Energy infrastructure

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119088094#Comment_119088094

Note to make it slightly more palatable, even the new 26-27B bill is in 2015 prices which EDF have started using "in order to maintain consistency for the markets" - lol - but meaning the real bill will be even higher after accounting for inflation.

This is jaw-dropping:

"EDF stressed that the additional costs would not affect UK consumers. The construction costs are being met by EDF and its junior partner in the project, China’s CGN, in return for a 35-year contract that guarantees a price of £92.50 per megawatt hour of electricity produced, rising with inflation"

Shows what a bad deal the Tory nuclear fan-boys signed - the price guarantee will still be profitable for the operators with construction costs at £27B even though when it was negotiated, the expected cost was only £18B. They can blow through the cost budget by 50% and still make money. For perspective, this bill would construct 18 National Children's Hospitals.

But of course they can make money at £92.50/MWh regardless of how incompetent they are. Compare with most recent prices for off-shore wind were £39.65/MWh about 40% the cost of Hinckley C power.

In fact the current high wholesale prices in the UK have led to the interesting situation where "Wind farms are expected to pay back £660 million under the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme amid the current energy crisis." - see this article. So having a large amount of intermittent sources using CfD (contract for difference) for pricing actually stabilises the cost of electricity for the consumer - the opposite of what many claim.

Nuclear electricity is an economic and financial clown-car.

bob mcbob

I have been looking at the UK grid stats for the past couple of weeks and have been puzzled as the UK has been exporting a lot of electricity (2.5 - 4G) pretty much consistently. This is not related to renewables as these vary. Here are the stats from now (31.9G demand but 34.42 generated). I was wondering what was going on as the wholesale gas price is very high at the moment.

It was explained in an article in the Times yesterday. Apparently there are not enough LNG (import) terminals in Europe so the terminals in the UK are being used to import LNG, this is then exported to Europe. However the gas export pipelines are not big enough to take all the LNG that is being imported and the UK has very limited storage capacity so there is too much LNG in the UK. The excess is used to generate electricity and this is being exported to over the interconnections. It really shows that there is a pan-European energy market / system.

Full article is here but behind paywall.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-energy-exports-to-europe-at-record-high-zlhrsd0xk

Apogee

The RESS 2 auction results have been released by Eirgrid. A lot of smaller solar projects, but a few larger (~100MW) solar and onshore wind proposals as well.

source:https://www.eirgridgroup.com/site-files/library/EirGrid/RESS-2-Provisional-Auction-Results-(R2PAR).pdf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119091579#Comment_119091579

Further to your post (for those that don't want to go to the link) some additional bits

Here's the table of the successful applications, reordered from the pdf to show wind and solar separately, sorted by MW

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119088301#Comment_119088301

a 35-year contract that guarantees a price of £92.50 per megawatt hour of electricity produced, rising with inflation"

That strike price had already risen to 106.12£/MWh as of 1st December 2021 so add half a year's inflation to that.

Then multiply by £92.50 / £ 89.50 If Sizewell C does not go ahead on or before the Reactor One Start Date.

Meanwhile solar, wind and storage get cheaper year after year.

josip

Interesting that way more solar was rejected than wind. The unsuccessful applications aren't listed. I would have though that solar was less objectionable than wind. Is it known why they were unsuccessful?

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119031248#Comment_119031248

No, and as strong a no as can be possibly stated.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119092298#Comment_119092298

Also interesting that the two top wind projects are subject to ongoing JR issues. Maybe someone forgot to tell Eirgrid🙄.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119088200#Comment_119088200

Wind bluffers like you seem to be rather scared of real world stuff - like the fact that Germany this week signed a massive deal with Qatar for LPG. I don't see nuclear grids like France or Czech Republic flailing around to the same extent for extra fossil back up???

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119091958#Comment_119091958

Yeah - Germany, Ireland etc. all cheap as chips......

https://www.bonkers.ie/blog/gas-electricity/irish-electricity-prices-fourth-most-expensive-in-eu/

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119092568#Comment_119092568

Have you managed to avoid the news for the last 3 months?

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119092573#Comment_119092573

My point is Germany's dependence on fossil for power generation despite its vast spend/rollout on wind/solar - whats yours???

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119092568#Comment_119092568

Cheap, Good, Fast. Renewables generally tick the boxes once planning permission has been approved.

