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UK Renewable Energy Capacity Surpasses Fossil Fuels For First Time (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The capacity of renewable energy has overtaken that of fossil fuels in the UK for the first time, in a milestone that experts said would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In the past five years, the amount of renewable capacity has tripled while fossil fuels' has fallen by one-third, as power stations reached the end of their life or became uneconomic. The result is that between July and September, the capacity of wind, solar, biomass and hydropower reached 41.9 gigawatts, exceeding the 41.2GW capacity of coal, gas and oil-fired power plants.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
Imperial College London, which compiled the figures, said the rate at which renewables had been built in the past few years was greater than the "dash for gas" in the 1990s. However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations. In terms of installed capacity, wind is the biggest source of renewables at more than 20GW, followed by solar spread across nearly 1m rooftops and in fields. Biomass is third.
Amory Lovins, a well-known advocate of renewable energy, likes to tell the story of how the whales were saved from extinction in the mid-1800s by "profit maximizing capitalists" who brought kerosene to market, which rapidly wrecked the market for whale oil. This is the same story... renewables are simply getting to be cheaper than fossil fuels now, and the trend is only going to continue as technology improves and fossil fuels become harder to extract.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is great but there is still a long way to go. Renewable capacity is not really comparable to fossil fuel power station capacity because the coal / gas ones can run 24/7...
To get a better picture of where we are check out http://grid.iamkate.com/ . Basically in the last year UK electricity was 19% from renewable sources with fossil fuels at 48%.
Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention. True: past performance is no indication of future results; but the trend has been clear for quite a few years now.
It's worth remembering that the cost of UK electricity is $0.22/kWh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
Renewable capacity is not really comparable to fossil fuel power station capacity because the coal / gas ones can run 24/7...
I don't know if you've ever been offshore in the North Sea but the wind blows there about as close to 24/7 as you are likely to find. Same thing with most hydro power - dams are quite predictable and steady at large scale. Geothermal is super steady. You really are just talking about solar and to a lesser extent on-shore wind. Sure solar is variable and wind to a lesser extent but with built in battery buffers and enough capacity that can be mitigated. And that variability can be an asset in the right circumstances. Solar power is a fantastic fit for use cases like refrigeration and AC which tend to draw the most power exactly when the sun is shining the brightest. Plus once you get enough renewables installed to the grid they statistically balance out and proved effectively a baseload. The wind is pretty much always blowing somewhere and you can route the power from there to where it is needed.
It's more than possible to power most needs of a typical house with a solar roof and a large battery pack. Coal and gas have their utility and are going to be with us for a while but the whole baseload argument really is not supported by the facts unless you (wrongly) assume we aren't going to make any changes to the grid. Plus if you need a constant carbon free power source nuclear is more than capable. I wouldn't call it clean per-se and it certainly isn't renewable, but it's arguably less dangerous than fossil fuels on grid scale.
Renewables in the UK were about 30% of electric generation; natural gas, oil and coal were about 52% of generation. And for those renewables? The largest portion was bioenergy - the burning of (predominantly) imported wood pellets to power turbines. Onshore wind was second-place. So first place is still evil fossil fuels, second place is burning trees imported from abroad, and then we're down to onshore wind...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Compressed air seems to be more economical than batteries today. Utilities would prefer this because, we would still need the grid.
Molten salt idea is to melt common salt using solar energy and keep it in underground tanks, and boil water off the stored energy to run steam turbines when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. It involves basic thermodynamics and heat to mechanical energy conversion. So its efficiency is not great. It might come back to bite. Again utilities like this because we would still need the grid.
