Slashdot Mirror
Britain Set For First Coal-Free Day Since Industrial Revolution (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK is set to have its first ever working day without coal power generation since the Industrial Revolution, according to the National Grid. The control room tweeted the predicted milestone on Friday, adding that it is also set to be the first 24-hour coal-free period in Britain. The UK has had shorter coal-free periods in 2016, as gas and renewables such as wind and solar play an increasing role in the power mix. The longest continuous period until now was 19 hours -- first achieved on a weekend last May, and matched on Thursday. Hannah Martin, head of energy at Greenpeace UK, said: "The first day without coal in Britain since the Industrial Revolution marks a watershed in the energy transition. A decade ago, a day without coal would have been unimaginable, and in 10 years' time our energy system will have radically transformed again." Britain became the first country to use coal for electricity when Thomas Edison opened the Holborn Viaduct power station in London in 1882. It was reported in the Observer at the time that "a hundred weight of coal properly used will yield 50 horse power for an hour." And that each horse power "will supply at least a light equivalent to 150 candles."
Britain's rise in the mid-19th century was due to coal. And major cities in the UK are still present around strategic coal fields. Moving away from coal is inevitable, but the British economy benefited greatly from this dirty energy source. And the West is currently denying those benefits to the third world, isn't it convenient that coal is bad now that the first world has exhausted theirs and no longer needs it. But the natural resource is plentiful in Africa, India and China and every step is being taken to prevent them from using it. Maybe Britain would be less full of shit if they started contributing to building of the infrastructure of Africa, if they are so keen on denying them the use of coal power. Solar panels have a very large capital expense, they are cheap in the long run, but they are not feasible for running industry in poor countries.
If everywhere had as much hydro available as Norway, most of the world would be at 99% renewables.
Oh, but you wouldn't know anything about that, would you? Can't say about other situations, offhand, but aren't you late finding some other imaginary oppressionâ to exploit? Does it make sense to anyone else that the first world goes around continuallyâ just for its amusement?
However Trump has promised to bring those coal mining jobs back and make Wales great again!
#DeleteChrome
However Trump has promised to bring those coal mining jobs back and make Wales great again!
You misheard Trump because what he said was he was going to, "make whaling great again". It fits in perfectly with his eco-destruction agenda and he wants to give miners the job of extracting all the valuable gems that encrusted on every whale belly which he learned from watching a very serious documentary... animated by Disney.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Norway .07% of the world's population.
If they had an order of magnitude more people, it would still be less than 1%.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I've seen this story posted on environmental sites touting this as a success. But it's really just no coal on the island... when electricity imports should also be considered (there are interconnections between continental Europe, and also Ireland). And then there's the other big coal user: steel. A lot of British steel has left the island; it's just produced elsewhere and imported.
So good for British air-breathers, but it's not exactly green energy transformation as some may believe.
The UK is still using LNG for electricity.
I really don't understand why people bought the idea that LNG is a good thing.
It's still fossile!
On top of this, nuclear power is in the cross hairs despite having close to the lowest CO2 emission of all types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources#2014_IPCC.2C_Global_warming_potential_of_selected_electricity_sources/
It's also the only thing we can run 24/7 without sending wast amount of CO2 into the air.
In short scrap all "renewable" hippie-power and go all nuclear with hydro as regulating power (or buy from your neighbors)
(That said, hydro isn't the best thing either for local ecosystems)
Mahna Mahna
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I see you didn't bother to read your own link before posting an extremely obvious too-good-to-be-true claim.
Let me copy-paste from our own link:
---
the average electricity consumption mix of a Norwegian household was 36% renewable.[4]
As per the European Union's 2009 Renewables Directive (later added in the EEA Agreement), Norway has established a national goal for renewable energy - 67.5% of gross final consumption
--
So 36% of what they *use* is renewable. What they *produce* is hydro and wind. Where do they get the electricity the use? They buy nuclear-generated electricity from Sweden.
