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Renewables Are Now Scotland's Biggest Energy Source
AmiMoJo writes Government figures revealed that Scotland is now generating more power from "clean" technologies than nuclear, coal and gas. The combination of wind, solar and hydroelectric, along with less-publicized sources such as landfill gas and biomass, produced 10.3TWh in the first half of 2014. Over the same period, Scotland generated 7.8TWh from nuclear, 5.6TWh from coal and 1.4TWh from gas, according to figures supplied by National Grid. Renewable sources tend to fluctuate throughout the year, especially in Scotland where the weather is notoriously volatile, but in six-month chunks the country has consistently increased its renewable output.
7.8 + 5.6 + 1.4 = 14.8
It's too late now. We'll have fusion in the next 50 years. It's a known fact since the sixties.
Hence the absence of the word "combined".
It will never work. Just give up.
Oh wait, it's starting to work.
Yeah? Are they actually building safe reactors, that recycle the 'waste'? You know, I don't know how warn this stuff is while it degrades, but if it is sufficient, just bury it under the streets up north so they don't get clogged up with snow and ice, or it could provide municipal hot water heating. Don't let the damn economy hold the tech hostage. The reason we don't have these things is because we let speculators run the world...
China, they're making as many AP1000 reactors as the rest of the world combined.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
And just as sustainable (if not more) than renewable energy.
So far the only country who doesn't seem to have their head up their ass in regards to nuclear policy is Russia (feel free to point me to other examples).
They have retired all the decrepid Soviet period nuclear plants qnd built new ones? Because if they haven't I'd say Russia's head is still firmly lodged up it's ass on nuclear policy.
France? Not looked into this so maybe their attitude has changed but they've traditionally been pretty pro-nuclear.
They're building one fast breeder reactor, the rest of the new ones are all VVER. It will likely pave the way for future breeder reactors.
Unfortunately no, they did the opposite of the safe thing and extended the life of old reactors and increased the output.
But just because they're being all twisted and stupid about it doesn't mean they have their head up their ass. They clearly see the benefit in investing in nuclear infrastructure. They have eight new reactors being built that are set to be completed all within the next two years. Probably plans for more on the way. It's a very aggressive strategy, and I'd imagine after the new ones are online the old ones are going to be decommissioned.
They did say combined, although they used the short form of it "and". The only thing close to being literally correct would have been to say "generating more power from "clean" technologies than nuclear, coal or gas". It would still be deceptive though, since they are taking the total of every dubiously clean technology and contrasting that to each individual traditional source.
Nuclear certainly can be clean, particularly if you are not trying to produce plutonium for use in weapons. China, for one, is doing a lot of work on Thorium reactors, and they should be extremely clean, extremely inexpensive, and extremely safe. I also wonder how clean Scotland's "clean" technologies are if you factor in the energy spent to produce them. Many supposedly clean technologies are very dirty when you factor in all production. (Which the eco-freaks tend not to do.)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They have eight new reactors being built that are set to be completed all within the next two years. Probably plans for more on the way. It's a very aggressive strategy, and I'd imagine after the new ones are online the old ones are going to be decommissioned.
Maybe, maybe not. The problem with nuclear reactors is they're like eating at a fancy restaurant. Lots of merriness until you decide the meal's over. Then the bill comes. Not shutting down the old reactors means not having to deal with the humungous costs to decommissioning them, dismantling the plant, paying for long-term storage of some highly radioactive parts that are no longer generating revenue, etc.
There's a reason you keep reading about the NRC granting license extensions to 50+ year old reactors in the U.S. The corporate heads of those power companies all want to cruise into retirement without having to deal with the clean-up cost fallout.
Title of TFA
Renewables Are Now Scotland's Biggest Energy Source
is misleading
Have they factored in the energy used to propel the vehicles on the roads in Scotland?
How can they say it's the "BIGGEST ENERGY SOURCE" when they haven't even exhausted the list of power hungry devices such as cars?
Nuclear releases less CO2, but kills more wildlife and releases more radiation. The UK has a very poor track record on contaminated material getting out of nuclear plants, and to this day stores spent fuel in open pools where birds periodically pick up the contaminated algae and carry it off.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So long, Irn Bru!
The corporate heads of those power companies all want to cruise into retirement without having to deal with the clean-up cost fallout.
I know you're making that out like it's a bad thing, but I actually think it's a good strategy to hold out as long as you can, because the more time passes, the more likely technology will catch up and make clean up slightly less difficult. It sounds like a cop out, but technology and time can solve almost any problem.
