power, or more flexible usage.

Not really practical for domestic customers though ?

We know that no gov wants to see domestic (ie voters) with blackouts, but certain larger customers it would work quite well. Not something we get involved with in generation, has any demand reduction been implemented in the last 5 years ?

[Condi]

Gary C said:

Not really practical for domestic customers though ?

I think it is, maybe not quite yet, but it will happen. Once you start thinking about when you use power then its easy to put your washing on at 11pm before you go to bed, rather than 6pm when you get back from work, or putting the immersion on at 4pm rather than 6pm for your evening shower.

There are already ideas to connect your smart meter to home appliances, so you could put your dishwasher, dryer and washing machine on at 9pm, and the appliances will operate over the cheapest times of the night so at 7am your washing and drying is all done. Similarly, at peak demand, your freezer might stop cooling down for half an hour - it wont defrost in that time, but if every household saved 200w, over millions of households thats a sizeable load. Electric vehicles will 'smart charge' at the cheapest times of the night, rather than simply when you plug them in.


As for demand - demand has been falling for years, and peak demand is now about 9GW less than it was 10 years ago.

Edited by Condi on Sunday 9th December 16:21

[Gary C]

Condi said:

Gary C said:

Not really practical for domestic customers though ?

I think it is, maybe not quite yet, but it will happen. Once you start thinking about when you use power then its easy to put your washing on at 11pm before you go to bed, rather than 6pm when you get back from work, or putting the immersion on at 4pm rather than 6pm for your evening shower.

There are already ideas to connect your smart meter to home appliances, so you could put your dishwasher, dryer and washing machine on at 9pm, and the appliances will operate over the cheapest times of the night so at 7am your washing and drying is all done. Similarly, at peak demand, your freezer might stop cooling down for half an hour - it wont defrost in that time, but if every household saved 200w, over millions of households thats a sizeable load. Electric vehicles will 'smart charge' at the cheapest times of the night, rather than simply when you plug them in.


As for demand - demand has been falling for years, and peak demand is now about 9GW less than it was 10 years ago.

Edited by Condi on Sunday 9th December 16:21

I meant active demand reduction, as in the trial that ENW did with voltage reduction a few years ago.

Domestic customers will only take part in demand reduction if it doesnt blackout the house, so do you mean a meter similar to the old E7 meters ? There is no way the public would accept a blackout, the world would end if the internet went down

Freezers would be interesting for active demand reduction, reduction at a peak, then higher use afterwards as they run harder to cool, might flatten out demand very nicely.

Our station director gave his update on friday and predictions are showing forward prices rising quite significantly. We were getting ~£44/mwhr about three years ago, and now its looking that future contracts are rising above £55, which is really going to help the AGR fleet in its lifetime extension projects but not sure if its anywhere near enough to stimulate any none subsidised building .

As to demand, the recession had a major impact on it, but i wouldnt rely on that continuing much longer, infact latest predictions show increasing demand

[PRTVR]

Condi said:

There is no denying that if we had a dry, cold, still week the system would be under a lot of stress, but thats exactly when it should be under stress, and tbh if its not then you have to argue that the government is paying too much in subsidies through cap-mech to keep uneconomic plant sat idle in reserve.

The whole reason cap-mech was halted by the EU was that the claimants successfully argued it prioritised generation over any kind of demand side response. The ability to reduce load is as important in the current system as the ability to increase generation and so the system can run at a much tighter margin because the models generally assume demand is inflexible. (ie - demand is 48gw and so supply must meet that. But in reality, when prices trade up high enough to buy 48gw, DSR has probably reduced the load by 1.5gw anyway, and actual generation only needs to be 46.5gw)


EDIT - Have a look at NG's winter outlook. Page 17 onwards shows their operating margins and expected demand peaks.

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/sites/eso/files/do...