Does that mean they don't use fossil fuels? Well no, transportation and everything is still fossil fuels, but their *electricity* doesn't come from fossil fuels. It comes from Sweden's nuclear plants amd Norway's mountains by way of hydro.
Hydro IS great in places with lots of mountains far from people. When you put your hydro upstream from populations, you eventually get Banqiao (200,000 dead, 11 million displaced). So don't do that. But where you've got lots of mountains and no towns downstream, hydro is great. It's not powering 99% of Norway, though. 36%, according to your link.
The energy is there to be used where the willpower exists.
My solution for sun power is to capture it in trees, bury the trees for millions of years, then dig holes down into those seems with heavy machinary and extract the black rock it has become. Oh wait, that sounds amazingly dumb and wasteful.
Erm, I'll use solar cells on the roof. My house roof is 20m2 facing the sun, i.e. approx 4kw at mid day. The problem isn't generating electricity the issue has always been storing it. I'll probably pump water up into the raising tank for that.
No matter how much solar you use, it can't compare to using that much solar plus hydro.
The link to the source for your 36% on the wikipedia page is dead, but anyway, Norway is producing more clean electricity than they consume (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/statistikker/energiregn/aar-forelopige/2015-05-06?fane=tabell&sort=nummer&tabell=226241). Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
If you include transport, heating, etc, the picture is as you point out, a bit different. But even then, the majority comes from renewables.
OP was clearly talking about electricity.
The 36% number comes from the Guarantees of Origin scam. It's an economic system which disconnects the production and consumption of energy from the buying and selling of it. It basically allows renewable energy to produce double the amount of clean conscience, for the same amount of clean energy:
Also, I suspect that the "67.5% of gross final consumption" includes stuff like gas for vehicles, wood for heating, etc, not just electricity, which makes it meaningless in this discussion.
Complete and utter fucking bullshit kid. Go ask your dad instead of making shit up. The plastic bags were a shitload cheaper, around an order of magnitude, than paper ones and that was the reason.
Reusable bags are great. I buy a new one every time I go to the store. I have a bunch of them at home in a drawer. My carbon sink I call it.
Note that Norway also exports a lot of their hydroelectric power to Sweden, so they simultaneously contribute to increasing the amount of renewables used in Sweden. Thus, you should really compare the number of kWh produced in Norway vs. the number of kWh used in Norway to get a good estimate. Let's look at the actual numbers. In 2013, they spent 129 TWh, while the renewable energy production was 131 TWh. In other words, Norway produces more renewable energy, than their total consumption of energy. (Note that I know hydropower can't be used everywhere, and unlike many others, I don't have anything against nuclear; just wanted to point this out.)
Coal was up against what and what did it do to make it beneficial?
It was up against tallow candles wooden water and wind mills and it produced electricity and steam power.
We don't use steam power. Are you suggesting that the developing nations be told to use steam power? And we have many different ways to produce electricity. Why should they use coal to do that? Especially since we already burned up the cheap and best coal? They skipped POTS and rolled out mobile phones, YOU demand they must use copper wire because "we" benefited from it, so they have to use it.
And surely we should let them benefit from nuke power,right? We should freely let every country develop nuke power stations, or we're denying somalia the benefit of it!
And it's odd you've never cared about their plight before. Only when you could sell them coal and might miss out....
Oh; and on a separate note from my comment that I am funding these:
There are a bunch of these ideas, such as Solar City's solar panels in roof tiles linked to Tesla's battery packs, which you actually can't practically fund because getting a chance to fund them is a competitive and the people with the ideas have already patented them. Yes, you could buy Tesla shares, however they are already extremely highly valued so it's probably not a very effective way of funding this development.
Simply put, these guys don't need your funding. Long term they are likely to convert their massive valuations into ownership of a huge sector of the energy market and if due to biased US regulation they fail, then one of their Chinese competitors will take over instead. At this stage it's more a question of "have you removed your investments from fossil fuels in time?". I think that lots of Trump's bluster about coal is more about his friends trying to pump and dump their old fossil investments before everybody realises this. We haven't yet reached the tipping point where renewable energy totally dominates fossil based energy in the market, however as an investment it's already a few years ago that the smart money realised that fossil fuel is becoming uneconomical. You just have to look at the amount that people are investing in new renewable capacity compared to new fossil capacity even in situations where there are no subsidies.
