Looking at that video of the University Students in the last thread... it seems possible that this situation in Palestine will be good news for right wing parties in the west.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
Charging car batteries I'd have thought.
In the past it was aluminium smelting, though I'm not sure how on/off that process can be.
This is the best, most succinct description of what has happened this weekend
"Everyone knows that in war, men are allowed to kill men. No one in US would care if Hamas had attacked or ambushed the IDF. Sucks but that’s how it goes. War is war. Hamas invaded a rave and raped and tortured and then displayed tourist women as trophies. Palestine is fucked."
War is primitive and animal. Atavistic emotions are evoked. Palestine will now endure a primitive, atavistic revenge
Won't shift Jezza's opinion of the matter....
It is so awful. Palesitnians (in the West Bank, not Gaza- never been to the latter) are some of the loveliest people I've ever met. Funny, generous, clever, and even quite candid about their own cause, and its failings. I particularly remember a drink with a Palestinian Christian restaurant owner in Bethlehem. He was a dude
Now they are reduced to being a perverse form of ISIS, and they will be punished as such. What's worse, they have brought it all on themselves
Bibi Netanyahu now has carte blanche to do what he likes to Gaza, the West won't intervene, and I don't know anyone else that will
Fantasising about the collective punishment of Muslims for the crimes of a few? Plus ca change.
Even after the Nazis seized power in January 1933, only 44% of Germans voted for the Nazis in the March election.
Should have we collectively punished the Germans in World War 2 given only a minority voted for Hitler?
We did collectively punish the Germans, most notably with the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans to the east of Germany’s new borders. This saw maybe 14 million displaced and 2 million died. It was approved by the Allied powers, albeit somewhat reluctantly by the UK and US.
We should not have done this and ethnic cleansing is now recognised as a crime against humanity.
Do tell us what we *should* have done then, given that the Red Army was hoovering up Eastern Europe and their soldiers were fired by the knowledge of 20 MILLION Soviet citizens brutally murdered by the Nazi Germans?
And repeat across Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, etc
We had no moral basis to intervene - nor was it practically possible. The Russians took their righteous revenge, and TBH the Germans were lucky it ended there, after what they did
It was never going to end any other way. We could not have intervened, and we had no desire to intervene. There was no way that people who had suffered horrors at German hands would not seek revenge.
When you embark on a war of extermination, you'd better make damn sure you don't lose it.
And, it could have been a lot worse for the Germans. The Morgenthau Plan envisaged that about 20% of the German population would starve to death, as the country was de-industrialised.
The more I read of WW2 history, the more I think it possibly SHOULD have been worse, for Germany. Within living memory, this country tried to enslave, decimate and culturally/racially annihilate its many neighbours to the east. Now Germany prospers. I can't blame the Poles - et al - for feeling aggrieved, even now
Russia got its revenge by raping every woman in eastern Germany. Poland had no such revenge, and suffered under communism
Nazi Germany actually implemented the Hunger Plan - strip everything east of Germany of food to feed the German population. And feed the German army in the area by stealing anything that was left.
The resulting deaths from famine reached millions.
This is why all the stories of DP (displaced persons, post WWII) are about people who are starving or close to it.
Looking at that video of the University Students in the last thread... it seems possible that this situation in Palestine will be good news for right wing parties in the west.
Perhaps, but wait until it has played out before leaping to judgement. The Israeli air force is chucking a lot of missiles at Gaza and an inadvertently flattened nursery might change sympathies. It is ironic that on policy grounds, you could just as easily believe the left would favour Israel.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
Charging car batteries I'd have thought.
In the past it was aluminium smelting, though I'm not sure how on/off that process can be.
IIRC aluminium *production* - from the cryolite - can be an on/off process, in that you can keep the the melt liquid from its stored heat for a day or 2. But the setup needs designing for it.
I thought he lived in the arse end of nowhere on the East Coast of the USA? I seemed to remember back in the day when I used to listen to him as I studied late into the night, he would give you his local time etc.
First night in Boston and as someone who was cynical of @Leon's claims about the high quality of New England beer I was pleasantly surprised. I love a good bitter and don't want my beer cold and fizzy and have never found a bottle beer or keg that could compete with a decent hand pumped beer, but the New England beer was full of flavour. At least the ones I have had so far. Pleasant light citrus flavours.
I thought he lived in the arse end of nowhere on the East Coast of the USA? I seemed to remember back in the day when I used to listen to him as I studied late into the night, he would give you his local time etc.
He was living in a small town just north of Boston, MA until recently, but must have moved back to Scotland. I still wish he was presenting Up All Night half the time, along with Dotun Adebayo. Distinctive voice, Rhod. His version of the show was seemingly killed off by Covid 19. It's been dumbed down a lot now, especially when not presented by Mr Adebayo.
This is from 2015.
"Up All Night: radio for the habitually sleepless Rhod Sharp’s 5 Live show is a comfort for the significant minority who can’t sleep without the reassuring sound of a bedside radio David Hepworth"
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
I thought he lived in the arse end of nowhere on the East Coast of the USA? I seemed to remember back in the day when I used to listen to him as I studied late into the night, he would give you his local time etc.
He was living in a small town just north of Boston, MA until recently, but must have moved back to Scotland. I still wish he was presenting Up All Night half the time, along with Dotun Adebayo. Distinctive voice, Rhod. His version of the show was seemingly killed off by Covid 19. It's been dumbed down a lot now, especially when not presented by Mr Adebayo.
