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Comment by reedf1 | Hacker News Reader

I took a course in my undergrad in physics on energy systems. It was basically a holistic look at the UKs primary energy sources, the grid, future sources of energy and some policy.

We briefly covered the elimination of coal. A graph showed a huge void in domestic energy at coal-plant closures, with other domestic sources planned in the future (renewables) to fill the void. These renewables sources have been much slower to come online and have been under resourced. The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning. So none of this reporting is really that honest about how horrific it is to be a net energy importer, it would be another thing if we were at greater than 100% domestic energy generation and that these can now be taken offline (which many will take as the implication.)

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https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/britain-net-electricity-exporter/ "Britain is a Net Electricity Exporter for First Time in 44 years" (2023)

OK, so that was the brief period when half the French nuclear reactor fleet had to be taken offline at the same time for crack inspections, but the other half of that - importing for 44 years - implies this is not a new situation nor a disaster. It is not "horrific" to be a net energy importer, nor is is particularly environmentally unfriendly when the French nuclear reactors are working.

The second most important link is importing energy from Norway, which is 99% (!) renewable.

The main delaying factor was the Conservative moratorium on building onshore wind in England, which I believe is ending, and the general reluctance to build new power lines to import more renewables from Scotland, Orkney etc.

Since someone complained, direct quote from article:

"So what happened?

Over the past year, French nuclear power stations had many maintenance problems which led to significant reductions in their output. In August, 57% of the country’s generation capacity was not being used. Despite a modest recovery, as of January 2023, 15 of its 56 reactors were closed for repairs. All this meant nuclear-reliant France had to import electricity from neighbouring countries.

This led to more electricity being generated in Britain than would otherwise have been the case, to satisfy the additional demand from France. So while Britain’s renewable generation was at a record level, its fossil fuel generation was also higher than in the previous year. Without the problems in France, 2022 could have been the first year that Britain’s wind, solar and hydro combined generated more electricity than its fossil fuels – a milestone that will happen anyway over the next couple of years."

One of Labour's more important policies is to repair the damage that the Tories did to the energy production system. The UK has a huge amount of potential wind energy just from off-shoring. Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants.

Are there that many biomass plants? Or is it just Drax? Which is something of an asterisk in the "no coal" story, in that the UK's largest coal burner is still running, just on imported wood pellets. Supposedly from sawmill waste in the US and Canada. I'm not sure how "green" that really is.

I once did a back of the envelope calculation that if you tried to run Drax on domestic timber only you would consume every tree in the country within a year.

Doesn't seem to be sawmill waste

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160

> Hopefully they'll start building onshore too and closing more of these ugly and polluting biomass plants

What's the issue with these? Biomass plants take the energy from biologically degradable farm and food waste that would otherwise decompose and degrade, releasing its energy as methane and other byproducts into the atmosphere, on either farm fields (where it contributes to overfertilization of fields and water bodies by runoff) or on dung piles/compost heaps.

Modern farming, particularly livestock farming, produces an awful lot of such waste that needs to be taken care of, and small but livestock-intensive countries such as Denmark or the Netherlands have to ship the biowaste across the EU because by EU regulations and practicality they cannot dispose of it domestically.

Biomass reactors make the process a whole lot easier. They take the biowaste, extract all energy they can by having bacteria and fungi break it down, burn the gas for electricity and district/local heating, and the solid remainder can then be landfilled safely.

I think you are mixing up three separate types of power generation

> Biomass plants take the energy from biologically degradable farm and food waste that would

Drax doesn't do that, drax burns wood pellets: https://www.drax.com/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy/so...

There are biowaste plants, I think there is one in thetford, but they are dirty and produce more CO2 per kwhr than gas (from what I recall, do check that first.) The thetford one is an incinerator, so requires a lot of processing to remove water.

> Netherlands have to ship the biowaste

thats because its really high in nitrates, and will kill waterlife should it run off.

> Biomass reactors make the process a whole lot easier.

not at scale. They are dirty, difficult to run and are dangerous at large scale. They often need to be heated. They also use a lot of water.

You can use it to generate low grade heat though. but needs to be mixed with something like straw so that the balance of sloppy to twiggy is right (not a technical term...)

Which damage?