Could you please enlighten me as to how the radioactive nuclear waste created by nuclear power is "sustainable"?
Or how the risks of a nuclear meltdown due to unforseen disasters or intentional sabotage are even worth it?
Nuclear is clean until it isn't. For reference: The state of nuclear technology in the UK.
10.3TWh in the first half of 2014. Over the same period, Scotland generated 7.8TWh from nuclear, 5.6TWh from coal and 1.4TWh from gas,
So that's 10.3 TWh renewables vs 14.8 TWh from non-renewable sources.
Interesting numbers game. Certainly only by lumping all the renewables together, and splitting out the other sources, they could make it work. Not exactly a fair comparison. Nevertheless impressive that they are now at about 40% overall coming from renewable sources.
It's not too hard.
It's the long-lived toxic nucleotides that are the real problem. Keeping something safe for 50 years isn't too hard (particularly if everything is vitrified and kept as small pellets so you can use passive cooling) but keeping it safe for 5000 years is a massive headache. So how should we deal with them? Bombard with more neutrons. Like that, they transmute into something hotter which will decay away much more rapidly.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Well, then maybe the English should have taken their chance to get rid of that resource drain instead of putting so much effort into scaring the crap out of Scotland before the referendum.
The math is clear
7.8 + 5.6 + 1.4 is greater than 10.8.
And before you go all nitpicky on me, I have combined all non-renewables (nuclear, coal, gas), in the same way as the original submission combined hydro, solar and wind, all of which have less in common than the non-renewables, which are all thermal power plants, and thus have a lot more in common.
One of the biggest challenges on Scotland has been the decentralisation of energy supply. The grid (high voltage power lines) was built to connect power stations that were usually less than 30 miles from cities and then smaller grid segments out to the less densely populated areas such as the highlands & islands.
The challenge Scotland now faces is that a large amount of renewable energy is being produced in the highlands and islands and coastal projects resulting in power having to be shipped "the other way" through the grid. So Scotland has had an enormous new power line from Beauly in the north to Denny in central region to help. The scandal is that a lot of Scotland's renewable energy is idle or switched off because there is not enough capacity in the grid to use it until the new line comes on board. Nearly every loch in Argyll has some kind of hydro power generation capabuility but it is switched off (except Cruachan)
The new wave power production systems are fabulous, especially the inter-connected wavenet squid system.
Not hard since they are building the first of that kind!
Be interesting to see how it performs.
Vitrification means keeping it desert dry forever. Incorporation such as Synrok is a different story.
Nuclear releases less CO2, but kills more wildlife and releases more radiation
I'd like a source for the 'kills more wildlife'. Even counting just emissions at the plant itself and not the huge amount from coal mining, nuclear power plants emit less radioactive material than coal.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think that's a pretty blatant misunderstanding of the workings of these things, the longer you leave things the less is known about them and the more shocked the new generation of engineers is at the practices of their elders, "what do you mean you just threw it all in a big hole??"...
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
This disingenuous comparison would not have been possible without aggregate numbers inflated by biomass.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Wikipedia has the same numbers on an article somewhere, can't find it now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
France has plenty nukes, China is building them and has ramped up development of a new eactor type based on Thorium, and India plans to bring a Thorium-fueled prototype online in 2016, banking on powering a good deal of their country with such reactors in a few decades time.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Breeder reactors create more fuel than they use. Further, techniques can be used to greatly decrease the amount of waste created.
The risks of a meltdown is zero with modern reactors, they have plenty of passive mechanisms in place.
I suppose you could sabotage a modern reactor, but the best you can do is blow up the whole plant and spread radiation everywhere. The reactor can't be forced to meltdown or anything of the sort.
In addition to transportation, I'm curious about storage. How much "peaking power" comes from renewables (or stored renewables) as opposed to grid purchase (or quick-startup resources such as gas turbine)?
I'm stoked to hear about real-world success in renewable energy, but I see a lot of "fluff" cheerleading in the press without much attention to details about how much this or that project produces, compared to total consumption, and how much power is being consumed by various sectors of society.
As home-built or purchased alt-energy installations become more common, and more people become aware of these issues, I hope we'll see more discussion of these issues in the press. It's about time.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
That's an institutional problem, not a technological one.
Incompetent handling of nuclear power does not undermine its potential.
Hell, even oil is renewable. You just need to wait a while.
I remember reading something about so law saying energy cannot be destroyed. ;)
Here in Spain, wind turbines have destroyed many beautiful natural landscapes (while affecting also some wild birds and other fauna).
I wonder wether populating a whole mountain range with huge poles should be considered "clean".