This is from 2015.
"Up All Night: radio for the habitually sleepless Rhod Sharp’s 5 Live show is a comfort for the significant minority who can’t sleep without the reassuring sound of a bedside radio David Hepworth"
I used to love to listen to Rhod as I worked through the night as a student. I haven't listened to it in years, but sad (but also somewhat predictable) that the show has been dumbed down. It used to be really interesting and informative, full of stories you just didn't hear anywhere else.
"Scholz Battered in German State Votes as Far-Right AfD Advances Ruling parties sustain stinging losses in Bavaria and Hesse AfD emerges as second-strongest force in both states"
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Last time I looked at this in any detail, the quickest and cheapest path to Net Zero was to push gas very hard while you wait for wind (and later solar and battery tech) to come online over the next 30 years. Purging coal was far more important than getting turbines in.
This is largely what the UK has achieved, which is if great credit to the governments since 2008. And why Germany has been so disappointing. Our recent failure in the windfarm auction was unusual.
I think the Labour policy is clever - people genuinely think wind energy is cheap and secure. I remember the Radio 5 call-in when Ukraine kicked off and people were fuming that their prices were going up even though they were on a "100% renewable tariff".
It's great news. The public now associate fossil fuels with economic disaster, and not just for the climate.
"Scholz Battered in German State Votes as Far-Right AfD Advances Ruling parties sustain stinging losses in Bavaria and Hesse AfD emerges as second-strongest force in both states"
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
It should almost never be getting curtailed, if it is that's due to a failure of investment. It's not that we can't find a use for the energy it's that the grid is failing to keep up with it and to move it from where it's generated to where it's needed. So step one, is to invest in the grid to remove curtailments.
As we transition to electric vehicles we are going to need massively more electricity not less. And those EVs will be coming with batteries.
Electrolysis of water into hydrogen has always struck me as a high intensity use for excess electricity if it's ever generated.
Exports are another great use for excess energy. And our balance of payments.
This story about the remarkable self-taught mathematician Oliver Heaviside suggests that the culture of managerial incompetence and dishonesty at the Post Office goes back a very long way indeed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside ..In 1887, Heaviside worked with his brother Arthur on a paper entitled "The Bridge System of Telephony". However the paper was blocked by Arthur's superior, William Henry Preece of the Post Office, because part of the proposal was that loading coils (inductors) should be added to telephone and telegraph lines to increase their self-induction and correct the distortion which they suffered. Preece had recently declared self-inductance to be the great enemy of clear transmission. Heaviside was also convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt (until 1891).[13] There was a long history of animosity between Preece and Heaviside. Heaviside considered Preece to be mathematically incompetent, an assessment supported by the biographer Paul J. Nahin: "Preece was a powerful government official, enormously ambitious, and in some remarkable ways, an utter blockhead." Preece's motivations in suppressing Heaviside's work were more to do with protecting Preece's own reputation and avoiding having to admit error than any perceived faults in Heaviside's work...
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
We are 52.8% fossil fuel this morning although we are currently exporting. The key to all of this is efficient batteries on a large enough scale so that surplus wind power can be stored, as opposed to switching the turbines off. Right now that looks seriously expensive and unachievable.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Not if the nuclear-scale tidal power stations result in electricity that is more expensive than even nuclear, let alone wind, like the last time this was looked at in scale, no thanks.
Especially since generating new metal in the future should be even cheaper if using zero-input cheap wind to generate it.
If it can be generated cheaply without subsidies or locked in prices at nuclear or higher rates, then great, but if its just a rort to get subsidies as the economics doesn't work then no thanks.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
We are 52.8% fossil fuel this morning although we are currently exporting. The key to all of this is efficient batteries on a large enough scale so that surplus wind power can be stored, as opposed to switching the turbines off. Right now that looks seriously expensive and unachievable.
There is no question the batteries will be available, they will be in cars, of which plenty will be plugged in at this time.
The issue is having the grid capable of moving it from where its generated to where its needed.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
The other end to make it green is to be able to use surplus wind to generate green gas. The Japanese have been working especially hard on this.
Then if there's no wind for a fortnight, use the gas, net zero emissions still.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Not if the nuclear-scale tidal power stations result in electricity that is more expensive than even nuclear, let alone wind, like the last time this was looked at in scale, no thanks.
Especially since generating new metal in the future should be even cheaper if using zero-input cheap wind to generate it.
If it can be generated cheaply without subsidies or locked in prices at nuclear or higher rates, then great, but if its just a rort to get subsidies as the economics doesn't work then no thanks.
Stop with the canard of expensive tidal power. You are shilling for the nuclear industry. Swansea was cheaper than nuclear. And that produced power for 180,000 homes.
A 3.2 GW tidal power station at say Cardiff will power 1.3 million homes.
The cost of the Cardiff-sized plants are no more than £10 bn each. For that, you get 120 years minimum power generation - guaranteed. Zero carbon, reliable power generation. That can recharge the nation's fleet of electric vehicles overnight.
The current costs for Hinkley C, life of project, are £50 billion. But to compete with tidal, you will need Hinkley D coming onstream in 60 years. Let's be kind and say that can be built then for £75 billion. So you have tidal costing £10 billion, versus nuclear production of identical output for the same period costing £125 billion.
