Britain’s electricity since 2010: fossil fuel use nearly halves
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
It is a different story in Germany, where North Germany is, apart from Hamburg, thinly settled and connecting far-off places like Baden or Bavaria to the North Sea wind farms runs into tons of NIMBY initiatives.
Reference : https://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/10/04/nyregion/wind600....
He did it by collecting signatures from local business owners complaining it would "ruin the view".
I think he may have been lobbying on behalf of incumbent utilities. He clearly wasn't doing this because of a few specks appearing on the horizon, but exploiting knee jerk NIMBYism over the view was how he got the project canceled.
As for extortions, I keep thinking of a scene from Boardwalk Empire. Nucky wants a highway to Atlantic City built. Some local political bosses are hemming and hawing around the issue. Frustrated, Nucky demands "Just tell me how much."
It's not right. But then life's rarely fair.
The uk needs to diversify its green energy, instead it seems to be consolidating on wind.
That is, for every £ invested, putting that £ in wind farms produces more energy and reduces carbon emissions more than it would by investing it in other technologies. That will continue to be the case so long as each MWh of wind generation offsets a MWh that would otherwise be generated from fossil fuels (or dirty biomass, for that matter!).
That's not to say that we shouldn't be developing other technologies too. They will certainly be needed in the future to reach a 100% fossil-free grid. But it makes sense to continue building wind turbines for the foreseeable future.
(Side note: one thing that should help in the future is increasing geographic diversity of wind farm sites. Today we have light winds over Scotland and the east coast where most turbines are located. But plenty of wind on the Irish sea / Atlantic side where there are, currently, comparatively few turbines)
Strange seeing a source of income in Farming Simulator 2019 being to cut silage to turn into biogas, I'm assuming to make electricity. How realistic is this?
They apparently aren't any more ecological than natural gas because the process generates large amounts of methane of which some is being released into the atmosphere due to the machines not being able to be 100% sealed.
Also the land needed for the biomass to grow is enormous.
I thought the problem with fossil fuels is that we're taking the carbon out of the ground instead of the air.
Methane is 21x more potent than CO2 over a 100 year period, and 72x over a 20 year period. So, if you're concerned about what's happening now, that's the figure you need to consider.
This is most technical description I could find, other articles frequently focus on the negative effects of resulting monocultures: https://www.vde.com/de/etg/arbeitsgebiete/informationen/biom...
Which is not an endorsement of incinerators. I don't know all the whatifs, but I'm hoping incinerators will be replaced, phased out.
Additionally, biogas is at best carbon neutral/slightly positive rather than carbon negative. Since you're still producing CO2 burning stuff, but it does get mostly reabsorbed by plants every cycle.
Such as? Wind/Solar/Hydro/Batteries all have their weak points.
The farms for biofuels are typically mono cultures, which is going to involve pesticide use and commonly fertilization. Both of which have some significant downstream effects that the world is trying to deal with right now (see the deadzones in many river estuaries, possible insect decline, etc).
Hydro is looked at less and less as a green energy solution because of the significant damage done to river/ocean systems (elwha river restoration, possible klamath river undamming). I don't think there will be any more large dams added to rivers that aren't already dammed in North America.
I'm also not a huge fan of utility scale solar. I understand that it is currently moving the needle significantly since the infrastructure costs are cheaper than residential solar, but there are so many added benefits of residential solar (reduced urban heat islands, no additional land used) that I see it as the main way forwards. I think that the solar power split that we'll eventually end up with is something like 40% residential solar, 60% utility as panels get more efficient.
I'd disagree
> biogas is at best carbon neutral/slightly positive
Of course that's the point - much better than oil/gas/coal. Yes ideally we'd like energy with no downside. Burning renewables is a great compliment to solar/wind.
UK Biomass in the last year is about 2GW average, Gas about 12.8GW, Coal 0.7GW
The former will have little impact on environmental CO2 versus the later.
Growing trees sequesters carbon and burning wood chips releases it again. This does not change the total amount in circulation and is much less of a problem.
