This is from the IMF:
Why not nuclear? Because it makes no economic sense: that's why not. And that's before the uncertainty of decommissioning costs are, I suspect, taken fully into account, as well as terrorism risk.
This should, surely, put this debate to bed?
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It should, but it won’t.
At least not quickly. There will be lots more public money scooped into doomed non-viable nuclear projects before we get to a sane conclusion. We’ll be paying the Chinese for decades for the Hinckley White Elephant House. Thanks for that George. 🙁
Yeah, well … This is a classic project for state ownership and finance! The government could have used £20 billion of the QE and simply paid cash for Hinkley Point, or if they had to issued a bond at 2% over 30 years. Instead we have had EDF borrow the funds commercially at 8% over 30 years. So that means the excess interest charge over those 30 years is about £22 billion so more than the estimated (currently!) £18 billion construction cost. If that isn’t insanity then tell me what is.
There is, though, another issue with Nuclear Fission, which is that Uranium is extremely rare. I believe that if you tried to power the planet with just fission plants you would have burnt our entire supply of uranium in around 50 years. So that is neither viable nor sustainable.
Yes fusion is my great hope, and I am sure it will come, but probably still 30 years away.
Does not the manner of the funding create a rentier class, fully appreciative of the political manoeuvring which has created them? That’s not insanity at all, it’s the deliberate manipulation of ways and means to effect a lucrative outcome for a few paid for by the many. Similarly, I understand Thames Water took out large loans the substance of which seems to have gone direct to the happy shareholders. We the water users are left to pay the loan and the interest through an unnecessary excess on our bills. Returning to Hinkley, I doubt involved minds will have been overtaxed in thinking of ways to apply these principles, or perhaps rather a demonstrable lack of any, to the project. That may well even be the reason for its existence.
Tim Rideout says:
” If that isn’t insanity then tell me what is.”
It’s called ‘corporate capture’ isn’t it? Something like that.
“Yes fusion is my great hope, and I am sure it will come, but probably still 30 years away.”
I have my doubts about Fusion. Not specifically so, but in general. The higher the technology we rely on the more fragile our societies become and the more easily they are plunged into chaos and a period of ‘dark ages’.
I rather like windmills and dynamos/turbines. They don’t ‘go critical’ they just break and need mending. Or wear-out and need replacing.
Must dash. I need to boil some lentils. 🙂
Bill has it, this isn’t insanity, or at least it’s only on the part of the masses, this is planned and for the planners it’s really just a return to a ‘natural’ order. Privatisation, PFI, international loan finance…all of it are just methods for removing things from public ownership and extracting ongoing rent. In this respect nuclear is a clear winner as the costs can just climb and climb.
Ultimate goal is that collectively we own nothing but debt/rent obligations and the state becomes a tool of collection, policing and enforcing.
Ah now, fusion is no longer ’30 years away’, they’re claiming 15 years now!
https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-world-30th-anniversary-podcast-series-fusion-energy/
Podcast from physics world, and says the biggest tokamak is in Oxfordshire. Toroidal plasma held in place by magnetic fields is so exciting. Maybe if the government tried putting decent funding into it, it might help. Still, 15 years away isn’t going to save us,,,
Alastair says “In this respect nuclear is a clear winner as the costs can just climb and climb.” Indeed – I believe in this instance they’re going into meltdown, all the way to China 🙂
Well the late David McKay in his book – Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air – did an energy audit of the UK on the basis of all available sources and resources and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that nuclear power was necessary. As an MMT proponent the key word is resources so whether you like it or not the bullet has to be bitten.
Mackay was very good, but his work is well out of date – at least 10 years, which is a long time for RE technology.
Check out Chris Goodall’s fond retrospective here…
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1wmjjz87t09usoq6jva
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air was published in 2008, which isn’t even on the chart. Sir David could not have foreseen solar prices falling by 85% in just one decade. Even the 30%-40% decreases in wind power costs are astounding if taken on their own merit. In 2019, nuclear just cannot compete anymore – on safety/security, on scalability or on cost. His argument still holds in terms of keeping existing nuclear plants running, but very soon even running those plants is going to be more expensive than building new renewable sources. Nuclear can’t respond rapidly to counteract load/availability variations, pretty much the only options for that are storage, long-distance smart grids – and gas. I used to be quite pro-nuclear, but the massive fall in the cost of renewables has made me change my mind.
As I recall, David MacKay ignored the economics when considering the energy mix. His book was solely based on whether the source could meet demand. His conclusion was that, short of covering the country with wind farms and solar panels, renewables can’t achieve the required output. The only options were a mix including significant nuclear or covering the Sahara Desert with solar panels – this was before ISIS and Boko Haram had made the news!
The only thing that has changed from a technical perspective is that solar panels are a bit more efficient than in 2008. They still stop working at night and the wind still, sometimes, stops blowing for days across large areas of Europe in January; leaving only storage to keep the lights on. How we can provide the storage necessary is still a mystery.
If the lights can’t be kept on, the cost will soon become a minor issue.
There is a question of back up, I agree.
But whatever it is, it’s not nuclear
That was my point.
