Coal keeps lights on at COP26 as low wind strikes again

[NNadir]

One need not comment much on this on this; it speaks for itself: Coal keeps lights on at COP26 as low wind strikes again

The UK’s failing renewable strategy is a national embarrassment. Critically low wind power, for nearly the whole of yesterday, resulted in extremely high prices, with the two remaining coal units at Drax offering to saving the day at £4,000/MWh, nearly 100 times the wholesale price normal before the current crisis started, with many other fossil fuel generators also riding to the rescue at staggering prices.

Indeed, yesterday, 3 November, saw a new record for the total daily cost of balancing the GB electricity grid. The previous record of £38 million, twenty times the current daily average, was smashed by a margin of £6 million, with the new record standing at £44.7m.

The causes are easy to identify from the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service’s own chart of the Transmission System fuel mix. Wind power, the dark blue bars, was extremely low for most of the day, with a minimum of only 1 GW, under 5% of its capacity...

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. Well, there's no inherent reason these fossil fuel-driven utilities HAVE to be allowed to get away

with flagrant price-gouging. There's no WAY their COSTS per electricity unit rose 100X.

So ... it's not just the 'renewable' part of the strategy that sucks.

[NNadir]

2. Redundant systems require two sets of O&M fixed costs.

These costs are there whether the plant is operating or it is shut down because the wind happens to be blowing enough for a few hours.

If the coal plant were not there, perhaps the COP26 meeting could be held by candlelight, using petroleum based waxes. Good idea?

The point of the remark however is NOT about money. It's about reliability.

The wind industry is not an alternative to coal power despite all the lies to the contrary about that being said here and elsewhere.

This is because the wind is not attached to energy demand; it blows whenever the fuck it feels like it.

It would laughable to assume that we should make all of our energy supplies entirely dependent on the weather at the precise time we are actively destabilizing the weather at an ever accelerating rate because we keep carrying on about how great so called "renewable energy" is were it not so tragic. The steel for those turbines, by the way, is made using coke made by heating coal with coal burning fires.

But look, don't worry, be happy. It's not like people who can afford a shit load of batteries made out of the slave labor of Congolese child miners are going to suffer.

It's poor people who will suffer, because the reactionary "wind energy will save us" fantasy's costs will fall on them.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. NNadir you don't have to ever refresh me on your basic arguments on this subject lol

I agree we should replace those coal plants with nukes, because as you say the sun doesn't shine 24/7 nor does the wind blow thusly.

However those are very expensive and take a long time to permit, etc.

In the interim, are these UK coal plants NOT burning less fossil fuels in totality due to the existence of these supplemental 'renewable' sources?

Is so much coke used to make the steel that wind power turns out to be a net negative in emissions during their life span, vs just burning coal to make the same amount of electricity?

Also not that I'm a fan of batteries in general but building them puts 1000's of non-Congolese child miners ... to work. IIRC one of the worlds biggest lithium operation is in S. America isn't it?

I think you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here to some extent my friend.

Lastly, the part that's an 'embarrassment' appears (per the article) to be ... the cost spikes, which is why I addressed that specific aspect. Obviously the power didn't shut off and there were no candles, so the 'renewable strategy' really only failed in an economic sense (for-profit businesses price-gouging).

And that seems to me more a failure of regulation than physics, or 'renewables' in general.

[NNadir]

6. You and I define "good" differently.

The so called "renewable energy's" LCA never makes reference to the LCA of the redundant systems. So there's that coke. On top of that there's all the copper to connect this junk and to build redundant generators with redundant magnets, redundant petroleum based insulators, etc., etc., etc.

These costs should be obvious, but still people carry on insipidly that wind energy is "cheap." It's cheap in a transitory fashion, when the wind is blowing. When the wind is not blowing it is prohibitively expensive, and in fact, quite deadly.

The idea that nuclear power plants are "too expensive" never accounts for the fact that the United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors in about 20 years while providing the lowest electricity prices in the world. A vast number of human lives, and medical costs associated with air pollution - never mind climate change - were saved as a result.

