Well the Portuguese have managed to hit 100 percent supply a few times in the past. They have wind farms everywhere and are one of the leaders in the field. It just shows that it can be done and when you factor in all those people with solar panels that supply the grid with their excess one can see the potential.
Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping one per cent of EU energy
The colossal, hugely expensive windfarms that are spread across huge areas of Europe's land and sea, which are projected to drive up household energy bills by more than 50 per cent in coming years, have achieved ... almost nothing in terms of reducing EU carbon emissions. We here on the Reg energy desk only noticed this …
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Monday 27th July 2015 13:35 GMT Androgynous Cupboard
Things windmills are bad at
Things windmills are bad at:
* Reducing CO2 emissions from fuel burnt for heating
* Ball games
* They are unable to read sheet music
* Holding doors open for ladies
* Leaving dishes to soak and then forgetting to wash them up.
I could go on, but the point is they're just a waste of time.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 07:36 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: optomistic
>>"Hardly "creative accounting". The claim was 8% of electricity, not 8% of total energy use; perfectly accurate, and not at misleading"
In the context of this article, no it's not misleading because this article is clear about the difference. However, look at the sort of press-releases it is in response to. The contributions of wind power are not put in any sort of proper context and presented as having a whopping effect on reducing CO2 and fossil fuel usage. And I have been in debates with plenty of people who are more than happy to conflate the two to make wind power look better. I recall a few months ago someone claiming how Germany is now a net exporter of energy and linking to electricity figures.
Never mind that even if Germany were, it would still be a grossly inefficient approach to it made sustainable only by subsidies.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 10:21 GMT Sirius Lee
Re: optomistic
It's misleading, Tony72, because the article (go read it) is titled "2014 JRC wind status report". It is the choice of the report authors to focus the comparison on electricity use - presumably because the comparison is more favourable. Wind power (along with other renewables), as Page says, is about replacing ALL our energy needs that are based on consuming fossil fuels not just one segment of our energy use. If you are jumping to complain about Page's less favourable comparison why not also attack the authors choice to fail to provide their own less favourable comparison. This is the kind reporting shenanigans that give the renewables lobby the terrible name.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 09:02 GMT 9Rune5
Hydro
"Hydro is one renewable, and at least one hydro station in the UK, Cruachan, has black start capability,. Norway almost certainly has more"
I am not sure where you are going with this?
Hydroelectrical power is brilliant. However, Norway was designed by a guy named Slartibartfast. Awardwinning work for sure, but it left the entire country with a topology perfect to build cheap hydroelectrical dams all over the place.
It is hardly a solution that will fit well in other countries. In addition, the construction of these facilities has a profound impact on local wildlife. A Fukushima-style nuclear spill will look like a walk in the park in comparison.
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Sunday 9th August 2015 12:28 GMT Spotthelemon
Scotland produces of that order (49.8% in 2014) of the electricity it uses from renewables with production capacity at 7383MW
"Onshore wind generated almost two thirds of all renewable electricity output in Scotland.
Hydro power contributed over a quarter of renewable electricity output, and while other technologies such as biomass and marine energy currently make a smaller contribution"
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Monday 27th July 2015 12:36 GMT Tony S
I don't know about Portugal; but I heard someone talking about Spain and how they were achieving 68% of their supply from wind.
Only that wasn't true; the figure was 56% and that was for about 1 hour during a major storm some years ago. On average, it's less than half of that and at times, it's less than 10%.
I'm all for reducing reliance on gas and oil; and I'm in favour of renewable technology. But it does seem that there are a lot of claims being made that don't actually stand up to close scrutiny; and especially being made by people that have an agenda to promote these products.
They actually do themselves and the technology a grave disservice; by over promising, it makes the failure to deliver on a consistent basis, seem much worse than it ought.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 04:32 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Spanish flies.
I'm impressed that Spain had learned how to build a set of windmills and use half of them in a storm. That is remarkable engineering.
FYI in Britain inclement cold weather is related to increased volcanic activity. A bête noire. I not only hate the cold the weather but the charts inevitably bugger about. If you would like to know how to interpret them, ask and ye shall receive. (But ask loudly I listen quietly.)
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 16:31 GMT enormous c word
Renewable / Sustainables Scam
Unfortunately, the whole renewables / sustainable energy thing was obviously a scam from the start. Starting from the 1970's, environmentalists have gone from one hysterical theory to another by looking too narrowly at data taken from too short a time-scale.
