The rough cost of plugging the gap [to make Britain’s energy generation 100 per cent renewable], if we did it with wind and sun onshore, is about £50 billion. You could borrow £40 billion and just stake £10 billion of public money to get that built.”
In the context of energy generation systems £50 billion is a pittance – two nuclear reactors or so at current rates. It’s also the sort of amount that the private sector would happily put up in a trice – if the number were correct and if there were a profit in doing so. So, why aren’t they? Possibly because the number isn’t right, or perhaps the profit isn’t there. Which is, largely enough, two versions of the same statement.
I also tend to think that it’s not actually possible to power the country with just solar and wind. Dispatchable power and all that. So perhaps it’s not just those numbers that are wrong then.
How could you possibly produce 100% of the UK’s energy requirements from wind & solar? And certainly not with £50 of added spending. The intermittancy problem. There is no way, currently, of bridging the generating gap & unlikely to be one. Three marginally possible routes. Battery storeage. Pumped water storage. Create an electrolysed hydrogen industry. Either for the gas or to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. Any of those would take hundreds of billions if not trillions to implement.
Solar? Even Spain’s not daft enough to go that route & we must get double the UK’s utilisable insolation.
Why not just write an article about unicorn ranching?
I do like the vision of all the carriages dragged and the generators rotated by unicorns BiS. Perhaps the aircraft’ll be hauled by the ones with wings??
Sigh
It is all too easy…
If everyone was forced to stop usng electricty and having banned motor vehicles the government then bans electric cars and busineeses only operated during daylight hours, then everything could be run on renewables.
Do keep up with The Plan, you lot.
I was saving Pegasus Airways for later, Boganboy.
Possibly because the number isn’t right
Yes, the numbers are bollocks.
https://utilityweek.co.uk/inside-1bn-pumped-hydro-plans-to-more-than-double-britains-electricity-storage/
So £1bn in the cheapest location gets you storage for 3 million homes for 24 hours. We have over 28 million homes so we need 9 of these plus our existing pumped storage to power the UK for one day. Better hope that the next day is brilliant as not only do those renewables need to power the country they also need to refill the storage. We would need a huge costly increase in generation capacity many times greater than what we currently have. Unfortunately real world observation shows that renewables can have miniscule output for weeks at a time. To give 2 weeks on energy security (not really enough) we would need about £130bn of these storage systems plus the extra renewable generation to fill them. On day 15 if the wind doesn’t blow the lights go out, the freezers start defrosting the electric cars can’t be charged, water can’t be pumped and people start dying. This is also a very optimistic scenario. In winter gas domestic demand is 3 times the electricity demand so if we were to stop burning gas for heat we need the extra electric power to replace that too. That means about £500bn of these pumped storage developments but we don’t have viable locations for more than a handful.
Pumped storage is a great fast reacting way to even out power fluctuations. It is not a credible way to to add storage to utility scale renewables.
” The intermittancy problem. There is no way, currently, of bridging the generating gap & unlikely to be one. Three marginally possible routes. Battery storeage. Pumped water storage. Create an electrolysed hydrogen industry. Either for the gas or to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. Any of those would take hundreds of billions if not trillions to implement.”
And also all the above would only be needed when the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow. So would have to be maintained on standby for 90% of the time and thus cost a fortune when they were needed, as they’d need to make out like bandits to make enough profit to make the whole thing worth while.
D’ya know it just occurred how much all this greenery resembles fantasy literature illustrations. Pegasus. A horse with all the musculature evolved for running. Then stick a couple of big bird wings on it & it’s supposed to fly. No thought as to what’s providing the force that’s getting the wings to flap gets half a ton of horse off the ground. Pure magic.
“If everyone was forced to stop usng electricty and having banned motor vehicles the government then bans electric cars and busineeses only operated during daylight hours, then everything could be run on renewables.
Do keep up with The Plan, you lot.”
Can you tell our host, who appears to view greenery as ‘well meaning but misguided’. When in fact they are evil scum who want the masses to live in poverty and (preferably) die off.
Or of course he may privately know the truth like the rest of us but is too afraid of being thrown out of polite society to say anything about it. No more Adam Smith boondoggles if you go off the Establishment reservation of course.
In winter gas domestic demand is 3 times the electricity demand
Yep, overall UK energy consumption is 4-5x electricity consumption. Which shows how deranged the Net Zero cult really is. Even if there is a cunning plan* to eliminate half the peasantry and keep the rest in the dark and cold, there is no way to reach Net Zero.