It’s not just about cost. It’s also about resources and does the island have those. McKay did an audit. He use geographical and meteorological data. I don’t think his work can be out of date. We don’t have any more high ground, rainfall, wind or sunshine. It’s wishful thinking and confirmation bias at work. Still, I’ll be long dead so it won’t bother me.
Robin Trow says:
“The only thing that has changed from a technical perspective is that solar panels are a bit more efficient than in 2008.”
I don’t think that is true at all. There’s research going on into different ways of converting solar energy into electricity. Making all manner of building surfaces , roofing, walls, windows operate as energy collectors and converters. Not all will lend themselves to viable retro fitting admittedly, but new technology has a way of becoming vastly cheaper as it is mass produced.
Since the advent of solar PV I suspect we are missing a lot of the scope for solar heating of water for domestic use. It doesn’t have to boil, it just has to be warmer to reduce the demand for other energy sources to get it up to the temperature we want it to be.
We’re going to have a wide range of solutions to our energy needs and no one of them will be the magic bullet that nuclear was cracked up to be. Politicians are easily gulled into believing that the only solution to a BIG problem is a BIG solution. Corporate developers love to provide BIG profit solutions when what we often need is a lot of smaller units doing the same job.
The profit from energy supply systems is energy, not money. We use costings to measure the effectiveness…or at least we should do. It’s one of the things bean-counters can work out quite accurately if they have the right inputs.
McKay was wrong almost from start to finish – even when his work was first published (his energy consumption assumptions were wrong) . However. Fact, right now, the economics stack up to build around 600GW of off-shore wind in the UK. More than enough to power the whole of the UK – for all sectors and to export. If you want to go the whole hog – there is perhaps another 600GW that could be exploited – at which point the Uk would be powering much of Europe.
In the case of nuclear, the Uk government’s nuclear fuel reserves were valued at arounf £60bn back in 2008 – a posisble reason to build a new fleet of reactors – but not at hinkley Pointless prices.
And as soon as they manage to connect sufficient storage to those wind turbines, so that the grid load can be provided when there are wind-free or highly erratic wind, things will go well. But there isn’t; yet.
And if there ever is (and some battery-grid-storage is trickling through) it will have to have sufficient capacity to not only store that power, but a capacity sufficient to allow the grid to provide power in prolonged conditions of wind “drought”.
At the moment, it is business-as-usual. With gas providing the easily-varied grid power, nuclear providing the constant 6.5GW and coal filling-in as needed (we still have a 10GW capacity of coal-fired generators).
I promise not to mention the couple of hundred Megawatts of diesel-powered generation in the Short-Term-Operating-Reserve…OOppss…
At this moment, wind is providing 1GW of energy, gas nearly 20GW, nuclear at 6.5GW, coal at 490MW and solar at around 4.5GW (but that can vary from zero to 5GW rapidly)
Grid demand is nearly 38GW.
That does not make the case for nuclear
Thank you very much for the facts.
I like the splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen (rocket fuel) and the salt drying out systems.
Tidal power is also predictable and overnight.
Battery packs as used in US stores also seem to work although I wonder on how many cycles they can go through before having to be recycled at a cost to energy.
So its going to be a messy mix of suppliers and Hinkley point should be ditched IMO.
Interestingly back in 1992 there was a life cycle calculation and costing that the energy put into building a nuclear power plant was the same as the energy got out with the added decommissioning costs into the future.
So we need 38GW of “battery packs”?
That’s at the moment…..now bring a few million cars onto the plot, charging their batteries overnight…and that is just an overnight charge…fast charge is another thing….
While you’re busy crowing about wind power, and other renewables, spare a thought for those that balance the grip supply. The power produced must match the power needed. Here’s a brief read on that subject: https://www.drax.com/technology/great-balancing-act-takes-keep-power-grid-stable/
Nuclear power is baseload, it is always run at peak output. Gas is dispatchable, it can be ramped up or down. Wind is neither.
Perhaps you won’t like the idea of local nuclear fission generators?
They are in planning mode.
The problem with current renewable energy is that it is intermittent and despite the attention and finance given to batteries there is significant problems with them, specifically battery life. Lithium batteries currently only last a couple of thousand cycles at the most. Phone and computer batteries only last 3 to 4 years and are still costly. (The cost of the battery in an electric car is approximately 30% of the cost of the car). There is a lot of work going into making the batteries last longer but there is no way a long distance articulated trucks can be battery powered with out severely compromising the load capacity. A quick calculation for the a long distance HGV with an equivalent of a 1000 lt. diesel tank, a lithium battery would be 37 to 89 tonnes! It is quite noticeable that the government is keeping silent about banning diesel trucks, like cars. We should be planning to divert all long distance goods transport to an electrified railway with electric trucks for local distribution.