The electricity system has done most of its decarbonising under either the coalition or Conservative governments, they used quite a lot of the machinery (the CfDs, capacity market, etc) setup at the end of the last Labour government but it has been the subsequent governments that have chose the annual budgets for the auctions as well as setting up the carbon budget system.

There have been only two things that I would regard as material mistakes in this time:

First, not adjusting the max strike price for offshore wind in AR5.

Second, changing the planning rules to make it very hard to build onshore wind.

Everything else, including things like the offshore bootstraps / HND which are now receiving FID (like EGL2 which was just approved), the upcoming decision on zonal pricing, and most of all the massive buildout of solar and offshore wind generation and battery storage has happened under previous governments.

It's arguably the only area of policy which has gone quite well over the last decade, so I'm intrigued which damage you have in mind.

Why replace ugly coal with ugly windmills? Why not build nuclear plants instead?

Nuclear plants are essentially identical levels of ugly to coal: from the outside both are concrete cuboids with cooling towers.

Aesthetics are not a reason either way, or the UK wouldn't have had brutalism.

Actual reason is that nuclear is expensive, while wind is much cheaper even after adding costs for storage etc.

Also that the UK can't cross-subsidise the power plants from the military because they no longer have a big enough military to justify the nuclear weapons they already have, let alone a big enough militarily to justify the capability to breed more plutonium.

> In 2020, the Boris Johnson-led government decided to permit onshore wind power, and since December 2021 onshore wind developers have been able to compete in subsidy auctions with solar power and offshore wind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_Wind_Farm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...

Adding my reply that explains why your claim that there hasn't been a ban since 2021 is only technically correct while actually misleading as to the real effects (to this comment that's in a more prominent thread).

Pasting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41444838 :

Yes, there hasn't technically been a universal ban since a few years ago, but until this year legislation basically allowed NIMBY's to veto any new onshore wind farms with no way for local authorities to force approval through, which is why less than ten new onshore wind projects were approved England in 2021-23 compared to hundreds in Scotland. So sure, not officially a ban but it was effectively a ban.

And that's what the new government have fixed: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-statement-...

Doesn't the UK have some of the highest electricity prices in the world? They're on trend to drop below the world average for energy availability per capita too according to ourworldindata.com [0] and are already behind the EU, US and China.

Horrific is in the eye of the beholder, but the UK's energy situation is unimpressive. I'd call it horrific, it looks like they've been in a state of acute crisis since around 2000.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&facet=...

> Doesn't the UK have some of the highest electricity prices in the world?

no.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

> They're on trend to drop below the world average for energy availability per capita too according to ourworldindata.com

it's not energy availability. it's energy use. and yes, energy use should come down worldwide over time.

> no.

Yet your link shows the UK at number 4. And I note number 1 is Ireland.

Do either of you have a source with more than 29 countries in it?

Statistia comes up a lot, but the free content always feels like it's an ad for their paid stuff.

Not me. I was phrasing it as a question because I thought maybe someone would have a better source that showed otherwise.

That being said, China & India are managing <10c/kWh for ~1 billion people each. I feel pretty safe claiming that the UK does indeed have a horrific problem making electrons move through wires. 500% cost increase above par is an uncomfortable statistic.

I'm no expert in the UKs domestic energy, but at least looking at electricity mix charts it seems to me like growth of renewables after introduction (lets say 2005) from <5% to ~40% compensates the drop in electricity produced from coal (~33% to <2%) quite nicely. The huge drop in coal production starting ~2014 also doesn't seem to correspond to an increase in net electricity import, so I don't see what you're basing your claims on.

It's also news to me that the UK was ever self sufficient for energy in the last few decades. Most countries are at least roughly matching their electricity production, but almost all are huge energy importers for non-electric energy, so I don't quite see the issue (if e.g. most large oil producing countries were to suddenly stop exports, most of the world would be in huge trouble).

Why do you claim that this, which has been the reality for almost all countries over the last few decades, would be horrific?

I'm no expert either but I do know that we have been importing significant amounts of energy from France for quite some time. This suggests to me that France has a huge surplus rather than just matching their own need.

France built out a huge number of Nuclear reactors in the 80s. Some 70% of it's electricity comes from Nuclear. Nuclear has a very low marginal cost so when it's up and running you want to run it at full power as much as possible. At times of low demand in France this means exporting as much of it as they can at whatever rate they can get for it. It's not that they have a huge surplus overall, it's just the economics make it better for them to export rather than load following.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-chapter-1-di...

