Demand response

The Energy and Climate Change Committee are currently considering demand response, which is an interesting subject for those who quite like the idea of having energy when required rather than when permitted by the political classes. The hearing started a few moments ago and features:

• Duncan Burt, Head of Commercial Operations, System Operation, National Grid
• Phil Jones, Chief Executive, Northern Powergrid
• Sara Bell, Executive Director, UK Demand Response Association
• Yoav Zingher, Co-founder, KiWi Power (who make kit for demand management)
• Zoe Leader, Climate and Energy Specialist, WWF

(because you can't have any hearing at the ECC without a green on board). This is followed by a separate panel.

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IPPR does climate and energy

A reader brought to my attention a new report on climate and energy policy by Labour's favourite thinktank, the IPPR.

The report was funded by the European Climate Foundation, with a steering group including represenatatives of green NGOs like Greenpeace and renewable energy investors like BNEF. With a background like that, nobody would expect that the report would make lots of dodgy claims and thinly veiled demands for transfers of money to those involved, would they? Readers can make up their own minds, but here are a few things that I noticed:

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Renewables cannot sustain civilisation

The other day we were considering the concept of EROI, the amount of energy you get out of a given technology for the amount you have to put in. Specifically we were looking at the figures for solar PV in Spain.

With splendid timing, the Energy Collective has published a post considering EROI for the full gamut of energy technologies. At first glance the story looks not too bad, with wind and solar PV (so long as it's in a desert) above the minimum level of 7 that the article says is needed to sustain a modern society (breakeven EROI of 1 is not really worth the bother). The problem arises when you have to start storing all energy from renewables, which as their adherents suggest is the key to having them compete with fossil fuels.

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What is energy?

From the journal of the Economic Research Council comes this paper by John Constable of Renewable Energy Foundation fame. It considers the question of whether energy is just another factor input into the economy or whether it has a more fundamental role. The conclusion is that energy is different, the reason being found in the realms of thermodynamics:

...wealth is created by using energy to introduce improbable order into the world, in other words a reduction of entropy in one part of the system at the expense of a greater increase in entropy in another.

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Kelly on the engineering challenge

Mike Kelly sends details of a talk he gave last week to a symposium on "Energy Challenges and Mechanics".  Mike writes:

There were about 130 energy experts from 40 countries in the room.

I was heard in respectful (stunned?) silence, and there were two mildly critical questions out of a dozen that I was able to handle.

Several came up to be and congratulated me for the courage in speaking out against the consensus.

If you take a look at the slides (PDF below), you will see that there is nothing that would surprise readers at BH, but 130 more people learning that the renewables king has no clothes is good news indeed.

Kelly ECMA

Dixon's cunning plan

I spent yesterday evening at the Edinburgh Book Festival at a debate about the need for fracking featuring Richard Dixon, the head of Friends of the Earth Scotland and Zoe Shipton, a geologist from the University of Strathclyde. As always with these things one came away frustrated with the sheer brassneck of the environmentalist contingent.

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Belgium asks "Can I borrow your power cable?"

Reader "Wellers" writes with an update from Belgium on the energy crisis there.

Yesterday there was more bad news regarding the two 1GW power stations already shut down in Belgium. They are probably shut down for good.

Predictably, the Energy Minister has come on air to try to allay the public’s fears. He appears to have a “cunning plan”, as Baldrick would say. Here is a quick translation I made from today’s De Standaard newspaper:

“There is an extra power station, but the cable is missing”

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The cost of wind

An article in the Australian Financial Review takes issue with the Abbott government's plans to scale back subsidies for the renewables industry. The counterargument goes that renewables doesn't actually add very much to the cost of an electricity bill, but I was interested in the graphic that accompanied the article, which breaks down the typical Australian electricity bill.

As far as I can see, nearly every single component cost of the bill is increased by renewables.

• Conventional power stations are forced to ramp their output up and down to compensate for mometary drops in wind, making them much less efficient. Worse, if wind power is subsidised sufficiently to get a lot of turbines connected to the grid, the economics of conventional power stations can be sufficiently adverse to prevent any new investment in new power stations that would take advantage of price reductions in other forms of energy and would also bring more efficient and therefore cheaper power to consumers. In the UK, this has led to the capacity market, in which all market participants will be subsidised.
• Wind is a dispersed form of energy generations, requiring prodigious quantities of power lines to connect the turbines to the grid.

