When Sustainable Energy Becomes Unsustainable

[88V8]

Power mix right now:
Gas turbines- 55%
Nuclear- 10%
Wind- 8%
Coal - 5%
+ the rest.

Perhaps one day there will be a category for grid-scale Batteries.
Then and only then will I take renewables seriously.
Until that time they're just an unreliable gimmick.

V8

[Lootman]

Power mix right now:
Gas turbines- 55%
Nuclear- 10%
Wind- 8%
Coal - 5%
+ the rest.

Perhaps one day there will be a category for grid-scale Batteries.
Then and only then will I take renewables seriously.
Until that time they're just an unreliable gimmick.

V8

The US company AES is probably closest. More generally NextEra, a Florida utility, is considered the best bet on utilities that are "green" and growthy.

[BullDog]

Power mix right now:
Gas turbines- 55%
Nuclear- 10%
Wind- 8%
Coal - 5%
+ the rest.

Perhaps one day there will be a category for grid-scale Batteries.
Then and only then will I take renewables seriously.
Until that time they're just an unreliable gimmick.

V8

Don't hold your breath waiting. The batteries typically supply megawatts for an hour. Two hour battery storage is on it's way. But we don't truly have grid scale storage except for pumped hydro, yet.

[Hallucigenia]

They aren't preheating the coal plant, they are actually on line.

Due to the unreliability and low capacity factor of French nuclear plants, which meant that we were caught short by not being able to make expected imports from France.

As usual - people get so excited when they discover renewables (and nuclear!) are variable, like it's something new that the renewable fans haven't thought of. And so once I again I'll refer people to Ruhnau and Qvist who worked the numbers on what storage in the real world might look like given current technology - and batteries are a pretty small part of it, they see a big part of long-term energy storage being in the form of hydrogen. It's not that cheap, but you don't need much of it and it's balanced by the fact that variable renewables produce electricity that's so much cheaper than anything else, you can afford to be a bit inefficient with it to get your reliability.

Although they explicitly didn't allow for new technologies - eg since the paper came out Form Energy have signed deals for two 10MW/1,000MWh (ie 100-hour) iron-air batteries in Minnesota and Colorado, they're expecting to produce their first batteries next year and the installation to go live early the year after. Form claim capex is 1/10 that of lithium batteries, but because they're aimed at a "slower", more long-term timescale than lithium so fewer cycles per year, one imagines that the electricity won't be 1/10 of the cost/kWh.

[Urbandreamer]

Due to the unreliability and low capacity factor of French nuclear plants, which meant that we were caught short by not being able to make expected imports from France.

If you follow scotview's link and dive into the graphs, we were burning coal to export electricity at the time of the post.

I'm not going to argue that we shouldn't do so, given that we import electricity at other times. However, it does show that you can't adopt a simplistic view on these things.

The more you dive into the graphs, the more complicated and rapidly changing the mix is. For example, at the beginning of last month, 49% of electricity came from wind, about twice as much as we got from gas.

[scotview]

As usual - people get so excited when they discover renewables (and nuclear!) are variable, like it's something new that the renewable fans haven't thought of.

Thanks for the post, good stuff. I am not getting excited, I was just looking at a bunch of pretty comical numbers on a screen, keystone cop kind of stuff.

You are presenting future solutions, we are living in the now, where hospitals, chronically ill and old folkies need guaranteed supply, fact.

The risk of sailing so close to the wind (pardon the pun) increases the risk of rolling blackouts, system instability or total regional blackout. Even if we get suitable backup storage, of whatever magnitude, the size of which will be another big debate in itself, it won't be available next week.

Surely a strategy of balancing intermittent supply with secure and immediate back-up would (have been) be the way to go.

[Urbandreamer]

You are presenting future solutions, we are living in the now, where hospitals, chronically ill and old folkies need guaranteed supply, fact.

The risk of sailing so close to the wind (pardon the pun) increases the risk of rolling blackouts, system instability or total regional blackout. Even if we get suitable backup storage, of whatever magnitude, the size of which will be another big debate in itself, it won't be available next week.

Surely a strategy of balancing intermittent supply with secure and immediate back-up would (have been) be the way to go.

Alternatively we could of course offer incentives for those who feel less need of the power than hospitals to reduce consumption at given times. For example by eating dinner at a different time or waiting until later to charge the electric car.

