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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

#151

Post by DC1350 »

neom wrote: post #122
DC1350 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Canadian engineers don’t make very much (60-120k range is typical) and that’s with a 4 year degree. Neither do technicians, repair people, scientists etc. $120k is just what 18 year olds make doing labour at the very beginning of their career. So the idea that replacing these jobs will ever be politically popular makes no sense to me at all. These people aren’t stupid and they know exactly what they stand to lose if Alberta transfers to renewables. I think they would love to build solar farms if it paid just as well though.

> Canada doesn't have to take such an American view of capitalism, and we often haven't in our history.

Canadian identity is a lot weaker in the west. I don’t think anyone really cares how “central” Canadians feel.

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

#152

Post by Symmetry »

wcoenen wrote: post #56
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…

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time t…

I'd assume their are tradeoffs between capital costs, maintenance costs, and efficiency. If electricity prices are really going negative you can funge against efficiency hard and still come out ahead.

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

#153

Post by bluGill »

missedthecue wrote: post #55
eldaisfish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of Tesla's batter in south Australia? It was recently expanded to 193 MWh. Care to guess how long it'll run at full power? Around 60-100 minutes. At its rated power of 100 MW, it can power around 25% of South Australia's lowest demand. That's it. At peak demand, the fraction is lower still. Cars have a fraction of the energy storage capacity of a single battery site and not all cars are connected to th…

I don't know if there's enough lithium in the world to stabilize a global renewable grid and make 100 million electric cars per year forever and make 1.5 billion phones a year and all the other things we use batteries for.

Hopefully we start to recycle batteries better. Most people throw their old broken phone in a landfill from what I gather. (broken, there is a market for non-broken phones)

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

#154

Post by avianlyric »

Toutouxc wrote: post #67
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…

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts of free electricity.

Ginormous batteries come to mind. Buy low (so low it’s negative) sell high.

We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K.

I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use.

Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it.

Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices.

All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.

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

#155

Post by JetSetWilly »

sandworm101 wrote: post #138
jonplackett wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well I believe the UK and EU are working on the agreements necessary for cross border trading of electricity: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trading-electrici...

There's no reason to believe that something won't be worked out in time.

So if by "hissy fit" you mean the people of the UK looked at the pros and cons of EU membership and narrowly decided that the cons can be lived with then.. yeah sure.

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

#156

Post by cbmuser »

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 can't stop start nuclear like you can with gas.

You actually can. All remaining six German nuclear power plants can operate in load-following mode and vary their output power by 10%-20% within minutes.

It just makes no sense to reduce the power on nuclear plants as they don’t emit any CO2 and you don‘t save much Uranium when you reduce power.

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

#157

Post by eldaisfish »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #148
eldaisfish wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you're talking about lowest demand are you talking about for the whole grid? A city block? A building? A condo? And I agree. I worked in solar and storage for a while. It's not a replacement, it's just an extension. It works out ok for a battery system for a building but anything larger they just don't last long enough

Only the south australian grid, which is not a relatively large grid.

South Australia's population is small, under two million and it's demand fluctuates between 400 - 3000 MW. For comparison, the Canadian province of New Brunswick has a comparable peak demand but fewer than a million people.

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

#158

Post by cbmuser »

mlok wrote: post #140
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…

Also : * Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles * Bitcoin, I guess

The apparatus to produce hydrogen from electricity doesn’t like fluctuations in its power input.

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

#159

Post by adwn »

avianlyric wrote: post #143
wcoenen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time t…

With negative electricity rates you can do crazy things like buy thousands of space heaters, and just heat the outside. Space heaters don’t become obsolete, and they’re not very capital intensive, or require much maintenance. You just need space to put them in.

> You just need space to put them in.

What are you talking about? Just take the three phases from your power outlet and stick them in the ground, with some distance between them. There, zero capital costs, and a nice, mostly resistive load for the power plant. A bad time to be an earthworm, though.

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

#160

Post by avianlyric »

piokoch wrote: post #35
sandworm101 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide Which is exactly what I would expect from island nations. The UK has lots of coast, which means lots of wind. That is a resource to export. The cornerstone of free trade is that some things are worth more in some places and less in others. UK has lots of wind. Maybe they can trade that for imports of luxury goods from elsewhere. If o…

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…

Electricity in most networks is bid on usually just two or three hours into the future, for 30min windows of electricity. (Biding starts up to a day or two before, but the auctions usually only close and hour or two before the 30min block starts).

It’s pretty easy to predict the amount of wind two or three hours into the future, wind doesn’t just “stop” without any sort of warning. (At least not when you’re dealing with wind over 100s of square KM in the middle of an ocean).

So selling renewables into the grid isn’t that hard, even across grids. But you might not be able to command the same premium that a more “reliable” source could.

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