9 ms·

The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this. Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours. In the last four m

The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this. Last calendar, it produced > 1 GW for 784 hours. In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with > 100 GWh shortfall. The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating. Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they've been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just feel like the right amount. We're all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn't get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.

raphaelj 5y ago
Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2]. -- [1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB [2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png
- yodelshady 5y ago
  https://gridwatch.org.uk/ https://gridwatch.org.uk/ currently 0.63 GW. That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look. edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.
- sdflhasjd 5y ago
  It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :) When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
  - JonChesterfield 5y ago
    Could also be called "fraudulent" data
    - hkt 5y ago
      Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.
      - EricE 5y ago
        lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.
        magicalist 5y ago
        > fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? The common and legal definition of "fraud".
        hkt 5y ago
        Yep, this. Fraud is not a synonym of "lie" or "wrong".
      - JonChesterfield 5y ago
        Someone is gaining from wind farms claiming power output numbers they don't produce. This website is grossly overestimating the output of wind farms. Seems plausible there's a relationship between those.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    It seems the technical problems are resolved and currently the data is no longer "estimated". 3% of the consumption comes from wind, and 17% from solar, which isn't to bad. While the UK certainly isn't the optimal place for solar power, it shows that it can deliver a large contribution. Especially as there is still so much roof area to use that it should be a no-brainer.
jacquesm 5y ago
You should see how little those solar panels generate at night!
- hkt 5y ago
  While you're not wrong to imply PV doesn't work at night, concentrated solar power (CSP) actually does. It achieves this by heating salt into a molten state which can then discharge heat (and drive turbines) overnight. CSP is very promising for helping manage peak loads in place of gas, too. There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_review_meeting_042413_reddy.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_revie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
  - EricE 5y ago
    CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing. Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around. Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid. Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
    - hkt 5y ago
      I'll not argue with anything in your post and accept the issues with CSP as per the status quo, but hot water needn't be a micro, single household scale. I've benefited from a CHP plant powered district heating system and it more than halved my energy use. There's definitely nothing wrong with big centralised heat generation and storage schemes. It also helps address baseload.
gnfargbl 5y ago
> Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW. If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?
- edf13 5y ago
  Reason why is as you state: >geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place That combined with geo-politics, war, big oil etc.
  - DanielVZ 5y ago
    Yet we do manage to wire the internet accross oceans and continents.
    - r9 5y ago
      The infrastructure scale is not even in the same ballpark, or even neighbourhood. Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby. Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
    - edf13 5y ago
      Internet connection doesn't suffer as much power loss over larger distances
    - Balero 5y ago
      The internet does not go from A -> B it is a web. You can (and some countries do) cut yourself out of it. But you cannot cut others out of it. Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)
makomk 5y ago
Yeah, and the UK's wind capacity factor should be better than average because most of the recently-added capacity is offshore, which is more expensive per GWh produced but produces it more reliably. There just doesn't seem to be a realistic non-nuclear path to ending fossil fuel dependence, and green groups have got away with obfuscating this fact because most of the press supports them.
pydry 5y ago
It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now. At a much much lower cost. Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed. The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps. There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual. The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe. A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.
- pydry 5y ago
  >The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
  - jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
LatteLazy 5y ago
I think "plans" is putting it quite strongly re the UK planning to move to electricity for heating. We've had a "plan" do something about emissions in <today> + 5 Years for about 40 years now. So I wouldn't rely on anything actually happening. Especially given that it would be practically impossible to switch from gas...
adrianN 5y ago
If you have enough installed capacity that the production averaged over a year is sufficient, you can store excess energy as hydrogen or methane and turn it back into electricity while renewable production is insufficient. The amount of storage you need is a function of how much capacity you install, how large the grid is, and how smart e.g. electric car chargers are. Some clever economists probably can figure out the cheapest configuration. Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.
- EricE 5y ago
  conversion has losses - if it was remotely economically viable people would be doing it ALL OVER the place. Energy storage is the magic bullet to make renewables truly feasible for base load support and if this was remotely viable AT ALL someone would have implemented it already. Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment. And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.

raphaelj 5y ago

Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2]. -- [1] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/GB [2] https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png https://i.imgur.com/URVfMDT.png

yodelshady 5y ago
https://gridwatch.org.uk/ https://gridwatch.org.uk/ currently 0.63 GW. That's interesting that they disagree. Gridwatch has been around a while but I'll have a look. edit: yep, electricitymap's free figures are not even close to live.
sdflhasjd 5y ago
It looks like electricitymap is showing "estimated" data for the UK. It's fairly calm at the moment, and it probably doesn't take weather into account when estimating.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  I think "estimated" is a recent addition they show, when the input data sources fail. Which unfortunately they do quite often. But then, I am not paying for the service, so who am I to complain? :) When values are non-estimated, they are about 2 hours behind in the free version.
- JonChesterfield 5y ago
  Could also be called "fraudulent" data
  - hkt 5y ago
    Not so. Fraud requires an intent to deceive to make unlawful (or unfair) gains. They're probably just abiding by the license of the data or struggling with a technical limitation.
    - EricE 5y ago
      lol - fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? Fraud comes into play any time someone intentionally tries to mislead - for whatever reason. And there has been plenty of fraud around energy reporting - again, for various reasons.
      - magicalist 5y ago
        > fraud isn't purely limited to gains. Where the heck did you get that from? The common and legal definition of "fraud".
        hkt 5y ago
        Yep, this. Fraud is not a synonym of "lie" or "wrong".
    - JonChesterfield 5y ago
      Someone is gaining from wind farms claiming power output numbers they don't produce. This website is grossly overestimating the output of wind farms. Seems plausible there's a relationship between those.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  It seems the technical problems are resolved and currently the data is no longer "estimated". 3% of the consumption comes from wind, and 17% from solar, which isn't to bad. While the UK certainly isn't the optimal place for solar power, it shows that it can deliver a large contribution. Especially as there is still so much roof area to use that it should be a no-brainer.

