The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain
Discussion
This is not intended to be provocative in any way, but simply to highlight possible shenanigans in Shells new electricity from 100% renewable sources.
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/03/27/shell...
If Shell are behaving as suggested above, then the recent television campaign is surely close to a breach of advertising standards.
It also furthers the myth that if only a few more windmills were built, then we would be 100% CO2 emissions free.
As we know, it is simply not feasible to move to zero emissions now or for the foreseeable without some breakthrough or other.
I have no vested interest in either Big Oil or Big Renewable - whatever works suits me
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/03/27/shell...
If Shell are behaving as suggested above, then the recent television campaign is surely close to a breach of advertising standards.
It also furthers the myth that if only a few more windmills were built, then we would be 100% CO2 emissions free.
As we know, it is simply not feasible to move to zero emissions now or for the foreseeable without some breakthrough or other.
I have no vested interest in either Big Oil or Big Renewable - whatever works suits me
3.1416 said:
This is not intended to be provocative in any way, but simply to highlight possible shenanigans in Shells new electricity from 100% renewable sources.
https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/03/27/shell...
If Shell are behaving as suggested above, then the recent television campaign is surely close to a breach of advertising standards.
It also furthers the myth that if only a few more windmills were built, then we would be 100% CO2 emissions free.
As we know, it is simply not feasible to move to zero emissions now or for the foreseeable without some breakthrough or other.
I have no vested interest in either Big Oil or Big Renewable - whatever works suits me
If you went nuclear powered you'd have a much larger chance. https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/blog/2019/03/27/shell...
If Shell are behaving as suggested above, then the recent television campaign is surely close to a breach of advertising standards.
It also furthers the myth that if only a few more windmills were built, then we would be 100% CO2 emissions free.
As we know, it is simply not feasible to move to zero emissions now or for the foreseeable without some breakthrough or other.
I have no vested interest in either Big Oil or Big Renewable - whatever works suits me
3.1416 said:
If Shell are behaving as suggested above, then the recent television campaign is surely close to a breach of advertising standards.
Not at all.... its industry standard for any tariff offering '100% renewable generation'. Signed off by Ofgem, been in place for years. What is just as interesting is in the article is that Good Energy claim to be 100% green by buying direct from renewable generators. What that actually means is they have a PPA for the output, which is then sold into the market, and they will buy from the market whatever they need to supply to their customers. So, on a cold, windless night in December the energy being supplied to their customers will be heavily reliant on thermal energy, and on a windy summers day they will be selling excess renewable power to someone else. To claim they are 100% renewable, 100% of the time is a total lie, although over the course of the year the output of their renewable PPA's will be higher than the customer demand, allowing them to declare a 100% renewable energy mix.
It is all smoke and mirrors up to a point.
EDIT: Good Energy's website even confirms that...
"Good Energy supplies UK-generated, 100% REGO-backed renewable electricity to thousands of businesses and organisations across the UK, and we'd love for you to become part of that.... So each kWh you use to heat your house, cook your dinner or make a brew is matched over the year with a kWh generated from British sunshine, wind and rain going into the grid."
A Rego is simply the certificate to prove that the renewable power was generated, even if you're not directly buying the output. So Orsted for example, who have a lot of wind farms but don't necessarily sell renewable power, will simply sell those MWs into the grid, and the sell the Rego's to Shell. It works almost exactly the same as Good Energy's way, except Good Energy have a PPA with the generator, Shell don't. What comes down the wire is identical, and the differences are contractual rather than practical. In fact, despite what the Good Energy blog says, they use the same language in their own marketing (ie above, "100% REGO-backed renewable energy")
EDIT EDIT : If anyone is interested in the small suppliers going bust, and what affect that has/will have on the market this is a good piece
https://theenergyst.com/energy-supplier-debt-crisi...
Edited by Condi on Wednesday 15th May 17:32
Back in the early days of "renewables" my sister worked in Yorkshire Eleccy Boards call centre. They'd have people ring up asking about "green" electricity and the tarrifs - she though a lot of people at the time didn't wan't nuclear green electricity so they'd quiz her about what electricity they were getting.
Standard (not necessarily company response) was:
Green electricity comes down the green / yellow wires to your plug.
Coal power black wires.
Biomass brown wires.
Gas (thank God for British Gas having chosen corporate blue) comes down the blue wires.
Nuclear comes down the red wires.