I agree about nuclear power using fission. This was developed to produce uranium or plutonium for nuclear weapons and so is inherently dangerous. There are other types of nuclear generation systems such as one based on Thorium but are still inherently dangerous as they all rely on a chain reaction
We should properly finance fusion power which basically fuses two hydrogen atoms to helium this is inherently safe as it depends on confinement either by compression under extremely high pressure or heating to extremely high temperatures. Both of these methods are very difficult and we still haven’t managed the engineering. The consequences of this is that reaction stops immediately anything goes wrong. A fusion reactor produces helium, an is an inert gas which is not radioactive and does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. Neutrons are produced and shielding is required, but some new methods show promise.
One type of green energy which needs finance is wave energy and the UK has plenty of this. It would also protect vulnerable coastlines from erosion. Especially useful with global warming driving more violent storms and sea level rise. For instance protecting the railway line along the south Devon coast at 650 million pounds.
The weight/power density of batteries used for grid storage is irrelevant. Light weight is only a factor for vehicle use.
Nuclear has used up multi-billions in research (and subsidies generally) which, if allocated to renewable tech would have produced even better results than those which are either trickling in or just over the horizon…
Fusion has been 20/30 years away for the last 50 years.
The last is so true…
with regard to batteries, the only type of battery I’m aware of that can be mostly recycled or repaired and is made of widely available materials is the lead acid battery,
they were being used in 1903 when there were more electric vehicles in use on the streets of London than internal combustion engines, they’ve always been used since and are a fully developed and sophisticated technology,
with an electric forklift the batteries actually form part of the required counter weight.
I think there’s a good case for manufacturing deep cycle lead acid traction batteries with re-usable casings and replaceable plate assemblies,
this is what lead acid batteries were like only a few decades ago before the advent of mass produced and disposable at end of life, plastic cased batteries.
the casing was reused, the earliest casings were glass, later ones were a rubberised plastic with a top sealed in with bitumen, the plate assemblies could be tested and replaced, the defective or worn ones recycled with much of the material recovered and the acid could be reproccessed.
a standard sized 6v, 3 cell, deep cycle, traction, accumulator could provide a battery storage array for domestic households that generate their own roof mounted solar PV and maybe a modest wind gen on a pole mounted to the chimney or eaves,
todays households could quite easily have a 12vdc local distribution circuit to power flat screen tv’s, computers, 12v halogen lighting, radio’s, phone charging etc. leaving the heavy work of cooking, heating, refridgeration, washing machine motors etc. to grid supplied energy sources such as 240vac or natural gas,
the hassle of topping up distilled water is easily handled by the single point, gravity fed top up system used on golf course electric vehicles and my Reva G-Wiz.
the same 6v deep cycle, traction, lead acid accumulator could be used in arrays for local private transport vehicles on a similar scale to electric golf buggies and utility vehicles akin to the US postal service’s electric vehicles and the classic electric milk float as used in the past,
actually a friend put an electric milk float motor in a Reliant Kitten and used it for local trips to the chip shop etc. it went like shit off a shovel too!
the golf buggies would bridge the gap between local walking and our new and fully integrated 24/7 public transport network, especially for those too fat or lazy to cycle!
electric utility vehicles below a certain maximum speed can be road registered and once insured they can be driven on a provisional licence and are MOT & Road Tax Licence exempt.
some friends who have a retirement place in Florida say they use a golf buggy as their local run around when they’re staying there.
most people don’t need a top of the range Tesla sports car, they just need to get to the bus stop, train station or the local shop for a packet of fags and a pint of milk.
nothing mentioned here needs to be invented or developed, it’s all available off the shelf… now!
You address a key issue: we think cars will look like they do today
They don’t need to, and they may well not do so
It’s not true that weight only matters for transport batteries. The best power density for lithium ion batteries I could fins was 100 Wh/kg. Assuming we need 1,000 GWh of storage, that would provide about a days worth of electricity at the UK’s present peak usage, the weight would be 10 million tonnes. That’s a lot of battery and a lot of lithium. Is there enough material available globally to cater for the global demand? This will have to be mined or recycled every few years as batteries don’t last forever.
A small addition of graphite (not graphene please note) to a standard lead acid battery has led to improved performance, much more elastic charge/discharge routines (one of the disadvantages of the LA battery – it cannot be fully discharged without damage) and vastly increased cycle times. (Check `Ultrabattery` on the web
Fully graphite based batteries (no chance of ever running out of graphite!) are being developed by large and small experimenters (look for Robert Murray Smith on u-tube).
In 10 years lithium will probably be as relevant as VHS.
“……. we think cars will look like they do today.”
And we don’t yet imagine that air travel could change radically, yet it is possible that new technology solutions will rehabilitate flying.
Air travel is the only way we have yet discovered to make long- and medium-haul travel a viable option. I’m ignoring the hey day of the ocean liner, here, because our perception of the importance of the journey-time is a genie which will not easily be put back into the box. (though we have let Concorde go…..)
Large scale energy storage will not come from Lithium batteries. Too expensive, even if costs are falling.
Large scale storage is likely to be mechanical in nature – for example, a UK company called Isentropic is developing Pumped Heat Storage with the energy stored in silos full of gravel. If their figures are correct and the technology comes to fruition, this would be a very useful way of having compact storage equivalent to smaller hydro facilities in areas without the necessary geography.