There is also, potentially, an opportunity cost in burning forests that could otherwise be acting as long term carbon stores (either leaving the trees intact, or harvesting their timber for something where the carbon will be stored longer term, such as construction/housing).
Importing electricity is one option, although for a country the size of the UK it does depend a lot on importing electricity:
The boxes starting with "IC" are inter-connections to other countries.
On the whole it seems like it doesn’t have that far to go
Most of the electricity we import is due to French nuclear power overproduction, the marginal cost of producing more power is negligible so it's more economical for them to produce as much as they can sell at almost any price.
Ireland also has enormous offshore wind potential off the Atlantic coast, which could be built out and the energy exported to mainland Europe.
However, let's hope that the UK can agree to a deal to fully develop the potential of the Dogger Bank project[3, 4] (collaboration between the British, Dutch, Germans and Danes to build the largest offshore wind project in the world).
Another project I'd love to see is Iceland's geothermal energy piped through Ireland or the UK to mainland Europe[5], supplying crucial baseload energy to the UK, perhaps even to mainland Europe.
[1] https://www.eirgridgroup.com/the-grid/projects/celtic-interc...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
[3] http://www.scottishenergynews.com/dutch-and-danish-grid-oper...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Wind_Power_Hub
[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iceland-energy-britain-id...
[6] https://www.landsvirkjun.com/researchdevelopment/submarineca...
https://www.nationalgrid.com/our-businesses/national-grid-ve...
This is good look upon UK energy utilisation over the decades and clearly shows industry usage declined decades ago:https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I would also factor in efficiency usage of appliances and house insulation etc playing into that 20% factor more than most. Dare say lighting has seen a big reduction in electricity usage in that period due to LED's.
> It would be great if UK wind power would be so abundant and cheap, it flooded the entire EU with cheap clean electricity.
Looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_European_Uni... The UK seems to be above average in wind electrical production.
As for this flood of cheap and abundant electricity it produces, given https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... and what I know of how such large wind farms are financed. It does seem to be a common theme that wind production installation costs are subsidised by a level upon consumer energy costs. So with most wind energy production being cheap, at a level well removed from the consumer - yes, though at the consumer level - not so much as they are subsidising this transition drive.
Not saying it is a bad thing, but the whole cheap and abundant aspect at a consumer level, does seem somewhat removed unless you have a large property with a wind turbine yourself getting a nice feed in tariff that is subsidised by everybody else to incentive green energy production.
But the shift from coal is a good thing, though one area that I feel gets overlooked would be ships that use brown coal and the emissions they produce.
There's a chart somewhere that quantifies the savings due to increased household efficiency
We switched to LED for all the lights in the house, and noticed a reduction in our electricity costs
There's some discussion ATM about converting Tata in Port Talbot to electric furnaces
"Deindustrialisation" is a meme, but people should be specific about what industries they think went and when; much of it happened in the 1980s, not the 2010s.
However, the decision to wreck the last of the mass car industry with Brexit isn't going to help.
Huh?
It seems likely to me that GB will be worse off without coal than it was when it was burning coal. It'll be interesting to see what happens to their economy - if it can prosper with that sort of hit to primary energy then there will be a lesson to us all. But I reckon someone poor is going to be doing without.
If I had to chop my electricity use by 10-20% I'd be pretty noticeably worse off. Maybe they've got some really impressive tech to maintain their lifestyles but the Occam's razor here is they're probably just going to be doing without and will likely lose industrial capability or see worse living conditions.
[0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/united-kingdom/energy-cons...
That’s continued with many people using very low power tablets rather than laptops, desktops, or giant TV’s. For portable devices low power means longer battery life and less weight which has been constantly pushing demand lower.
That said, IIRC the main electricity users in the UK are business rather than domestic, and I don’t know anything about how that’s changed in the last 70 years, only that it has.
Electrically heated houses are a very small minority of UK houses:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/426988/united-kingdom-uk...
Brexit adds to the pressure, we are likely to lose most of our car production over the next decade.
