Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 364 posts

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

#131

Post by Ma8ee »

boustrophedon wrote: post #116
somedudetbh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal-related air pollution causes an estimated 10.000 extra deaths each year across the continent. Radiation caused one direct death in Fukushima. What's the rationale for comparing indirect deaths from coal to direct deaths from radiation?

What other direct or indirect sources of deaths are there from nuclear power?

Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are.

My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.

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

#132

Post by glogla »

Retric wrote: post #125
renaudg wrote: post #106

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries : https://www.electricitymap.org/map As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about. This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany…

France imports and exports a lot of electricity, so the used electricity is far less clean than that suggests. Similarly, countries that import from France are cleaner than that suggests. This is an important consideration when looking at the cost of scaling nuclear power as it gets far more expensive the lower the utilization. You can get to around 40% across an electric grid such as Europe or an island, but scaling…

The linked page tracks both - production and consumption.

For example, at the moment, Germany produces at 415g/kWh but consumes at 382g/kWh, mostly thanks to 3 GW import from France and 2.7 GW import from Switzerland.

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

#133

Post by csours »

renaudg wrote: post #106

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries : https://www.electricitymap.org/map As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about. This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany…

ERCOT aka Texas isn't showing up. It says something like "data not available at this time". Does anyone know if data has ever been available from ERCOT? I know that there have been a very large number of wind turbines added to the Texas grid over the last few years, including some near my home town, which I didn't really expect, as that is central Texas and not west Texas where the big farms are.

Edit: I will say, at the other end of my home county there is a coal plant.

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

#134

Post by sgt101 »

totalZero wrote: post #93
torpfactory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure you can make a reasonable argument that burning wood is carbon neutral, unless you want to open the door to saying that any CO2 emission is carbon neutral because the carbon can be reclaimed when it is converted into plant matter. It is kind of an absurd argument, unfalsifiable because it also applies to kerogen-based fuels like petroleum and natural gas, both of which begin their long life cycles as org…

>- harvesting trees results in release of CO2 from soils, which continues for decades;

I coppice, no tree dies, the soil is not disrupted.

>- burning natural hardwood forest and replacing with fast-growing forest plantations (a common practice), permanently elevates atmospheric CO2 because plantations don’t store as much carbon as natural forests;

There are plenty of fast growing woods - willow, beech, hazel

>- cutting and processing wood uses energy, which generally results in CO2 emissions.

Meaculpa - I use a chainsaw, but there is a future in which I can use an electric saw and and axe (I use an axe alot now anyway)

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

#135

Post by torpfactory »

aksss wrote: post #109
torpfactory wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't make an argument that it's carbon neutral -- They don't just burn deadfall, and you can't grow trees faster than you can burn them. Prior to coal, the developed world burned massive amounts of wood, which contributed to massive deforestation. This is literally a step backwards, and not in any good way. When civilization burned wood for energy >500 years ago, sure, because demand was so low. But by the 1700-…

That Michael Moore film is pretty terrible and doesn't contain the best available and most recent science. I wouldn't consider it a reliable source.

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

#136

Post by aksss »

renaudg wrote: post #106

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries : https://www.electricitymap.org/map As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about. This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany…

Great points, great site. I would just note that those scores are near real-time, so they don't reflect the full picture for a country year-round (summer will have better scores than winter, and thus better than an annual score).

For instance, the Yukon Territory in Canada shows on electricitymap.org as 100% hydro with 24g Carbon Intensity score (and 3x that only 12 hours ago). Which is great, but a look during winter surely must be a different story. Having lived at a similar latitude, I know the water powering the hydro plants freezes up at some point during the winter months, at which time the small communities I've been in switch exclusively to diesel generators for part of the year (fuel for which is trucked in). Indeed, quick research of the power suppliers in Yukon (YEC/YECL) indicates several diesel generation facilities probably for exactly this purpose.

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

#137

Post by the8472 »

tomp wrote: post #87
iguy wrote: post #30

This is a good discussion of the accounting of biofuels, with a guy called Tim Searchinger (there is a transcript if you don't want to listen): https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/11/manifold-podcast-23-ti... One takeaway is that you should think of farming trees as fuel as a competitor for land use. If it displaces growing food crops, then they will be grown elsewhere, possibly in newly cleared rainforest. Even if no…

> If it displaces growing food crops But does it? Not all food is suitable for growing crops; even less industrial farming crops, which requires tons of (fossil-fueled) fertilizer, so almost no soil is appropriate. But still, I imagine you need certain flatness to even begin thinking about machine farming. Forests on the other hand can grow on all kinds of land, same with free range animals, and presumably doesn't re…

My understanding is that forest left to mature, i.e. not harvested, stores more carbon than intensely managed ones.

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

#138

Post by glogla »

Ma8ee wrote: post #131
boustrophedon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other direct or indirect sources of deaths are there from nuclear power?

Mining and transport of uranium ore, processed fuel and nuclear waste. I don’t know how significant those are. My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.

> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy.

That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel.

Only, we're not building them. Because coal is better or whatever.

[1]: that's bit of a shortcut, but elements that undergo radioactive decay on timescales that make them dangerous are unstable enough, you can put them in a reactor and poke them to undergo that decay faster and get you electricity.

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

#139

Post by pfdietz »

aksss wrote: post #117
fersho311 wrote: post #11

Anyone watch the documentary planet of the humans on YouTube? After watching that, I’m no longer sure what renewable energy even means anymore, which no longer gives these accomplishments any meaning. Can someone help with my disillusionment?

I think the only decent criticisms had to do with incremental technological process, i.e. solar panels are marginally more efficient than they were when the film was made. On the balance though, I don't think this negates the points the film made - the amount of mining, manufacturing and transportation balanced against the in-service life and the energy actually produced make for a very bad story. Burning biomass is…

Solar panels are much cheaper than when the film was made. It's this reduction in cost that's driving the energy disruption, not increase in efficiency (although that helps).

Smil's critique seems off base to me. Yes, replacements of energy infrastructure take a long time if the replacing technology is developing slowly. But the cost of PV crashed by a factor of 5 in a decade. This rapid change will lead to existing infrastructure being ripped out before its normal lifespan.

(The next cost crash appears to be in electrolyzers, which will be the final coffin nail for nuclear.)

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

#140

Post by pfdietz »

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).

Go to https://model.energy/ and see what the best (that is, cheapest) way to produce a steady power output would be with various assumptions about the cost of renewables, nuclear, and storage. You will find that for most locations, including the UK, under the reasonable assumptions used, nuclear optimizes to 0%. Renewables + storage can take us to 100%, and are the cheapest way to do that.

And I noticed that the 2030 assumption at the web site for the capital cost of electrolyzers for hydrogen production has already been beaten by a factor of 2. Hydrogen is very important for minimizing cost in their UK solutions, so this is very good news for renewables there.

Post reply on HN