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Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

bbc.com

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Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#61

Post by abakker »

vkou wrote: post #49
renegading wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.

1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and s…

to make matters worse, all the shipping involves wet wood, which makes the whole process more intensive, as you move a lot of water around, and then ultimately the water contributes negatively to the energy output when processed and burned.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#62

Post by mywittyname »

jjoonathan wrote: post #45
TheUndead96 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately not the case. Lots of wood is imported from the third world, potentially the Amazon. Even if it was grown in the country it is consumed in, it would eventually suffer the same issues that industrial farming does. The soil becomes depleted and requires fossil-fuel based fertilizer. Burning the Amazon is now progress, apparently. Something like fusion, or cleaner nuclear, is our only hope. I worry…

> cleaner nuclear If we (USA) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had merely continued building it at the same pace, our grid would be (approximately) carbon-free today. Not twenty years from now, not fifty years from now, today. But no, we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe, and we made the grown-up responsible decision to pump our atmosphere fu…

> But no, we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe

This is such bullshit. We have reactors that are 40 years old still operating safely. And in the 40 years since, safety systems have improved considerably. A modern reactor could probably have a 100 year service life and no accidents.

But such is the world we live in: people are scared of stuff they shouldn't be, and ignorant of all that should scare them.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#63

Post by DFHippie »

vkou wrote: post #49
renegading wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.

1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and s…

> By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant.

I would like to see a citation for this. It seems highly improbable.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#64

Post by DFHippie »

abakker wrote: post #61
vkou wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and s…

to make matters worse, all the shipping involves wet wood, which makes the whole process more intensive, as you move a lot of water around, and then ultimately the water contributes negatively to the energy output when processed and burned.

Really? They don't make the pellets in Canada and then ship them?

Again, citation please.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#65

Post by grey-area »

wazoox wrote: post #8

And nuclear . Because Brits know that you can't rely 100% on renewables (30% is about the maximum for most countries; "wood pellet" isn't actually renewable, it's forest mining).

Not sure where you got that maximum figure from.

Scotland is already near 70% and aiming for 100% renewables. With sufficient storage capacity (hydro and batteries), there's no reason any country couldn't be 100% renewables.

Biofuels are a very small part of the mix, and I agree pretty pointless except on a small scale in remote locations to provide heat as well as power.

https://www.energylivenews.com/2019/09/23/scotland-will-soon...

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#66

Post by LatteLazy »

Great, now we just need to do it for the other 364 days a year,m and when we're not half closed for a pandemic.

Then remove gas from the breakdown.

Then we'll have solved about 25% of the problem and only have to fix transport and home heat and industry, all much harder.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#67

Post by hinkley »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #54
leonardaustin wrote: post #5

Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100

Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely p…

Carbon neutral has to cover the entire supply chain, for which pellets are going to have a lot of sooty diesel engines in the mix.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#68

Post by DFHippie »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #6
TheUndead96 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately not the case. Lots of wood is imported from the third world, potentially the Amazon. Even if it was grown in the country it is consumed in, it would eventually suffer the same issues that industrial farming does. The soil becomes depleted and requires fossil-fuel based fertilizer. Burning the Amazon is now progress, apparently. Something like fusion, or cleaner nuclear, is our only hope. I worry…

Do you have any source for that? I find shipping wood half way around the world for power troubling but I've never heard anyone claim that the wood is not sourced from sustainable forestry. For the most part the Amazon is being burned to provide farm and grazing land.

I would be surprised if the pellets weren't sourced from Canada, where it's probably white pine, not tropical hardwoods.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#69

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #54
leonardaustin wrote: post #5

Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100

Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely p…

The UK already has around 12,000 sq miles of forest, which is about 13% of the area.

Half of the UK's land is owned by 1% of the population - a mix of aristocrats, wealthy individuals, and corporations.

There is no practical issue with mass reforestation contributing to energy self-sufficiency, but there would be huge political issues.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#70

Post by hinkley »

torpfactory wrote: post #60
leonardaustin wrote: post #5

Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100

Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc. However, there…

Or a carbon sink.

Most of these trees are coming from temperate forests, and while tropical forests don't put much carbon in the soil, temperate forests do. Or rather, mature trees in temperate forests do.

As long as you can keep the temperate zones from moving too far toward the poles (and plant tundra aggressively as it thaws) that's another opportunity cost of cutting them down before they hit their stride.

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