And then my generation of pampered consumers suddenly started a festival of selective attention as to what is safe and what is dangerous. This ignorant affectation killed people, over my life time more people than were killed in the Second World War from all causes, combat, bombing, starvation, genocide, what have you.

If you want to talk about a failure of regulation, one might start here. We are willing to spend, in appeals to stupidity and selective attention, millions upon millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, to imagine we are saving one or two lives from radiation, and are not willing to spend the same money to prevent the far worse and far more deadly, by six or seven orders of magnitude, deaths from climate change and air pollution, which occur regularly and consistently without stop.

For me there's no "good" in any of that.

You may focus on momentary prices that outrage you from the Drax powerplant as needing "regulation," but made no reference to the fact that the Drax power plant kills people whenever it operates normally. And since it must operate whenever the wind fails to blow, while these shithole turbines rot at sea doing nothing but accumulating costs, it follows that, to my mind, there is nothing "good" about it at all.

"Lithium" batteries depend on electrodes that are cobalt based, so it doesn't matter where lithium is mined; what matters is where cobalt is mined. Every month hundreds of papers are published in the scientific literature about lithium batteries and how to get around the ongoing requirement for cobalt, still the children dig in Congo for no or little pay. Lithium needs to be intercalated in these electrodes for the battery to operate; the only practical structures for doing this involve cobalt, manganese and nickel based alloy/oxide structures. (Similar strategies for sodium and even potassium batteries are an on going scientific quest, but basically, none of these research efforts has built a practical plant to build batteries to store energy, thus wasting energy.

The cost spikes at Drax don't fucking matter a bit in this context. It's small potatoes. I personally feel that the French should suck all the money it can out of Germany this winter, because Germany's contempt for addressing climate change hurts everyone on the fucking planet. They should pay. The real cost of energy is climate change because we've chosen to make nuclear energy expensive by destroying nuclear infrastructure, demonizing it, and holding to standards that no other form of energy can meet.

It is clear to anyone who can compare numbers that the 2nd derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change of concentration is rising. I monitor the numbers every damned week; they scare the shit out of me. The rate of new accumulations of carbon dioxide has risen, since the year 2000, as measured by running ten year week to week comparisons from 2.44 ppm per year as of the week beginning October 26, 2021 as compared 2.04 ppm/per year for the week beginning October 23, 2011, and 1.60 ppm/year for the week beginning October 20, 2001. (The data can be calculated from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory at the "Data" pages for weekly comparisons. I've pulled it off a spreadsheet I've prepared from this data reaching back to 1975.)

The whole damned time this was going on, I was hearing how "good" wind power was, and trillions of dollars were thrown at it in that period. I fail to see the "good." What I see is a waste of resources on a faith based effort to turn the whole damned world into 17th century Holland. It's reactionary horseshit.

I would suggest that you are making a rote illusion of the "good" into a defense of the indefensible.

There is nothing good about the wind industry. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Why? Because faith in it did nothing, nada, zilch, to address climate change. Faith in it merely made the destruction of the planetary atmosphere worse and resulted in making it worsen faster than ever.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

7. Again you don't have to spend all that time recounting all the points I've seen you make countless

times.

The ARTICLE you posted, at least the blurb you posted, addresses the 'strategy' being a failure due to the cost spikes, calling that a failure. Which is why my initial point addressed that.

I think it makes sense to supplement the existing coal power plants with wind so they burn less fuel, and I don't think the emissions cost of spinning up that wind power is greater than the amount of emissions from the coal plants that they REPLACE by their existence. If you're saying I'm wrong on that specific point, I'm open to looking at actual statistics.

The coal plants are there (and as you say, we NEED sources that can be spun up on short notice) but the nuclear plants are not and there's not plans for them, there may be no place anyone will let them be built, etc, etc, etc.

Ergo, burning LESS coal from those existing plants by creating a less-expensive (than nukes) and faster-to-spin-up-but-intermittent wind power system solution, in the UK ... makes sense to me.

