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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

#271

Post by pojzon »

bluGill wrote: post #169
pojzon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, why not simply stop generating energy by wind istead of stopping nuclear stallar ? You „can” stop generating power using wind. Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.

You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all. An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year…

This sounds like the issue railways had in UK 100 years ago. Solution was to nationalize the infrastructure. If the nation would own the wind-farms and nuclear plants, both can be managed to the benefit pf the nation.

If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.

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

#272

Post by Corazoor »

sir_bearington wrote: post #245
Corazoor wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. Only if you want to produce syngas (methane). If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed. That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here... Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane…

The whole point of power to gas (methane) is that we can reuse the existing natural gas storage, distribution, and generation infrastructure. Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Namely grid scale deployment of energy cells, storing hydrogen. Basically it's swapping one set of challenges with a different set of challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at an…

> Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.

We do have a rather good idea. There are several studies and large test facilities both in Europe and the US. Specifically in the area I was mentioning (salt caverns). From wikipedia on hydrogen storage: "Underground hydrogen storage is the practice of hydrogen storage in caverns, salt domes and depleted oil and gas fields. Large quantities of gaseous hydrogen have been stored in caverns by ICI for many years without any difficulties." "Another study referenced by a European staff working paper found that for large scale storage, the cheapest option is hydrogen at €140/MWh for 2,000 hours of storage using an electrolyser, salt cavern storage and combined-cycle power plant."

There is more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage

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

#273

Post by bluGill »

pojzon wrote: post #271
bluGill wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all. An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year…

This sounds like the issue railways had in UK 100 years ago. Solution was to nationalize the infrastructure. If the nation would own the wind-farms and nuclear plants, both can be managed to the benefit pf the nation. If we privatize essential infrastructure it means -> yea the owner will want to have biggest profit possible and will not be flexible vs rest of the grid.

National railroads don't have a good history in the US. Though here it was the cities taking over.

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

#274

Post by bluGill »

rhodozelia wrote: post #265
bluGill wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents in 1988 put their water heater on an overnight mode. Even with 4 kids taking baths we ran out of hot water twice that I remember (so about once every 5 years), and I can assure you as kid we weren't worried about conservation. 200 gallons (800 liters) of storage turns out to be plenty for all the baths people take in a day. I know my parents got half price electric for water heating, but I don't know how m…

A 60 gallon tank is considered large around here, so no wonder you had a 200 gal tank if it only heated at night!

The electric company gave us the tanks for free to us to sign up. Though the need for larger tanks to pull this off is important.

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

#275

Post by enjoy-your-stay »

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…

>Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.

Bitcoin miners probably.

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

#276

Post by agumonkey »

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...???"

Slightly similar, akon brought solar panels in a few african countries, and let the local people setup and install the mini grids (most probably under supervision from other people I didn't read about that). so now people got jobs, skills and light.

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

#277

Post by moonbug »

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…

Use it to make methane, store, burn later in existing ccgts. Carbon neutral.

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

#278

Post by billbrown »

_Microft wrote: post #66
beaconstudios wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh I've heard about that one too actually - don't they suspend a large weight and use its potential energy as storage? I'm a sucker for these back-to-basics engineering projects. High tech batteries be damned, let's just use potential energy for storage!

There is a German company suggesting to cut a large piece of rock (think: hundreds of meters in diameter and depth) lose and lift that by pumping water beneath it. A moving mountain, it would be. Totally crazy stuff, I should check if that ever made any progress. Here is a German article about it. As far as I remember, the real issue is that pumps/generators with the required powers are very expensive. https://www.in…

Omega Tau Podcast had a great episode about this company and project:

https://omegataupodcast.net/299-gravity-storage/

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

#279

Post by runeks »

leoedin wrote: post #177
Toutouxc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. Some we do already, like aluminium smelting and steel manufacture. Some we have the technology to do, but don't currently do because the economics don't work - water desalination, hydrogen production through electrolysis, electro-chemical synthesis of ammonia. We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there'…

> The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy.

You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes.

Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.

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

#280

Post by runeks »

ic0n0cl4st wrote: post #118

Seems like a great reason to invest in kinetic energy storage like this pumped hydroelectric reservoir in Wales. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station?wprov...

That depends. E.g. if it costs $100bn to build enough of these to store the power needed to go from 97% to 100% then it may just not be worth it.
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