Norway exports power, but not necessarily to Sweden.
The map on Kontrollrummet is a bit more detailed and shows current distribution data.
Well, *ultimately* coal is also the same energy source, sunlight captured by ancient forest that turned into coal
Use old coal mine shafts for power storage. Big tank at the top, big tank at the bottom, and a turbine between. Pump water back up when power consumption is low or there is excess of power. Most of the infrastructure is already in place at the mines plus skilled labor to operate such a plant.
Its really no big deal. All these type of claims always come on a Sunday in spring or fall when heating or cooling isn't needed. Coal has not provided much power on these days since Gas became bit.
What they didn't say is that gas, nuclear, and hydro made up almost all generation on this day, wind and solar just a small amount.
Solar is the least expensive source of power, and saddling developing nations with the high cost of coal power (in addition to the pollution) only benefits the first world companies that want to get paid to build mines and power plants.
https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-year-solar-panels-finally-became-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-just-wait-for-2017/
Even Britain knows solar is a loser, which is why almost none of their power comes from solar.
blast-from-the-past dept
Apt. It happened yesterday.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Again, even if you use all these new methods, it won't beat using all these new methods plus hydro.
... and lives of those involved in the production.
Song now playing in my head*: "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Carbon Neutral"
(to the tune of Monty Pythons "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK" for those who didn't get it. Which is OK.)
the old empire is being run by a wooden top - whats the difference? they suit each other
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
He's going to bring back the whale oil industry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...anthracite in the UK?!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The UK is 18.5% nuclear, which helps, and it also imports 5% of its power from France. The giant coal plant at Drax in Yorkshire was converted to burn American wood pellets, which makes this hellmouth count as a renewable source under the European carbon accounting rules. Set up an artificial accounting system of any kind, and human nature dictates that tit will be scammed.
Renewables have not been notably successful at making Britain sunnier.
fossil fuel subsidies dwarf anything solar gets so thats a non-starter some reading for you.
https://www.ft.com/content/fb2...
https://cleantechnica.com/2016...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
this says differently https://www.theguardian.com/en...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Even Britain knows solar is a loser, which is why almost none of their power comes from solar.
Somewhat true, but misleading. The percentage of renewable energy (mostly solar and wind) is increasing, but the increase mostly comes from wind and because coal is rapidly disappearing as an energy source. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/...
For a developing country that has more sun than the UK the tradeoff is likely to be different, of course.
> Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
You may be "missing a valid point" because I didn't explicitly say it. That is, there IS a difference, an important difference, but I didn't say what the difference is.
On a small scale, perhaps an individual, the net effect would indeed be the same. On a broad scale, for national policy and international agreements, there is a HUGE difference. I should start by saying wind power is great. It can produce a lot of cheap clean power when the wind is right. The power available from wind is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. So there is a LOT of power there during a medium-strong wind, and virtually no usable power in a light breeze. That cube power law becomes even more important at higher speeds, when the extreme forces on the turbines are trying to destroy them. So within a fairly narrow range of wind speeds, wind power is great. Roughly 30% of the time, it provides a significant portion of Norway's electricity needs. The other 70% of the time, the wind isn't right - and building more turbines doesn't change that. If the world, or Europe, produced 500% of the energy they need on Saturday, and 10% of their needs on Wednesday, that doesn't work. The net effect is *not* the same. The net effect is blackouts on Wednesday.
This is why we'd love to have a practical method of storing enough energy to run a country. We don't have that yet. There are some ideas, ideas which are 10-20 years out - and have been since the 1960s. Maybe one day some very clever people will come up with a practical way to store the immense amount of energy needed to power a whole country.
