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The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suit

The Octopus energy guy Greg Jackson has come out swinging for regional pricing but the incentives are terrible given fair chunks of the country just aren't suitable for wind and a lot of the places that are are less densely populated and so it affects people less there too.

arethuza 1y ago
We're a windy island surrounded by sea - which seems to be pretty ideal for wind generation going by the number of huge projects underway?
- physicsguy 1y ago
  Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast. It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
  - arethuza 1y ago
    The north of the UK is definitely windier than the south, but I'm not sure that the west is windier than the east - it's certainly wetter? e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-Atlas_fig7_6532939 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...
    - physicsguy 1y ago
      Yes, there is a prevailing south-westerly wind in the UK. The air comes in from the tropics and comes over the UK. From wiki: > Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/ https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/ It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
- yrro 1y ago
  Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml 16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW. We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
    - physicsguy 1y ago
      I haven't read it recently but don't think the book, written at the time it was, was necessarily a bad view of things though. I think I first read it in about 2007 or so(?) so we're nearly 20 years on. A lot of it reflected the political debate and projections that were being put out by the government at the time too in what they'd allow in for e.g. offshore installations, so it was basing itself on that too. IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.
    - yrro 1y ago
      I'd like to see an updated edition too.
ta1243 1y ago
Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.
- physicsguy 1y ago
  It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"

arethuza 1y ago

We're a windy island surrounded by sea - which seems to be pretty ideal for wind generation going by the number of huge projects underway?

physicsguy 1y ago
Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast. It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
- arethuza 1y ago
  The north of the UK is definitely windier than the south, but I'm not sure that the west is windier than the east - it's certainly wetter? e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-Atlas_fig7_6532939 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...
  - physicsguy 1y ago
    Yes, there is a prevailing south-westerly wind in the UK. The air comes in from the tropics and comes over the UK. From wiki: > Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/ https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/ It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
yrro 1y ago
Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml 16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW. We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
  - physicsguy 1y ago
    I haven't read it recently but don't think the book, written at the time it was, was necessarily a bad view of things though. I think I first read it in about 2007 or so(?) so we're nearly 20 years on. A lot of it reflected the political debate and projections that were being put out by the government at the time too in what they'd allow in for e.g. offshore installations, so it was basing itself on that too. IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.
  - yrro 1y ago
    I'd like to see an updated edition too.

ta1243 1y ago

Gives incentives to build storage and interconnects. Maybe when people down south stop having their electricity subsidised, they'll be less likely to object to infrastructure.

physicsguy 1y ago
It does, but it's not some panacea. It would cause a massive upheaval in planned investments to start which would likely cut investment overall for a few years, you have to hedge no longer against one price but many prices, a transition would be complex, settlement would be much more complicated, not to mention the massive political cost of it when campaigners go "the government has legislated to make our electricity cost more!"