And the £50 billion number is an obvious lie.
*there is no cunning plan, just virtue-signalling stupidity and wishful thinking
I have to agree with you all. Running everything with windmills and solar panels is bullshit.
The only way we could even think of doing this is build lots and lots of nukes to provide our basic power, and use them to produce the hydrogen and capture the CO2 to make all the hydrocarbon fuels we need.
Of course provided we can capture the CO2 on the necessary scale, in addition to the huge cost we’d also face the fanatical hatred of the Greens, who loathe nukes even more than they do CO2.
And the only way to deal with this is, as the hero of one of my scifi favourites said, to ‘take them outside and shoot them in batches.’ But if we did this we wouldn’t need to worry about the ‘oncoming climate catastrophe’.
When in fact they are evil scum who want the masses to live in poverty and (preferably) die off.
I don’t think it’s that at all, Jim. I’d refer you to my individuals seek to maximise what they perceive as their own personal advantage view of the world. All of these people are benefiting personally from pushing all this. Careers are being made. Politicians thriving on it. Money’s made through applications. Journalists get to sell articles. If they think about the consequences – & people are very good at not thinking about consequences, when thinking about them might lead to personal loss – they see their own personal gain in the short term outweighing any general harm over the longer term. When the shit hits the fan none of these people are going to be still in a position to get sprayed.
You look at something like Putin’s Little War. How much of what’s gone on is down to individuals seeking to maximise their own personal advantage. Why it started in the first place. Why the Russian military has failed to deliver what it said on the tin. Why response in the Western countries has patchy, delayed & contradictory. Why western Europe’s energy supplies were hostage to Russian gas.
I’d say the same about the responses to Covid. Why it’s bankrupted us.
The individuals who make decisions. The individuals who influence them. They’re all primarily looking after their own interests.
BiS, whilst I agree to some degree about maximising their personal advantage, there are people out there who really do believe there are 7 Billion too many of us and that the only solution is to reduce that number* (see: Attenbore, Paul 1968: “we’ll all be starving to death by 1975” Ehrlich** or Jane Goodall, the gorilla / chimp woman, who said at a WEF discussion the population needs to be around the level 500 years ago = 500 million).
* THEY never seem in a hurry to do their bit, off themselves and reduce the ‘burden’ do they?
**Another of Erhlich’s quotes was “giving poor people access to cheap energy would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
They hate humans.
I am coming round to the view that we will end up with a similar system to what we have today. The middle eastern countries are already experimenting with shipping hydrogen. They are doing it by making ammonia and then shipping it LNG ships. Receiving countries then pump it off the ships and extract the hydrogen from the ammonia (though they could just burn the ammonia directly).
So I think the future will be a combination of renewables and imported ammonia that is produced from solar power from the middle east. This will preserve the current geopolitical order. The petrodollar system stays in place in all but name (ammoniadollar? Hydrodollar?) , we get some of our money back by selling weapons and financial services to the middle eastern countries and our energy bill fluctuate depending on whats going on in the world.
Any greenies hoping that the world will transform into a wonderful eco-paradise of luxury communism will be disappointed.
He’s a factor 10 off. Period.
And that’s not even considering the technical feasibility or desireability of the idea.
That 50 billion wouldn’t even work for Clogland, and that’s a tad smaller and more concentrated than the UK.
Addolff, you’re talking about people who make careers out of their opinions. Of course they’ll have opinions they can make a career out of. I sincerely believe in my opinions when they’re to my personal benefit.
@salamanda
The future looks to be a smelly but remarkably clean & hygienic world.
Grikath, yes. The Australian government has committed something like 20 billion Pacific Pesos just to build the transmission network to support future wind and solar sites. No generation, just getting the power to where it is needed, assuming it’s available.
50 billion (of any currency) to convert any western nation to pure wind and solar is laughable.
On green hydrogen – of course, according to our Energy Minister, Australia is poised to be the renewable energy superpower (yes, another one). Presumably his department hasn’t advised him that the Middle East have better insolation, more capital, and much more lenient labour laws and will eat our lunch in that market.
Ignorance, it is. No understanding that it is all governed by physics, not economics nor politics.
None of these fantasy calculations include the fact that electricity demand will near treble to cover the energy currently provided by motor fuels and domestic natural gas use, nor the cost of building the grid infrastructure at all levels to carry the increased load and distribute it.
Nor do they understand the difference between unit of energy -GW – and unit of consumption – GWh, therefore it is not the capacity of a wind turbine array that matters, it is the number of hours that capacity can be produced. For a wind power station that is about 25% annualised, for coal and gas it is about 95%.