In my life time, we have been about to enter into a new Ice Age, then more recently Man Made Global Warming (later re-branded as Global Warming once it was realised that man had little effect, then more recently re-branded as Climate-Change). The environmentalist scare-mongering was seized upon by academics seeking research-grants, then politicians to control populations with rising se level nonsense, then industrialists saw an opportunity to introduce disruptive technologies and charge premium rates for them before the facts came in and the trough of money emptied.
Burning oil / coal / gas is clearly wasteful (once its gone its gone for good) but a 1.5% reduction of non-renewable energy consumption is dire. Nuclear-energy looks like being humanities only recourse - if the environmentalists hadn't been so successful in moving away from Nuclear to wind/sun, we would be a lot closer to clean nuclear energy today.
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Monday 27th July 2015 12:39 GMT Mad Mike
The problem is, wind energy is not reliable. Neither is solar, although there's always some unlike wind. Any source that cannot produce electricity on demand and reliably needs another source of generation to back it up. This is the major problem with these technologies. Gas power stations are the normal source of backup, but that effectively means you have to install generation twice. And one, the backup, is only used very occasionally making them uneconomic.
In the UK, when we get a period of really cold weather, it is normally associated with a lull in the wind. Think back to the last few times and think how much wind was blowing. Just when the weather is coldest and we need power the most, wind power is generating close to nothing. When we need it less, it's generating like a good 'un. But, that's no good. It's really lucky that in the UK we still predominantly use gas for heating, as otherwise the number of people dying through cold would be much larger.
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Monday 27th July 2015 14:09 GMT TheOtherHobbes
>The problem is, wind energy is not reliable.
No, that's story-telling and hand waving about a topic you clearly don't understand. It's like complaining that high-level languages can't possibly work because compilers just aren't clever enough to output clean code.
Firstly, offshore really isn't that intermittent. Secondly on-shore isn't built where your semi is in the middle of the city. It's built in - you know - areas where the wind blows. Because building it where your semi is would be really stupid.
Clever people do a lot of modelling and statistical estimation of potential sites, and bankers won't fund projects if the numbers don't work out,
Because the numbers are conservative - those bankers have their uses - wind reliably outperforms the estimates.
Finally, we have this thing called a National Grid, which means - here comes the clever part - that it's possible to move electricity from where it's generated to where it's needed.
Now, as for energy generation - there's been relentless hostility to renewables from the fossil dinosaurs for decades now. They really, really hate the fact that they're not going to able to keep holding everyone to ransom with fossils. (If you think wind is unreliable, why not rely on Russian gas instead? Genius...) So offshore wind build out is some tiny percentage of what it could be.
In spite of this - more than 8% across the EU. That's an incredible achievement, and well above most predictions.
And longer term - do you think we should burn oil to keep warm, or should we keep it for useful things, like plastics?
Elon Musk is betting the farm on electric travel being the future, and if he had to go brain to brain against Lewis Page in an IQ battle, I know who I'd be betting on.
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Monday 27th July 2015 14:32 GMT Mad Mike
@TheOtherHobbes.
Spot the man who doesn't work in the 'industry'. Essentially wind farms are allowed to produce as much as possible whenever possible and often other power sources (such as gas power stations) are turned off to allow this. In some cases, wind farms have to be stopped as oversupply is too great. Strangely, they get paid to turn their turbines off!!
However, even if it only happens once a year, you have to have backup capacity for them in the event of a lull. Look at the wind generation over the last few cold snaps in the UK and you'll see this. Doesn't matter if it happens once or a hundred times.....you still need it. And that's the problem. If you look at the stats, you'll also see that the power produced is really quite variable and the band is quite large.
Everything is stacked towards making wind farms look good, but the important thing is ability to reliabily produce electricity when it is required and due to the variability of the wind, wind farms will always have a problem there. One solution to the issue, which national grid are looking it and implementing, is to pay large users to shutdown during periods of low wind and therefore low generaiton. However, they normally want a pretty big 'bonus' for doing this, so economically, it's really stupid. It is done in gas mind, to cover for periods of low gas reserves and high consumption.
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Monday 27th July 2015 14:35 GMT Mad Mike
@TheOtherHobbes.
"Elon Musk is betting the farm on electric travel being the future, and if he had to go brain to brain against Lewis Page in an IQ battle, I know who I'd be betting on."
Just because he did something good once, doesn't make him Einstein. Unless you've met both people and spoken with them, the above comment is really silly.