Edited by Condi on Sunday 9th December 16:09

Well we will see how resilient the system is if we have a bad winter, I would not expect to see warning of black outs with the weather we have had over the last month, I remember a five day period of -10 to -15 with no wind, the diesel in my van froze , driving around the country the wind turbines were turning with no wind, they were been driven to prevent problems with gearboxes using electricity, gas demands were through the roof, could we cope now?

[Merry]

Gary C said:

I meant active demand reduction, as in the trial that ENW did with voltage reduction a few years ago.

Being rolled out more widely now:

https://www.enwl.co.uk/about-us/news/latest-news-a...

I work in telemetry for ENW so have a tiny bit of involvement. Its all pretty interesting stuff.

[wombleh]

Condi said:

I think it is, maybe not quite yet, but it will happen. Once you start thinking about when you use power then its easy to put your washing on at 11pm before you go to bed, rather than 6pm when you get back from work, or putting the immersion on at 4pm rather than 6pm for your evening shower.

I'm not sure modern houses have much kit that can work like that. Running washing machine/dryer/etc overnight is not advised for safety reasons as they can cause fires, tumble dryers are particularly bad for it.

Immersion heater is perhaps a good example, but aren't they way more expensive than gas? They're normally only provided as a fallback if the boiler is broken. Night storage heaters maybe good example but don't think they're very common any more either...

[LongQ]

Merry said:

Gary C said:

I meant active demand reduction, as in the trial that ENW did with voltage reduction a few years ago.

Being rolled out more widely now:

https://www.enwl.co.uk/about-us/news/latest-news-a...

I work in telemetry for ENW so have a tiny bit of involvement. Its all pretty interesting stuff.

Quite a few documents in the link but I'm wondering if any of them explain the economics of the potential savings vs the cost of implementation. If there are any could you point to them please? I'm guessing that they may not be directly accessible from the landing pages.

[LongQ]

wombleh said:

Condi said:

I think it is, maybe not quite yet, but it will happen. Once you start thinking about when you use power then its easy to put your washing on at 11pm before you go to bed, rather than 6pm when you get back from work, or putting the immersion on at 4pm rather than 6pm for your evening shower.

I'm not sure modern houses have much kit that can work like that. Running washing machine/dryer/etc overnight is not advised for safety reasons as they can cause fires, tumble dryers are particularly bad for it.

Immersion heater is perhaps a good example, but aren't they way more expensive than gas? They're normally only provided as a fallback if the boiler is broken. Night storage heaters maybe good example but don't think they're very common any more either...

Safety reasons and noise. Plus people are not that keen on the idea of letting a cycle finish and leaving the clothes in the machine for a few hours before they get up. Or a day if also have to plan ot get kids to school and get to work.

Then there is the question of noise. Not all houses are noise suppressed and flats might be especially susceptible to noise management pressures.

And I'm not about to get up in the middle of the night to have a electric shower. And if a lady feels the cold, even when temperatures are quite reasonable, as many ladies do, they will want to put some secondary heat source into action - typically a couple of KW of electricity. The sort of energy consumption that might well be useful for achieving balancing effect during whenever low demands periods end up being but is best use on demand when cold.

Then there is cooking. Can we use economy 7, whilst it still exists as a feature of imbalance, to cook overnight?

Uswitch has this observation about Economy 7

"
When you use electricity

As a general rule of thumb you would need to use more than 40% of your electricity at night to make Economy 7 cost effective. Some Economy 7 plans charge almost twice the standard night rate for any electricity used in the day, which can cancel out the benefits of the cheap electricity you get at night.

The more electricity you use at night and the less you use in the day, the more money you will save with Economy 7."

I looked up a typical 8kg rated mid priced washing machine from Samsung, picked at random form a Google search.

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances...

The required sales blurb assessment suggests that expected annual electricity usage would be 166kWh or 0.85kWh per wash.

So at my current rates that's about 14.5p per wash. A little less come January.

I might save 40% of that, although given the much higher likely use of a 2kW fan heater during colder days, (both washing machine and fan heater usually being operated by my wife so no say over that) and the probability that the day time consumption would be at a higher rate per kWh, the likelihood is that the bills would go up.

