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How the U.K. broke its own economy

theatlantic.com

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Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#321

Post by hadlock »

curo wrote: post #272
nikkwong wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.

Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.

The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#322

Post by chrisbriard »

Manuel_D wrote: post #266
chrisbriard wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind Energy, like Solar Energy can be stored in Battery Energy Storage Systems to provide reliability to the grid in the event of shortages.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

[dead]

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#323

Post by littlestymaar »

roenxi wrote: post #276
blibble wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't have mattered due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas

That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.

No product on a real market ever works like that (otherwise all goods of the same kind would cost the same everywhere in a country, priced at the marginal cost of supplying it to the most remote island community, which everyone can attest is not how markets work).

Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should behave.

Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#324

Post by hadlock »

riffraff wrote: post #287
owenversteeg wrote: post #226

>Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world. Yikes. Housing is the big issue that gets everyone’s attention, but this is huge. Cheap energy drives economic growth at all levels. It’s incredible that the various…

I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy. Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.

Germany and the Netherlands bled off more than half of London's finance industry since Brexit if you look at recent numbers. They still have a finance industry but powerhouse might be a stretch these days.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#325

Post by Ekaros »

alvah wrote: post #305
bryanlarsen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.

It's misleading, and those who use it generally know it's misleading. It's used to persuade the layperson that electricity generated by wind turbines is cheaper to the consumer or industry than electricity generated by thermal sources or hydro turbines, when in fact that is only true if you disregard the requirement for said electricity to be available on demand - a fairly important omission.

I often wonder how many people would accept automatic black outs when buying green energy. A process that "happens" here. You can buy for example purely wind powered electricity. But somehow that does not stop being delivered when there is no wind.

Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#326

Post by badgersnake »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project. I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

> I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.

It doesn’t fit their agenda.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#327

Post by Manuel_D »

stephen_g wrote: post #298
Manuel_D wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days. There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where sol…

> Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.

That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards:

> Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Even leaving 1% of demand unfulfilled amounts to multiple orders of magnitude more frequent electricity production shortfalls. Figures like "fulfill 99% of electricity demand" might sound promising, until you compare against the standards of reliability modern society expects of the electrical grid.

And that's in Australia, quite literally the best-case scenario for renewables. By comparison, in Germany even 12 hours of storage would only satisfy 80-90% of demand.

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#328

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #261
cycomanic wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg)…

Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy. Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy lik…

it's possible (and fairly easy) to build infrastructure that only turns on when there is excess energy

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#329

Post by rossriley »

hadlock wrote: post #324
riffraff wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those are intentionally misleading numbers. The UK is a finance power house, not a manufacturing one, so of course it derives a larger share of GDP from less energy. Italy has a higher % of GDP from manufacturing but way more expensive energy.

Germany and the Netherlands bled off more than half of London's finance industry since Brexit if you look at recent numbers. They still have a finance industry but powerhouse might be a stretch these days.

UK has 10% of the entire world's digital exports: https://www.voronoiapp.com/technology/The-Worlds-Largest-Dig...

Re: How the U.K. broke its own economy

#330

Post by Manuel_D »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #293
Manuel_D wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity. Intermittent sources don't just experie…

Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries. This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid. 95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying di…

> This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light.

I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit.

> You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level.

"only" 12 hours of storage is 30 TWh of storage, at the world's current electricity consumption rates. This is an immense amount of storage, amounting to decades worth of global battery production. And that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of batteries are going to electric vehicles, not grid storage. It's true that battery production is growing, but electricity demand will similarly grow as fossil fuel use in transportation and industrial processes are electrified. Out of all of our fossil fuel use, electricity production is only ~40%. Not to mention, poorer countries are developing and will eventually start deploying refrigeration and air conditioning on similar scales as developed countries.

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