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.

Comments

Is anyone surprised by this?

[taiwanjohn]

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.

Re:Is anyone surprised by this?

[stealth_finger]

or whales?

Re:Is anyone surprised by this?

[jbengt]

And then, to refine kerosene from oil, they had to remove the volatile, explosive components, like gasoline, which they dumped into the river, killing plants, fish, amphibians, and the animals that fed on them.

Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky

[Shisha]

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%.

Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky

[Zocalo]

Depends on the renewable source (geothermal can easily be 24/7 for instance, not that it's currently a realistic supply generation option within the UK) and whether you are integrating any kind of energy retention system into your generator, e.g. an "Electric Mountain" or Telsa battery bank. You've also got the averages to factor in; we have a National Grid, so if it's overcast and reducing solar capacity in the South, as long as the wind is blowing in the North that might be able to make up the shortfall.

Not that traditional power plants don't have their problems. Coal and some types of gas-fired plants simply cannot be fired up quickly enough to respond to sudden spikes in demand, but since you can usually find a use for any excess are often left to at least idle 24/7, even if the energy produced is essentially being dumped. What's needed is diversification of sources, both geographically and by type, with an emphasis on deprecating the least economical and highest polluting power plants first. That's been the UK's strategy for some years now, but these things do take time, and as you say, there is still a long way to go before we can completely remove any need for fossil fuels from the system.

Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky

[Zocalo]

I don't think the math works with current battery tech, although there's a lot of conflicting results in studies because of the number of factors involved. Obviously you have to supply the energy to the batteries in the first place and since no system is 100% efficient that means wasteage, and wear and tear on the batteries resulting in earlier replacements to factor in - which means you need to start thinking about the energy consumed by the battery supply chain. Another major consideration is that not all locations are physically wired to allow power to flow from homes/businesses to the grid, and that's before you factor in any metering for billing credit purposes.

On top of all that, you've also got the psychological factor. People expect their car to be ready to go when required, and even with a safety net of any discharge to the grid will not take their car's battery below (say) 75% charge, that's still a 25% variance in how far the car will be able to go without requiring a top-up. While they'd presumably be able to set the threshold to ensure their morning commute, apparently that's enough ambiguity to trigger range anxiety to the point that many electric car owners would set a minimal contribution, or opt out entirely.

That's not to say a distributed battery system - using cars, powerwalls, or whatever else, won't work, or even be implemented, eventually, but I think there's a lot of infrastructure to be built, technology advances that need to happen, and consumer adoption to be encouraged before it can.

Re:Good progress but renewable capacity is tricky

[Spirilis]

If I had a dollar for every time someone suggests OMG EV battery storage for the grid....

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.

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). The crutch required with current tech would be some expensive DC Fast Charge-based inverter you plug into at night which can go bidirectional at the request of the grid - charge the EV over DC when appropriate and pull DC from the vehicle, invert and feed into a grid-tie system much like solar or wind.

The next best thing may be load trimming, which eMotorWorks has in the form of JuiceNet - juicenet compatible J1772 chargers can trim the available current as needed to create a large-scale electrical load shedding system.

Unthinkable?

[necro81]

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

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.

Re:Unthinkable?

[Gonoff]

Anyone who, a few years ago, couldn't predict that renewable capacity would overtake fossil fuels' hasn't been paying attention.

People have been predicting the overtaking for a long time. The problem is that there is a lot of money in oil, gas and other ways of causing pollution. That is why big oil get massive subsidies but grants for things lest likely to ruin the planet are being cut wherever some types of politicians are in control....

The good news is that renewables can be "rich people friendly" too and there is actually progress like this.

Renewables and variability

[sjbe]

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.

Capacity != generation

[LynnwoodRooster]

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...

Next breakthrough needed is in energy storage

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The promising new technologies are: Compressed air in caverns, molten salt, and Li-Ion batteries.

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.

So what?

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Sigh

[dj245]

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.

Biomass is a fucking scam

[Pinky's Brain]

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.