Only the costs of the retail end are not obviously inflated by renewables.

It would be interesting to know how much of the 52% represented by network costs is inflated by the need to connect wind turbines to the grid.

Belgium shows us the way

In the comments to the previous thread, reader Wellers points us to a story from Belgium that looks very much as if it will presage the situation in the UK over the next year or two.

Belgian energy company Electrabel said its Doel 4 nuclear reactor would stay offline at least until the end of this year after major damage to its turbine, with the cause confirmed as sabotage.

Unfortunately, several other Belgian reactors have been shut down for maintenance in recent months due to what may be a generic flaw in the design - this seems to be the same issue that affected  nuclear plant in the UK last week. The loss of Doel 4 therefore means that fully half of the country's nuclear capacity is offline. Doel 4 could be out for months, so guess what is going to happen.

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Another blackout up north

A blackout has hit Scotland, plunging 27,000 homes into the dark.

The power loss lasted for several hours before engineers managed to restore supplies.

Energy giant SSE said a transmission fault had been the cause of the power cut.

This is pretty interesting, coming so soon after another blackout took out over 100,000 Scottish homes back in April. Does anyone know if this kind of incident is expected to happen so frequently?

More capacity margin shrinkage

Several nuclear reactors have been forced to close down temporarily due to a fault identified during routine inspection of their boilers. Initial estimates are that it will take eight weeks to fix the affected plant in Heysham and Hartlepool.

If it takes much longer, the capacity margins for the winter will start to look very interesting indeed.

Which industries will Davey close first?

Sometimes it's hard to find words to express how one feels about the energy policy of the United Kingdom. Having hosed down the green crony capitalists with public money to enable them to rape the countryside by covering it in windmills, Mr Davey and his colleagues are developing a sort of Gosplan for the UK. This will enable them to work out which industries will be allowed to wither and die because they can't afford their power bills and which ones be hosed down with public money to keep them afloat. This being the era of "eyecatching initiatives", a public consultation is being held.

DECC said: “We welcome views from all interested stakeholders on the proposed eligibility criteria so that these schemes target the support where it is needed most, helping to secure and maintain critical industrial investment in the UK.”

Ed Davey: closing down the UK a little bit every day.

Fire in the galley

SSE's Ferrybridge C power station in Yorkshire is currently on fire. As this picture suggests, it's a big one.

There has been some speculation that it may have something to do with the renewables activities on the site. The main plant now cofires with biomass and there is a dedicated mixed-fuel power station on site too. However, word on Twitter is that the fire is actually in the flue gas desulphurisation plant which has been installed for two of the operating units in the main power station. If you look at Google Earth you can see the relevant part of the power station.

The more interesting aspect of the story is what it means for grid margins. Ferrybridge C has a 2GW capacity, which represents a substantial chunk of peak winter demand. There are reports of explosions on site at the moment, so heaven alone knows how long it will be out of action.

Better pray for a mild winter.

Update on Jul 31, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The Telegraph's Emily Gosden has just tweeted that restart by winter is unlikely.

Gulp.

Update on Jul 31, 2014 by Bishop Hill

A statement from SSE suggests that one of the generating units is out for the medium term:

Early indications show the fire itself started in unit 4 but also had some impact on Unit 3.  Currently we do not expect Unit 4 to return to service in this financial year.  Unit 3 is not expected to return to service before 1 November.

I guess 0.5GW down is better than 2GW down.

A hint of panic

While I was away, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee announced that it is to take a look at the question of "energy resilience". The terms of reference are here, and make for interesting reading. There is more than a little hint of "OMG, what has Ed Davey done?", with a leavening of "Maybe the boffins can save us". Needless to say, there's also reference to "We could get some more bureaucrats and hope we are no longer in office when the wheels come off".

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Expert commission

I'm back at my desk for a couple of days...

The Scottish Government has published the findings of an expert commission into how the energy market north of the border would work post-independence. Unlikely as that result might seem at the present time, the report makes for amusing reading.

The commission itself seems to be one of those bodies like the Russell or Stern reviews that was put together to lend credence to a pre-ordained result. If you take a look at the panel members you can see what I mean:

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