Put another way, you can have a dozen tidal power stations now - producing nearly 40 GW - for the same cost as one nuclear power plant producing 3.2 GW.
Tidal will get built - and Sizewell C not - for the same reason that HS2 got canned. Value for money. Regardless of who wins the next election.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
That makes adaptability a strength, not a weakness, of wind.
Given technology generally is progressing, locking in what will be obsolete technologies for over a century in order to get a payback isn't promising.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Not if the nuclear-scale tidal power stations result in electricity that is more expensive than even nuclear, let alone wind, like the last time this was looked at in scale, no thanks.
Especially since generating new metal in the future should be even cheaper if using zero-input cheap wind to generate it.
If it can be generated cheaply without subsidies or locked in prices at nuclear or higher rates, then great, but if its just a rort to get subsidies as the economics doesn't work then no thanks.
Stop with the canard of expensive tidal power. You are shilling for the nuclear industry. Swansea was cheaper than nuclear. And that produced power for 180,000 homes.
A 3.2 GW tidal power station at say Cardiff will power 1.3 million homes.
The cost of the Cardiff-sized plants are no more than £10 bn each. For that, you get 120 years minimum power generation - guaranteed. Zero carbon, reliable power generation. That can recharge the nation's fleet of electric vehicles overnight.
The current costs for Hinkley C, life of project, are £50 billion. But to compete with tidal, you will need Hinkley D coming onstream in 60 years. Let's be kind and say that can be built then for £75 billion. So you have tidal costing £10 billion, versus nuclear production of identical output for the same period costing £125 billion.
Put another way, you can have a dozen tidal power stations now - producing nearly 40 GW - for the same cost as one nuclear power plant producing 3.2 GW.
Tidal will get built - and Sizewell C not - for the same reason that HS2 got canned. Value for money. Regardless of who wins the next election.
HS2 got canned because a bunch of idiots argued against it for a variety of bogus reasons. Don't be surprised when a scheme you want - such as tidal - gets blocked by idiots for a variety of bogus reasons.
The mantra should be: "Just Fucking Build It".
If you were against HS2, don't expect your dream infrastructure project to be supported.
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
We are 52.8% fossil fuel this morning although we are currently exporting. The key to all of this is efficient batteries on a large enough scale so that surplus wind power can be stored, as opposed to switching the turbines off. Right now that looks seriously expensive and unachievable.
There are lots of other possible technologies than batteries. The great advantages batteries have, though, is the enormous investment headed their way to increase production for cars, and the enormous research investment into improving the technology as a result of their use in cars and phones.
The excess production from wind will be an opportunity for one of these technologies, but at the moment it's not an issue on the grid often enough to be regarded as that much of a problem.
It's much more regularly a feature of the Irish grid, which has a much larger proportion of wind in the mix, but the government here have done very little to encourage a much of technologies. They seem to be aiming for simply batteries.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Solar panels makers guarantee an output for 20-25 years
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
What would 3 months usage in TWh be?
U.K. is something like 720TWh per year, I believe.
First night in Boston and as someone who was cynical of @Leon's claims about the high quality of New England beer I was pleasantly surprised. I love a good bitter and don't want my beer cold and fizzy and have never found a bottle beer or keg that could compete with a decent hand pumped beer, but the New England beer was full of flavour. At least the ones I have had so far. Pleasant light citrus flavours.
The two I did the other month were Democracy Brewing - a must for a PB contributor - not far from the Boston Common, and Trillium Brewing - in an old warehouse near the Harbour. Both were pretty good….
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
No cognitive dissonance whatsoever.
My children go to school, that's good for them. Doesn't mean I should be in school, I've done that already.
Ukraine lacks our history of democracy etc and wants to ensure those are locked in via the EU. We evolved those things on our own before and without the EU.
Of course we also aren't next door to Russia.
Do you think Canada should be in the EU? Australia? We are no different to them apart from utterly irrelevant geography.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Solar panels makers guarantee an output for 20-25 years
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
More likely they'll be replaced not because they've lost a little efficiency,but that 'modern' ones are so much more efficient (hopefully...). As land to build solar farms on decreases, there will come an incentive to maximise efficiency on the farms we have.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
Then what is stopping tidal now? If it is cheap, ready to go and can get planning quickly, why is a project not moving forward rapidly?
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
There's room on the grid for a mix of tidal, wind, solar and storage. Britain might need to triple its grid capacity to electrify surface transport, domestic heating and industry. It's not a matter of choosing one renewable technology over another. Use them all.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Solar panels makers guarantee an output for 20-25 years
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
More likely they'll be replaced not because they've lost a little efficiency,but that 'modern' ones are so much more efficient (hopefully...). As land to build solar farms on decreases, there will come an incentive to maximise efficiency on the farms we have.
In the very early days of solar in the US, subsidy schemes had to take into account the early adopter problem - that installing next years panels was always much, much better.
Especially since the rate of improvement is a function of demand - if everyone waits for the better panels, demand is zero. So research slows to a halt, as does investment in better manufacturing.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
What is the current hold up on the Swansea scheme being built? In simple language please.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
Then what is stopping tidal now? If it is cheap, ready to go and can get planning quickly, why is a project not moving forward rapidly?
