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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

#131

Post by Mvandenbergh »

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…

PWRs actually can ramp their power up or down and the French run a number of theirs in this mode. I don't think AGRs can in quite the same way since thermal stresses on the graphite need to be avoided.

Economically, it's not clear that economically you'd want to run PWRs this way though since FuelEx is only a small part of the LCOE of a nuclear plant.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

captainmuon wrote: post #77
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…

This. Transition to renewables is not just about replacing power plants, it is about changing demand structure. Negative prices are an incentive to build power buffers, or to use power when it is plenty. You can even do crazy things like make steel. One funny side effect that might happen is that for individuals, power will not become more expensive from renewable energy, but rather cheaper - so cheap that the meteri…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by ThomPete »

batpangolin wrote: post #110
ThomPete wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so will fusion. Much better to spend resources building high density energy like fusion than these Rube Goldberg machines.

Are you suggesting that fusion is a close-to-viable technology which has been held back because it hasn't had enough research resources spent on it?

No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.

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

#134

Post by aardvark179 »

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…

Most articles about generation are inaccurate in this sort of way. France has huge base load capacity thanks to its nuclear power plants, and the UK has had excess peak load capacity, and we’ve sold each other electricity via the channel DC link, but a lot has been written over the years on how the UK has not relied heavily on nuclear power, or on how France has been fine relying heavily on nuclear.

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

#135

Post by bluGill »

sofixa wrote: post #123
Corazoor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, you are carbon neutral. The most obvious (though maybe not best) way to do this is turn separate water into H and O, then store the H in a tank. When you need more power you burn the H getting water back. This process is not very efficient, but when power is cheap who cares.

You can also turn CO2 into synthetic oil (Methane, gasoline, Jet fuel, motor oil - your choice of what you want) via known processes. Again the process isn't very efficient, but when the inputs are free who cares. The sum of is carbon neutral.

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

#136

Post by Mvandenbergh »

martinald wrote: post #46
IAmEveryone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s with the quotes around “exported”? Excess power is exported, which happens to be one way to manage it, reducing the need for storage.

Because Scotland isn't its own grid, it's on the UK national grid, it was to differentiate that from HVDC export.

Nitpick: it's the GB national grid, Ireland has an all-island grid which is separate.

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

#137

Post by eldaisfish »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #103
kalleboo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% of lowest demand sounds amazing! I'm mostly a pessimist about renewables due to the storage issue so I would have guessed more like 2-5%. Assuming lowest demand is at night, that means that building just 3 more batteries you could power the whole state for an hour at night?

Agree, I'm missing some context to see why your parent post thought this was good enough. I suspect that "Lowest Demand" is being thought of in two different ways.

even at the lowest demand, a large, grid-connected battery can only provide minutes of back up power, and that too for only a fraction of already low demand.

A storage battery is not a viable means of balancing demand and supply over a time period longer than minutes.

What's needed is not more batteries but better transmission, more hydro where possible and where hydro is not possible, more nuclear.

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

#138

Post by sandworm101 »

jonplackett wrote: post #79
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maybe Canada needs power." Maybe mars needs power, but neither of them is going to get any of it from britain. Laws of physics take precedence over 'free trade'

This was a joke about the UK not getting a good brexit deal and instead trying to get a deal like Canada, and therefore not being able to sell its excess electricity to somewhere closer, like the EU.

Exactly. The "super canada" concept. Anyone who thinks Canada is in any way comparable to Europe as a UK trading partner doesn't know much about geography. Maybe if Britain hadn't had a hissy fit they could now be selling that extra power across the channel.

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

#139

Post by Tade0 »

headmelted wrote: post #113
CraigJPerry wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cool if i could use an electric car parked at home during the day to store some of that cheap electricity then spend it from the car back into the house at night. When i looked into this last, it wasn’t common to have that bi-directional power flow capability. There was one, very expensive, Mitsubishi solution on the UK market around 2 years ago.

Nissan were looking into V2H for years but not sure what happened with it. I was registered for a pilot at one point with a third party but never got invited to participate and have since forgotten who the company is. EDIT: Looks like these can now be purchased and imported from China by end users: https://www.setec-power.com/product/vehicle-to-home-v2h-6kw/

Second gen Leafs are equipped with the proper hardware - at least in Japan.

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

#140

Post by mlok »

pydry wrote: post #45
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…

>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…

Also :

* Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles

* Bitcoin, I guess

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