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Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

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Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#161

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

elcritch wrote: post #13
ghighi7878 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But these things can be orthogonal. Or actually brcause gas is expensive. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro The price for wholesale electricity is set by a bidding process, with each generating company saying what it would be willing to accept to produce a unit of electricity. Once built, the cost of generating power from renewables is very low, so these typically come in with the cheapest bid. Nucl…

Renewables may be the cheapest at spot values, but there needs to be a way to price in the intermittent nature of the power.

People disliking renewables always say this.

Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.

It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.

The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#162

Post by djhworld »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #147
terabytest wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you choose this plan in place of a fixed price plan?

Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?

Exactly.

For me I'm happy to avoid big power draws during the peak times, as I'm 'compensated' for it outside of those periods with a little planning. Downside is when the wind is not blowing AND disruptions to global energy markets - I'm exposed to that, warts and all, there's definitely been an increase in prices over the past 4 weeks, although there has been a few days (including today) where the wind has basically made the energy free and my average unit rate is dropping again.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#163

Post by functional_dev »

piva00 wrote: post #136
oskarkk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places? Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.

HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.

Why 600km exactly?

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#164

Post by roryirvine »

djhworld wrote: post #130
terabytest wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you choose this plan in place of a fixed price plan?

Explained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods. Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe. Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take a…

Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with.

For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then.

I have electric heating, which I thought might be a cause of anxiety but it's not really worked out that way. The temperature in my flat won't go down by more than a degree or two with the heating off over the course of the sort of 4 hour price spikes you tend to see in mid-January. If it looks like it's going to be unusually bad, I could always raise the temp by half a degree beforehand, but in reality I've only bothered to do that maybe three times in the past couple of years.

Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#165

Post by oskarkk »

maxerickson wrote: post #133
eis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you classify nuclear as renewable? You can say it's clean energy but it's not renewable.

We've probably increased the amount of fissile material on earth. It's pretty renewable at that rate.

If you're talking about uranium enrichment, that's like saying we increased the amount of gasoline on earth (by refining crude oil). Natural uranium is ~99% non-fissile, and ~1% fissile, and we're only removing part of the non-fissile isotope to obtain 5% concentration of the fissile isotope. Uranium still needs to be mined, spent fuel can be partially recycled, but you need some new natural uranium input in the end. That said, non-renewability of uranium is a non-issue IMO, compared to the huge amounts of other non-renewable resources we're extracting.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#166

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

danw1979 wrote: post #74
goldenarm wrote: post #46

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

Because nuclear. Which is a great 20th century French achievement ! If the EPR2 doesn’t spiral into costing £17.5bn per unit as the UK-PWR has, perhaps we can get them in to “rustle me up a nuclear power station” or two, in the words of Tony Blair.

The subsidies for the EPR2 fleet is a 10 euro cents per kWh CFD and interest free loans. With the first reactor coming online in 2038 at the earliest.

That sums up towards 20 cents per kWh in total.

It’s an absolutely horrifyingly expensive boondoggle before they have even started, and it won’t deliver any electricity in the relevant timeframes for electrifying industry and society.

On top of this EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for their existing paid off nuclear fleet. Let alone new builds.

And that is France which has been extremely protectionistic shielding their nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and even then its already leaking in on pure economics.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#167

Post by functional_dev »

jonatron wrote: post #138
piva00 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places? I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...

Iron air batteries sound promising

exactly, and they are cheap, right?

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#168

Post by swarnie »

teamonkey wrote: post #156
swarnie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It’s not currently happening in the UK. 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 c…

Are you sure?

The Octopus subreddit seem pretty convinced they get negative pricing when its windy.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#169

Post by acron0 »

rwmj wrote: post #145
djhworld wrote: post #109

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…

My friend has a car which can charge only when prices are low. I'm not totally sure how it works though, does the smart meter communicate this to the car?

Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#170

Post by oskarkk »

functional_dev wrote: post #163
piva00 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.

Why 600km exactly?

600km is roughly the distance from the hilly parts of Scotland to the south of England.
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