In the end, fossil fuels will run out and cars will have to run on electricity. However, that doesn't mean that batteries are the answer, which is pretty much all the main manufacturers are looking at. Some are looking at hydrogen, but not many. Batteries as a means to store power on a large scale or for things like cars are really stupid. Battery cars will never make it mainstream as they are simply impractical. Electric cars which use another power source, which is converted to electricity; now that's another story.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 07:54 GMT h4rm0ny
>>I'm interested to know what that mythical 'other source' is
It's called hydrogen fuel cells and Toyota have a commercially available family car that uses one right now, so you have a funny definition of 'mythical'. Lot of London busses run on HFC as well. It's far more energy dense than any battery ever produced or likely to be any time soon. And the exhaust is water vapour.
Hydrogen can also be produced cleanly with electricity and hot water - something nuclear powerstations have in abundance. So you have power generated by nuclear and you can do it efficiently because you use the troughs in demand to produce the hydrogen as a storage mechanism for energy. Nuclear power is most efficient run at a steady output so they're a perfect compliment. And you get cars that are clean, lighter than battery equivalents, have greater range and use existing petrol infrastructure with the relatively simple addition to the station of a new pump and accompanying tank.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 15:55 GMT Alan Brown
"Hydrogen can also be produced cleanly with electricity and hot water "
Making hydrogen is easy - and best done where needed.
HFCs are straightforward
Storing the stuff safely under pressure in an automotive environment with equipment which will last at least a decade in service is a task of materials engineering that we can't do yet.
Metal hydrides have been "promising" for the last 30 years but they cost too much.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 14:19 GMT Mad Mike
@JamesHughes1.
The most obvious 'other source' is hydrogen, hence why I mentioned it. You can refill a car very quickly (basically the same as petrol or diesel) and then carry on, unlike waiting hours to recharge.
750k is a niche market in terms of automobile. There are always some uses, but you need something that can replace the umpteen tens of millions of cars rather than a handful. Milk deliveries were a great example where battery power was possible as range only had to be small. However, that is not true of the mainstream, where range and refueling is a big issue, hence it being stuck as a niche.
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Monday 27th July 2015 16:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Battery cars are impractical
"Battery cars will never make it mainstream as they are simply impractical. "
Impractical *for what*, sir?
Do some numbers and you'll find that for the 2nd car in an N-car household, which only ever does the school run, the supermarket run and such like they're eminently practical. Not so practical if you're a Yodel/Uber driver or a techy road warrior. Somewhere in between is a dividing line which moves as battery technology improves.
The snag with that picture is that by definition these are low mileage journeys. Low mileage journeys tend not to use much energy in the bigger picture, although they do account for a disproportionate amount of pollution. So this isn't an obvious winner if you consider energy and pollution separately, as is typically done. Look at the bigger picture and it makes more sense to change.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 07:22 GMT Arisia
Re: Battery cars are impractical
Actually it's not quite right that the main use is the urban shopping trolley. The most effective use of the current generation of EVs, e.g. Nissan LEAF, is as a commuter car. They can pay for themselves with the fuel savings.
The average LEAF does 40% more miles per year than the average petrol or diesel. This I think was unexpected by the manufacturers.
http://www.newsroom.nissan-europe.com/uk/en-gb/Media/Media.aspx?mediaid=128282
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 15:52 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Battery cars are impractical
"The most effective use of the current generation of EVs, e.g. Nissan LEAF, is as a commuter car. They can pay for themselves with the fuel savings."
No real surprise: This is the same reason I used a little french diesel crapbox (Pug 106) as my daily beater over the 2 litre japanese large family car.
The pug ended up getting twice the annual miles the Nissan did.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 14:24 GMT Mad Mike
Re: Battery cars are impractical
@AC
"Do some numbers and you'll find that for the 2nd car in an N-car household, which only ever does the school run, the supermarket run and such like they're eminently practical. Not so practical if you're a Yodel/Uber driver or a techy road warrior. Somewhere in between is a dividing line which moves as battery technology improves."
2nd car for a family could be practical, but the maths still eludes. You need to charge all the cars in a street, almost certainly overnight. Local power grids are simply not designed to supply that much power, certainly in the UK anyway. Unless you're ready to rewire every city, town and village in the land, anything more than a token number of electric cars in a street will either result in an overload of the local grid, or severe restrictions on when you can recharge them. Either way, not really practical.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 16:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Battery cars are impractical
"anything more than a token number of electric cars in a street will either result in an overload of the local grid"
Where do you get this idea? I'm interested.
It's not the number of cars that matters, it's their accumulated energy demand from the Grid that matters.