A civil service that nailed Britain's colours to the nuclear mast. (No, not paranoia - many examples. Like Swansea tidal barrage was the only planning application not to get any extensions as a result of Covid. Everyone else got, from memory, 15 months. A civil service decision.)
Even though it is eye-poppingly expensive, it has leveraged "reliabilty" over other forms of renewables. Except, it loses that argument to tidal.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
We should have started this in 2010. Imagine had we financed a massive program at 1% interest rates.
Of course it's highly unlikely we could finance it with 100 year bonds - what's the likely current cost per MWh borrowing at current 30 year rates ? (I acknowledge that depends on a number of assumptions.)
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
What the UK should be doing is working with Ukraine and proposing a multi-tier EU (what Macron was proposing and should have been done prior to the Brexit Referendum). The most-integrated tier is the one which will eventually end up with the countries merging into one. The less-integrated tier is just a single market like it used to be in the old days. Much easier for Ukraine to get into the less-integrated tier.
On topic, still no wager from me. Gun to head, it’s Tories. But hard to recall an odder by-election. The Mad Nad hokey-cokey (plus her appalling track record as a constituency MP), three main parties all pushing hard, a strong independent, all after conference season *and* in a seat which has pretty much been blue forever, but afaict largely on the tribal level rather than through conviction.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
What's required from government at this point ? As is it likely to get a positive reception - or at least a hearing - from Labour ?
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Solar panels makers guarantee an output for 20-25 years
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
More likely they'll be replaced not because they've lost a little efficiency,but that 'modern' ones are so much more efficient (hopefully...). As land to build solar farms on decreases, there will come an incentive to maximise efficiency on the farms we have.
Also, I think many planning permissions were limited to 25 years. 25 years on, pressure on land use will increase. If you could change land use from agricultural, there will be pressures to change it again to residential.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There are various proposals along those lines for the Severn.
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
What the UK should be doing is working with Ukraine and proposing a multi-tier EU (what Macron was proposing and should have been done prior to the Brexit Referendum). The most-integrated tier is the one which will eventually end up with the countries merging into one. The less-integrated tier is just a single market like it used to be in the old days. Much easier for Ukraine to get into the less-integrated tier.
Ukraine is not going to be an easy argument, since under current arrangements it would be a large recipient of EU money, and probably would turn several current net beneficiaries into net contributors.
Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves pledges overhaul of UK's 'antiquated' planning system The shadow chancellor will also charm business leaders at a forum that has been described as the party's biggest yet. ... In her speech Ms Reeves is expected to highlight how decision times for major infrastructure projects have increased by 65% since 2012, now taking four years. https://news.sky.com/story/labour-chancellor-rachel-reeves-pledges-overhaul-of-uks-antiquated-planning-system-12980515
What happened in 2012 besides the Olympics? And why use the tag Labour Chancellor?
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There are various proposals along those lines for the Severn.
Which? Designing in excess head space in the ponds and turbines to pump water in?
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
What's required from government at this point ? As is it likely to get a positive reception - or at least a hearing - from Labour ?
What is required of government is basically not to get in the way of private investment. Telling the civil service that government wants it to happen, so make it happen.
Cameron and Osborne were big supporters of big tidal projects. When they left the stage after Brexit, there was no-one prepared to fight their corner. Theresa May deferred to the civil servants. Their report to her recommending it did not get Government support was a hatchet job. If you doubt me, go talk to Charles Hendry who wrote the report on tidal lagoons saying they were a "no regrets" decision. He can tell you how it was nobbled. One of the numbers was £30 billion - in favour of nuclear. Another was £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
Boris, on his trip around the country applying for the job of PM, told Welsh audiences he was very much in favour. But once in Number 10....
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There have been experiments with tidal turbines for decades. They never get anywhere.
Surely you also need a design that will minimise, or stop, marine growth?
Parapet wall gone, and more. Perhaps much more, as the scuttlebutt on the forums is that it needs total replacement...
BTW, although Network Rail did heroics to get the railway line south of Oxford opened when a bridge failed earlier this year, this viaduct is a very different matter. Five arches, each 55 foot, and 90 feet off the valley floor.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There have been experiments with tidal turbines for decades. They never get anywhere.
Surely you also need a design that will minimise, or stop, marine growth?
Same as anything in a marine environment.
Like birds for airports by the seaside - there are mitigations.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Wind power costings, of course, include ongoing maintenance over the lifetime of the project.
And anything being built in 25-30 years time is likely to be much more efficient. Turbine cost is largely about materials technology, and the improvements over that timescale (even assuming exotic technologies like fusion don't become an alternative) are going to be enormous.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There are various proposals along those lines for the Severn.
Which? Designing in excess head space in the ponds and turbines to pump water in?
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
What the UK should be doing is working with Ukraine and proposing a multi-tier EU (what Macron was proposing and should have been done prior to the Brexit Referendum). The most-integrated tier is the one which will eventually end up with the countries merging into one. The less-integrated tier is just a single market like it used to be in the old days. Much easier for Ukraine to get into the less-integrated tier.
Ukraine is not going to be an easy argument, since under current arrangements it would be a large recipient of EU money, and probably would turn several current net beneficiaries into net contributors.
But a way should, must be found.
The unaffordable nature of structural funds for a Ukrainian accession makes a UK-sponsored tiering offer quite attractive.