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/co ... 04062.html

Reportedly, the scheme works by comparing the customer’s usage against usual demand and pays £3 for every unit or kilowatt hour (kWh) saved, with it believed it could save customers £100 over the winter.

[Hallucigenia]

You are presenting future solutions, we are living in the now, where hospitals, chronically ill and old folkies need guaranteed supply, fact.

The risk of sailing so close to the wind (pardon the pun) increases the risk of rolling blackouts, system instability or total regional blackout. Even if we get suitable backup storage, of whatever magnitude, the size of which will be another big debate in itself, it won't be available next week.

It won't be available next week - but at the same time it's not decades away either, it's a few years away. And we don't *need* it next week, but we will need it in the next few years.

Yes we're going to be winging it for a few years as the margins get a lot thinner than are desirable - but at the same time I remember arguing on TMF with people who thought that 5-10% renewable would hopelessly destabilise the National Grid, at a time when NG themselves were saying that the grid would be good for at least 20% renewable (and plenty of people were poo-pooing even that). We've come a long way since then, and we understand much better the factors that matter when thinking about this stuff - IIRC NG are now saying that the current grid should be good up to 70-80% renewables and they're working on how to get to 100% which will probably involve some of the things discussed by Ruhnau and Qvist.

But the fact we are winging it is less to do with technology (we're not waiting for nuclear fusion or warp drives to rescue us) than other factors like finance and the regulatory environment. Covid has been part of that but you can't ignore the way Brexit has sucked out government's capacity to get stuff done. For instance I've a friend who's a civil servant who's worked on energy policy at a fairly senior level - but in the last 6-7 years they've spent 2/3 of their time exclusively on Brexit, and another year working on another project where government had made promises without thinking how to deliver it. And then you have all the department reshuffles

Surely a strategy of balancing intermittent supply with secure and immediate back-up would (have been) be the way to go.

Err - that's what we are doing?

But the last year has taught us a few things about what secure and immediate backup looks like - gas now longer looks like the cheap and reliable source of electricity that it used to be, the French woes have showed how nuclear can be less reliable than offshore wind, and Hinckley Point is a warning about depending too much on single large projects, a strategy of more-but-smaller projects is more robust.

To give a ballpark estimate, Hinckley Point is now forecast to cost £32.7bn for 3.2GW that let's say will have a 90% capacity factor (nuclear has quite a bit of downtime for refuelling and maintenance).

That compares with Dogger Bank costing £9bn for 3.6 GW, so £8bn for 3.2GW, and let's say a 45% capacity factor for convenience (although eg Hywind has managed up to 57% capacity and SSE seem to be implying something similar when they say that each of the three 1.2GW bits of Dogger Bank will generate 6TWh annually). So £16bn spent on Dogger Bank-alikes would generate 6400MW at 45% capacity, compared to Hinckley Point generating 3200MW at 90% capacity.

Form seem to be implying $20 capex per kWh stored, so $20k/MWh, which for a 100-hour system implies $2m per MW of output. So 100 hours of backup (in reality more as you wouldn't need to give 100% backup in the middle of the night during a multi-day windless period) for 3200MW would cost $6.4bn - assume 1:1 exchange rate and it's £6.4bn.

So one 3.2GW windfarm, plus 100 hours of 3.2GW batteries, plus another windfarm to fill the batteries and directly increase the % of time during which you generate 3.2GW when winds are low but not zero, to give you 3.2GW at 90% capacity factor like Hinckley Point - all that costs £22.4bn, or <70% of the cost of Hinckley Point.

Now in the real world you wouldn't want 100-hour coverage of 100% of your capacity, you'd want more of a mix along the lines of Ruhnau and Qvist - but the above gives you an idea given what's possible with technology that is coming online this year (Dogger Bank) or is entering production next year (Form iron-air), and you've still got an extra £10bn to play with compared to Hinckley Point.

Yes, UK energy policy has been a mess for 20+ years, and government has been completely distracted by other things since 2016, and as a result we are winging it far more than we should do. And as in 2022 we may end up cutting it a bit too fine on some occasions. But there's lots to be optimistic about as well, and the constraints are more political and financial than technological.

[scotview]

You are presenting future solutions, we are living in the now, where hospitals, chronically ill and old folkies need guaranteed supply, fact.