Electrification does make cars simpler so perhaps there's still some scope for someone
We make a surprising amount of high-tech stuff, but it tends to be bespoke and expensive or very automated. Mass employment manufacturing is down to a few car plants owned by Nissan and Honda whose future is in doubt over Brexit. This is partly due to terrible industrial relations in the 1970s and 80s.
Also worth mentioning: the UK has a cool, maritime climate and abundant natural gas, so there's just not much demand for the biggest sink of residential electricity. This is one of the UK's bigger challenges for further decarbonisation: the political consequences of a cold, windless spell, electrical heating, and lots of pensioners would be... interesting.
Coal production is down for the same reason arithmometer and rotary dial telephone production is down. Nobody needs it.
The economics of overproduction doesn't change the unit cost. Unless the UK wants to heavily subsidize coal at a major loss and force themselves to continue to use antiquated technology to prop up this energy buggy whip, it's done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
> Unless the UK wants to heavily subsidize coal at a major loss and force themselves to continue to use antiquated technology to prop up this energy buggy whip, it's done.
If the buggy whip drove further & faster than a motor vehicle we'd still be using them. Coal produced more electricity than their new setup does. This is more akin to all the horses being dead so everyone has to move to bicycles. Arguably not a big step back, but not obviously better.
In this case, the horses are far from dead, but people are unhappy about all the manure that stems from their use.
Accidentally, the problem with manure in city streets was a major motivator for a switch from horse carriages to early cars.
Very nice analogy. Having major coastal cities underwater or regularly threatened with huge flooding is the 21st century version of manure piling up on the street.
The "more electricity" point is a red herring. Cost per kwh is all that matters.
That's like pointing to AM radio being around longer saying it produced more hours of audio and then trying to use that as a basis for it being of superior quality. It's just older.
The bicycle argument is also a total misunderstanding of the vast technical superiority of things like modern solar.
The aptera and light-year one automobiles for instance, both due next year, will feature solar panels, that in sunny climates, will charge a vehicle more miles than an average daily commute.
This means that in typical use, the owner will never need to plug in or otherwise fuel up the vehicle, at all.
For a WFHer like myself it means I effectively will always hop in with a "full tank". I'm excited and you should be too.
These are the 1.0 version of the cars. Wait until the 5th or 10th year.
In 2030, a 1,500 or 2,000 mile range vehicle that fueled itself merely by sitting outside is what I'll be driving. You can continue going to the gas station and paying $10-20/gallon if you wish. Have fun.
There's significant revolutions in energy coming in the 2020s. Such as partially transparent photovoltaics that transition window UV exposure with the sunlight so you get a pleasant adaptive window coating that also powers your home.
We're on the road to effectively unmetered energy. We are doimg much better than coal now. Let's keep moving
Battery technology seems to anecdotally increase capacity at 10% year on year, at best. The typical electric car has a battery that gets 150-200 miles at the moment. I don't expect to see a 1500-2000 mile range battery in 10 years. Or even 20 years.
You'll also "pay" the same tax/duty per mile as you currently do, when the law changes to include GPS chips in every car to track your mileage, since the government can no longer tax petrol at the pump. The next 10 years might be the golden 'cheap' era for electric cars before governments figure out how to make up the fossil fuel tax shortfall.
1500 is totally doable within the decade
The government tax strategy is already being done in many states who give higher annual registration fees for electric cars. It's hurt their adoption but it's not a huge amount
I assume you mean natural gas, since renewables are still a small portion of the overall energy mix.
Bear in mind that fracked gas wells decline much faster than conventional ones, and the only reason gas is so cheap is due to fracked wells. It's anybody's guess how long this "superior technology" will last.
Let's also not ignore the fact that coal use has effectively been exported to China as the UK/US increasingly rely on manufacturing abroad. We still share a single atmosphere, and global coal consumption is up 6.2% from 2010, regardless of how much the UK/US have reduced their specific share: https://www.worldometers.info/coal/
(It's most efficient to do iron refining as close as possible to the iron and coal mines since all the components are so heavy and much of the ore ends up as waste slag)
Plus I suspect deepmine coal that the UK has used in the past will be pretty expensive to extract relative to the alternatives.