151–160 of 313 posts
Yes, if you count the Drax power plant as renewable, sure. If you add to that deindustrialization and buying everything from abroad and not caring where that energy comes from, it’s super easy.
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> Or actually brcause gas is expensive. Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017. Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is de…
Is gas expensive though? It's like 6p per kWh at the moment with electricity about 25p per kWh for consumers. I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.
Heat pumps are 400% efficient or more, so have parity or better with gas prices
I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…
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Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
Discussion (didn't seem to get much traction): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553165
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Yesterday it was announced that a trial would take place so that regions near wind farms can receive free energy from them in periods of curtailment. https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNewsUK/s/jG5OCSWTTy
Unless i'm reading this wrong I'm pretty sure i already have this in the UK nad have done for years. What's the trial even for...
A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.
This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.
These titles are misleading, they always omit the rest of the grid and the final carbon footprint. In March, the UK emitted 161g CO2/kWh. France did 6 times less CO2/kWh with 2x less renewables ! https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/12mo/monthly
France has an amazingly developed grid, with a lot of nuclear. But I think there's a risk of seeing grid make ups as "one size fits all". Norway and Sweden do well with huge amounts of hydro storage, but few countries have the geography for that level of hydro. Similarly, the UK has an abundance of offshore wind (especially in Scotland), so further developing that (rather than focusing heavily on nuclear because it w…
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> Or actually brcause gas is expensive. Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017. Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is de…
Is gas expensive though? It's like 6p per kWh at the moment with electricity about 25p per kWh for consumers. I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant
Then you have electric distribution costs (costs for building and maintenance of electric grid, transformers, power lines).
In many industrial process heat applications direct burning of gas is preferred, because it lowers the costs.
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For those of us outside of Britain (i.e. 98% of us?) the message here isn't "mission accomplished" -- it's "Yes it's possible"
Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.
It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.
I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…
Transmission and construction, crewing and maintenance of of thermal power plants (under the name of "reserve energy") cost a lot of money, which in turn becomes fixed grid costs. On top of that you got consumption costs during periods of poor weather, which in combination of high fossil fuel costs means that the consumption prices spikes. The cost of energy during optimal weather conditions is in contrast so low that at this point they can basically just be rounded down to zero.