Nuclear isn't cheap. Look at the way Hinkley C's costs and strike prices keep going up. Every year it's delayed means another year of 3GW from fossil fuel (or Drax biomass from bird habitats ) as nuclear only provides base load.

Nuclear isn't fast, especially if you are trying out a new unproven design. What matters is when it provides full power reliably. It takes half a year to ramp up and debug and commission a proven design.

Nuclear isn't good, it can't match follow demand. It can't be restarted quickly. France recently had 26 plants out of 56 offline, it's not even reliable. In the UK only 8 out of the 12 remaining generators are at Nominal Full Load. If you have any links to actual Czech nuclear output I can check it out for you. ( I am not wading thought the centralised European database because you'd likely ignore any facts that didn't fit your world view )

The graphs I posted showed that Germany doesn't have enough renewables to meet demand. Which is exactly what you are saying too.

A wind farm has a capacity factor of 1/3 so installing three times as much means you get 100%. It's not quite as simple as that. But the graph of output over the UK is linear apart from a week with no power. Having solar, hydro, waste to energy, biomass, better building and water insulation to reduce demand spikes, demand shedding, interconnectors, storage etc. etc. AND fossil gas to a level of up to 20% of previous emissions we can stay within our 2030 target and have 20 years to reduce emissions by 1% a year.

More on the RESS auction

https://www.independent.ie/news/environment/solar-transformation-on-the-way-as-66-new-solar-farms-approved-to-supply-electricity-41672503.html

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119093123#Comment_119093123

That is simply nuts ie. claiming that installing 3 times as many windfarms as currently will meet demand during low wind conditions!! Do you actually read some of the nonsense you post here???

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119095782#Comment_119095782

Do you actually read some of the nonsense you post here???

Pot, meet kettle

Markcheese

Could the massive midlands wind project of a decade ago be restarted ... Or is it not worth it in that location ?

Sam Russell

For wind, off shore is needed because it spreads the capture area substantially, so increasing the chance that any wind will be generating somewhere. We could cover an area of 500 km by 500 km.

We would not rely solely on wind. Interconnectors allows backup for extended periods of calm, while biomass, and solar would allow respite, while grid scale battery and pumped storage coupled with domestic battery storage would see us over short term shortage, which coupled with load shedding, is close to a complete solution.

@Birdnuts - Your fixation with wind being the only solution to renewable energy should be reviewed. Include in your portfolio of solutions other forms of renewables like solar plus the option of interconnectors which allow export and import of energy, and then include energy storage. When the wind does not blow, we will not be in the energy doldrums.

Can't find the nuclear thread maybe I'm blind, mods feel free to move.

Nuclear fusion may be knackered before it even gets going

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nuclear-fusion-is-already-facing-a-fuel-crisis

Like many of the most prominent experimental nuclear fusion reactors, ITER relies on a steady supply of both deuterium and tritium for its experiments. Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, but tritium—a radioactive isotope of hydrogen—is incredibly rare.

Atmospheric levels peaked in the 1960s, before the ban on testing nuclear weapons, and according to the latest estimates there is less than 20 kg (44 pounds) of tritium on Earth right now. And as ITER drags on, years behind schedule and billions over budget, our best sources of tritium to fuel it and other experimental fusion reactors are slowly disappearing.

Right now, the tritium used in fusion experiments like ITER, and the smaller JET tokamak in the UK, comes from a very specific type of nuclear fission reactor called a heavy-water moderated reactor. But many of these reactors are reaching the end of their working life, and there are fewer than 30 left in operation worldwide—20 in Canada, four in South Korea, and two in Romania, each producing about 100 grams of tritium a year. (India has plans to build more, but it is unlikely to make its tritium available to fusion researchers.)

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119096454#Comment_119096454

I think there are 3 variations of perspective evident in posts here (from everyone).

• GWh, capacity, power generation type posts.
• Bigger picture consideration of the immediate impacts of power gen types on our current environment
• Longer term urgency to divest of fossil fuel generation

Based on his posts, I don't think Birdnuts has an objection to wind from a purely power generation perspective. He accepts that it can generate some power, doesn't deny that offshore wind will be better than onshore wind and would agree that wind has some place in the energy mix. He seems to react strongly to any very optimistic posts about how large a percentage of that mix could be met by wind. In fairness some of the posts do seem very optimistic, even by 2050 ambitions, but many of those posts are also couched with various caveats, so they're not all being madly unrealistic either.