Well, the entire human race isn't sustainable.
TFA is 190 words long. How is it possible to define this as anything other than a "fluff" piece?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Chernobyl is attributable to very little death.
I'm trying to read this site, but it's quite difficult as they pop up an obnoxious banner that doesn't go away when I click the red close box. Their figures are 7,900,000 birds killed for coal, 330,000 for nuclear. So your citation directly refutes your point: coal kills 24 times more birds than nuclear.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Landfill gas requires using landfills, a terribly outdated and wasteful technology. Hardly "green" energy.
I know you're making that out like it's a bad thing, but I actually think it's a good strategy to hold out as long as you can, because the more time passes, the more likely technology will catch up and make clean up slightly less difficult.
If we leave the mess lying around for a long time where it can be distributed into the atmosphere like at Fukushima if something goes wrong, you mean. What a great idea! Let's create lots of those messes and see if any of them blow up! Whoops, in fact, something like half our messes are exactly like that. Same reactor design, usually sited someplace ignorant where it will flood, with a bunch of spent fuel sitting around on top of it... sometimes more than they had at Fukushima Daiichi.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because you just don't count cars and horses here. FFS, people generata loads of heat energy all the time, yet we leave that from the calculations also. Sun warms way more than all those energy sources combined when it shines. Direct heating renevable!
Why on earth would you have a problem with scotland getting their energy from renevables? It's a good thing if it works. When you count the amount of energy some area produces you are usually talking about electrical energy. Cars zapping around the streets produce no electrical energy.
I suspect than one adds transit to the mix, the headline is rather misleading.
By this means, Canada has met this goal since electricity was commercially available (53% of our electricity is hydro, alone).
Still greener than not using it. Not everything can be recycled or burned. Even the best countries, germany and austria, are still far away from 100% recycling and burning of waste.
... ie 10.3 < (1.4+5.6+7.8)
doesn't it rely on dumping infinity amounts of garbage in holes in the ground?
The combination of wind, solar and hydroelectric, along with less-publicized sources such as landfill gas and biomass, produced 378 GWs as of 2014. While Beilun Coal Power Station only produced 5,000 MWs and Tianwan Nuclear power Station only produced 8,380 MWs.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I was comparing wind and nuclear, not coal and nuclear. Even the worst estimate for wind is lower than nuclear.
Wikipedia has some slightly different figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Even so, in the worst case wind and nuclear are broadly comparable. Coal is, of course, terrible and no-one wants it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You have to solve the problem of incompetence and putting profit before safety if you want nuclear power. You can't just say "don't put idiots in charge", you have to figure out a way to actually do that for 50 years, well beyond your own working lifetime.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
None, Scotland gets 8% of the revenue for the UK, has 10% of the population, and pays 12% of the taxes. Scotland in fact (slightly) subsidises England.
According to the UK government data in the first link in TFA, renewables share of total generation was less than 20% (and falling) in the first half of 2014.
Renewables' share of total generation in 2014 quarter 2 was 16.8 per cent, an increase of 0.9 percentage points on 2013 quarter 2, with a 6.2 per cent fall in overall generation exceeding that of renewables. This was a 2.7 percentage point fall on 2014 quarter 1's record renewables share of 19.5 per cent.
The biggest hand waving always comes with decommissioning
Okay, I'll wave my hands about and gobble about 'decommissioning'.
People tend to increase over time. Energy use increases over time. Globally we are not even close to providing the whole world with a grid coverage and capacity that provides the comfortable existence we ourselves would not tolerate losing. Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear. The renewable numbers just don't work out, even when you imagine a magical solution to the storage problem, and especially when you include ground transportation.
So where did this 'decommissioning fable' come from? When was it decided --- and by whom --- that ~60 or so years hence there must be a desolate public park at every site chosen for a gigawatt nuclear plant, today?
Suggest to anyone that a water or sewage treatment plant cannot cost what it costs, it must also gather funds to fund its own destruction and demise and people will shake their heads. But this is crazy! The sewage will always flow downhill to here. We're not going to move a water plant, tear the pipes out of the ground and route them somewhere else. Oh, it's soo much different.
But is it really? Who is telling us we will be using less energy in the future? Should we listen to them?
Decommissioning funds gathered for nuclear plants may seem like a great idea, but it has also become an awful idea. It does not make nuclear energy any safer. It has promoted technological sloth, dissuaded investors from supporting (and injecting R&D to improve) the only clean base load energy source on the table. It has handicapped nuclear from being THE cheapest source of energy. It has enabled the most short-sighted and fuck-stupid forms of corporate vandalism. This is because when anyone owns or acquires an aging nuclear plant, they are faced with a choice --- whether to re-invest and re-structure to replace aging components, as they would for any other source, or trigger its destruction and unlock the magic chest of decommission funding. Getting a little kick to the balance sheet by rendering a productive energy source into a blight on the landscape, something intentionally broken that cannot be fixed.
