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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

#191

Post by jwilliamson »

bgorman wrote: post #171
macspoofing wrote: post #161

Serious question, Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood) ... Why even bother with wind and solar? Why not just do nuclear and hydro and be done with it. I've noticed anytime there's an article that talks about some country reaching 100% renewable energy it is always due to Hydro (and maybe Nuclear). Wind and solar are neve…

Solar panel manufacturers and wind turbine manufacturers lobby governments to exist. It is a combination of a jobs program and virtue signaling for politicians.

So do coal, nuclear and gas. What forms of power generation don't lobby governments?

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

#192

Post by mantap »

macspoofing wrote: post #179
cardinalfang wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Britain's energy mix for 2019 had more wind than nuclear+hydro 56 TWh nuclear, 6 hydro, 132 gas, 64 wind, 12 solar, 36 bio https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Is that good? Why so much natural gas usage, pray tell?

You need something to provide the peak load when the wind isn't blowing.

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

#193

Post by Brakenshire »

macspoofing wrote: post #161

Serious question, Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood) ... Why even bother with wind and solar? Why not just do nuclear and hydro and be done with it. I've noticed anytime there's an article that talks about some country reaching 100% renewable energy it is always due to Hydro (and maybe Nuclear). Wind and solar are neve…

> Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood)

That’s not even remotely true.

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

#194

Post by the8472 »

tomp wrote: post #159
the8472 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really, unless the resulting carbon somehow gets stored underground (e.g. trees become coal). Even carbon from soil eventually gets released (by bacteria) or reused (by other plants). Really, the only question is the biomass of trees. 1MT trees left to grow for 100 years == 2MT of trees harvested every 50 years.

You're only looking at the deltas of carbon in/out. I am referring to the absolute amount of carbon stored per area. Older forests -> higher soil carbon and larger trees

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

#195

Post by hinkley »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #82
hinkley wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are few coal mines left in the UK so coal has the same issue. I think we can all agree that biomass might be a slightly less bad than coal solution to reliably dispatchable power generation. It's far from perfect though.

Coal is irredeemable. We don't talk about if it's neutral because you can't even see neutral from where coal is.

We need improvements, and we should encourage them. But.

If we stop shy of the goal because people start misusing terminology or using fuzzy math then we are just as dead but drag it out longer. The Earth doesn't care about spreadsheets or feelings. It only cares what actually happened.

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

#196

Post by wazoox »

nimish wrote: post #80
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).

Solar and wind are getting so cheap that you could feasibly overbuild to deal with low production times. And no, 30% is nowhere near the max, especially with storage

They're getting so cheap because they produce energy at times we don't need it, so market price fall through the ground to zero or even negative flash prices. Low prices are an compound artefact of heavy subsidizing and production in complete inadequacy with demand.

Electricity storage doesn't exist. There is no existing industrial solution at scale (except hydro, but there's no room left for expansion in Europe). We're talking of scales of many GWh of storage. Then there's price of a multi-GWh storage.

Our society is entirely relying on on-demand power generation. Wind and solar are utterly inadequate tools. In actuality while Spain installed 20GW of wind and solar, it also installed 15 GW of gas-powered plants. Climate change anyone?

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

#197

Post by Brakenshire »

macspoofing wrote: post #170
nsl73 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are wind and solar just vanity projects? Solar is great for lots of non-grid applications, such as places without a grid connection or satellites. The entire technology isn’t vanity.

Sure. Vanity as grid-scale power source. If you want to charge your phone battery while camping, solar is great.

Solar is currently close to being the cheapest way of generating a unit of electricity that has ever been existed. Very strange definition of vanity. Anywhere near the equator the technology is going to totally replace all other generation within 20-30 years.

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

#198

Post by jwilliamson »

08-15 wrote: post #83
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK's combined wind (23GW) and solar (13GW) generation capacity is at least 3x that of nuclear (9.3GW). Capacity factor aside, nuclear is not a necessary component of a future UK grid (with the caveat that it can import nuclear generated power from France over a 2GW interconnector). [1] There are ~269 renewables projects, roughly 40GW, in the planning stages that will add to that existing renewables capacity. [2]…

Capacity factor for wind is about 20%, for solar about 12.5%, for nuclear 90%. So let me restate it for you: The UK's combined annual wind (40TWh) and solar (14TWh) generation capacity is still less than 3/4 of nuclear (72TWh). Capacity factor aside, unreliability aside, seasonal variation aside, real word aside... you can argue literally anything.

The last year Britain had a capacity factor for wind that low was 2010. The capacity factor last year was 33%.

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

#199

Post by scotty79 »

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…

Poland looks horrible when you count CO2 per kWh. But pretty good if you count CO2 per capita per unit of time. We use so little energy per capita when compared to western world that our CO2 emissions look better than some bit greener countries (for example UK or Germany) despite getting nearly all of energy from coal.

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

#200

Post by Brakenshire »

wazoox wrote: post #196
nimish wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind are getting so cheap that you could feasibly overbuild to deal with low production times. And no, 30% is nowhere near the max, especially with storage

They're getting so cheap because they produce energy at times we don't need it, so market price fall through the ground to zero or even negative flash prices. Low prices are an compound artefact of heavy subsidizing and production in complete inadequacy with demand. Electricity storage doesn't exist. There is no existing industrial solution at scale (except hydro, but there's no room left for expansion in Europe). We…

No, that’s wrong, they are cheap on a levelized basis, those costs don’t rely on spot pricing.
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