Drax a green washing 'con'?

[Whoppa Choppa]

Interesting thread. I used to work in Power Station Industry before I retired. I think Hartlepool and Heysham are both offline atm for steam valve checks - unscheduled. Ratcliffe on Soar (currently at 65% output) needs to stay - that is seriously obvious.

Edited January 17 by Whoppa Choppa

[Steven P]

For the French, their renewable energy will help but they will sell to us at a premium, as will the Norwegians with their Hydro (it also goes the other way when we have a surplus - I think to Norway we refill their hydro reservoirs with our spare electricity). Something in the back of my mind is that we take more than we send.

 

Here at least is one of those bad days - cold, wind free, winter.

 

Need a good mix of energy supplies, however maybe not burning traditional fuels (gas, oil, coal, wood), Nuclear is a good backup if you can get the locals to accept it (mini nuclear whatever they call it could be good near cities when they get that worked out) and renewables. I also think we need to be a little clever in the future as where we generate electricity. All the Barratt sheds should have excess solar capacity built in, so can supply not just that one house. Roofs in cities can be updated with solar, and I think possibility for small wind turbines - don't have to go for large scale turbines and solar farms, however they will have a part to play too. Solar farms I think lose about 20% crop productivity underneath - so a field of sheeps or chickens would barely notice them.

 

For Nuclear the current government took their eye off the ball, happy to decommission coal power stations but forgot that nuclear takes 15 to 25 years to build 

 

As above, not convinced that wood chip from around the world is a solution, like oil we will be at the mercy of foreign supplies. However unlike oil, the wood producing countries aren't ruled over by mental cases as often.

[GarethM]

France is like 75% nuclear, they're not fussed about renewables as they'll just export more of the electricity they produce to Germany.

[Muddy42]

1 hour ago, openspaceman said:

Which is a problem about 10 days a year around now, as I said we are burning coal and gas today as well as the Drax pellets. Drax burns 7.5 million tonnes of dry pellets a year, I think our total harvest of wood is only 13 million tonnes of green wood.

 

We lost production from 3 nuclear power stations since Xmas which exacerbated the problem.

 

A lot more foreign owned wind turbines are coming online this year to add to the french government owned nuclear power stations. I wonder how French prices for electricity compare with ours?

 

Yes storage is a bottleneck to more renewables as are new electricity grid lines

 

Yes but presumably the number of problem days would increase drastically if we increase renewable generation? Yes and most of the decent green wood is needed for housebuilding or pallets.  I agree storage and grid capacity are a problem.

[openspaceman]

23 minutes ago, Muddy42 said:

 

Yes but presumably the number of problem days would increase drastically if we increase renewable generation? Yes and most of the decent green wood is needed for housebuilding or pallets.  I agree storage and grid capacity are a problem.

We are such a long way off having enough renewables that it is hard to see what might happen, I think we will depend on imports of LNG for a long while. Currently we rely on gas because it can load follow when wind and solar cannot provide.

 

From a personal level I can manage without grid electricity for 8 months of the year,I need to import about 1MWh from mid November to March, just with solar PV and it has been fairly consistent for 12 years. In summer I export more than 1MWh so I am a net exporter. I would bet that if the money paid out bailing out electricity companies and consumers had been invested in rooftop solar PV and domestic storage the energy crisis would have been a mere blip, plus we might have doubled our PV production.

 

I am off grid now because my supplier is running a saving session 17:30 to 18:30 as wind has fallen to 8GW and gas is nearly maxed out at 24GW. My daughter is exporting 2.5kW from her battery ( for a reward of ~£5) but I cannot do that. Imagine if 25% of households could do this.

 

I heat by wood  which makes a big difference for me because my house is poorly insulated but even here the technology exists to make electricity in a micro chp generator which would guarantee I would never need grid electricity, except the technology never got developed for domestic use.

[Stere]

BP want to build a 350MW solar farm locally

 

Maen Hir Solar and Energy Storage (English) | Lightsource bp

LIGHTSOURCEBP.COM

 

 

Will be the biggest in UK by a long way if it goes ahead

[GarethM]

35 minutes ago, Stere said:

BP want to build a 350MW solar farm locally

 

Maen Hir Solar and Energy Storage (English) | Lightsource bp

LIGHTSOURCEBP.COM

 

 

Will be the biggest in UK by a long way if it goes ahead

So we demolished Wylfa which had a capacity of just under 1000 MW 24/7 on a tiny site and they want to keep littering the countryside with these solar panels.

 

I've flown into Manchester, before they even think of doing such things every warehouse and supermarket should be covered 1st! 

Edited January 17 by GarethM

[Whoppa Choppa]

There are a number of grid watch websites; this one and another are permanently on my desktop. And the edf Nuke live 😀

 

Price per megawatt hour will generally mirror interconnect imports / exports.

 

National Grid: Live

GRID.IAMKATE.COM

---

Shows the live status of Great Britain’s electric power transmission network

 

Edited January 17 by Whoppa Choppa

[scbk]

8 minutes ago, GarethM said:

So we demolished Wylfa which had a capacity of just under 1000 MW 24/7 on a tiny site and they want to keep littering the countryside with these solar panels.

 

I've flown into Manchester, before they even think of doing such things every warehouse and supermarket should be covered 1st! 

Yup, even in rural areas there's plenty of very large industrial and commercial buildings that should be covered in solar panels before they allow planning to convert farm land into solar.

Edited January 17 by scbk

[doobin]

7 minutes ago, scbk said:

Yup, even in rural areas there's plenty of very large industrial and commercial buildings that should be covered in solar panels before they allow planning to convert farm land into solar.

Problem is the roofs aren’t built to take the weight in an awful lot of cases.