Such as the Kewaunee Power Station which went offline in 2013 despite that it is in good condition, has maintained a healthy balance sheet, perfect safety record, operating license extended to 2033 and had six months' fuel left in the reactor. All because Dominion is riding the natural gas 'glut' at this brief moment in time. When the glut peaks out Dominion will invest in some other, dirtier short-term solution.
We should be upgrading these plants and taking them to the next level as we do with every other utility. Given the gigawatt-year track record they have demonstrated It is ludicrous to assume that any nuclear plant operating today deserves to be destroyed rather than upgraded. There are too few of them and they are too precious.
Do not feed the vultures.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
It is more than that. China is building more reactors than the rest of the world combined period. They have build most of the currently used reactor types in the last couple of decades. Including the French, Canadian, and US models.
No, it's just a cop out.
It's the lament of idiots who say "we don't know how to solve this problem, so we'll keep going and hope that later someone solves this problem".
It's not based in anything other than either being a lazy fucking moron, or being a useless sack of shit who has decided that your short term benefits are the only thing that matters and that this will become someone else's problem.
The people who make the claim you just did are intellectually disohnest, and typically selfish bastards maximizing profits.
Oh, we can't possibly solve environmental problems, so let's keep polluting and in the future maybe someone will fix it.
Tell you what, we'll keep kicking you in the head until someone solves the problem of nuclear waste. We'll see how you feel about your moronic 'solution' then.
You sound like a fucking lobbyist, which means by definition you're a lying sack of shit.
It is obvious that if we allow the population to double we will need to double energy production. And if strict birth control cuts our population in half we can essentially do fine with half as much energy production. The issue extends across almost all miseries common to humanity lately. It is also reasonable to view nuclear power as a total failure. Two major disasters and a semi major disaster at Thrree Mile Island are reason enough for the world to get rid of nuclear plants completely. If you don't believe that I have a lovely home in Chyrnoble to sell you on the cheap. The truth is that the system resists change at all costs. Powerful people own oil, coal, gas and nuclear systems. They like their money. The Tesla car demonstrates this issue in spades. Tesla has a breakthrough design and a wonderful product. Make note of how many law suits are attempting to make like impossible for those that own Tesla. And if recent history is a clue there may be fires in the night, untimely deaths, and all kinds of covert actions to try and ruin Tesla. Think about how things really work. The guy responsible for Segway sees all kinds of local laws forbidding the use of the device on sidewalks. Yet electric wheel chairs use the sidewalks and both are electric vehicles. And then I am asked to believe that the owner of Segway gets confused and drives a Segway off a cliff. Despite being a wonderful device the Segway really is not in common use in the US.
The difference to the idiotic solar cells is that nuclear is a proven around-the-clock technology. The enormous subsidies for solar cells would make sense if we had even a *remote* option to make it a baseload power source. The fact is, all options seem abysmal at best.
So, even if nuclear got massive subsidies - they are by now PAID BACK 1000 TIMES by all the economic value we got from that leccy. And by the lives saved because neither France nor Germany nor Japan had to go to war as often as they would have if they had no nuclear energy.
You are spouting the RAND-led* shite of "nuclear is soooo sooo bad" - as long as it is outside the U.S. and its Imperial Desires.
* Herman Kahn and the like; now transformed into GREEN* horror propaganda
Both Germany and Japan fought Oil Wars in the 30s and 40s. Please tally the cost of that and compare it with the human cost of nuclear energy.
As Scotland is the "windy" part of Britain, YOU BETCHA, this whole thing only works because the Evil(TM) Coal and Nuclear Station Operators have been forced by law to supply the leccy whenever there is neither wind nor sun. Which happens ALL THE TIME.
In other words, this is a scam which only works by shifting the baseload burden to somebody else and that means on the medium term that prices must escalate. See "Tatsächliche Produktion Wind" and "Tatsächliche Produktion Solar" for real-world examples of the daily, weekly and yearly fluctuations of "renewable energy generation".
Here in Germany they consciously destroy the established coal and nuclear generation company's capital (by forcing the electricity companies to buy the solar leccy at fixed price whenever the solar cells supply anything), because "they are ugly capitalists" or some similar Maoist line of thinking. Leccy prices have exploded at the same time.