I doubt my wife would be in any way interested in saving not more than 5p on the wash and ending up with a load of crumpled washing in the machine to deal with in the morning.

I think it would quite difficult to explain the background reasons why, in the 21st century in a first world country, the electricity supply is to be subjected to management methods that, at best, have no immediate customer benefits but are projected to be possibly useful to as yet unborn (and maybe never born) people 80 to 100 years into the future.

As for the immersion heater .... really? I thought storing hot water in a tank was frowned upon these days and instant heat via a combi gas boiler (at least for now) or an electric shower was the way to people were expected to go. So tricky to make a schedule change away from showering at 6pm if 6pm is the time you need to shower.

Better and perhaps more effective might be to resurrect an old idea from water shortage days (To save water, bath with a friend) and adapt it to "Save electricity, shower with a friend". That would probably get closer to a 100% saving in electricity (and water) if using an electric shower.

But anyway, by the time everyone is on 3 phase supply so they can fast charge their mobile electricity storage passenger capable wheeled device things like saving a fraction of a kWh by scheduling a washing machine to run in the middle of the night will seem somewhat ludicrous.

IMO.

[V8 Fettler]

You can tinker at the margins by shifting energy consumption by a few hours, but that's of little use when an extended cold spell creates a gas shortage; the short cooler spell described as the "Beast from the East" earlier this year was an indicator of the inherent weakness of the current model.

[turbobloke]

V8 Fettler said:

You can tinker at the margins by shifting energy consumption by a few hours, but that's of little use when an extended cold spell creates a gas shortage; the short cooler spell described as the "Beast from the East" earlier this year was an indicator of the inherent weakness of the current model.

The event which followed BFTE in late Feb 2018, called the Mini Beast from the East (mid-March) really describes both as they were 'Mini' compared to what happened in 1962/63 which those who experienced the 60s will know only too well.

Known as the ‘The Big Freeze’ it's seen as the worst British winter of the modern era. The coldest weather for 200 years was recorded. The sea froze in some parts of the country. Seawater doesn't freeze above ~ 2 deg C below zero. The cold weather began in late December 1962 just before Christmas and persisted through to March 1963. The 'mean max' for January 1963 was -2.1 deg C. It was also a time of sharply declining solar activity (as per this year's Brief Beast). During this transit from solar cycle 19 to 20 there were 227 days with no sunspots and overall low solar eruptivity (not just irradiance). At such times of lower UV activity cold air forms high above the tropics affecting atmospheric circulation patterns, bringing winds from the east as a cause of very cold winters in the UK and other parts of northern Europe including Germany.

The relevance here is prolonged bitterly cold weather with significant cloud cover and not much wind - and our ability to stay warm with the lights on if it happens again for a period of over 2 months rather than 2 weeks (excluding the Mini Beast). In another thread I've mentioned peer-reviewed science on this topic from Bucha and Bucha, a level of detail which needn't be repeated here, but it's been known for decades.

[speedking31]

Condi said:

I think it is, maybe not quite yet, but it will happen. Once you start thinking about when you use power then its easy to put your washing on at 11pm before you go to bed, rather than 6pm when you get back from work, or putting the immersion on at 4pm rather than 6pm for your evening shower.

There are already ideas to connect your smart meter to home appliances, so you could put your dishwasher, dryer and washing machine on at 9pm, and the appliances will operate over the cheapest times of the night so at 7am your washing and drying is all done. Similarly, at peak demand, your freezer might stop cooling down for half an hour - it wont defrost in that time, but if every household saved 200w, over millions of households thats a sizeable load. Electric vehicles will 'smart charge' at the cheapest times of the night, rather than simply when you plug them in.

After a few cycles, all of the predictive switching on will have evened out demand through the night so electricity will cost the same whatever time you purchase it and we're back to where we started but with the overhead of a lot of computing power with nothing to do.