As a very very rough indicator, if you drive one car for half an hour on the school/shopping/commuter run and have a 3kW charger at home it'll take maybe half an hour to recharge, assuming it hasn't already been fast-charged at the supermarket or wherever. Various manufacturers figures are around this scale, though actually I've tried to be a bit conservative here.
Feel free to correct my numbers and logic if you have better options.
One car, wanting one and a half kWh of off peak electricity each night for each half hour it's been driven during the day.
Optionally add a small proportion of slightly longer distance journeys. They won't be *long* journeys in an electric car. Range anxiety(tm) and all that.
If the weather's horrible (hot, cold) there may be heating or aircon in the picture. Lights and so on. Add a bit for them if you wish.
Now scale it up to lots of cars which are all used every day (doesn't really matter whether they are or aren't in the same street).
You'll still find that's a tiny fraction of what domestic Economy Seven users used to want (and get) overnight for their storage heaters and hot water. The transmission and distribution networks didn't collapse because of Economy Seven back then. They wouldn't collapse now either. People were (and still are) offered cheaper electricity overnight.
Note also that the same reasoning demonstrates why there's no issue with overnight generation capacity.
The generation and distribution impact might be more significant if you had 50% of the households doing hundred mile round trips each day. That's not happening in the foreseeable future.
Somewhere in between the usage starts to be noticeable. But not for a long time yet.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 20:01 GMT Mad Mike
Re: Battery cars are impractical
"Where do you get this idea? I'm interested.
It's not the number of cars that matters, it's their accumulated energy demand from the Grid that matters."
You are correct in that it is the accumulated energy demand. But, it is much greater than you think. The local grid problem is well known within the industry and there have been various companies trying to provide solutions, but nothing that I'm aware of at the moment. One answer is local generation, but at the moment, this isn't really practical and tends to be more available when you're least likely to be charging the car.
What you need to think of is the number of houses (and therefore second cars) on a local loop, which in most cases will comprise of three phases. This loop needs to be sized to take the maximum possible draw from the cars at any point in time. Although it varies from place to place,in many areas, this is way beyond the capacity of the loop. Then, you also need to consider the next stage up. The local substation has to be supplied with enough energy for all its loops. Again,this would in many cases involve substantial upgrades.
Due to the costs involved, cables are normally not that oversized and so the margin from current peak load isn't that great. Bear in mind what the current maximum load from a typical house is. Not a lot compared to the charging requirements of a car.
On top of this you have to consider some other cases, such as flats, where the number of cars is much greater and the current maximum load is much smaller. Everyone in the industry knows that widespread adoption of electric cars at the moment (even as second cars) would cause all sorts of major issues.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 21:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Battery cars are impractical
"Everyone in the industry knows that widespread adoption of electric cars at the moment (even as second cars) would cause all sorts of major issues."
Really? Is there somewhere I can read about it or is it hush hush?
Show me some numbers and some logic (not just unquantified words), similar to what I've got below, and I'm ready to be convinced, honest.
"Bear in mind what the current maximum load from a typical house is. Not a lot compared to the charging requirements of a car." (and the rest).
I have borne it in mind thanks :) That's why I chose Economy 7 domestic heating compared with a standard 3kW plug-in (not fast) charger. I don't know what car charger you're thinking of when you say "the current maximum load from a typical house is not a lot compared to the charging requirements of a car".
I accept E7 heating is no longer typical, but it'll be a long time before homes with car chargers (fast or plug-in) are typical. If we're talking long term planning rather than an immediate issue, just say so.
So, with with numbers and logic, why is E7 heating vs plug-in (3kW) car charger not a fair comparison? I've shown you my arithmetic, can anyone show me what it should look like instead?
I'm told that parts of the local LV/MV network in the UK have an investment vs capacity problem, not least due to increased housing density without corresponding distribution upgrades, and that to avoid the symptoms showing in the short term, local top-up feed-in (e.g. from diesels, occasionally from pilots of grid-scale battery powered grid-connectable inverters) is being used in some areas. That's hopefully a separate issue, albeit related.
Details:
Consider a home with E7 for heat and hot water: say 3 storage heaters at 3kW plus hot water at 3kW. Round numbers, call it 10kw per E7 house, potentially consuming 10kW throughout the E7 window if the weather's cold. IE 70kWh over 7 hours. Outside the areas with short term problems, are you saying the grid can no longer cope with this E7 demand?
Compare with 3kW plug-in electric car charger.
E7 heating can (presumably) work with a 10kW load throughout the E7 period, why doesn't the car charger with a 3kW load for an hour or two during the E7 period also work?
What am I missing?