A tier where members pay less but also receive less. Cheaper for the UK but still a useful injection of funding into the union, and cheaper to pay for Ukraine.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
What would 3 months usage in TWh be?
U.K. is something like 720TWh per year, I believe.
You wouldn't need anything like three months storage, though. A month would cover the vast majority of likely winter calm periods - less once a pan European grid is built. And there's always LNG imports.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There have been experiments with tidal turbines for decades. They never get anywhere.
Surely you also need a design that will minimise, or stop, marine growth?
Not been a problem at La Rance for near sixty years of electricity production....
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
What's required from government at this point ? As is it likely to get a positive reception - or at least a hearing - from Labour ?
What is required of government is basically not to get in the way of private investment. Telling the civil service that government wants it to happen, so make it happen.
Cameron and Osborne were big supporters of big tidal projects. When they left the stage after Brexit, there was no-one prepared to fight their corner. Theresa May deferred to the civil servants. Their report to her recommending it did not get Government support was a hatchet job. If you doubt me, go talk to Charles Hendry who wrote the report on tidal lagoons saying they were a "no regrets" decision. He can tell you how it was nobbled. One of the numbers was £30 billion - in favour of nuclear. Another was £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
Boris, on his trip around the country applying for the job of PM, told Welsh audiences he was very much in favour. But once in Number 10....
Get lobbying now, then.
Energy seems to have been chosen as a day one policy for any incoming Labour government, so plans will be already starting.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
This is easy.
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
What would 3 months usage in TWh be?
U.K. is something like 720TWh per year, I believe.
You wouldn't need anything like three months storage, though. A month would cover the vast majority of likely winter calm periods - less once a pan European grid is built. And there's always LNG imports.
I'm being conservative. Three months should be enough to cover wars / clouds / low pressure zones /etc.
And three months usage (less domestic gas production), is probably only about 150 TWh. Which is a lot... but is less than Italy or Germany has today, and is barely more than the Netherlands.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
I’m in favour of tidal. Let’s build one, since it costs less than a traditional Big Nuke.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
There have been experiments with tidal turbines for decades. They never get anywhere.
Surely you also need a design that will minimise, or stop, marine growth?
Not been a problem at La Rance for near sixty years of electricity production....
Sorry, brainfart on my part. I was thinking of the seabed tidal flow/stream generators, not a tidal barrage (both of which are tidal turbines, and very different).
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
"Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated."
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
I stand by my claim. Show me a solar panel manufacturer that gives warranties beyond 25 years. Wind will need significant maintenance, especially on their bearings. Those built in the sea are going to suffer corrosion in one of the most demanding environments on earth. The anchoring systems are especially vulnerable, being one of the areas where longevity has been sacrificed over cost reduction.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
Solar panels makers guarantee an output for 20-25 years
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
More likely they'll be replaced not because they've lost a little efficiency,but that 'modern' ones are so much more efficient (hopefully...). As land to build solar farms on decreases, there will come an incentive to maximise efficiency on the farms we have.
In the very early days of solar in the US, subsidy schemes had to take into account the early adopter problem - that installing next years panels was always much, much better.
Especially since the rate of improvement is a function of demand - if everyone waits for the better panels, demand is zero. So research slows to a halt, as does investment in better manufacturing.
This problem certainly isn't unique to green tech. My dad was working for a firm making medical diagnostic kit in the late 90s. They had a popular main product something like "test kit mk3", and were well into the development of a mk4 version which had about double the throughput at a similar price point.
Unfortunately, their sales guys thought it would be a good idea to start talking about what a mk4 rig would do. All their customers went "sounds great, we'll wait for that", and cancelled their orders for mk3 units. The company ran out of cash and collapsed before they could get the mk4 on sale.
The party says the bill will enable a Labour government to establish a UK electricity system fully based on clean power by 2030, with the largest expansion of renewable power in Britain’s history, and establish “GB Energy”, a publicly owned energy company announced by Keir Starmer last year.
Labour sources have suggested the party would aim to include the act in the king’s speech so it could become law soon after a general election win. One source said the act showcased “modern public ownership, working with the private sector without the need to nationalise”...
Out of interest, other than creating some quangos and spraying lots of money around, how exactly are they planning to do this?
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions. Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
As currently envisaged, it wouldn't cur bills, just cement them at their high level, because the renewables providers would all need to be paid at a far higher level than gas prices are likely to return to when sanity comes back into fashion.
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Missing the fact that if you don't look at crackpot conspiracy theorists that NEW wind was cheaper than gas even before the price of gas surged to it's peaks.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Except, every wind turbine (and solar panel) currently producing will be scrap metal in 30 years. It all has to be built again from the ground up. With new contracts being negotiated.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Green NIMBYism will prevent that - they will require 20 years of planning, while will cost hundreds of millions - just for the enquiry.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
Planning consent for Swansea took 2 years, not 20. Tidal gets built becore nuclear even has its planning boots on.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
It won't, because the anti-progress NIMBYs and BANANAs will jump on the project.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
Tidal had and has massive support. And more to the point it has a practical purpose - unlike the HS2 white elephant. Tidal is progress and tomorrow's technology. HS2 was last centuries' solution to last centuries' problems.
Tidal may or may not work but the reason it fell over is the business case wasn't attractive enough and so no-one invested.
Do HMT take some of the blame in this?
