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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.
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.
Found it:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-...
And my comment:
A GBP1bn wind-farm.
"It can generate 659 megawatts"
Current price paid on the energy markets per megawatt-hour: GBP65.36 (Source: https://www.apolloenergy.co.uk... - year ahead electricity price for 2018)
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.
So... if this windfarm is able to run at full capacity, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, until the year 3764, without any further ongoing costs, then it might just pay back the amount it cost to build.
You forgot to divide by the 659 MW, which changes things to a 2.65 year payback at 100% capacity factor. At a more realistic capacity factor, the payback period is probably between 5 and 7 years. That's on par for most power plants. The maintenance will start to really hit at the 8-10 year mark though, and may make continued operation nonviable without subsidies.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
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.
So, who is the bigger idiot?
The people who set up 1B GP wind parks?
Or the guys who are bad in math?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"It's also worth remembering that renewables are very heavily subsidised." - so are fossil fuels and nuclear who should have lost theirs decades ago as they have been a done tech for a long time, at least renewables is a new market deserve help to get them on the road.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.