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Wednesday 29th July 2015 13:30 GMT Mad Mike
Re: Battery cars are impractical
@AC
"Really? Is there somewhere I can read about it or is it hush hush?"
It's not hush hush at all and is well known in the industry. The following link talks about one such initiative, which involves working out who should get the available electricity and how to charge as many cars as possible to the greatest extent possible.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524866/the-coming-problem-with-electric-cars-how-to-charge-them-all/
However, you will also note they don't think it will necessarily work, as it requires people to have predictable journeys. Might be OK for some, but not for many. This also talks mostly about power supply rather than distribution, but the same sorts of ideas are being used for distribution. Accept you can't charge all the cars fully, so you try and determine what each car needs for the next days driving.
You choose you use Economy 7 heating as a comparitive load, but fail to realise that most local loops never allowed for widespread installtion of Economy 7!! If every house on a local loop had Economy 7 installed, you would get the same problem!! Economy 7 was a relative fad for a while and was generally installed across estates, where the local loop was beefed up to allow for it, but this was a very small amount of the housing stock, so doesn't apply to most houses/flats.
I agree that where Economy 7 was allowed for in the original local loop, then provided you don't want to use a fast charger, you should be OK. However, this isn't a typical local loop install.
I suggest you do some searching on google and there are plenty of articles dealing with this sort of problem. This is especially true of some areas of London where there is no ability to get more power into whole areas, let alone streets or individual houses. Big business in London is beginning to feel this.
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Monday 27th July 2015 18:19 GMT honkhonk34
I'm genuinely confused here...
You're suggesting that battery powered cars aren't viable long term, right?
But Hydrogen might be okay, except only a few people are looking at it..
Question: Which kind of hydrogen system are you talking about?
Do you mean hydrogen cells or hydrogen combustion engines? these are reasonably different systems. Hydrogen cells are batteries (with all the implied dangers of a battery) insofar as chemical to electrical energy storage is concerned. Hydrogen combustion engines have a lot going for them (like their similarity to a traditional combustion engine) but also involve storing a highly combustible element in much greater concentration, even compared with petrol or diesel.
I think battery technology is a field which still has a long way to progress. Until the full utility of a technology is required, there's no push for it to be reached; in the last 15 years the importance of the battery has sky rocketed, but it still takes time to develop functional market ready products which can achieve the requirements we have now.
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Monday 27th July 2015 23:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hydrogen
Hydrogen in commercial quantities is made from Natural Gas using steam reformation, a process that releases 4 tonnes of CO2 for every 1 tonne of Hydrogen.
Extracting hydrogen from water is still a developing art. Humans need to perfect that process and roll it out on a massive scale, not to mention crack the carbonized coconut or similar hydrogen storage technology, then and only then start thinking about 'The Hydrogen Economy'.
Program schedules with 'magic happens here' are daft.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 11:11 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: Hydrogen
>>"Extracting hydrogen from water is still a developing art."
Well pretty much all tech is still developing - there's very little that is completely matured short of the wheel and fire. But no, it's not difficult and we can do it fine. The reason it's still made from natural gas is that this is cheaper. Just like running a car from petrol is cheaper than batteries. But we can make it from clean sources just fine so the correct comparison is how it compares to batteries, to which the answer is it's better.
You are also either being disingenuous or just repeating anti-hydrogen soundbites with your "4 tonnes of CO2 for every 1 tonne of hydrogen". That's meaningless without comparing it to actual energy densities. It is sad that proponents of battery powered cars would rather attack a fellow clean energy approach than be pleased by it. But then I suppose it's seen a rival and if you support "batteries" rather than "clean energy" then I suppose it must be hated as it's a threat to battery-powered cars in a way that fossil fuel isn't - competing on its own "clean energy" turf, as it were.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 07:58 GMT h4rm0ny
>>Hydrogen cells are batteries
Wrong in both technical terms AND in layspeak. Hydrogen Fuel Cells are not batteries.
A battery is something you charge up with electricity and then you discharge it over time. Even lay people understand that a battery is something charged with electricity.
A hydrogen fuel cell is connected to a tank of hydrogen. The hydrogen is reacted with oxygen to produce energy and the resulting water vapour is expelled. Have you ever seen a battery that you plug a hydrogen tube into and watched it give out steam from the reaction? No, because that's not what a battery does.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 12:52 GMT Alan Brown
"But Hydrogen might be okay, except only a few people are looking at it.."
Hydrogen is _hard_. It's highly reactive and makes just about everything you use to store it, brittle.
