Bishop Hill Powering the Nation
Oct 10, 2012 DECC Energy: biofuels Old coal and nuclear power stations are coming to the end of their lives. We face a race against time to ensure our energy security. We need to secure £110billion of investment in a secure, diverse and low carbon power mix. It is a huge challenge, but an equally huge opportunity, with the Coalition’s reforms to the electricity market having the potential to support a quarter of a million jobs, many of these highly skilled. New nuclear, gas-fired power stations, carbon capture and storage and renewable energy will bring new investment to all parts of the country, developing supply chains which won’t just serve the UK market, but the global market too. [Block quote added 7.45pm, 11.10.12]
From Powering the Nation, article by Energy Minister John Hayes for DECC
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/housemag/housemag.aspx
A number of unanswered questions within that paragraph, such as why don't we prevent the closure of the older power stations until we are sure we can manage without them.? Where is £110 billion coming from? What reforms to the energy market- smart meters? No thanks. A quarter of a million jobs- ever heard of Bastiat? CCS?- it doesn't work.....and so on.
[Update: figure on last paragraph corrected to £110 billion, 5.00pm]
Reader Comments (64)
The CCA was but a step along the path to the totalitarianism now taking over the Western democracies. The windmills are an amalgam of the Windmill in 'Animal Farm' [Marxist dogma], the Easter Island Statues [the attempted re-establishment of aristocracy, owning BTL and the electrical power system] and the Swastika [an ever present symbol of the power of the EU's totalitarian State].
They can save no CO2 in our grid unless we install massive pump storage pumped by dedicated nuclear plants at peak times when we need to sink 5 GW wind surges to stop the N. Sea arrays from having to be disconnected otherwise the grid will collapse. Even then the cost of the hardened transformers and the emergency repair teams will bankrupt us on its own
If you wish to know the extent of this totalitarianism, the BAE/EADS merger was all about the single EU state. Merkel's opposition to the deal may have marked the apogee of its power for which we should perhaps be thankful. The daughter of the Stasi State may have turned away from its dogma at the last moment.
Britain uses about 40 GW of electricity as baseload . The Westinghouse AP1000 is available internationally for £800 million - probably £600m if bought in quantity. So we could replace all of baseload for about £32 billion plus instalation costs.Since nuclear plants can theoretically run for years without fully automatically, real running & fuel costs must be miniscule.
Almost all the rest of the costs are, by definition, governmental parasitism.
I assume Mr Hayes has been informed of these facts.
Dodgy
Fawley (which is across the water from me) has been going for 40 years, and there is little on their website to suggest that it is about to die of old age.
Link
EU interference is another matter.
I've been assured (by a "green" contact) that wind's intermittency problem has been solved. Apparently the solution is to manufacture methane (using surplus wind energy) by electrolysation from water and air. This is stored and released to produce power when winds are light. It seems it's a wonderful solution: because wind energy providers will charge (at normal rates) for this when it's used, it makes wind turbines "even more economic". Moreover, it's carbon neutral as "you use carbon taken from the air". It seems E.ON is investing heavily in this wonderful solution.
Does any of this make sense?
This is probably the nanoparticle gold-copper catalyst developed at MIT, supposed to use water and CO2 to produce CH4: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/hybrid-copper-gold-nanoparticles-convert-co2.html
I've worked on such ideas in the past. 1% make it to market.
Brownedoff
OFF with their heads! Or any other useless appendage we can get our hands on ^.^
Green Sand
I followed up on a comment by MikeH about a power plant in Norway called Mongstad which was supposed to be testing CCS for real.
Apparently they have successfully tested it on a 5 MW operation and also on a 54 MW operation and are now installing it on a 250 MW plant. The cost of adding CCS to the larger plant is estimated to be £1 Billion.
AlecM: you can find out more about the intermittency "solution" here. Any comment?
Oct 11, 2012 at 10:09 AM | Anthony Hanwell
I do not want a generator running all the time.
It's OK to have one run for a few hours/day. The batteries/inverter silently power the rest of the day and night.
Oct 11, 2012 at 3:34 PM | Robin Guenier
I think you are being very naive.
Fairies are much more efficient than the scheme your 'green' contact's scheme.
Where does the carbon come from (400 ppm in the air ain't gonna do it) to make the methane after you've electrolysed the water? You can't use the methane at atmospheric pressure to power anything so there's another inefficient process required to compress it; then you've got to burn it in another inefficient process and drive a (not quite so) inefficient generator to produce the power.
I would guess by the time you get the power out you're into negative percentages of overall efficiency: ie it will require the input of extra power to make the whole process go at all.
Robin: my latest electrochemical patent was in 2003, so I am fairly up to date. I judge the probability of this technology to work commercially as next to zero because it's far easier to use biological processes to convert biomass including sewage to methane than to make chemical engineering plant, especially electrochemical which is controlled by the area of flat plates.
Dung, re: your question about CCS.
I've seen Statoil advertising themselves in this regard. e.g.
http://www.ccsassociation.org/why-ccs/industry-experience/
I'd be interested to see some informed comment from industry insiders as to the real costs and technical reliability. I'm skeptical, to put it mildly.
I'm confident of one thing though: sequestering huge quantities of a water soluble gas that doesn't condense above -78C strikes me as a lot harder than burying a relatively small amount of vitrified solid radioactive waste.
Billy: "very naive"? Moi? I think you've misunderstood. You can find the discussion (with Daniel Maris - a big renewable fan) here. After I had disputed his claims about this so-called "solution", he said "we'll see who's right". Here's my reply:
michael hart
I was not trying to advocate CCS, I was merely trying to get a figure for the cost of its futile installation hehe
Sir....as regards the four choices going forward...
1... New nuclear. The UK's nuclear plants are the oldest and smallest in the world.
You have debated this over the last few years and are the path to building anew. Good!
2... Natural gas. You have recently "found" frackible shale gas...lots of it. GO, Go, go..!
This will be an inexpensive source...go after it with a vengeance.
3... Coal w/CFCs. Drop spending any money, any! Let some fool spend time here.
4... Renewables. Drop, drop, DROP.... Way too unreliable, thus costly.
Advise from San Diego