Mind you, I don't think she was entirely committed tot hat job and wasn't too sad when she left after having mixed up a customers account with the fixed annual fee that the BOC plant next to Tinsley viaduct had compared to a fixed tariff!
Standard (not necessarily company response) was:
Green electricity comes down the green / yellow wires to your plug.
Coal power black wires.
Biomass brown wires.
Gas (thank God for British Gas having chosen corporate blue) comes down the blue wires.
Nuclear comes down the red wires.
Mind you, I don't think she was entirely committed tot hat job and wasn't too sad when she left after having mixed up a customers account with the fixed annual fee that the BOC plant next to Tinsley viaduct had compared to a fixed tariff!
StanleyT said:
...
Mind you, I don't think she was entirely committed tot hat job and wasn't too sad when she left after having mixed up a customers account with the fixed annual fee that the BOC plant next to Tinsley viaduct had compared to a fixed tariff!
I have an artwork of the Tinsley Viaduct (incl. cooling towers) on the wall at home - Sheffielder "exiled" darn sarf.Mind you, I don't think she was entirely committed tot hat job and wasn't too sad when she left after having mixed up a customers account with the fixed annual fee that the BOC plant next to Tinsley viaduct had compared to a fixed tariff!
(Just found it online)
Nickgnome said:
R Mutt said:
Presuming we're all renewable by 20xx how would we best generate heating/ hot water?
Even if we could stick solar panels on flats, which would house most people in England in a few years, which we can't, they'd not be able to generate heat. Using electricity, however cleanly it's generated for heating and water is not efficient in its current form. We are talking about banning gas, but have we even built anywhere with halogen heating etc?
Properly designed and constructed houses and flats need little or no heat. So only hot water load, cooking, lighting, fridges etc. Even if we could stick solar panels on flats, which would house most people in England in a few years, which we can't, they'd not be able to generate heat. Using electricity, however cleanly it's generated for heating and water is not efficient in its current form. We are talking about banning gas, but have we even built anywhere with halogen heating etc?
I think the most likely solution will be the tha government will simply make gas central heating progressively illegal. This will force a translation to air/ground source heat pumps potentially with supplementary firing. Likely that gas will be banned by 2025 in new installations, some time after that (say 10 years) it will be banned for replacement systems and probably 10 years after that domestic gas will be phased out entirely.
WhatHappenedThere said:
Jambo85 said:
Yes it's more expensive than using gas directly but that's more to do with the inefficiencies of generating and transmission than anything else surely?
For how long though ? article said:
It’s the moment the global sustainable energy market has been waiting for. Battery technology, the essential element in ensuring continuity of supply from weather-dependent sources such as wind and solar, has suddenly become cost competitive.
For lithium-ion batteries, the 'levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE) - the total cost of building and operating an electricity-generating plant - has fallen by 35% since the first half of 2018, analysis by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) shows.
At the same time, the LCOE for offshore wind has dropped by 24%. Onshore wind and solar's benchmark costs fell 10% and 18% respectively from last year.
“Looking back over this decade, there have been staggering improvements in the cost-competitiveness of these low-carbon options, thanks to technology innovation, economies of scale, stiff price competition and manufacturing experience,” says Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF.
“The low prices promised by offshore wind tenders throughout Europe are now materializing, with several high-profile projects reaching financial close in recent months," says Giannakopoulou. "Its cost decline in the last six months is the sharpest we have seen for any technology.”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/this-is-how-much-renewable-energy-prices-have-fallen/For lithium-ion batteries, the 'levelized cost of electricity' (LCOE) - the total cost of building and operating an electricity-generating plant - has fallen by 35% since the first half of 2018, analysis by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) shows.
At the same time, the LCOE for offshore wind has dropped by 24%. Onshore wind and solar's benchmark costs fell 10% and 18% respectively from last year.
“Looking back over this decade, there have been staggering improvements in the cost-competitiveness of these low-carbon options, thanks to technology innovation, economies of scale, stiff price competition and manufacturing experience,” says Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF.
“The low prices promised by offshore wind tenders throughout Europe are now materializing, with several high-profile projects reaching financial close in recent months," says Giannakopoulou. "Its cost decline in the last six months is the sharpest we have seen for any technology.”
Using electricity to generate heat directly is massively inefficient, using it to operate a heat pump is generally a better idea. However if you size your electricity grid to deliver enough electricity to cover the peak heat load it will be oversized.