The best way to use hydrogen as a transport fuel is to bind it to carbon atoms. There are more hydrogen atoms in a litre of petrol than in a litre of liquid hydrogen and we already have pretty good infrastructure for handling the stuff (if you're going to make synfuel then you'd probably make a form of kerosene and burn it in diesel engines. This would have low contamination and high conversion efficiency in terms of particulate output being almost null - it's the long chain stuff which is problematic)
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 14:28 GMT Mad Mike
@honkhonk34.
Hydrogen cells aren't batteries. They generate electricity from hydrogen, giving out water. They're pretty advanced now. The bigger issue is storing the hydrogen in big enough quantities, although they're getting there. Either hydrogen cells of direct burning of the hydrogen is possible, as both are equally clean (broadly). However, the hydrogen cell is more efficient and has the advange than any electrically driven car could loose much of the power train and become much more reliable and simpler.
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Monday 27th July 2015 16:34 GMT M7S
Re: Elon Musk is betting the farm on electric travel being the future
He is indeed and I'll probably buy into that vision in due course as prices fall and ranges rise.
How on earth does that relate to wind power, or perhaps I've missed where a spinnaker folded in the boot is the range extending option?
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Monday 27th July 2015 18:04 GMT Cynic_999
"
>The problem is, wind energy is not reliable.
No, that's story-telling and hand waving about a topic you clearly don't understand. It's like complaining that high-level languages can't possibly work because compilers just aren't clever enough to output clean code.
Firstly, offshore really isn't that intermittent. Secondly on-shore isn't built where your semi is in the middle of the city. It's built in - you know - areas where the wind blows. Because building it where your semi is would be really stupid.
"
Do you know what a synoptic chart is? Do you know how to interpret them? If you have look at such charts reasonably regularly as I do, you will have seen many occasions where there really is very little wind over at least 75% of the UK, and that can be the case for a week or more. Also, it is all very well to state that electricity can be transmitted via the National Grid, but the grid is not robust enough to supply all of (say) the power requirements of Southern England from power sources in Scotland. It was designed for reasonably distributed generation and would not handle the currents of having most of the generation situated in a localised area.
So on the days when there really is little wind over almost the entire country, you would either have to have to have a way to store huge amounts of energy to tide us over the lull, or you would have to have on-demand power stations that are capable of supplying our entire electrical need. Energy storage to that extent is simply not practical, and having large capacity conventional power stations that sit idle for 60% of the time or more is uneconomic.
Of all the "natural" energy sources, in my opinion tidal energy is the most practical because it is 100% reliable, but making use of it is difficult and costly. As the article states, the one and only solution today is nuclear energy which we have stupidly vetoed by exaggerating its risks out of all proportion to reality. Nuclear energy has seen less deaths per TWh *both actual and projected* than either wind or solar energy.
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Monday 27th July 2015 18:24 GMT Tomato42
"Even taking into account increased instances of radiation-induced cancer that aren't noticed until nearly half a century later?"
yes, including those
it's not hard, as radiation-induced cancer accounts for less than 1% of non-thyroid cancer incidence from stuff like Chernobyl
more people are dying of cancer because we live long enough to die of cancer, not because there is radioactive stuff everywhere
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Monday 27th July 2015 22:47 GMT Alan Brown
"Even taking into account increased instances of radiation-induced cancer that aren't noticed until nearly half a century later?"
For all statistical purposes, they simply don't happen.
Radiation exposure tends to kill you relatively quickly or not kill you at all. The bigger issue is poisoning from radiation breakdown products (beryllium is a nasty carcinogen as a for-instance) and heavy metal poisoning from things like uranium 238 - which isn't radioactive to speak of, but is an environmental toxin.
Being exposed to radioactive isotopes doesn't mean you _will_ get cancer. It raises the risks - you might go from a 1 in 1,000,000 risk to a 1 in 500,000 risk as a for-instance (which gets "doubles the risk of cancer" scarelines.) Bear in mind that cancer levels in Nagasaki and Hiroshima are 2% above "normal", whilst down the road at Minamata Bay it's about 25% higher thanks to organic mercury compounds in the seawater.
Pressurised water reactors have a "sweet spot" at 7-10MW electrical power generation (which is hardly surprising, as that's what the original research was aimed at for submarines). Scaling them up to 1400MW is bad news, but they're still safer than every other form of electricity generation and produce less waste than coal ever will. That said, there are safer methods which aren't pressurised and don't use metals which catch fire on expsoure to air, or graphite cores.