Norway DOES have clean electricity (not to be confused with energy). That's awesome. Let's look at how they achieved that. Was it by spending hundreds of billions on subsidising solar-electric, handing out taxpayer dollars to "companies" who haven't actually produced any solar panels, but are run by friends of the politicians? Nope. They achieved clean energy by taking advantage of their particular geography that's especially well-suited to hydro (and taking the risk of a Banqiao) and buying clean nuclear energy (despite the risk, and mostly fear, of a catastrophic nuclear event, which is theoretically possible although nuclear has in fact been the safest energy).
Nice milestone, but see https://www.gov.uk/government/... for a far more informative overview. It looks like coal usage in the UK is falling off a cliff.
No it doesn't.
Wind makes much more sense for most of Britain than solar. Coal has mostly been displaced by gas.
A major dam failure may be unlikely in Norway, and as seen at Banqiao and elsewhere it can be a MAJOR catastrophe. Why mention unlikely risks? Norway gets the electricity it uses from three sources - wind, hydro, and nuclear. A nuclear catastrophe is similarly unlikely, but its certainly something people bring up! Actually nuclear catastrophe is quite a bit less likely - the type of nuclear accident they are afraid of has NEVER happened. (Chernobyl killed 38 people, and decades later probably shortened the lives of 4,000 others). Dam failures DO actually happen. They are real events, that actually kill hundreds of thousands of people. If you're going to consider the risk of a theoretical type of event that has never actually happened, certainly it makes sense to similarly consider the types of catastrophic failures which *do* actually happen in real life.
So that's the point - for the people who choose to consider worst case scenarios, who are afraid of nuclear, they should be even more afraid of hydro. Or chill out and realise that there are dams and nuclear plants all over the place, but what kills people is Corollas and Big Macs.
99% of Norways coastline is fjords. And they only have 5 million people on a land size that 2.5x times of the UK. Half the population live in Oslo, Stavenger, Bergen and Trondheim.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Given the land mass of Africa, most of it being empty desert, they have infinite potential for solar power (aside from being underneath migratory routes for birds).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
i guess you didn't read it
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
now run by a muppet.
WTF are you talking about? The Muppets have a much better platform than our current 'leadership'.
He probably meant a Feeble, but then again most people wouldn't get that reference....
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I read it. Its back up what I spoke of. What you don't realize is that increased gas usage is what has reduced coal to a small part of generation, and solar is still even a smaller part when you don't just look at the summer months (as plainly shown in the graph)
I think there is some truth to both of those versions of events, in that plastic bags were considered both more environmentally friendly and they cheaper when they were introduced. The problems of plastic bags not decomposing wasn't yet a known issue when they were first being introduced in the 70s, and at the time, it took about 1/4 of the energy to produce a plastic bag as a paper one, so it seemed like an environmental win at the time. But while the adoption of plastic bags may have been supported by environmentalists at the time, it's pretty clear the reason stores started offering the choice of plastic or paper was because they could buy 4 plastic bags for every paper bag. That's a clear cost saving and the fact that some customers found the plastic bags more convenient that paper (because they had handles) made it also a goodwill win. Blaming environmentalists for the change, however, is so one-sided as to be beyond the point of self-delusion.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Coming next : Removing dirty Nuke energy.
aaaaaaa
I dare you to compare subsidies on a per MWH generated/to be generated basis. I imagine you will avoid doing so.
> Your numbers for Chernobyl are retardedly optimistic - I have no clue where you got them
Check *any* source not paid for an extremist anti-nuclear group. There was a lot of variation in projections back in the late 1980s, estimating how it might effect cancer rates in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Now pretty much everyone is roughly in agreement. The World Health Organization did one well-known study. See Sovacool for other references. Since it's been 30 years, experts no longer need to debate about projections - the actual data exists.
There was one estimate at 6,000+, but it was pointed out that's more than the TOTAL number of deaths in the area, from car accidents, old age, etc. The concern with Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and we now know how many cases of thyroid cancer there have been.