Ignorance, it is. No understanding that it is all governed by physics, not economics nor politics.
It’s not ignorance. It’s wilfully not admitting to understanding something that conflicts with a preferred narrative. Politics with a small P. It’s why it’s not really worth debating the subject with them because you’ll always be talking right past each other. Why I keep saying to Tim he should cease promoting carbon taxes. It would be a solution to a problem they don’t want a solution for.
The £50bn claim is testes.
Comparing energy sources 1KW of electricity for 25 years costs:
£3k nuclear
£6k gas – £1k to build, rest is consumables.
£6k wind
£20k solar.
Wind and solar are factored to what they actually produce, not what their theoretical maximum is. E.g. a theoretical 1kw solar array is about £2k, but actually only produces about 10% of that.
Back of a beer mat but there or there abouts.
Obvious conclusions:
commercial solar is stupid.
Base load should be nuclear.
Top up with gas. It’s cheap to build in the spare capacity, and can be switched on quickly. Gas heating makes perfect sense.
Wind is unreliable and expensive, so a dead loss.
Currently the UK is generating 20GW from fossil fuels. To sub that with wind you need… 1GW = 1m KW … 20m KW.
So 20m KW x £6k/KW = £120bn on mostly unreliable electricity.
Which would only get a small fraction of the way to net zero anyway.
The £50bn claim is testes.
Now try this NET zero plan:
Coal is the dirtiest electricity. It produces 800g CO2 / KWh. Or 800kg / MWh. Or 800 tonnes per GWh. Which means a 1GW coal power station running 24/7 puts out 7 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
The UK produces in total about 500million tonnes of CO2 a year. That’s the official figure for everything.
Substitute out a steady 80GW of coal power for nuclear you save that. NET zero.
At £3k per KW that’s £250bn to get the UK to net zero by subbing nuclear for coal.
We don’t use that much coal, but China India Africa all do for base load power.
Spend £10bn a year building nuclear power plants as gifts to developing countries to sub out their coal power and the UK reaches NET zero by 2050. No other changes needed. No arsing about with battery cars, windmills or power cuts.
All of which goes to point out what a stupid idea the current multi trillion pound plan is.
Well, looking through govt figures & Wikipedia (I know), the UK currently has about 29GW of wind generating capacity and another 23GW due to come online by 2030. Seeing as our average demand varies between 25GW and 40GW over the course of a day it will soon be possible to power the UK on an averagely windy day using wind power alone. Add in the 6.4GW of new nuclear (one half built, another approved) and the SMRs (if they ever happen) and the National Grid’s intention of being frequently fossil fuel free by 2030 and completely fossil fuel free by 2035 seems eminently achievable.
Wholesale electricity prices frequently drop below £0 overnight and as more wind power comes online this will happen more often, at which point it becomes financially feasible to operate some sort of energy storage capacity, buying low and selling high. New sodium-ion battery chemistry is cheaper and cleaner than lithium-ion and as TW occasionally reminds us Porsche are already operating a wind powered eFuel plant in Chile, making green hydrogen and combining it with CO2 from the air to make hydrocarbons.
I don’t think that a carbon neutral energy grid is as difficult or as expensive as some people make it out to be, and it doesn’t need £billions of taxpayer’s money either.
“For a wind power station that is about 25% annualised, for coal and gas it is about 95%.”
Onshore wind load factor varies between 25% to 30%, offshore wind is roughly 40% to 45%.
Ltw, my experience with Australia is that if the Unions ( including the supermarket cartel ), Politicians, and the local Chamber of Commerce ( may or may not overlap with the local Mason Lodge) don’t get their 12 Silverlings, you can get nothing done, and will be actively opposed by said worthies.
I may try the ideas I had then again, maybe one day. But only after you lot have woken up and strung up the entire lot currently in power. With soecial consideration for the trade unions. They deserve the Carthaginian Treatment, just to make sure.
And yes… I ‘m bitter..
@EL – what happens when we have a week or more of low wind? How many batteries do you envisage us having in order to get over such periods? Or, alternatively, how much spare wind capacity will we need to produce enough hydrogen to get us through such calm periods?
And, bearing in mind that UK electricity use is a fraction of our overall power consumption, how is any of the above going to get the UK to Net Zero? And, of course, if the UK did get to Net Zero, what difference would it make to global emissions?