It doesn't solve it, but if we end up burning less coal, more quickly, I guess I don't see what's such a failure about that. You don't have to repeat everything you've already said, I know your arguments. And I disagree on this point. As long as the wind power system is a net carbon-negative solution over its likely lifetime vs. burning the coal that'd be burned otherwise, it's HELPFUL, even if it's not the end-all be-all.

BTW, a LOT of the redundant stuff you complain about will also have to be done switching to nuclear, won't it?

[NNadir]

8. Well, I do make the same points over and over, and plan in the near future to give up writing...

Last edited Sun Nov 7, 2021, 10:38 AM - Edit history (1)

...very much here at DU, beyond a few fun things in the Lounge.

Writing about climate change and all this wind and solar faith here is a losing cause. We're mostly old people here at DU, and many of our minds, mine too, are ossified. I responded as I did, repeating myself, because I believe what I say, and you don't believe what I say.

This "burns less fuel" stuff fails to acknowledge the zeroth law of thermodynamics, the one about thermal equilibrium, and irrespective of whatever happens at Drax, the data I presented on the rate of change above contradicts that the destruction of wilderness all over the world for wind power industrial parks served by devices with diesel engines is a "good."

To me, it's not.

Mostly I write to fix things in my mind, but my mind doesn't have long to go since it is served by my old body.

I plan to use the time I waste here to compose some notes to my son to guide his career, to the extent he's interested in them. He claims he is.

[Finishline42]

4. High prices will just be another nail in the coffin

How many people will invest in a solar system with battery storage? A smart controller that pulls power from the cheapest source? Charge batteries either when the sun shines or off peak from the grid when it's the cheapest?

New nuclear is done. Too costly to build and operate and it's the government that insures against catastrophic failures (Chernobyl and Fukushima).

Beside where would you find the technological expertise needed to run them?

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. I'll let NNadir fill you in as to why what you're saying is insanity and won't work to solve ACC nt

[Ghost Dog]

9. Notwithstanding the above discussion, Scotland's

natural sources of non-polluting energy - hydro, ocean, wind - will enable the country to be a net exporter of energy once it has departed the Union with England and rejoined the EU.

It is England that needs to go nuclear.

[Finishline42]

10. RE: England going nuclear

Hinkley Point C is under construction. Due to come on line in 2026 (or so).

The deal he refers to is the so-called Strike Price for Hinkley C's electricity. Also in 2016, the British government fixed that price at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh). The price rises with inflation and has now reached £106/MWh.

Back then, the equivalent price for electricity from offshore windfarms was well over £120/MWh. But wind costs have fallen fast. Today new wind projects are fixed at about £50/MWh, well under half the price of Hinkley power.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-58724732

It's the problem with nuclear - it's more expensive to operate existing nuclear plants than it is to build new wind and solar.

[Ghost Dog]

12. Yes. For this reason I recommend developing small nuclear

plant, I've heard there's some English R&D, along the lines China is developing, thorium-fuelled.

Small distributed nuclear - > faster, lower cost implementation and decommissioning + increased safety.

[Finishline42]

14. But what will it cost?

How much will the fuel cost?

Just what we need - suitcase nukes on every corner.

Just last year England went months without using coal at all.

[Ghost Dog]

15. See Rolls-Royce:

... Each £2bn reactor is expected to have a generation capacity of 470MW, enough to power 1.3m UK homes. The company hopes to build five by 2031, and then another eleven in the years that follow...

... Ministers say that the new generation of small nuclear reactors will be quicker and cheaper to build than traditional large-scale nuclear reactors. Tom Samson, CEO, Rolls-Royce SMR, said: “Rolls-Royce SMR has been established to deliver a low cost, deployable, scalable and investable programme of new nuclear power plants. “Our transformative approach to delivering nuclear power, based on predictable factory-built components, is unique and the nuclear technology is proven. Investors see a tremendous opportunity to decarbonise the UK through stable baseload nuclear power.”...

https://nation.cymru/news/nuclear-set-to-return-to-wylfa-and-trawsfynydd-as-rolls-royce-secures-funding-for-mini-reactors/

[Finishline42]

17. From your linked article

Rolls-Royce has previously said that there was a “pretty high probability” Trawsfynydd could house the first reactor by the early 2030s.