Yes. They will take virtually no risk and this kills all sorts of aspects of our industrial strategy.
One reason that's partly our fault though: if it doesn't pan out HMG would quickly be criticising for 'wasting taxpayers money', 'government gravy trains', and 'this could have paid for X more doctors and Y more nurses', and so forth - so we all have a part to play if we want to the Government to do more of this.
When you make bets they don't always pay off. But the point is enough of them do to make it worth your while.
Henry V should be remembered not as the heroic victor of Agincourt but as an uncivilised warmonger, according to author and comedian David Mitchell.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
Medieval monarchs were not, on the whole, adherents to the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Waging war to enforce one's claim to a throne was considered to be entirely legitimate among contemporary theorists.
I think there's a better argument that had Henry succeeded in enforcing his claim as King of France, then England would have been relegated to a backwater, next to the more populous and prosperous kingdom.
But calling him "nasty" and "uncivilised" is a silly case of presentism.
Mid Beds -the latest from Betfair – politicalbetting.com
Comments
We currently have lots of green power when the wind blows, and not much when it doesn't, especially if this coincides with it also being dark. This gap mostly gets filled in with gas, for which we barely have enough generating capacity (we were lucky last winter was mild, and we've even less coal capacity available for last resort action this winter).
Grid scale battery storage still seems to be too expensive to make more than marginal differences, and we don't yet seem to have found a way to make the wind blow at convenient times, or arrange for it not to be dark during the times of peak winter electrical demand.
Building more renewables is all well and good, but we're already curtailing their output half the time because we've got too much power relative to demand. Build lots more and the annual useful amount of electricity generated per turbine will drop as curtailment rates rise. This will mean someone somewhere (guess what, either taxpayers or consumers) paying out lots of money for turbines which generate very little as they are only useful in marginal (low but not zero wind) conditions.
Meanwhile, I still don't see how that gets us away from burning lots of gas when the wind drops. Until the intermittency problem is solved (i.e. batteries become very cheap), the grid will have to stay gas based, not "clean energy" based.
If they do go wild overbuilding turbines there is of course a potential bonanza for anyone with an industrial use for vast amounts of almost free electricity supplied at random times and durations, but I'm struggling to think of good applications in a UK context (in the middle east, desalination plants would be an obvious one - make your plant 10x the size required and have good storage capacity for your clean water, run it in bursts to coincide with times of excess electricity supply, and bingo, no energy cost for you plant).
In the past it was aluminium smelting, though I'm not sure how on/off that process can be.
The resulting deaths from famine reached millions.
This is why all the stories of DP (displaced persons, post WWII) are about people who are starving or close to it.
Labour to gain Tamworth
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/10/08/britain-will-start-dating-the-eu-under-labour-plans-suggest/
I would be interested in seeing whether they have plans to get tidal over the line though. That's an exciting renewable. Wind and Solar can piss off.
Rhod Sharp, formerly of Radio Five Live's Up All Night programme, reports on flooding near the River Tay in Scotland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-08YrHYfrso
This is from 2015.
"Up All Night: radio for the habitually sleepless
Rhod Sharp’s 5 Live show is a comfort for the significant minority who can’t sleep without the reassuring sound of a bedside radio
David Hepworth"
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/sep/19/up-all-night-radio
What the UK lacks is gas storage.
Gas power stations are cheap. They cost almost nothing to maintain. And they're efficient. It really isn't complicated to have enough CCGT and OGCTs to power the UK.
They're also - unlike coal or nuclear - flexible.
Sun shining and wind blowing? Turn 'em off.
The issue is that the UK bugger all gas storage. This meant that, when Russia invaded Ukraine and the gas market was thrown into flux, we had to pay crazy prices to import gas.
The Germans, by contrast, just ran their storage down.
The chart below is gas storage cacpacity in TWh for European countries:
If you have enough gas storage for - say - three months usage for the UK, then you can have as much renewables as you like. They will be used when available. And stored gas will be used when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
Incidentally that is a very good hour indeed, especially on weekdays, with very high quality guests.
Ruling parties sustain stinging losses in Bavaria and Hesse
AfD emerges as second-strongest force in both states"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-08/scholz-battered-in-german-state-votes-as-far-right-afd-advances
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/08/grizzly-bears-eat-moths-wyoming
Take it easy for the next 24hrs.
This is largely what the UK has achieved, which is if great credit to the governments since 2008. And why Germany has been so disappointing. Our recent failure in the windfarm auction was unusual.
I think the Labour policy is clever - people genuinely think wind energy is cheap and secure. I remember the Radio 5 call-in when Ukraine kicked off and people were fuming that their prices were going up even though they were on a "100% renewable tariff".
It's great news. The public now associate fossil fuels with economic disaster, and not just for the climate.
As we transition to electric vehicles we are going to need massively more electricity not less. And those EVs will be coming with batteries.
Electrolysis of water into hydrogen has always struck me as a high intensity use for excess electricity if it's ever generated.