An anecdote to amuse: There was a nasty cluster of cancers amogst workers in the old Rutherford laboratories at Oxford. The labs were cleared out and gone over with a fine-tooth comb to fine what residual radioactives might be causing this. Nothing was found, so they virtually tore the place apart trying to find them eventually finding the cause - which was nothing radioactive at all. A long time before Rutherford even set foot in the labs they were used for chemistry research and mercury from broken thermometers had found its way into the floorboards, oxidising and forming nasty carcinogenic organic compounds.
This risk is well understood and looked for in chemistry departments, but because "Radiation" might have been the cause, everyone was blinded to looking for anything other than a radioactive cause.
last week someone posted pictures of deformed daisies around Fukushima as "evidence" of radiation poisoning. Never mind that the species in question is well-known for producing odd shapes all the time without any radiation exposure, somehow these particular ones are a direct result of non-existent radioactive contamination simply because they're in the area.
The USA let off a large number of atmospheric tests in the 1950s, many of which produced substantial fallout downwind because they were fired too close to the ground. The statistical increase in cancers in those areas is about 5% over "normal". This is down in the noise as changes like that are seen all over the world without radiation exposure (the highest spikes are downwind of coal burning plants and they're more statistically obvious). Areas around US military nuclear installations are bad news requiring superfund cleanups, but that's the military all over. Civilian installations have been very clean.
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Monday 27th July 2015 18:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
the one and only solution today is nuclear energy
Don't spoil an otherwise well-reasoned post with loose words like that.
Nuclear energy might have been a plausible solution if we'd started a pilot programme maybe ten years ago. For reasons now irrelevant, that didn't happen. Consequently nuclear is not a solution today. Its inevitable long lead times (even with all the luck in the world) mean it can't be an answer in the short term, and its medium term relevance will continue to be debatable unless the industry can get its own act together and get a few things right, ideally leading to an installation delivered on time and on budget. What kind of odds do you think you'd get on that down the betting shop?
E.g., the current round of UK nuclear applicants can't even get their safety documentation right before submitting it to the regulators. E.g.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Second-regulatory-issue-raised-with-UK-ABWR-17071501.html 17 Jul 2015
"UK regulators have asked Hitachi-GE to address a series of "shortfalls" in the probabilistic safety analysis (PSA) of its Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). The request takes the form of a Regulatory Issue, which is the second in as many months in the generic design assessment (GDA) of the reactor for its use in the UK."
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""Overall, the UK ABWR PSA information received so far does not provide ONR with confidence that Hitachi-GE, without further work and changes, will be able to deliver a modern standards full-scope PSA for the UK ABWR, which is suitable and sufficient for ONR to carry out a meaningful assessment within the project timescales," ONR said. "This is considered a serious regulatory shortfall which ONR, in line with our Guidance to Requesting Parties, is now escalating to a Regulatory Issue.""
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"In its response to ONR, which the regulator also published yesterday, Hitachi-GE said it acknowledged that the PSA submissions it made in December did not meet UK regulatory expectations. As a consequence, the company said it must "develop a revised approach in line with UK good practice, in order to build the UK regulator's confidence in our ability to deliver a suitable and sufficient full-scope, modern standards PSA by June 2016."
Hitachi-GE stressed that the design process used in the development of the Japanese ABWR reference plant is "rigorous" and that the company is confident it will demonstrate that the proposed UK ABWR generic design is safe and will meet UK environmental and safety standards.
The company added: "In view of the challenges we have faced in meeting the UK regulator's expectations, Hitachi-GE has enhanced its PSA team, including securing the support of internationally recognised PSA experts to ensure that our PSA submissions meet UK regulatory expectations.""
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 08:06 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: the one and only solution today is nuclear energy
>>"UK regulators have asked Hitachi-GE to address a series of "shortfalls" in the probabilistic safety analysis (PSA) of its Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). The request takes the form of a Regulatory Issue, which is the second in as many months in the generic design assessment (GDA) of the reactor for its use in the UK."
Isn't this what is supposed to happen? A process between the designers and the regulators to iron out problems and get documentation in order. I do the same with software requirements documents every month and I'm dealing with specifications far less complex than I imagine a nuclear power station to be. Do you really imagine whole books of documentation being handed over to the regulators and them NOT coming back and saying "we need more on this bit" or "please clarify or amend this" ? If you do, you have no experience of complex projects. If you don't, then why are you damning nuclear power for the process working as it should?
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 10:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: the one and only solution today is nuclear energy
"A process between the designers and the regulators to iron out problems and get documentation in order."
Absolutely. A process with formal standards and informal expectations which can be understood in advance of formally submitting the documents in question.