The Li-Ion battery prices are following a 7 year half life curve. We are at the cusp 100 $/kWh at pack level magic number right now. Tesla claims it is at 120$/kWh at pack level and below 100$/kWh in cell level. Others are close or ahead. Even at this price, batteries can stabilize the grid and take care of sudden changes in wind or solar generation. It has already saved Southern Australian grid several million dollars in the spot market for electricity. And with some financial engineering and capitalization of revenue streams, solar panel companies are viable in many places where the utility prices are high. At around 80$/kWh at pack level most middle class homes will be able to choose the grid or panel+batteries for their home. As prices drop below that level, affluent people will start dropping off the grid, (like affluent commuters dropped off public transportation in the 1960s and bus/tram lines collapsed in 1970s). This is the scary situation for the electric utility companies. Cost for remaining customers go up, and more people drop off the grid. When will the batteries be at 65$/kWh at pack level? If Elon Musk's secret master plan is right, it is just 7 Elon years from now. Like N Dog years = 7*N human years, N Elon years = N+6 human years. So we are looking at 2031 for this price for batteries.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't know how much time you've spent offshore, but sea spray is highly corrosive and requires constant maintenance to keep things made of metal and carbon fiber and fiberglass from literally falling apart in a matter of a few years.
Got any more off topic strawmen you'd like to eviscerate? Yes they require maintenance. So what? You think coal or gas plants require no maintenance? Those boilers don't magically run without some serious upkeep. Maintenance is a cost for every form of power generation. Nuclear plants have huge maintenance costs. At the end of the day the maintenance is just one factor among many in determining the economic viability. Increased maintenance is (often more than) offset buy not having to buy any fuel stocks.
Last time I commented on an article, it was about a GBP 1bn wind-farm that would take nearly 3000 years to pay itself back at even 100% generation, zero ongoing maintenance, and an ever-increasing pence-per-kwh price.
Just because it's there, doesn't mean that it's in any way sensible.
I seen that Wind being the major source of renewable energy. Makes sense, North Atlantic, windy and rainy. Does anyone know if a commercial scale of wave power has been developed and utilized? North Atlantic, I would think would be a great place to harness that renewable energy. Sure would never have to worry about it not being available like solar.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Solar and wind generators are rated by the maximum capacity of the source. These 'nameplate' values add up fast for factory-built technologies, but what happens when that solar panel spends most of its time sitting under a white, drizzling British sky?
Just write it in as if it's a fait accompli - 'carbon' is bad, because we say so, over and over again. What a joke 'climate change' is, the most blatant fraud ever perpetrated by the 'scientific' community.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Does this 'low carbon' bollocks include importing RAIN FOREST trees in the form of wooden pellets, and BURNING them in power stations? This is the end result of this blatant insanity - any bollocks goes, as long as we can prove how 'green' we are. Meanwhile the rainforests are being irreversibly destroyed, millions of animals are brutally killed, and thousands of indigenous people are forced off THEIR land and into the wage slave system. Fucking idiots.(That includes all the 'climate change' cretins on here, who can't even THINK that they just might have been duped by vested interests.)
The islanders are going to need it, now that the North Sea fields are fast becoming uneconomical.
You nailed the problems on the head. Using an EV to supply battery back to the grid is like loaning out your car to the general public... You had better be paid princely for the "miles" they put on your vehicle, in this case, the charge-discharge cycles put on the battery.
Sure there is a cost to that but if the price is right then so what? You're certainly right that there is a wear and tear cost to cycling the battery but that's fine if the economics of it work for all parties involved. In a high demand situation (hot day with everyone's AC going) I could see it making more economic sense than to fire up a peaker plant or similar. I don't think it would make sense as an every day go to solution but I could see it being a sometimes solution for some situations once there are enough EVs in service.
Actually I think the more useful thing to worry about doing in the short term is to allow EV cars to act as battery backups to private residences for power outages. I have a Chevy Bolt EV with a gigantic traction battery pack. I'm not really interested in feeding the grid but it is criminal that I cannot use it as a battery backup for my home in the event of a power outage for the 1-2 power outages I experience per year. It's got enough power to keep the lights on and refrigerator going for 1-2 days but I have no means to make that happen. (yes I know you can do some 12V hacks to get a bit of power out but it's not worth the trouble)
Most vehicles are not wired to allow this at residential level - the J1772 standard doesn't allow the vehicle to pump inverted AC power out, although that would be a neat trick (and probably feasible in future cars).
From a technical standpoint, feeding power out would be an almost trivial endeavor even today. I'm honestly kind of irritated nobody is seriously trying to do it already from EVs. The hardware requirements could probably be figured out in about a weekend and then you just need some sort of transfer switch for private use. Hooking into the grid would add some complication but it's not crazy hard to do. But for powering your home without a grid tie is something that should already be possible for those who are interested.
don't run 24/7. Power demand is not constant. It peaks twice during the work day. In the morning when people are going to work and just get to work. And in the Evening when people are finishing up their day and are going home. So most fossil fuel power plant only run for part of the day.
