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Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

bbc.com

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Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#121

Post by jliptzin »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

You have to be really unimaginative to consider a surplus of renewable energy a crisis.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#122

Post by neom »

DC1350 wrote: post #93
neom wrote: post #5

"Not only do renewables reduce the impact of our electricity use on the climate, they are also generating jobs and income for communities around the country." I wish everyone thought that way, all I hear in Canada is "oh the jobs, oh the jobs, what will happen to the jobs...???"

Canadian oil workers who make $120k fresh out of high school with no education are never going to be satisfied with training for their new $70k clean energy jobs. The problem is good jobs, not just jobs. How bad does climate change have to be before the lost wages and income decline is worth it? That’s the real question that nobody ever wants to talk about.

Maybe I'm missing something but I just don't understand why those workers can't still make the same $120k out of college no education building solar farms in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, the winds WHIP across the arctic. Maybe I'm ignorant but it's all engineering, you're working on or build an oil rig or you're working on or building an offshore wind turbine, to me it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to think those same jobs could be transitioned over. Sure, what's the incentive for the private sector? Very little. However Canada doesn't have to take such an American view of capitalism, and we often haven't in our history. So it would require either regulation or forcing the issues through crown corporations. Is that not worth it? Personally I'd be missavily in favour of using a crown corporation to shift things faster.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#123

Post by sofixa »

Corazoor wrote: post #111
aclelland wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an u…

> but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task Only if you don't look at all available solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas "P2G is often considered the most promising technology for seasonal renewable energy storage" I dunno why this is such an unknown technique, natural gas storage is a very old and proven technology. Yet it is ommitted fro…

If you convert Power to Gas in the form of LPG or methane you then burn for energy when renewables aren't working, you're kinda defeating one of the main purposes of renewables - low carbon output.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#124

Post by supernovae »

dmitri1981 wrote: post #72
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

From what I understand that does not really work. For example, you can't have jet fuel manufacturing based on negative prices, because you need to have high utilisation rate for manufacturing equipment itself. It's not economically viable to have that equipment sitting idle during times of normal electricity prices.

Statistical analysis would show regions where production is viable for x days per year and to be honest, a jet fuel manufacturer could just recognize this energy abundance and build its own grid and invest in solving these problems as a means of optimization / investment / market strategy....

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#125

Post by gambiting »

londons_explore wrote: post #51
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

Sadly these 'negative' prices aren't available to regular people. Only a select few who can trade on the spot market can use them. If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.

Anyone can go on the Octopus Agile tariff here in UK, where you pay exactly what the prices are. If the prices are negative, then Octopus actually credits your account. I know some people with EVs on the Agile tariff, they have their car chargers set to only charge when the price is <0 - which happens at least a couple times a week, and they effectively get paid for charging the electric cars. Personally I'm on their GO tariff which guarantees 5p/kWh at night which I prefer because I charge my car every night so I can't wait for negative pricing.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#126

Post by bluGill »

tda wrote: post #60
piokoch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the point with selling electricity is that you need to guarantee that you will deliver some fixed amount of electricity. If you depend on wind power plants how this guarantee can be given? What if wind stops. Maybe it would make sense to build huge bitcoin mining data centers and mine bitcoins in case of surplus. Hardly useful, but given current coins rush could be profitable. Better than paying producers for no…

You can get a better price if you can guarantee availability, but there is also a market for variable supply.

In particular those investing in utility grade batteries are playing the low price/high price arbitrage game.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#127

Post by Dylanfm »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #25
VBprogrammer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part electricity isn't used for heating in the UK, generally gas central heating is preferred. There are obviously some exceptions, houses built in the 70s with electric ceiling heating (this is as bad is it sounds) or electric storage heaters.

Electric heating in a country like Scotland is simply unconscionable. There is natural gas infrastructure. And where it’s not, even oil is better than electricity.

These days many new builds are using air source or ground source heat pumps. And existing dwellings are beginning to be retrofitted for them. I don't have numbers, but I expect that it will soon be the norm for new builds for places without gas infrastructure. Especially with any new legislation around heating for new builds (e.g. https://www.gov.scot/news/new-build-homes-to-be-more-energy-...).

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#128

Post by giobox »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #20
aclelland wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an u…

Electric cars are perfect for this. Connect them to the grid and the internet, and they’ll charge but also feed back as needed.

As an electric car owner, do I want to give my limited lithium battery charge cycle lifespan back to the network? This storage isn't "free" to the vehicle owner - charging and feeding back will contribute to the total charge cycles on your very expensive battery pack, which of course reduces range over time. I'd need to be heavily convinced by the economic arguments outweighing the wear on a very expensive vehicle component before I'd consider this.

When you come to resell an electric car, the condition of the battery is going to be significant in resale value too.

There would presumably be a zip code lottery element here too - would some areas of a given country make much greater demands of resident's privately owned car batteries than others?

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#129

Post by dan-robertson »

JamesBarney wrote: post #109
londons_explore wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly these 'negative' prices aren't available to regular people. Only a select few who can trade on the spot market can use them. If regular people could get paid to switch on space heaters, the negative prices would soon go away.

Here in Texas a lot of people could get access to spot prices and it didn't work out as well as they'd hoped.

Yeah the problem is that what people actually want is not exposure to volatility in the energy market so much as cheaper energy prices. And energy looks cheaper if you just get wholesale prices because you are not paying for the insurance against high prices that your energy provider is probably buying. It isn’t easy to convince people that they are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, so I’m not sure I would actually like to see it becoming easy to get wholesale prices.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#130

Post by belorn »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

It not only misleading, it is intentionally mixing of fungeable and non-fungeable goods in order to turn something obvious dirty as being clean.

If Scotland exports of wool exceeded the amount of imported cotton, then we can pretend that the cotton import never existed. Cotton and wool is pretty interchangeable as textile fibers. This then allow us to purchase cotton that is produce by child labor, because the cotton didn't actually exist because look, wool production exceeds the demand for textile fiber.

It pure silliness. If a country buy energy produced from fossil fuel then that country is responsible for the pollution. No amount of exporting clean energy will erase the pollution. Its there, it is being generated, and the customer who pays for it has a distinct responsibility.

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