The only thing they will achieve is that baseload electric power generation will switch to Russian Gaz !
As they say - Russia plays chess while our idiots come to the game with marbles.
From a strategic POV - this has made WAR more likely. A population without electricity will be more inclined to listen to the Dogs Of War.
I know you're making that out like it's a bad thing, but I actually think it's a good strategy to hold out as long as you can, because the more time passes, the more likely technology will catch up and make clean up slightly less difficult.
That is a huge ass assumption.
You realize thinking like this is exactly why we have the environmental issues we do today? No one wanting to make the tough choices (back when the problems were first discovered), let's keep going as we are and in the future I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. ("of course, if we haven't I'll be pushing up daisies anyway," they were thinking back then).
Back in the '60s folks through by the turn of the millennium we'd all be driving flying cars and living on other planets. That didn't happen, not even close. A hopeful dream by futurists and sci-fi writers. Staking the future of the environment on things that haven't been developed isn't any better. The companies that run the plants could have been putting money away, into a trust fund-like arrangement to pay the plant's decommissioning and demolition costs, but that would cut into the profits every quarter. Better to leave it all for "the next management team" to deal with. Bonus points if you can make it a God-awful mess and force the federal government to come in and take over the whole thing! Then the tax payers get to pay for the cleanup while we keep all the profits from over the decades!
There is also an issue with that graph in that it gives raw numbers of bird deaths. It does not take into account the number of different installations of each type and the energy produced by each installation. For example, if twice as much energy is produced by nuclear than by wind then there are half as many birds killed per unit energy produced.
Coal is, of course, terrible and no-one wants it.
Coal produce a lot more electricity than wind or nuclear.
At peak load, or even base load does Scotland generate enough power to sustain itself, or does it rely on capacity from the rest of the UK to generate the balance..
I'm sure the press release didn't have the same sensational headline... This is probably another case of bad journalism...
Breeder reactors are not perpetual motion devices. They must exten the usable amount if nuclear fuel by making some if the nonfissionable isotopes into fissionables.
If you had bothered to check the sources you would have noticed that it's actually worse for nuclear if you adjust for energy produced: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Notice that there is a range of estimated deaths for wind turbines, .02 to 0.57. What value did they use to calculate the estimated deaths per GWh? If they used the low value the high value would calculate to 7.6 deaths/GWh. Going from a range to a single number is not valid.
Therr numbers don't even match their references.
Form this;
The study estimates that wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.
That is higher than the 0.269 in the graph. Note the article refers to "birds and avian wildlife";
The paper concludes that further study is needed, but also that fossil fueled power stations appear to pose a much greater threat to birds and avian wildlife than wind farms and nuclear power plants.
Another example from another reference;
I estimated 888,000 bat and 573,000 bird fatalities/year (including 83,000 raptor fatalities)
So the high should be 1.46 million avian deaths.
...that the USA, teh greatest country on earth, is getting left behind. Still burning dead dinosaurs and million year-old trees 'n' shit that makes everyone ill.
And more windmills, solar, fast trains etc as anyone who watches more than cartoons knows. So what is your point exactly and what does it have to do with me stating that they are the only ones with AP1000 reactors close to completion?
I get my electricity 'from' wind turbines in Scotland. It was the cheapest on the market when I switched about three years ago and is still cheaper than most other energy companies.
One of the few examples being, errr, in Scotland. Dounreay, if you don''t know the place.
(OK, the decommissioning is not finished there, but it is well down the road to being finished.)
Would I buy a house on the old site? Probably not, but that's because it's in the arse-end of Caithness (to quote a Thursonian friend of many years), not because it's on a nuclear site. Hell, I could probably do with the reduction in radiation counts that I'd get from moving to live on Dounreay. The background radiation there is lower than at home (same Thursonian source, who did Physics in 1st year and was gob-smacked by the background radiation levels when he came to university).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Solar hot water at whatever it can do on one side and mine water at 12 celcius on the other. Not a large temperature difference but things can be done with it.
"Thousands of BritainÃ(TM)s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/
I was just reinforcing the concept. No argument here.
It is a good thing the Chinese are building the AP1000 because at this rate the US will not be building a reactor like that any time soon. Plus as we saw with Fukushima nuclear reactors should be made passively safe and the alternative to not having nuclear reactors in a lot of places is increased energy costs and economic misery. There is more than one report than Japan slumped back into their long economic depression in a large part because of the added energy costs of coal imports since the shut down of their nuclear power plants.
One of the examples here has the maximum temperature as low as 70C.
http://www.renewableenergyworl...