The risk of sailing so close to the wind (pardon the pun) increases the risk of rolling blackouts, system instability or total regional blackout. Even if we get suitable backup storage, of whatever magnitude, the size of which will be another big debate in itself, it won't be available next week.

It won't be available next week - but at the same time it's not decades away either, it's a few years away. And we don't *need* it next week, but we will need it in the next few years.

Yes, UK energy policy has been a mess for 20+ years.

Morning Hal, thank you for taking the time to post that detailed and clear headed reply, interesting information, many thanks.

[Hallucigenia]

Surely a strategy of balancing intermittent supply with secure and immediate back-up would (have been) be the way to go.

As it happens, today the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee has delivered a 131-page grownup version of my post yesterday, essentially answering the question of "what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine?" including hour-by-hour modelling of the country’s electricity system out to 2035 and a to-do list for government.

https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/d ... er-system/

Even allowing for a 50% increase in demand due to heat pumps, EVs etc, they see 2035 electricity production at 70% cheap wind/solar, 20% baseload (nuclear, biomass etc) and 10% variable, of which 2% will be natural gas.

[scotview]

Surely a strategy of balancing intermittent supply with secure and immediate back-up would (have been) be the way to go.

As it happens, today the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee has delivered a 131-page grownup version of my post yesterday.

Thanks for posting. Good to see this type of up front, readable stuff from government.

Just a thought. Considering the implications of project organisation, disruption, mobilisation, cost etc. What do you think the magnitude of implementation by 2035 is, say compared to HS2. I would hazard a guess at 50X order of magnitude.

Thats without insulating homes, installing heat pumps to dwellings, making BVs affordable to all, solving vehicle to grid and converting the heavy goods industry.

A stab at overall cost and a key date project plan would have been good in the report.

From the report, it seems that investing in hydrogen might be a good idea and converting your home to having larger summer living spaces and smaller, easily heated, winter living spaces might be a good idea, for those that can do that of course. Looks like individuals will have to look out for themselves in our bright new, carbon free world.

Need to have a couple more reads through. Again, thanks for posting.......food for thought.

[Urbandreamer]

Just a thought. Considering the implications of project organisation, disruption, mobilisation, cost etc. What do you think the magnitude of implementation by 2035 is, say compared to HS2. I would hazard a guess at 50X order of magnitude.

Don't get me started on HS2! If they had started building it in the north, there would be no question about it being completed.

Returning however to the subject on hand. When we had far less wind turbines it was argued that possibly we should invest in pumped hydro.
As a shareholder in SSE at the time I knew that they had identified a site and run the numbers. There was just no return on investment, so they didn't do anything. Instead building gas plant.

.....

That is until the numbers changed.
https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables- ... ro-scheme/

It's all about returns on investment. I was a early investor in UK renewable infrastructure, buying Scottish Hydro shares. I'm not so sure that I'll continue to invest, now that the government decides how much profit they will allow such companies to make. Let the government find the money to build new generators is what I say. I'll invest overseas. It's possible/likely that others will too.

[Hallucigenia]

Good to see this type of up front, readable stuff from government.

Just a thought. Considering the implications of project organisation, disruption, mobilisation, cost etc. What do you think the magnitude of implementation by 2035 is, say compared to HS2. I would hazard a guess at 50X order of magnitude.

Thats without insulating homes, installing heat pumps to dwellings, making BVs affordable to all, solving vehicle to grid and converting the heavy goods industry.

A stab at overall cost and a key date project plan would have been good in the report.

Just to be clear, this is not a report *from* government but *for* government, from their advisors. And their remit is specifically advising on the science and technology side of things, it is not for them to advise on economics, nor to make decisions about eg project dates.

Really it's the sort of high-level overview that we should have had back in 2015 or so, to provide guidance for those whose job it is to think about economics and project management - the sooner we get going on this stuff the cheaper and less painful it will be. One of the great might-have-beens is what would have happened if Cameron had won 5 fewer seats in 2015 and missed out on a majority - on the assumption he would stay in coalition with the LibDems, Ed Davey would likely have continued at DECC where he was ideally suited, as an economist with a background in market forecasting and a Thatcherite love of the market. Instead DECC was folded into BEIS by May which in turn became a victim of the Tory infighting after 2015, with a new Secretary of State every year since then who in any case would be constantly firefighting the Brexit mess with no time for long-term planning.