jacquesm 5y ago

You should see how little those solar panels generate at night!

hkt 5y ago
While you're not wrong to imply PV doesn't work at night, concentrated solar power (CSP) actually does. It achieves this by heating salt into a molten state which can then discharge heat (and drive turbines) overnight. CSP is very promising for helping manage peak loads in place of gas, too. There's also batteries: virtual power plants that give us the ability to arbitrage between when power is cheap and when power is needed. These can be rolled out in conjunction with residential PV systems and eventually pay for themselves. A similar approach can be used to store hot water produced during the day by PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) cells. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_review_meeting_042413_reddy.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/01/f7/csp_revie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
- EricE 5y ago
  CSP plants have never gotten beyond the prototype phase because no one has figured out how to make them economically viable. One near me in California just shut down because maintenance costs were skyrocketing. Batteries, in their current form, have all sorts of issues that haven't made them economically viable either. Liquid electrolytes (liquid batteries) do show promise for grid level storage, and I am pleased to see lots of activity around them but we are still probably 5-10 years away from anything worth scaling up around. Hot water is fine for extreme micro uses - individual buildings - but again not even remotely viable for something at scale, let alone replacing base load generation for the grid. Base load is the real nut to crack - and so far solar is no where near being anything but a nice supplement for base load.
  - hkt 5y ago
    I'll not argue with anything in your post and accept the issues with CSP as per the status quo, but hot water needn't be a micro, single household scale. I've benefited from a CHP plant powered district heating system and it more than halved my energy use. There's definitely nothing wrong with big centralised heat generation and storage schemes. It also helps address baseload.

gnfargbl 5y ago

> Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall. I like nuclear. I have always liked nuclear. However: it's always sunny somewhere on Earth, and the total amount of solar energy delivered to us by nature's finest fusion reactor is something like 170TW. If you will indulge me the geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place, is there any particular reason we couldn't switch to all-solar?

edf13 5y ago
Reason why is as you state: >geopolitical fantasy of putting a suitable planetary-scale transmission system in place That combined with geo-politics, war, big oil etc.
- DanielVZ 5y ago
  Yet we do manage to wire the internet accross oceans and continents.
  - r9 5y ago
    The infrastructure scale is not even in the same ballpark, or even neighbourhood. Besides the fact that you can't just "make" internet from a coal/petrol/etc generator somewhere nearby. Imagine a ship's anchor damaging a cable carrying a couple megawatts of power (this happens frequently to the undersea fibre optic cables, and even those are a nightmare to repair).
  - edf13 5y ago
    Internet connection doesn't suffer as much power loss over larger distances
  - Balero 5y ago
    The internet does not go from A -> B it is a web. You can (and some countries do) cut yourself out of it. But you cannot cut others out of it. Solar generation of power across countries will pretty much go one way. The most obvious and likely one is from North Africa to Europe. If the North African states decide to turn off the power to Europe they can. This is why geo-politically you cannot rely on this as a 100% solution. It can add to a solution, but it is not a good idea to let another country hang a sword over your head like that. (Or more precisely to hang the sword there yourself)

makomk 5y ago

Yeah, and the UK's wind capacity factor should be better than average because most of the recently-added capacity is offshore, which is more expensive per GWh produced but produces it more reliably. There just doesn't seem to be a realistic non-nuclear path to ending fossil fuel dependence, and green groups have got away with obfuscating this fact because most of the press supports them.

pydry 5y ago

It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now. At a much much lower cost. Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed. The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps. There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual. The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe. A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.

pydry 5y ago
>The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.

LatteLazy 5y ago

I think "plans" is putting it quite strongly re the UK planning to move to electricity for heating. We've had a "plan" do something about emissions in <today> + 5 Years for about 40 years now. So I wouldn't rely on anything actually happening. Especially given that it would be practically impossible to switch from gas...

adrianN 5y ago

If you have enough installed capacity that the production averaged over a year is sufficient, you can store excess energy as hydrogen or methane and turn it back into electricity while renewable production is insufficient. The amount of storage you need is a function of how much capacity you install, how large the grid is, and how smart e.g. electric car chargers are. Some clever economists probably can figure out the cheapest configuration. Currently it's much cheaper to just burn fossil fuels or import power from your neighbors than to build hydrolyzers, which is why you don't see many, but pilot facilities in the multiple-MW range exist, so the technology is available.

EricE 5y ago
conversion has losses - if it was remotely economically viable people would be doing it ALL OVER the place. Energy storage is the magic bullet to make renewables truly feasible for base load support and if this was remotely viable AT ALL someone would have implemented it already. Just because a tech is available doesn't mean it's practical for every day use.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Conversion has losses, true. For electricity to gas and back the losses are around 50%. That's perfectly fine for a technology you need for maybe a couple of weeks per year. The real question is how expensive the equipment is. Power is essentially free for renewables, all costs are depreciation of equipment. And as I said above, people _have_ implemented it already. There are dozens of MW of hydrolyzers installed in Germany alone.