So at least 10 years away... so what do we do in the meantime?

Again the question is at what cost to the consumer?

The secondary theme of this OP was the high cost to provide electricity when the winds didn't blow but as I showed in a similar post, the power from the Hinkley Point C plant will be double the current cost of off shore wind (BTW, it wasn't initially but over time wind and solar will get cheaper and better thru manufacturing improvements and innovation).

Another interesting quote from your article

Investors see a tremendous opportunity to decarbonise the UK through stable baseload nuclear power.

IMO, the problem with investor owned nuclear power plants is that at some point a bean counter is going to start making decisions on where to cut the budget to increase the return to the 'investors' and it will once again prove the adage - privatize the profits, socialize the loses.

[NNadir]

11. The extent to which Scotland relies on wind is the extent to which it will always be dependent...

...on dumping the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the planetary atmosphere.

The wind isn't blowing anywhere in the UK right now. The Germans have a word for this situation - Dunkelflaute - and I have quantitatively, downloading CAISO *.csv files, a couple of weeks worth data on California's Dunkelflaute event in the weeks before the equinox. As I wind down my tenure here, I may post it.

Over a period of weeks, two small buildings in California, the beautiful Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on a twelve acre footprint surrounded by 700 acres of virgin Chaparral, was routinely and consistently producing more energy than over a thousand square miles of desert and mountain wind industrial parks.

Predictably, because we live in age of the celebration of ignorance, it is the Diablo Canyon plant that will shut and not the vast distributed trash laced across California.

If the Independent Scots wish to destroy their aquatic ecosystems, jacking up microplastics and other shit in them, to provide tidal energy - after half a century of wild cheering all over the world, it remains a completely useless and worthless and trivial form of energy - that will be their business. It won't be "green." Just as is the case with wind power, destroying wilderness, including aquatic wilderness, to make industrial parks to provide diffuse and unreliable energy will be a crime against the future.

Hydro is slightly less obnoxious than wind, tidal, and solar, but it always amuses me that the Sierra club was founded by John Muir to prevent the destruction of wilderness - in this case the Hetch Hetchy valley, a battle he lost - to construct a dam. The current membership, who diligently drive their electric SUV's to the mall to buy their Sierra Club Calendars - have never seen an offshore landscape that they don't want to tear apart with diesel barges hauling carbon dioxide intensive concrete, to convert into an industrial park that will be landfill (or sea fill) in 25 years, nor have they ever seen a mountain top that has been torn pieces for service roads to industrial parks for wind turbines of which they don't approve. Probably these modern oblivious bourgeois types, unlike their founder, will never see a dam they don't like. Maybe like David Brower, they can trade the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon, I don't know.

However, returning to California, even dams are unreliable sources of energy, because after all they depend on weather, weather that is being destabilized by climate change because cheering for so called "renewable energy" has failed miserably to address climate change.

If Independent Scotland built a few reactors along the coast, either in our out of the EU or Britain, they could dispense with all this worthless garbage and have completely carbon dioxide free electricity. If they build high temperature reactors to do what Calder Hall was designed to do, albeit in a time of primitive materials science, and make fuels, they can be totally independent for all forms of energy to do this.

Some countries in the EU are climate disasters, in particular Germany, and don't get it at all. They have decided that "nuclear energy is too dangerous," the obvious corollary being that "climate change is not too dangerous."

The EU, like everyone else on the planet, should ask which killed more people this year, nuclear energy or climate change?

[hunter]

13. Scotland has ample supplies of natural gas to support its renewable energy fantasies.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/vision-scotlands-electricity-gas-networks-2030/pages/6/

[Ghost Dog]

16. That too.

But fossil hydrocarbons would be better used for other, more sophisticated, purposes.