If you google uk area, then repeat with norway area, then do some simple calculations, you will see that 2.5x times is a bit far fetched.
> So says greenpeace, the WHO, 'Doctors without frontiers
Let me copy-paste from WHO (World Health organization) for you:
--
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster
--
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
The only mention I found on the Doctors Without Borders site says "dozens of lives". If you want to, you can do a more thorough search of their publications.
Btw the United Nations report is also pretty thorough, if you'd like to have a read. The UN conclusions are very close the WHO numbers.
Pretty much only Greenpeace sticks to their original estimates, despite them being very obviously wrong at this point. They projected by now, radiation would have killed more cleanup workers than the total who have died from all sources combined. In other words, even if we counted workers who died in car accidents decades later as Chernobyl victims, there are STILL too many workers alive today for the Greenpeace numbers to be anywhere close to correct.
Here's a video of Greenpeace reporting the death toll for you:
https://youtu.be/uBxMPqxJGqI
Too bad the colonies across the pond are now run by a muppet.
Yeah, and Carthage must be destroyed, too.
Your side lost. Five and a half months ago. Isn't it time you got over it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When you put your hydro upstream from populations, you eventually get Banqiao (200,000 dead, 11 million displaced).
Are you saying all dams eventually fail?
No, the simple answer was the reason and not some weird illuminati conspiracy theory about environmentalists with vast amounts of political power controlling everything from the shadows.
It was known, (especially in areas where they relied on tourists visiting beaches) but ignored for financial reasons. It's not "history" to me.
> Are you saying all dams eventually fail?
Well, do you think do you think all 40 or so dams in Norway will be intact 2,000 years from now? Lake Homs in Syria might still be there, but it's a pretty good bet Norway will have some more failures - they have before, just as the US has. If they make a habit of building dams upstream of cities, it's a pretty good bet some failures will wipe out cities. Niagara failed at Schoellkopf power station. If a major failure at Niagara that happened today, with the number of people now living downstream, it wouldn't be pretty.
If you drive drunk tonight, you'll probably make it home okay. If you make a habit of driving drunk all the time, in all likelihood you'll *eventually* get into a major crash. The idea that long-term risk requires that bad consequences occur *every* time rather than *some* times is a major, major source of bad decisions, especially among young people. If you play Russian roulette once, you'll probably be fine. If you make a habit of playing Russian roulette, you'll be dead. Most of our decisions are about the kinds of things we'll do on a daily basis, habits, how we live life on a regular basis. They aren't really one-time events. Each is just an example of our habits, and our habits will almost certainly have consequences.
We're not talking about having one dam in one place for one day. We're talking about many dams, which will be there for tens of thousands of days - including the day tha the worst storm in a hundred years hits.
Complete and utter fucking bullshit kid. Go ask your dad instead of making shit up. The plastic bags were a shitload cheaper, around an order of magnitude, than paper ones and that was the reason.
I'm old enough to remember when plastic bags became mainstream. Not only were they cheaper, they were stronger, moisture resistant, and had handles so you could carry more than one at once.
No, the simple answer was the reason and not some weird illuminati conspiracy theory about environmentalists with vast amounts of political power controlling everything from the shadows.
My point was that at the time, some people did consider plastic bags more environmentally friendly.
It was known, (especially in areas where they relied on tourists visiting beaches) but ignored for financial reasons. It's not "history" to me.
If you say so, though I'm not sure how people would have known that plastic bags would be a trash nightmare before they were in common use.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Really? Did you meet one of those people? I certainly never did.
Also what is being argued here is not "some people" but a major motivation, which really makes zero sense IMHO. It smacks of pure revisionism and trying to blame the "other" for the very thing that the "other" warned people about, an oft used and somewhat pathetic trick used by political animals used to attempt to discredit a group they do not like. There's no point trying to take a calming middle view against such tricks - halfway to bullshit is still harmful.
Plastic bottles already were a trash nightmare so it was kind of obvious. I spent days in the 1980s cleaning stuff off beaches.