Various ideas such a co-firing boilers with hydrogen made when there is excess wind energy have been proposed as have simply having a large number of open cycle gas turbines that are only fired up for days of the year to run the heat pumps.
Personally I think the best technical option is low temperature (200 degrees C) nuclear reactors delivering district heat, which is what China the country run by engineers and scientists rather than Oxford PPE and Classics graduates is currently proposing.
turbobloke said:
Talksteer said:
Personally I think the best technical option is low temperature (200 degrees C) nuclear reactors delivering district heat, which is what China the country run by engineers and scientists rather than Oxford PPE and Classics graduates is currently proposing
Good points.3.1416 said:
0GW of wind is of interest.
Earlier this week there was 0, or close to 0GW of wind. It wasn't interesting at all. Even with a load of gas plants on outage it still wasn't interesting.
Why are you such a rude and insulting person? What is your knowledge or experience which allows you to be condescending?
s2art said:
turbobloke said:
Talksteer said:
Personally I think the best technical option is low temperature (200 degrees C) nuclear reactors delivering district heat, which is what China the country run by engineers and scientists rather than Oxford PPE and Classics graduates is currently proposing
Good points.The long and the short of it is that to build enough combined heat and power plants to supply enough district heat in the winter and you will have idling plants in the summer.
The issue is that a nuclear plant is expensive to build and cheap to run, you want that plant on all the time.
If you don't try to generate electricity with a nuclear plant at a stroke you remove much of the equipment and much of the hazard (high pressure, loss of coolant potential) so you need very little safety equipment. You now have a plant which is cheap enough to build that you can idle all summer long.
In the UK the difficult part of this isn't the reactor design it is coordinating building a massive district heat network.
Worked on an incinerator project in Sheffield that was supposed to have district heating. Don't know if it ever happened. Teflon shoulders appeared in my career path when "commissioning engineer opportunities" were mentioned.
Now, if the gubberment could reduce the demand from some electricity hungry industries, such as steel, just a little bit more, we might get away with failing to build the nukes we're not building anyway.
I have a friend in National Grid, what is really "terrifying" them (word used in meetings) is when the UK rail power draw becomes greater than baseload can supply. Trains don't run off heat pumps, solar or direct hydro.
Now, if the gubberment could reduce the demand from some electricity hungry industries, such as steel, just a little bit more, we might get away with failing to build the nukes we're not building anyway.
I have a friend in National Grid, what is really "terrifying" them (word used in meetings) is when the UK rail power draw becomes greater than baseload can supply. Trains don't run off heat pumps, solar or direct hydro.
Condi said:
3.1416 said:
0GW of wind is of interest.
Earlier this week there was 0, or close to 0GW of wind. It wasn't interesting at all. Even with a load of gas plants on outage it still wasn't interesting.
Why are you such a rude and insulting person? What is your knowledge or experience which allows you to be condescending?
If you can, ignore them. Empty vessels and all that.
An interesting article on load following nuclear reactors.
https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/reacto...
As far as I am aware, I have not insulted anyone.
https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/reacto...
As far as I am aware, I have not insulted anyone.
When i was a mere lad and a reactor control engineer and our load was fluctuating one of our big concerns was the Xenon build up. If you can master the control of all the different extra systems required for "load following" and controlling the Xenon in a Nuke then it might happen, but not for 50 odd years yet.
Anyway we have CCGT`s, Hydro`s and Coal for load following, frequency response and genaral load adjusting, and not forgetting the STOR sites which are predominantly gas powered
Anyway we have CCGT`s, Hydro`s and Coal for load following, frequency response and genaral load adjusting, and not forgetting the STOR sites which are predominantly gas powered
phumy said:
When i was a mere lad and a reactor control engineer and our load was fluctuating one of our big concerns was the Xenon build up. If you can master the control of all the different extra systems required for "load following" and controlling the Xenon in a Nuke then it might happen, but not for 50 odd years yet.
Anyway we have CCGT`s, Hydro`s and Coal for load following, frequency response and genaral load adjusting, and not forgetting the STOR sites which are predominantly gas powered
Your reactor control experience is somewhat atypical, a large PWR is capable of ramping at around 5% per hour.Anyway we have CCGT`s, Hydro`s and Coal for load following, frequency response and genaral load adjusting, and not forgetting the STOR sites which are predominantly gas powered
The only place that they load follow is France, everywhere else has enough non-nuclear plants to run them pure baseload. Obviously the original application of a PWR is a load following extraordinaire.
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