Exports are another great use for excess energy. And our balance of payments.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
..In 1887, Heaviside worked with his brother Arthur on a paper entitled "The Bridge System of Telephony". However the paper was blocked by Arthur's superior, William Henry Preece of the Post Office, because part of the proposal was that loading coils (inductors) should be added to telephone and telegraph lines to increase their self-induction and correct the distortion which they suffered. Preece had recently declared self-inductance to be the great enemy of clear transmission. Heaviside was also convinced that Preece was behind the sacking of the editor of The Electrician which brought his long-running series of articles to a halt (until 1891).[13] There was a long history of animosity between Preece and Heaviside. Heaviside considered Preece to be mathematically incompetent, an assessment supported by the biographer Paul J. Nahin: "Preece was a powerful government official, enormously ambitious, and in some remarkable ways, an utter blockhead." Preece's motivations in suppressing Heaviside's work were more to do with protecting Preece's own reputation and avoiding having to admit error than any perceived faults in Heaviside's work...
(Conversely, the telephony arm of the GPO had a long history of employing technical geniuses.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
Oil prices jump as Middle East violence rattles markets
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-prices-jump-middle-east-violence-roils-markets-2023-10-08/
..The eruption of violence threatens to derail U.S. efforts to broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, in which the kingdom would normalise ties with Israel in return for a defence deal between Washington and Riyadh...
Iran's share iof the oil market is also increasing.
Of course if you only look at old wind from when the technology was nascent and being developed, it's a different matter.
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from wind that has effectively zero input cost.
Surging oil prices will be no use for them if Israel targets their oil production capacity, which is probably why prices are surging in any case.
The monarch’s skilful use of English longbowmen in the battle in 1415 against a French army up to five times their size was immortalised in William Shakespeare’s history play and its screen adaptations.
However Mitchell, whose latest work Unruly: A History of Kings and Queens chronicles the lives of English monarchs until the unification with Scotland, argues such romanticism has glossed over the brutal realities of his reign.
For Mitchell, Henry V was a “troublemaker” who died an ignominious death from dysentery before “all his plans collapsed around him”.
“I think if there has been misrepresentation it would be that Henry V was that terrific. He was a great warrior but in his aims, which are to totally take over France, he was not very civilised,” he told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday evening.
He added: “It is a nasty thing to do, so I think representing him as a nationalistic hero is misrepresenting him.
“There was no way he was going to succeed in keeping control of England and France, that was just bound to fail ...it couldn’t have worked”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/08/henry-v-warmonger-not-hero-says-david-mitchell/
I'd rather be able to charge my car cheaply from a 3,200 MW tidal plant that will last a minimum of 120 years (and probably far longer) that has effectively zero input cost. And, delivering itself to your door twice a day, for free, is as reliable as nuclear but for a fraction of the cost. And if you build several of them around the coast, with guarnateed baseload because of the differing times of high tide.
Nuclear-scale tidal power stations will get built.
Especially since generating new metal in the future should be even cheaper if using zero-input cheap wind to generate it.
If it can be generated cheaply without subsidies or locked in prices at nuclear or higher rates, then great, but if its just a rort to get subsidies as the economics doesn't work then no thanks.
The issue is having the grid capable of moving it from where its generated to where its needed.
Are they actually trying to make every government on the planet into their enemies?
Then if there's no wind for a fortnight, use the gas, net zero emissions still.
A 3.2 GW tidal power station at say Cardiff will power 1.3 million homes.
The cost of the Cardiff-sized plants are no more than £10 bn each. For that, you get 120 years minimum power generation - guaranteed. Zero carbon, reliable power generation. That can recharge the nation's fleet of electric vehicles overnight.
The current costs for Hinkley C, life of project, are £50 billion. But to compete with tidal, you will need Hinkley D coming onstream in 60 years. Let's be kind and say that can be built then for £75 billion. So you have tidal costing £10 billion, versus nuclear production of identical output for the same period costing £125 billion.
Put another way, you can have a dozen tidal power stations now - producing nearly 40 GW - for the same cost as one nuclear power plant producing 3.2 GW.
Tidal will get built - and Sizewell C not - for the same reason that HS2 got canned. Value for money. Regardless of who wins the next election.
That's simply not true.
Solar panels degrade over time. But this isn't one or zero, it's the very slow process of oxidation, and you lose a tiny bit of capacity every year. Now, you may need to replace contacts that corrode, but that's chump change. The panel will still be producing 75-80% of stated capacity thirty years after installation.
Wind is a bit more complex: turbines have more maintenance needs, but they don't become useless. It's usually simply that more modern turbines are more efficient, and the oldest farms have the most wind, and therefore are the ones where reinstalling the newest, most efficient turbines makes the most sense. Take the UK's oldest wind farm, Delabole. That operated with some Vestas turnbines from 1990/1 to 2011. They then replaced them with new (larger) turbines. But the old turbines were reused at another Good Energy site, not thrown away.
Given technology generally is progressing, locking in what will be obsolete technologies for over a century in order to get a payback isn't promising.
The mantra should be: "Just Fucking Build It".
If you were against HS2, don't expect your dream infrastructure project to be supported.
Interesting story in the Telegraph.
Apparently Britain is putting its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine's EU membership bid, but is having to do so covertly because the cognitive dissonance with Brexit would be too unbearable if it were to do so overtly.
The excess production from wind will be an opportunity for one of these technologies, but at the moment it's not an issue on the grid often enough to be regarded as that much of a problem.
It's much more regularly a feature of the Irish grid, which has a much larger proportion of wind in the mix, but the government here have done very little to encourage a much of technologies. They seem to be aiming for simply batteries.