Still, we are where we are. OBR have published [url=
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Fiscal_ ... df#page=15]high-level reports on possible costs[/url]. They suggest there are plenty of direct savings to offset some of the costs, but they come up with ballpark numbers of £1400bn costs between 2020 and 2050 to get to net zero, offset by £1100bn of savings. But it's complicated as maybe 75% of those costs fall to the private sector (businesses and individuals), and getting to net zero is a mass of individual projects unlike the monolith that is HS2 - you can eg put 40GW of wind turbines in the North Sea without installing a single heat pump or electrifying a steel mill, whereas if just one metre of railway is missing between London and Brum, the whole project stalls.

But if you just take the government share of a quarter of £1400bn over 30 years, that averages at ~£12bn per year, which is less than the DfT 2020-21 spend of £13.4bn on conventional rail infrastructure via Network Rail (ie not subsidies to operators, and not new lines like HS2 and Oxford-Cambridge, just the existing network of rails). The comparison with HS2 is anybody's guess, it was £3.6bn in that year but if you take the current estimate of £106bn and divide it into 15 years (2020-2035???) then you get £7bn/year.

But yes, the energy transition is the generational challenge. On the other hand, a lot of it is spending that would still have happened as operators built new coal power plants or consumers bought 20mpg petrol cars. And I wouldn't just think of it as a climate change thing - it can pretty much be justified on grounds of energy security, which we should have been thinking about 20 years ago when we first started to import gas due to declines in the North Sea. Energy security is surely the ultimate guarantee that your country doesn't become Putin's bitch like Germany, which is surely the true meaning of sovereignty rather than who makes the rules on banana shape.

From the report, it seems that investing in hydrogen might be a good idea

It's interesting, BEIS in the Johnson years got terribly excited about hydrogen, but it seems that someone has done some sums (or talked to Michael Liebreich) and worked out that making it is a pretty inefficient use of energy (which in turn means it will be expensive), it's a low density form of energy storage, and it will be really hard to make the volumes needed for major replacement of fossil fuels. In fact at the moment hydrogen is as much a problem as a solution, at the moment there's a lot of hydrogen being made from fossil fuels so it will be a big job just to replace that existing industrial hydrogen with hydrogen from renewable sources. So it will have a place in some niches (a bit like LPG at the moment for properties not on the gas grid), but hydrogen is unlikely to be wasted on eg home heating at a large scale.

So there will be lots of opportunities in hydrogen, as there is in all this stuff, but the question is whether current valuations anticipate an even bigger role for hydrogen than now seems likely. Don't know.

[Hallucigenia]

And the view from National Grid, based on modelling one year based on 2013 as a "typical" weather year (so not an extreme Dunkelflaute scenario), and looking at the last week in January as the most difficult week of that average year.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/documen ... 1/download

Every year National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) produces our Future Energy Scenarios (FES). These scenarios explore a range of credible pathways for the development of energy supply and demand and how the UK government target of a Net Zero carbon power sector by 2035 can be met. The UK is racing towards more renewable energy supply while increasing system flexibility and ensuring stability. We need to understand how we can operate the energy system with only residual backup unabated natural gas1 for CCGTs (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines). This will play a critical role in meeting our 2035 target. Jeremy Wardle, in the Energy Insights and Analysis (EIA) team, considers the impact of removing unabated natural gas for CCGTs from the energy mix on our dispatch modelling. Achieving this target requires revolutionary thinking about how the energy system is operated.

• In the future, the electricity system will be supplied by a much greater share of renewable energy, increasing from 29% in 2022 to 78% in 2035 in the Leading the Way scenario
• In 2035, we expect to have flexible, supply-side technologies such as hydrogen generation (7.6GW), bioenergy (3.3GW) and storage (37.3GW) to ensure the system meets demand

Also worth noting that the Highlands' electricity was zero carbon intensity yesterday, and the Lowlands were down to 8g CO2/kWh, UK overall was 60.4% wind/solar.

[daveh]

Northern Scotland is almost always at 0g/kWh. It is again today. 7.4%hydro and the rest wind. Excess being exported to southern Scotland. Data from carbonintensity.org.uk It's almost always like that whenever I check. The exceptions are on the few windless days when Peterhead gas station fires up and there are imports from Southern Scotland which still has nuclear and gas availability. We definitely need more storage and it will be interesting what happens with Peterhead, there is talk of replacing it with CCS.