I suspect that Birdnuts is not so fundamentally against the power gen claims of wind, as to the potential environmental impacts of large turbines. Many people in rural Ireland feel that they bear most of the environmental cost of wind, while the urban dwellers benefit with zero cost. There's a certain validity to that opinion. Although Birdnuts himself isn't as close to a windfarm as some, his posts reflect a strong concern for the environment and for that reason alone, any increase in wind capacity is seen as a loss from the environmental perspective.

Of the environmental impacts, bird strikes would be the single biggest concern I suspect, based on the username itself. And for that reason, offshore is not a magical silver bullet. Some people will quote the domestic cat kills on birds numbers as a rebuttal of that concern, but there are specific concerns for rare breeds in certain areas that cannot be predicted in advance. Put that against the bigger global long term issue of impact on the environment and the undoubted benefit of wind over the likes of Moneypoint for example, and you've got the basis for page upon page of interestig to and fro on this thread. I think it's one of the better threads on boards because of it.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119095782#Comment_119095782

Read it again

Interconnectors + Storage (including a grid-month worth of Hydrogen) + Demand shedding + Better insulation + Waste to energy + Biomass + up to 20% of the gas we currently use. And Solar , oodles of cheap solar. 3GW could be retro-fitted to existing farm buildings.

It's not just wind. It never was. But we got over 50% of February's electricity from wind. With 3x capacity we'd have got 100% and have 50% to export/reimport or store.

Birds don't respect borders. Neither does CO2. Every kWh of wind energy we export can save more being produced elsewhere.

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119092298#Comment_119092298

It can only have been on the basis of their prices. RESS 2 got rid of the special category for Solar in RESS 1.

specialbyte

An Bord Pleanála has granted permission for the Celtic Interconnector between Ireland and France. The 700MW interconnected aims to be operational by 2026. This project in combination with the 500MW Greenlink interconnector to the UK will increase our interconnection from 1GW to 2.2GW. They will all be great at creating down-ward pressure on electricity prices and make renewables in Ireland even more appealing.

https://twitter.com/jqbilbao/status/1528779562313711618

Apogee

^^^There is a good map of the proposed route at the Irish end in that twitter thread:

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119103746#Comment_119103746

If it completes on schedule it will have been 15 years from conception to delivery.

On those kind of timescales, if we want to export our surplus offshore wind power before 2040, we need to start planning for additional interconnectors now. Greenlink is a little quicker, 9-10 years to completion.

gjim

That's a huge length of underground transmission? There's a lot to be said for underground in terms of aesthetics but it's hugely more expensive and much slower to construct. Studies in the US show underground to cost 5 to 6 times as much per km in terms of costs and 3 to 6 times the construction time. I can understand why people don't want HV overhead transmission lines near their houses but this is a pretty big price to pay.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119105593#Comment_119105593

Also massively more expensive to resolve any problems should they arise

bk

"Studies in the US show underground to cost 5 to 6 times as much per km in terms of costs and 3 to 6 times the construction time."

I'd wonder is that just the construction cost and does it take into account years of delays due to public and planning objections to overhead cables?

I've no idea, but if it was just the direct construction cost (and perhaps higher maintenance), it is possible if you add in planning delays, underground might become more competitive.

I suspect it might just be quicker and easier and perhaps even cheaper to avoid all the court cases and trouble and go straight to the underground option.

Note, I could be completely wrong about the above, just a guess.

Apogee

Eirgrid halting discussions with data centres seeking access to grid on foot of CRU advice:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/eirgrid-halts-talks-with-potential-data-centres-over-electricity-curbs-1.4886383

gjim

Just construction costs I presume.

Also, while overground transmission is more susceptible to damage by very high winds or ice, underground cables have to use complex insulation systems meaning repairs on average (again from a US study) take between 5 and 14 days depending on the dialectic used (solid, liquid or gas) to insulate the cabling. Also this insulation has a life-span and has to be replaced every couple of decades (again depends on the type of insulation). A break in an overhead cable can be repaired in a day or two.

This complex insulation is required because of the confined space - strung from pylons, the cables can be kept far apart so air is effective as an insulator.