This is what you want to look at. Really energy dependance is a complicated issue. You'd have to be living under a rock to not see how this dependance has rocked Europe (particularly Germany) since the Ukraine war. Energy price instability is an enormous social problem.

The UK seems to import around 10% of its electrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom

""" Demand for electricity in 2023 was 29.6 GW on average (259 TWh over the year), supplied through 235 TWh of UK-based generation and 24 TWh of energy imports.[4] """

Hopefully this is paired with reduced coal burning in the places Britain relies on for power, and improvements in efficiency. The wastefulness of British houses is something to behold...

Of course, there's also the energy used to build things that Britain imports that used to be made domestically, not accounted for here.

Britain seems to be doing reasonably well w.r.t. energy imports though - https://www.statista.com/statistics/550304/electricity-impor...

From https://www.statista.com/topics/4938/energy-imports-in-the-u...

""" Although historically relatively self-sufficient in covering domestic energy demand, the United Kingdom’s dependency on imports has increased in the past few decades. With oil and gas fields on the continental shelf depleting and the government phasing out coal, the country has grown increasingly reliant on supplies from other countries. Energy dependency reached its peak in 2013, at nearly 48 percent. Thanks in large part to growing capacity additions of wind power and a decline in primary energy consumption, the dependency rate had fallen to some 35 percent since. This is notably lower than the European Union average. """

> The wastefulness of British houses is something to behold...

I'm reminded of how there was an "Insulate Britain" campaign group, using unpopular disruptive tactics; the outcome of that was the law changed and they got jailed for several years, and the British public could go back to not thinking about insulation again.

We have some of the oldest housing stock in Europe.

There isn't much space inside for insulation, one solution is thin wall insulation.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> We have some of the oldest housing stock in Europe.

Yeah. One of those complex issues that just keeps getting worse as you dig into it. I think people in the UK are much more conservative about historical preservation of ordinary houses, due to both percieved ugliness and build quality issues and also some genuine regressions of utility from, say, the days of the Parker-Morris standards.

Also we appear to be unable to build new houses at anywhere the rate needed to meet demand, so it's unsurprising that old houses are retained and that people are willing to live in houses with suboptimal energey efficiency...

Not to mention horrendous draughtiness.

Which was a feature, given historical reliance on coal fires inside homes for heating.

tbh it still is kind of a feature given that we (collectively) also don't really know how to ventilate old houses and many many who have tried to tackle the insulation problem live with terrible mould problems

In the North East of England, theres a point where these houses aren't even worthwhile purchasing to rennovate. Houses can be purchases easily for £60k but require at least that to modernize. But while you've done well to purchase a house for £120k, it doesn't reflect in the local market.

The solution would be to knock the house down and build a modern one on the reclaimed land. But you've just bought a mid-terrace, so that's out of the question.

I would be considered a monster for saying it but maybe it's OK if someone buys up a row of houses to knock them down and build new, warm apartments.

External wall insulation is your friend there. Its about £12k to do, possibly including windows. will reduce your heating needs by 3/4ths if done properly.

How does it count if you import fuel and burn it locally? It's still "imported energy". Most of our energy is imported if you look at it that way.

The vast majority of imported energy comes from France and Norway, much cleaner energy than the UK.

> some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning

Actually very little. Most is French nuclear power. The electricity that the UK imports has a lower carbon footprint than the UK's domestic electricity.

Does this mean the UK is basically completely reliant on import of power for a base load or does the nuclear reactors and whatever hydro there is cover the need to offset the intermittency of renewables?

> These renewables sources have been much slower to come online and have been under resourced.

It's far worse, then have been over-resourced using green taxes on fossil fuels and are still not coming to fruition. When they lose their green tax subsidies, the cost of renewable energy will sky-rocket.

> The issue is now that we are enormous net-importers of energy, some of our demand is likely fulfilled by foreign coal burning.

When the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, we have no other way to magic up energy. The thing that made the most sense was nuclear, but the UK also failed to invest in that too.

I think the UK is quickly heading towards energy insecurity, rolling black outs and high-priced foreign energy. This winter for example is already set to be overly expensive.

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