Other than mechanical storage, flow batteries are most likely to be the solution as many different chemistries exist which can support practically unlimited cycles. Capacity is very low in comparison to Lithium and they are very bulky, but for stationary usage, that’s really not an issue.
If you want to go for batteries as we know them now, Sodium Ion and Magnesium Ion batteries are also well into development. Again, less energy/power-dense than Lithium, but potentially a lot cheaper. We’ll use Lithium or similar for transportation and where high energy/power density is required and these other chemistries/technologies for more general storage/load levelling.
However, all these advances and technologies do not mean that it isn’t necessary to have reliable base-load generation. If you consider climate change to be one of the most important issues we face (as the science would indicate), the only technology which has a hope in hell of saving the planet when you consider the population growth on the cards, is Atomic power of some form. This certainly shouldn’t be over-engineered and expensive designs such as the EPR, but there are many Gen IV designs in development (though I’d argue not nearly enough is being spent on them) which can resolve most of the worries about waste. I’ll make further posts about these later if I get the opportunity to do so.
Mariner says:
“Large scale energy storage will not come from Lithium batteries. Too expensive, even if costs are falling.””
Added to that, the advantages of lithium for small scale portable devices will be lost if we are cranking-up demand to a level where the market pushes prices back up again. (?)
Geopolitics is going to be important too. The Cobalt mining industry is politically filthy. Over-reliance on chemical battery solutions for energy storage will kick-off new resource wars as the powerful nations scrabble to control the new ingredients for their energy security. Conquest is a much faster process than trade negotiations 🙁
I agree the decommissioning costs and sheer lack of an established process for doing it is highly problematic,
apparently we still have all our out of service, legacy, nuclear submarines parked up and waiting for a disposal strategy to be decided,
all at a lay up cost,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-32086030
but, the real fly in the ointment is that of the other energy generating methods shown, hydro is pretty much fully exploited in the uk, though there is certain potential for micro generation,
and wind and solar are notably intermittent,
also the energy density of solar is very poor, couple that with the fact that the UK is rather northerly, even at midsummer the sun never gets higher than 62 degrees above the horizon at noon and at midwinter it only rises 15 degrees above the horizon at noon.
another prediction of climate change is an increase in low level cloud, we all know the UK is an island on the edge of the Atlantic and can be prone to thick cloud cover for days if not weeks at a time,
this just doesn’t happen if you live inland on a continental land mass like the USA, honestly, the Americans would go insane if they didn’t see the sun for 3 weeks in the winter but for a Brit it’s not an unusual phenomena,
the energy density issue of solar panels means you have to have a hell of a lot of them to get much output, that is if it’s actually daytime and if the sky is clear and if the sun is high enough to achieve much strength,
the reason coal was such a boon in the industrial era was it’s energy density, it’s stability in storage which added to the simplicity of transportation, but also it’s land usage aspect, the energy gained by mining was vast compared to the land area that was required for mining operations,
previous to coal the UK was run on wood and this required vast areas of land dedicated to forests and a very slow (in human terms) regeneration of harvested woodland.
look, the thing is that the development of human industrial civilisation and the expansion of the global human population has all along been tied to energy availability and usage, we went from wood, to coal, to oil and gas and have arrived where we are with 7.5 billion people and a very complex industrial society that is daily reliant on a constant supply of mind boggling amounts of energy.
the human race has painted itself into a corner by this paradox, our use of fossil fuels is killing the planet but keeping us alive ‘en masse’ (for the present)
stop using fossil fuels over night and the planet will start to recover but we as a currently technologically dependent species will start to die off at an alarming rate,
a sizeable chunk of the human race, if not majority, is now living in mega cities dotted over the planet, they don’t all have roofs for solar panels or a back garden vegetable patch,
we need a way of transitioning from fossil fuel dependence to a zero carbon energy future without destabilising the delicate balance that keeps society functioning and avoids chaos and anarchy,
the fact that as a species we have vacilated and pontificated since the 1970’s without really doing much just means that the transition is desperately overdue now and incredibly complex and challenging,
also fossil fuels are actually running out, we’ve used the easiest to access and the best quality stuff already, the rest is dirtier and more problematic to extract, running out of fossil fuels completely would actually save the planet but unfortunately we have enough left to kill the planet before they are exhausted.
much as I dislike nuclear it does have some redeeming qualities, it’s currently in a sufficiently developed form to be utilised commercially, it’s energy dense, it’s land usage is moderate and it’s output is constant, not intermittent,
the biggest reservation about nuclear is the potential mess of large scale cockups, the fact is that the first nuclear reactors that were built were reasonably small, in the region of 3.5MW, they were used for nuclear submarines etc. engineers could build a containment vessel for the reactor that could guarantee 100% containment in the event of a core meltdown,
unfortunately political and economic considerations pushed governments into commissioning vast 600MW plus projects, reactors of this size are beyond engineerings ability to build reliable containment vessels, it was a really dumbass move because we built loads of power stations that were all potential Chernyobl’s in the event of a cock up (cock ups are part of being human)
so yes, I am freaked out by any plans to build huge nuclear ‘vanity project’ plants because they are inherently dangerous,
but there are numerous smaller nuclear reactors currently in use worldwide reasonably safely, nuclear subs, nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear icebreakers.
the Russians are currently building floating nuclear power stations using two of their nuclear icebreaker reactors, they supply 3.5MW per reactor, can output electricity or desalinated water,
their purpose is to replace the power stations in their northern coastal regions, their current power stations need decommissioning and building new ones is problematic because climate change is thawing the perma frost and making land based structures even more problematic to build that they have been historically.