Then you will find that the price of building (essentially) a chunk of beach will be 50 times what it costs to build artificial reefs and beaches elsewhere. Because Big Government Project.
They won't be competing with tidal lagoons that are built to last a minum of 120 years with minimal maintainence. Look at La Rance in Brittany - built in the 60's, paid back after twenty years, producing France's cheapest power - and will do so for many decades hence.
That don't step function down on 25 years and 1 day.
They lose a tiny bit of generating power every single day.
You said they become worthless, and that's simply ridiculous.
My children go to school, that's good for them. Doesn't mean I should be in school, I've done that already.
Ukraine lacks our history of democracy etc and wants to ensure those are locked in via the EU. We evolved those things on our own before and without the EU.
Of course we also aren't next door to Russia.
Do you think Canada should be in the EU? Australia? We are no different to them apart from utterly irrelevant geography.
It had over 80% local support through that planning process.
And it is a private enterprise project, not a Big Government Project. Private enterprise built small towns on stilts in the middle of the North Sea. Left to Big Government, the oil there would stil be under the seabed.
I am tidal-sceptical, but not enough to want to stop a project if it gets the go-ahead. Sadly, there are lots of people who are anti-progress. Like the people who were against HS2....
Especially since the rate of improvement is a function of demand - if everyone waits for the better panels, demand is zero. So research slows to a halt, as does investment in better manufacturing.
Do any of the current proposals offer a pumped storage “boost” option?
The forgotten technology is probably tidal turbines. Think underwater wind farm. Since they can be out of the wave action zone, they might have a chance of being long lived. And because, like wind, you can start small and scale up.
Even though it is eye-poppingly expensive, it has leveraged "reliabilty" over other forms of renewables. Except, it loses that argument to tidal.
Imagine had we financed a massive program at 1% interest rates.
Of course it's highly unlikely we could finance it with 100 year bonds - what's the likely current cost per MWh borrowing at current 30 year rates ?
(I acknowledge that depends on a number of assumptions.)
But report says Labour lead is much narrower among working-class voters than electorate as a whole and urges focus on fairness
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/oct/09/working-class-deserting-tories-in-droves-under-rishi-sunak-poll-finds
As is it likely to get a positive reception - or at least a hearing - from Labour ?
ECML out of action for a while then.Plessey Viaduct.
https://x.com/tulyardave/status/1711126544683254084?s=20
Everyone knows that medieval monarchs weren't exactly Mother Theresa.
But a way should, must be found.
But DYOR for relevant time, etc. etc.
The shadow chancellor will also charm business leaders at a forum that has been described as the party's biggest yet.
...
In her speech Ms Reeves is expected to highlight how decision times for major infrastructure projects have increased by 65% since 2012, now taking four years.
https://news.sky.com/story/labour-chancellor-rachel-reeves-pledges-overhaul-of-uks-antiquated-planning-system-12980515
What happened in 2012 besides the Olympics? And why use the tag Labour Chancellor?
Or tidal flow turbines?
Cameron and Osborne were big supporters of big tidal projects. When they left the stage after Brexit, there was no-one prepared to fight their corner. Theresa May deferred to the civil servants. Their report to her recommending it did not get Government support was a hatchet job. If you doubt me, go talk to Charles Hendry who wrote the report on tidal lagoons saying they were a "no regrets" decision. He can tell you how it was nobbled. One of the numbers was £30 billion - in favour of nuclear. Another was £60 billion wrong - in favour of nuclear.
Boris, on his trip around the country applying for the job of PM, told Welsh audiences he was very much in favour. But once in Number 10....
Surely you also need a design that will minimise, or stop, marine growth?
Like birds for airports by the seaside - there are mitigations.
And anything being built in 25-30 years time is likely to be much more efficient.
Turbine cost is largely about materials technology, and the improvements over that timescale (even assuming exotic technologies like fusion don't become an alternative) are going to be enormous.
Our best monarchs didn't spend all their energies, and the nation's treasury, fighting wars.
A tier where members pay less but also receive less. Cheaper for the UK but still a useful injection of funding into the union, and cheaper to pay for Ukraine.
A month would cover the vast majority of likely winter calm periods - less once a pan European grid is built.
And there's always LNG imports.
Energy seems to have been chosen as a day one policy for any incoming Labour government, so plans will be already starting.
And three months usage (less domestic gas production), is probably only about 150 TWh. Which is a lot... but is less than Italy or Germany has today, and is barely more than the Netherlands.
Unfortunately, their sales guys thought it would be a good idea to start talking about what a mk4 rig would do. All their customers went "sounds great, we'll wait for that", and cancelled their orders for mk3 units. The company ran out of cash and collapsed before they could get the mk4 on sale.
Do HMT take some of the blame in this?
Yes. They will take virtually no risk and this kills all sorts of aspects of our industrial strategy.
One reason that's partly our fault though: if it doesn't pan out HMG would quickly be criticising for 'wasting taxpayers money', 'government gravy trains', and 'this could have paid for X more doctors and Y more nurses', and so forth - so we all have a part to play if we want to the Government to do more of this.
When you make bets they don't always pay off. But the point is enough of them do to make it worth your while.
I think there's a better argument that had Henry succeeded in enforcing his claim as King of France, then England would have been relegated to a backwater, next to the more populous and prosperous kingdom.
But calling him "nasty" and "uncivilised" is a silly case of presentism.