"Do you really imagine whole books of documentation being handed over to the regulators and them NOT coming back and saying "we need more on this bit" or "please clarify or amend this" ?"
I don't imagine it, I've seen it (in another regulated safety critical industry), at least to the extent that the regulatory authorities didn't go public about it, twice on the same issue (which is the example in question here).
I've also seen nuclear suppliers previously try to do things on the cheap. It's one of the reasons Olkiluoto is late and overbudget; the initial bid turned out to be technically unacceptable in resilience terms, for example. Despite clearly documented pan-European nuclear regulatory standards, during the budgeting process the control systems suppiers chose cheap rather than compliant, and got found out later.
At the better places I've been, formal regulatory documents are/were reviewed to ****y before they leave the works formally, by people with experience who understand the applicable standards, and by a 'fresh pair of eyes' too, just in case. Getting it wrong costs money and time. Mistakes happen, but there are supposed to be processes in place to stop mistakes being visible. Getting it wrong to the extent that the regulatory authorities go public about it, twice for the same problem? Not a good sign.
When mistakes happen consistently, and a supplier says "we're going to fix this next time by recruiting people with a clue and putting a bit more staffing on the team" (which is the proposed solution in the article extracts here), that means the supplier hadn't taken the job seriously. That's not an oversight, that's bad management. There's a lot of it about.
An earlier post referenced the industry's shortage of qualified staff and qualified suppliers and its impact on timescales. Well here, by the sound of things, is a supplier who's tried to get away with insufficient qualified staff. Will it have an effect on their credibility? Surely. Will fixing that affect timescales and budgets? Might do, depending on how much contingency is allocated where.
You say you work in software projects. Regardless of where you personally work and how good your employer is, any sensible observer knows that major software developments in general have a pretty crap reputation for delivery on time and on budget. Worse, it's been that way since forever, e.g. since 1975 when Brooks wrote the Mythical Man Month [1].
Follow the newspapers (not even the trade rags) and you can see that currently the car industry is doing a grand job of highlighting their own software and system design quality capabilities. Arguably we (as engineers and as members of the public) should be just as worried about in car computers as we are about nuclear matters, but that's another story.
Ideally I'd perhaps look for a different industry, one with a better record than most of the software world, to compare the nuclear industry with before deciding whether the nuclear suppliers' current performance is to be considered acceptable or not. Suggestions welcome. Obviously not cars or banks.
[1] F. P. Brooks, The Mythical Man Month, 1975.
https://archive.org/details/mythicalmanmonth00fred (free download of full book)
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 09:13 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Divine retribution
If yellow-cake turns out to be the stone cut out "not by human hands" we can only tell ourselves that we have none to blame but our wise men. And that we chose them. I am not looking forward to being right but it is nice to think that it might be nearly over. I am going to have to start behaving. I certainly don't want poetic justice I'd much rather have forgiveness.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 06:32 GMT Amorphous
European Grid
Here in the Antipodes we are able to move wind/hydro/gas/coal electricity thousands of kilometres, even across the Bass straight which is several hundred kilometres wide. I feel confident that the windiness or otherwise of UK in any particular week can be offset by connecting to the great European landmass across the relatively narrow channel.
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Tuesday 28th July 2015 14:58 GMT Alan Brown
Re: European Grid
"Here in the Antipodes we are able to move wind/hydro/gas/coal electricity thousands of kilometres, even across the Bass straight"
How many GW is the Bass strait Interconnector?
I'll save you the effort: It's 500MW
The UK has 2GW to france + 1GW to holland + 1GW to Ireland.
If you look at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ you'll see that _minimum_ power demand within the UK is around 20GW and that wind power at the absolute best it's ever been (7GW) has been about 3/4 of the nuke plants on a bad day (2 reactors were offline), whilst peak demand is just under 40GW.
Even if the interconnectors could handle the load, if the UK was 100% solar/wind, there isn't sufficient capacity in the whole of mainland western europe to act as backing store for a cold winter night and that assumes that europeans all froze to death instead of switching their heaters on.
Wind power is mostly in the 1-2GW camp and it regularly goes to zero as you can see in the weekly chart. Solar is so low it doesn't even register.
Even if the UK was carpeted in windmills, average output would still only equal the existing nuke fleet, which is only 1/4 of minimum current energy demands, let alone having them go up by a factor of 5-15, which is what would be seen if all housing moves to electric heating and transport towards BEVs (My gas-fired central heating system is rated at 55kW and on a cold night will average 8-10kW just maintaining temperatures at 16-17C)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