I wonder whether, as part of a transiton strategy that minimises disruption, if the UK, being an island and surrounded by towns and cities with port facilities, we could build small nuclear power station barges using 3.5MW nuclear sub reactors that have reliable containment vessels, and use them as the primary constant energy supply hooked up to coastal towns and cities direct, we’d tow them back to say Rosyth or Devonport for service and refuelling whilst a refurbished one took up the berth at a coastal town.
I’m sure for security purposes and practicality the Royal Navy could run the whole thing, they have all the skills and experience already.
it would be a wiser expenditure of Government funds than building aircraft carriers we have no planes for, buying F-35’s from America that don’t work properly or building American designed nuclear submarines equipped with American leased nuclear missiles that can never be used as it would result in the end of life on earth!
the other plus point for floating nuclear power stations is that they are mobile, land based nuclear power stations could be inundated by rising sea levels even long after being decommissioned, the worst case scenario of decommissioning a floating power station is defuelling, encasing the reactor in concrete and scuttling it in the deep ocean, not a ‘perfect’ solution but much more practical than anything currently offered for land based nuclear power stations.
please don’t take this screed as any attempt to obstruct the transition, I’ve spent the last 10 years deeply immersed in the compexities of our current predicament desperately trying to find a realistic path through the present to a survivable future, I’m convinced it is possible but it does require us to be realistic and take a vast amount of conflicting issues and try to blend them into a broad policy.
magical thinking will not save us, reality is messy and will require some compromises,
we should accept the challenge to do these things, “not because they are easy but because they are difficult”
I think you are right to ask the ‘hard’ questions and regret that few people are
You raise the neeewd for planned transition in society
We also need this for business
The big macro stuff is easier to say than the micro is to do in this case
Very interesting ideas Matt B.
I’m sorry to keep harping on about tidal, but it hasn’t been mentioned in this debate up till now. That it’s the only ever-reliable renewable source available to us ought to be obvious to everyone, yet the Westminster government has starved it of funding for R&D for years. Why? Scotland in particular has massive potential, not just in the massive tidal flows of the Pentland Firth, where some generation has begun, but also in the as yet undeveloped and less stormy fjords of the west coast. Some, like Loch Linnhe, provide multiple opportunities: there are narrows with strong tidal flows not just in Loch Linnhe itself, but also in the large fjords running off it – Loch Etive, Loch Creran, Loch Leven and Loch Eil – all with proximity to the grid.
The development of floating, moorable platforms (already developed here and currently being tested in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia) offers huge opportunities for power generation wherever there are strong tidal flows, yet UK Gov seems uninterested. Perhaps it’s scared of releasing this huge potential, given the understandable “unrest” among the natives?
I have a lot of time for tidal: I think it’s vital. Scotland also has a real role to play here: it has very large tidal ranges!
The tidal flows in the Pentland Firth are an immense resource but the engineering challenges in exploiting it significantly are commensurately immense. At 18 knot flow, just anchoring it on the seabed, at scale, is a huge problem. I don’t expect it will contribute much soon (like fusion) – like the next decade or two. Yes it should be worked on, and yes it might one day be significant.
Westminster’s ludicrously poor energy policy has been holding Scotland back for years. Tidal power has never had the chances that wind power or (to a lesser extent) solar power got to receive government funding until the industry could stand on its own.
Here’s a long Twitter thread I wrote on the subject (and related areas like pumped storage hydroelectric), with lots of links:
https://twitter.com/NeilImperator/status/1052015098838048770
Ken, thanks for expressing an interest, it’s encouraging!
on the subject of tidal, yes, it’s one of many ways we can take advantage of natural phenomena and it should be exploited where ever possible,
I think of tidal power as ‘harvesting the power of the moon’ !!
another utilisation of a phenomena I like is the solar updraught tower, it’s more suited to hotter countries than the UK but I have toyed with the idea of using hockey stick profile tunnels in the chalk cliffs of southern England with a further tower built on top and using the predominant onshore breeze to ram charge a updraught tower setup,
a huge solar updraught tower integrated into a sky-scraper in central London could generate electricity and also draw the ground level pollution up and away from the suffocating masses,
I’m most interested in any phenomena that is predictably cyclical, like tides, or constant, like say geo-thermal,
wind and solar are rather fickle and difficult to plan around.