Think of all the oil going unburned. It must break your little climate-change-denying hearts. Boo.
The good news is that renewables can be "rich people friendly" too and there is actually progress like this.
That's my usual response to people who are ideologically against renewable energy. I just ask them "are you against making money?" because they almost invariably are conservatives who would sell their own mother for a tax break. They either have to admit they are just arguing against it because of tribalism (they don't like tree huggers) or they have to admit they don't understand the economics involved. It's obvious that there is huge profit to be made in renewable energy technology and that the technology is advancing very rapidly. Arguments that it it only profitable because of subsidies apply to fossil fuels too which get $5 trillion in direct subsidies annually globally and even more if you count the cost of the pollution they are permitted to dump without cost. Anyone interested in energy sector investments for the long run had better have renewables as part of their portfolio because the economics of them make way too much sense. Coal and natural gas really aren't going to benefit from advancing technology substantially. Solar and wind very much will.
The Li-Ion battery prices are following a 7 year half life curve. We are at the cusp 100 $/kWh at pack level magic number right now. Tesla claims it is at 120$/kWh at pack level and below 100$/kWh in cell level.
Bear in mind that for grid level power, Li-Ion is not the only or even necessarily best type of battery to use. There are cheaper batteries that are bulkier but have good characteristics for grid power. Li-Ion is popular because its power to weight ratio is good but if we don't care about that lots of other battery chemistries become viable. Tesla is using Li-Ion because they are trying to achieve economies of scale with that technology for their vehicle production with a dual use technology so it makes sense for now. But a company that only cared about grid power could probably produce a different and cheaper battery chemistry and get the cost per kWh down further.
GBP1bn will therefore take 1,000,000,000 / 65.36 =
15,299,877 hours to pay back, at full generative capacity.
15,299,877 hours = 637,495 days = 1,746 years.
You forgot to divide the megawatts out to get to units of just hours.
GBP 1B / 65.36 GBPperMWh / 659 MW = 23,216 hours or around 2.65 years payback.
It is done in Europe since a decade.
No it hasn't been done for a decade in Europe or anywhere else. There have been some baby steps in the last 2-3 years. Nissan and some others have been working on the problem recently but we're just now seeing early versions of the technology roll out. I am not aware of any technology for a Tesla or Bolt EV that would permit direct use of the traction battery to power your home much less the grid. This isn't because it isn't possible but just because they haven't bothered to work on the the problem.
Honestly it seems ridiculous to me that EV makers (Tesla especially) aren't using this as a fantastic way to show how they are better than ICE vehicles. The marketing almost writes itself.
However, the amount of power from fossil fuels was still greater over the quarter, at about 40% of electricity generation compared with 28% for renewable sources. In total, 57% of electricity generation was low carbon over the period, produced either by renewables or nuclear power stations.
So by "surpasses" you mean "didn't surpass"?
Sounds like an interesting material to use, would the wave actionand wind driven sea spray abrade it however?
Yet another AC agw/climate change denier spouting from behind a cloak of anonymity. grow some courage and stop being aonymous then people may be able to believe anything you write or link to.
Yes it has. I worked on such projects.
Really? What equipment could I buy in 2009 that would allow me to power my home from a traction battery from any EV available at the time. You claim that it's been worked on for a decade. Bear in mind that the Nissan Leaf wasn't even on the market in 2009, the Chevy Bolt EV was 8 years away, and the Tesla Model S wasn't available until 2012. Hell show me what I could buy off the shelf in 2015 to power my home from the traction battery of my EV.
Obviously they still are research projects. About 1000 cars are involved in Germany.
That means it hasn't been done. I don't give a shit about research projects. Those mean nothing. There are fusion power research projects too if we're talking about technology that is not useful to to anyone today. I know people have been working on the problem but there really wasn't anything commercially available prior to 2017 and still isn't anything widely available to power my home from an EV traction battery despite it being technologically not all that challenging.
There's an enormous difference in maintenance.