@EL – “it will soon be possible to power the UK on an averagely windy day using wind power alone”
But what about days with below average wind? We need power on those days too. And there can be a period where all the days are below average. From this point of view, solar is much better, as there are no days without sun and solar panels still generate significan power on a dull day.
The problem to be solved is not how to provide for average days, but how to provide on the least favourable days. Currently these are cold days of low wind at the end of a long period of low wind. If we could magically switch everyone to using electric vehicles, that might change to days where everyone wants to charge their vehicles in anticipation of going away (e.g. Christmas, when delivery vehicles would also see high demand).
@ EL
Whence do you get your figures? They seem discordant with observed reality.
Last year wind power day averages ranged from 0.141Gw to 16.97GW with an average 7.033GW.
7.033 is less than 25% of 29, so I cannot see how you can say that with a straight face.
@John77 I think EL does his beermats with theoretical maximum rated wind generation capacity.
Which, of course, is wishful thinking while buttplugging Unicorns into the equation.
Peeps also make the mistake of only looking at the low-wind days when it comes to production limitations.
High winds are very much an issue as well, since the bird-choppers have to be taken out then, to prevent them from destroying themselves…
High winds also come with the double-whammy of notoriously dense cloud cover and other weathery nastyness….. So under those circumstances, you can guarantee that output from solar will be low to negligable as well, as opposed to calm days where you at least generally can expect decent solar output.
Oh, and you’d have to make your entire main grid suitable for long-distance transportation of electricity at impressive demand figures..
After all, the whole Green Plan relies on getting ‘leccie from, say.. Aberdeen, when the weather there is good, to , say… London, where the weather is proving the Unofficial Tourist Guide to be correct at that moment.
And they even assume zero-loss on transport in that scenario… ummm… yeah…
From this point of view, solar is much better, as there are no days without sun and solar panels still generate significan power on a dull day.
Jeez! Now the seasons have been abolished. At the highest energy demand time of the year, mid-winter, the effective amount of daylight for solar power generation is around 6 hours. And due to the sun being low in the sky, the atmospheric attenuation is at its highest. Why do you think the UK has winters?
I find it slightly reassuring that the comments on The Times article are running about 9:1 against the grifter. More and more people are starting to see through the climate/net zero bollocks, and the lights haven’t even gone out yet.
@EL
the UK currently has about 29GW of wind generating capacity
On paper, yes, but despite that optimistic figure, last year it averaged only 7GW. The best year so far but only 25% of what the claims suggest. Double that real capacity and double it again and you are approaching peak demand for electricity. Double it a couple more times and you go from peak electricity to peak energy. But even so when the wind doesn’t blow for three weeks double, double, double, double zero is still zero energy for that three weeks.
“solar panels still generate significant power on a dull day.”
A rough estimate is that in the UK you get about 50% of the annual solar output in the months of May, June, July and August, ie the 4 months of the year when power requirements are lowest because, duh, its hot and sunny, and the days are long. In November, December, January and February you get perhaps 10% of your total annual power output, at a point when demand is highest due to, duh, it being cold and wet and cloudy, and the days are short. How do you propose getting around that little problem?
@ Jim
With power storage that will release in March energy stored since before the autumn equinox, that has negligible leakage (normal leakage rates from a heat store over the six months including and bracketing winter would be worse than burning gas in a CCGT to bridge gaps).
Sadly the technology to do this, other than pumped storage, has yet to be invented and there are only 13 decent sites for pumped storage in the UK that would, if all used, roughly double current UK capacity.
So, basically, he/she doesn’t know what he/she is talking about.
Grikath, your comment on the difficulty of getting anything done in Oz is depressingly accurate.
Ltw, I’m thinking about some coal mine start-ups in Queensland that have been buggered around for years. And the Qld government depends upon this sort of stuff for revenue.
Boganboy, ditto new gas fields in NSW and Victoria. Surprise surprise, we’re short of the stuff. But wait, price cap will fix it!
Oil, coal and gas are in an important sense just as renewable as wind, solar or tidal. Oil is in the final analysis no more than a chemical. The important point is the cost of turning any source into useful stuff. At the moment the policy of most governments is to outlaw anything that is relatively cheap to exploit. Utter madness!
@Jim – “How do you propose getting around that little problem?”
Firstly, I think your figures are pessimistic, but anyway the solution is the same – use more panels. The important part is that the power is predictable (unlike wind) so you can have enough capacity to serve your needs at the worst times.
And you can improve the summer/winter difference by panel angle – make them point at the low winter sun, making them more efficient in winter and less in summer.