I also think we should be utilising all organic effluent, be it human or agricultural, spoiled foodstuffs, food proccessing byproducts and any organic waste that usually finds it’s way into landfill for producing natural gas in the form of methane by putting said organic matter through anaerobic digesters, apart from bio-gas you also get an output of quality fertiliser, it’s like accelerated composting where the methane given off doesn’t escape into the atmosphere but is captured and used as a renewable energy source,
this wouldn’t be a total solution to energy needs but could account for 10% of our current natural gas consumption,
it could also capture and re-use some of the nitrogen, phosphorus & potassium (npk) we keep losing into the sea that causes severe algal blooms,
the fertiliser produced would also displace some of the artificial fertiliser that is currently used, did you know that a lot of artificial fertiliser is synthesised from natural gas?
we only need find 10% here and 5% there a few times and we start creating a new energy picture.
the present, currently, seems so dismal but the future could be really exciting!
Tidal energy is being produced and looks like it will be a major contributor to the renewable mix in years, not decades. Recent news from Energy Voice, extract and link:
‘Simec Atlantis Energy’s chief executive Tim Cornelius announced that the Meygen tidal array had exported more than 12 gigawatts (GW) of energy to the Scottish grid. The tidal turbine has now beaten the previous world record held by SeaGen. Mr Cornelius said: “Meygen has now exported more than 12GWh of tidal energy to the grid in Scotland, surpassing the previous record held by SeaGen in Strangford Lough (11.6 GWh). The project announced the completion of its construction phase and the start of the tidal projects 25-year operational phase last April. During Phase 1A the tidal array generated 6GW of energy and saw monthly production of 1,400MW a month of tidal energy.’
https://www.energyvoice.com/otherenergy/193129/meygen-tidal-turbine-notches-up-new-world-record/
I think making tidal the primary contributor is the way to go, and should have full government funding instead of being mostly left to commercial enterprise – too slow – but we’ll never get that with Westminster still in charge with it living in the dark ages still intent on its oil and weapons money and power. There is some innovation on tidal too, not just using turbines, but I didn’t investigate feasibility and I’ve lost the links!
It would be a primary focus of Green Investment Bank for me
There are other possible forms of grid-scale energy storage.
Cryogenic energy storage which uses liquified air looks promising and it uses only mature technology. All the components – turbines, tanks, heat exchangers, etc – are off-the-shelf. No unpleasant battery chemicals either.
Unfortunately, it receives only tiny amounts of funding.
Sounds promising, e.g. “Highview Power has already built and connected two cryogenic energy storage plants to the UK grid. The first plant was commissioned in 2014 in Slough, Greater London, with a capacity of 2.5 MWh, while last year, the world’s largest liquid air energy storage plant was inaugurated in Bury, Greater Manchester, with a capacity of 15 MWh.”
“When shutting down and dismantling old power stations, the existing infrastructure and connections left behind become the perfect location to install cryogenic energy storage plants, solving the challenge of integrating massive amounts of renewables while retiring traditional assets.”
https://www.highviewpower.com/news_announcement/highview-power-and-tsk-enter-joint-venture-to-develop-cryogenic-energy-storage-projects/
Batteries have been mentioned in the comments, as has hydro, but nothing said about using the two together. There is surely no reason why a hydro reservoir can be used as a great big battery!
When there is little wind hydro power can be used to meet the demand of the moment and during low demand from consumers excess power from wind/sea used to pump water back into the reservoir.
I have been unable to find a reference for this but I’m sure I read about it not very long ago.
See David Mackay’s book. The UK already has exploited it’s easy-to-use pumped storage. This cannot contribute much more to flexibility.
It’s true to say that the UK has already developed the lion’s share of its conventional hydroelectric potential, but there are still plenty of places to build more pumped storage hydroelectric.
The reason is that conventional hydroelectric needs not just a big valley to dam up, but also a decent amount of river water flowing into it to fill it up. Only then can you run that stored water through turbines to generate electricity.
Pumped storage only needs access to a higher body of water and a lower one. Any decent sized upper valley will do; you don’t need any river water, because you’re going to pump the water up there yourself anyway. There are plenty of upper valleys like that within reach of large bodies of water that can serve as the lower water source, especially in Scotland.
Here’s a BBC article about the Coire Glas project near Loch Ness that SSE could start work on immediately, if only Westminster would give them confidence that they wouldn’t lose money on it:
https://archive.fo/HAcOM
That project alone would *double* the UK’s storage capacity.
There’s another site just up the road that SSE were also considering, but they decided to focus on one project until they saw evidence that – again – Westminster would back them up with workable energy policy.
We’d need about 30 Coire Glas-style stations to provide the UK with one day of total backup power, so pumped storage hydroelectric isn’t going to be the one magic bullet for UK energy storage, but the UK’s future energy transition would be a lot simpler if Westminster would just get on with doing things like this that we can already do right now.
Mackay gives these numbers: current pumped storage 30GWh. He estimates this could be increased to 100GWh, perhaps 400 GWh. Coire Glas is planned to be 30 GWh, so another 11 or 12. Mackay puts all of these in Scotland, I imagine there would be a lot of opposition to actually building all these. Cruachan is already an eyesore. He also estimates we need 1200 GWh storage to cope with wind lulls. So, pumped storage is important, it can and should be increased, but it is not enough on its own.