There is also a difference in the cost of fuel stocks. $0 for renewables versus $HUGE for fossil plants. You seem to be missing the point. The only number that matters at the end of the day is the total cost. (including externalities of pollution that fossil fuel plants never are forced to fully pay for) It doesn't matter if wind costs more to maintain if the cost of a watt delivered is similar or less. You're trying to imply that wind power has these huge maintenance costs but the fact is that the accounting has been done and it doesn't matter because cost of maintenance is only one item among many in the cost of the system.
Offshore wind needs basically continual maintenance due to the large number of machines- once you finish all of them you need to go back to the first one.
Even if true, so what? Just requiring maintenance is insufficient data to tell us anything useful. Fossil fuel plants require maintenance too as well as fuel and lots of other costs. The profile of these costs will be different but that's not important. What matters is how much it costs to deliver a watt. So offshore wind has higher maintenance costs? It has lower fuel costs, lower emissions control costs, isn't subject to geopolitical fluctuation in fuel prices, doesn't have a single point of failure if one turbine fails, and doesn't dump massive amounts of particulates and CO2 that never get cleaned up.
A SmartMeter and SmartCharger from Siemens, obviously you need an internet connection, and a power company involved in using your SmartMeter/SmartCharger.
Siemens makes chargers for powering your EV at home. If they sell a device that let's you power your home from an EV they are doing a good job of hiding it from the internet. There literally is no mechanism in most EVs for running power out of the EV and into your home. The software in the cars doesn't support power going out from the charge port. Only in the last year or so has that changed for a handful of cars. My Chevy Bolt EV cannot do it in stock form no matter what I plug into it and that's true in Europe as well. I don't believe any Tesla can do it either and only recently in a few places can you do it with a Nissan Leaf or any other mass market EV.
If it was a 1000 cars around 2005, then most certainly there are far more now.
Citation needed. There weren't very many EVs made circa 2005 with a battery pack large enough to power a home for any meaningful amount of time. So again you are making claims without evidence.
Either we have no power outages (Europe) Either we have no power outages (Europe), or if there is one: you are in much deeper shit than just having no power (Asia).
No power outages in Europe, huh? You do know that we can check your bogus "facts" right? Power is reliable in Europe but let's not pretend blackouts are never a thing there.
It mostly just means burning wood in old coal plants for massive subsidies. It's a complete dead end. Hideously expensive, unscaleable, with massive transport costs burning lots of fossil fuel.
It's only the subsidies which make it profitable, subsidies which should be targeted at something not so utterly retarded and destructive ... but then relying on government on the scale of the EU not being utterly retarded and destructive is a lost cause.
This doesn't surprise me, fossil fuels are really expensive.
Heck, in the USA, they would be the most expensive if we didn't artificially subsidize them with "mix" requirements for utiilities, cheaper rates for industry, tax exemptions for fossil fuel vehicle fleets, tax deductions and depreciation schemes all of which prop up a dying industry.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It says 29.9% renewable. Add on biomass and its the same as fossil fuels.
There are better chip technologies than Si for various uses. Yet everyone is on silicon, because economies of scale left everything else behind on old slow processes.
Better is too vague a term to be useful because you have to define how it is better. Cheaper? Performance? Manufacturability? Supply? Yes Gallium Arsenide chips (for example) have better performance characteristics but has worse economics (silicon is cheap) and is harder to manufacture (read expensive).
Also be careful about making analogies like that. There already are pretty substantial economies of scale on other battery chemistries AND there is evidence that other chemistries could become dominant in the future. Lead Acid batteries are used in every car on the planet (ironically even my Chevy Bolt EV) so they are being produced at large scale and it wouldn't be super hard to scale that up even further. (not saying they should - just an example) You are correct that silicon is the dominant chemistry for making chips and is likely to remain so but it doesn't automatically follow that the same economic model will be true for batteries. The manufacturing process and supply chain characteristics are quite different. If a new and better performing battery chemistry comes along (which seems probable) which makes big gains in performance, then it is very likely that they will be replaced in due course. If Tesla could double their range or cut their recharge time in half with a Li-Air battery, they are going to have to look hard at doing just that. We have a pretty good idea what the theoretical limits of various battery chemistries are and Li-Ion isn't at the top of the list