Nigel Goddard says:
“See David Mackay’s book. The UK already has exploited it’s easy-to-use pumped storage. This cannot contribute much more to flexibility.”
I find that very difficult to believe. I would suggest that we have hardly scratched the surface…..but it does depend on how ‘easy-to-use’ is defined. There will be outrage in many suitable locations because of objections to the despoliation of ‘treasured’ landscape. (Much of which I regard as green desert, but my opinion is not widely shared by lovers of, what they think of as, ‘wild’ landscape)
……and there will be serious issues of weighing carbon footprint until containing structures can be constructed by low carbon technology (cf the carbon footprint paradox of nuclear plants).
It’s too early to be writing-off increased capacity of pumped water storage. But it will no more provide a panacea than any other avenue currently being developed.
Willie John wrote “I have been unable to find a reference for this but I’m sure I read about it not very long ago.”
Willie you’re probably thinking of the Cruachan Power Station at Loch Awe. Here’s the link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
Another grid-scale storage solution is hydrogen, and that is being tried. Renewable electricity drives electrolysis (at the windfarm, or nearby) to create hydrogen. Hydrogen is pumped around the country and converted in fuel cells to electricity if that’s what’s needed, or burnt for heat if that’s what’s needed (e.g., 80% of domestic energy consumption, or 25% of national). The UK needs to decide soon (5 years or so) if it will, over the long term, decommission the gas grid or convert it to hydrogen. Neither path (full electric, or combined hydrogen / electric) is easy, and at this point it isn’t obvious if one is preferable as far as I know, but the choice will have to be made.
I agree there is a role for hydrogen as an energy storage medium but may I add a few refinements,
I’m led to believe the current natural gas distribution network isn’t compatible with hydrogen, hydrogen, due to it’s low atomic number, is a bugger for leaking and is astonishingly flammable, also even when liquified at massive pressures hydrogen isn’t particularily energy dense, liquified natural gas has a considerably higher calorific value for the same given volume and at a much reduced pressure.
but certainly excess generating capacity could be used to create hydrogen through electrolysis and then compressed to a liquid state for storage, this ought to be done adjacent to nuclear plants or wind farms in a secure and controlled environment for safety reasons,
then when increased demand calls for more power the hydrogen can be used to power gas turbine generating sets,
fuel cells are rather expensive and delicate and a bit overkill when a common place gas turbine will do the job fine,
there is considerable energy loss involved in electrolysis, compression to liquifaction, storage and then decompression back into gas form for combustion via a gas turbine but without storage any generating over capacity would be total wastage,
hydrogen could play a huge role in storage in this manner but for practical and the paramount safety concerns it would have to be constrained within a very secure and tightly regulated environment,
hydrogen will never replace traditional portable liquid fuels for general usage because it’s just too light, challenging and frankly bloody dangerous!
Well put. Perhaps industrial usage only for hydrogen.
Batteries have a carbon footprint and this is significant the larger the battery. It depends on what fuel/fuels mix you are comparing it to.
Either way we need the GND for so many reasons
As Nigel Goddard says, using spare electicity to produce Hydrogen is a form of storage. There has been an experimental hydrogen generator on Unst, Shetland, for many years. The hydrogen was stored and used as a back-up for wind power, which was the source of power for the hydrogen generation. Spare hydrogen was used to power a vehicle (this was a tiny experiment). There are now (small) fleets of hydrogen buses in cities like Aberdeen and Dundee and more in other European cities and this specific use overcomes one drawback of using hydrogen as a primary source of transport power, as the fleet returns to base to be refuelled. The technology exists but excepting a small area of British Columbia, there is no infrastructure to support the distribution of hydrogen as a mass-transport fuel.
Also in BC is a project which captures carbon from the atmosphere, either for storage or for combination with hydrogen to make a range of hydro-carbon fuels which will power existing vehicles, diesel, petrol or aerofuel and which are carbon neutral. This requires electric power (Hydro in BC) and is thus another form of power storage. The company developing this is Carbon Engineering The fuel produced can be used with existing networks of filling stations and is thus a replacement for fossil fuel. That is probably why we haven’t heard much about it, as it directly challenges big oil.
With regard to tidal power, there is huge capacity on Orkney, but expansion is currently prevented by UK Government’s refusal to increase the capacity of Orkney’s power grid connection. Tidal power has its problems, but lack of investment is the main one. It has the advantage of being completely reliable and predictable, unlike the various weather related power sources.
Nuclear power, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is the energy of the past, not the future. Certainly in its present form.
Flamanville in Normandy, which was supposed to be France’s flagship and exportable super EPR plant, is still under construction almost 10 years after it was supposed to be commissioned. It keeps having technical problems, with leaky joints….(!) and will end up costing so much more than it was supposed to that in the end, the energy it may…or may not…eventually produce will not be cheap at all. That’s all before planning decommissioning costs, security costs etc…
It is not the way to go. Despite massive lobbying pressure from the nuclear champions in France (75%> of energy production is nuclear there) the government is finally accepting that proper Green energy needs more investment in research and subsidies to be built.
I’m often amused by the quaint notion that the Sun goes out at night. 🙂
I’m fairly sure that the proponents of tidal power generation are on the right lines.
Harvesting energy from the moon ….I like that. Idiot critics will tell you that tidal systems only work twice a day, but ignore the fact that tides are stationary only momentarily as the direction changes. The rest of the time they are flowing one way or the other and a system which generates on rising and falling tides is going to be a great way to provide base-load supply.
Other sustainable systems, including solar, wind, ground-source, heat conversion etc… all get dismissed as useless by somebody or other when they consider them in isolation, and go into Cassandric mode about the hopelessness of it all.
We need to give them short shrift, and stop paying them attention they really do not deserve. Some of them are just defending the staus quo of big fossil interests whether they realise that’s what they are doing or are just paddlers of the propaganda of despondency.
I agree nuclear is dead on economics and fusion should be too. We need reduced energy use, through more efficiency and more conservation and less use.
All the big centralised technical fixes are a con. Batteries are not green, extracting Lithium is energy intensive and it will soon run out. Most electricity is lost in transmission. We need more micro generation in every community in the country.
It’s obvious that Hinckley is making some bankers a pot full of cash and you need to look no further than that to understand why it’s being built.
Just a note…at this time/date:
Wind energy = 0.82% of the energy needs at this time (300MW) (total grid demand = 37.6GW)
Solar 11.18% = 4.21GW
Nuclear providing baseload, and gas dispatchable at 20.44GW.
Natural gas in back in the news “it must stay in the ground”…well, Natural gas is used to make fertilizer, antifreeze, plastics, pharmaceuticals and fabrics. It is also used to manufacture a wide range of chemicals such as ammonia, methanol, butane, ethane, propane, and acetic acid. Doubt it will remain in the ground…
JohnM objects to:
“Natural gas in back in the news “it must stay in the ground”…”
I’m in agreement with your point, John.
It’s the wrong battle-cry. Doubly wrong because it frightens the fossil industry unnecessarily.
The correct policy battle-cry is we should stop squandering this stuff by burning it. It’s too valuable to burn.
But we must learn better to recycle its products or that is nearly as criminal a waste and is fouling the earth.
Probably it is. But wait for the screams of rage when people have to scrap their gas boilers and install other heat sources….like air/ground sourced heat pumps. And that is coming. That will also up the demand for electricity. And also for fossil fuels. Never forgetting that heat pumps use refrigerants to transfer heat….
going back to nuclear,
I remember James Lovelock saying he wished he was allowed a lump of nuclear waste, encased in concrete and buried in his garden to use to heat his home,
after refuelling the spent rods have to be stored in deep pool storage facilities for 5 to 10 times the amount of time they ever spent in the reactor producing heat for generating electricity,
with spent fuel rod storage ponds the depth and volume of water provides all the required radiation shielding,
the pond operates at atmospheric pressure,
a Canadian University was using a deep pond to store radioactive materials that were used as a controlled radiation emitter for scientific research purposes,
the facility was considered stable and safe enough to be left unstaffed overnight with monitoring carried out remotely,
from my reading I discovered China is currently building deep storage ponds for their spent fuel rods that also double as district heating projects,
I remember that Battersea power station provided it’s waste heat to a local district heating service, I think it was for the Council owned apartment blocks in the area,
even though the UK has mostly discarded the notion of social housing I dare say large university campuses and district hospitals could still benefit from utilising storage ponds for district heating,
of course the requirement for heating does fall for a few months a year in the UK but that is when you could redirect the heat to generating mechanical motion with Stirling Engines and generate electricity, possibly to run ventilation systems?
Really?
scroll down to ‘other configurations’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool
James Lovelock in 2008, please read, his predictions are blunt and scary,
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
a reference for his comment on using waste to heat his home, I’m sure he was saying it for illustrative purposes,
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_Lovelock#Happy_to_store_nuclear_waste_in_his_garden_shed
I’m not suggesting that nuclear power is the ‘be all and end all’ of our problems, but our problems are massive, it’s probably too late anyway,
as a species we have sown the seeds of our own destruction already and it’s going to take some pretty radical action to rescue the situation at this late stage,
I actually doubt the human race is capable of getting it’s shit together sufficiently until it’s got so bad nothing can be done.
nuclear is going to have to be one of the tools in our toolkit, I’m wary of mega projects but I do think that small scale reactors based on existing marine units could be rapidly deployed to buy us time for transition to more pleasant alternatives,
utilising the heat from spent fuel rods just gets us more bang for our buck and more fossil fuel usage displaced.
in reality, even concentrated deposits of fissile material that can be used for nuclear power are limited, we may have reached ‘peak uranium’ already,
also at the same time we need to be reclaiming all of the degraded land that’s turning to desert by planting 4 trillion trees in the next couple of decades, this would suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and help fix the water cycle,
I strongly urge people to download and read Pieter Hoff’s proposal, it only takes an hour or two,
http://www.thetreesolution.com/en/download-the-book
we’ve left it so late in the day to act that we really have to do something pretty spectacular at this point if we’re going to stand a chance of having a future.
it’s not a case of deciding what to do, it’s a case of having to do whatever can be done.