Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by pete » Sat Feb 27, 2016 8:55 am

Mikie711 wrote:Anyone want to hazard a guess as the surface area required in solar panels to power the entire world, current technology panels not some super duper panel.

Not much, I would guess. just double figures but not much more? (Do you know? Or are we all going to have to Google this for ourselves? Or is this the natural conclusion of the internet - rather than actually researching anything we are all just going to shout out answers then just agree the average is right?)
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Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by campbell » Sat Feb 27, 2016 9:07 am

I heard that if we dammed and flooded every loch & Glen in Scotland, we still couldn't generate enough hydro to provide base load.

So our current and successive governments - whichEVER "party" they are formed by - have some challenge on their hands.

PS Mike, no idea...spill the beans!
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by pete » Sat Feb 27, 2016 9:22 am

thinfourth wrote:
Yes we will need to make more electricty to charge EVs

No we won't need more power generation capacity to charge EVs

As they most owners charge overnight when demand is lowest. So while a gas powered plant is at idle currently if we magically put a few million EVs on the road then it would no longer be at idle overnight

And if they get the tech working where your car can feed power back into the grid then they will help not hinder. Your car could charge up to 100% overnight and then dump 10% back into the grid while you are making your toast. Your average daily milage in the UK is 40 miles which only needs about 50% of the battery anyway.

So EVs are not a huge problem for the grid
I really like that theory but having thought about it I think your maths might be a bit out.

(And then was chatting to someone about this at work, passing your theory off as my own, and got called on it.)

So we can work it out.

According the the UKPIA we the uk sold 35 billion litres of road fuel last year.
According to the EPA one gallon of fuel contains 35KWh, but that's a US gallon so in litres it's 35/3.79=9.2KW

So 322 billion kW-H. 332 TW-h.

Hmm which is about UK electricity production I'm afraid, and that's before we allow for the lousy efficiency of burning petrol, (about 30%) so just over 1 PW-h of electricity to replace ALL petrol/diesel cares with EVs?

I've shown my working. Could be very, very wrong.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by pete » Sat Feb 27, 2016 10:29 am

campbell wrote:I heard that if we dammed and flooded every loch & Glen in Scotland, we still couldn't generate enough hydro to provide base load.
Cruachan, (the hollow mountain - well worth a visit) uses off peak electric to pump water up hill and then when demand is high releases it again to make electricity. It's a very good "battery" and was built (I think) to compliment Hunterston*. You'd need an awful lot of Cruachans to power the whole of Scotland though...


I didn't know how much of our power was nuclear until I started reading around this thread. Torness and Hunterston provide 40% of our power!! Who knew?

And for the SNP haters, Osborne** ditched carbon capture (which left Scottish plans high and dry). energy policy is reserved (ie not devolved)***. Power production is a long term problem and Sturgeon has not been in power long, successive governments have been firmly ignoring this problem too.

Finally it's privatiased! Are all you right wingers now crying out for nationalisation? Why not stick to your principles and let the market decide?****


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*"Hiya Hunterston it's Cruachan, I love what you're doing with that Uranium."
Compliment. See what i did there? I don't know why I bother, i don't think anyone reads this far.

**Osborne isn't in the SNP. Y'all knew that, right?

***Which is true but I suspect it's more complicated than that.

****Although it kind of has. Wait until all the lights go out then make us pay through the nose. Then blame the left wingers for failing to make and enact plans 20 years ago when they weren't in power.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by kenny » Sat Feb 27, 2016 11:11 am

Sigh.

Pete, Power generation might be privatised but many of the industries are heavily subsidised by the UK government and government policy is massively influential on means of generation given that it's now fully linked to climate change (see DECC).

Our current bat- sh*t crazy heads in sand approach isn't solely attributed to lefties, there are very many right wingers who are on the bandwagon. Or snouts fully in the trough, look up the recent exploits of Tim Yeo for a perfect example of a slimy barsteward.

That said, the left do seem to be most in favour of very expensive generation methods that ultimately hurt the poorest in society most. I wonder why that is?

By the way, I am not a right winger, it's just from your loony left perspective that my radically extreme centrist outlook seems like swivel-eyed right wing nutjobism to you :winkysmiley: :thumbsup

Campbell,

I read a while ago and depending on whose figures you read, they tend to be wildly misleading, approximately 13% of power in Scotland comes from hydro with potential to increase this to around 19% however this would have significant environmental consequences.

A pity because hydro is the one proven renewable that is economically viable.

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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by thinfourth » Sat Feb 27, 2016 11:24 am

35million cars in the UK

average milage of 7900 per year

gives a big number

Average electric car uses about .25 of a Kwh to travel a mile

divide big number by 4

get 69,125,000,000 kwh

Feck knows what that is in billions


Oh and your efficacy calc

Somehow you have taken X amount of energy and put it through a 30% efficient machine and got 3 times the energy out of it

You been using the SNP issue calculator again?
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by Mikie711 » Sat Feb 27, 2016 1:41 pm

The solar panel area required is roughly the size of Spain but would require world wide agreement. Interesting blog here with the figures.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by BiggestNizzy » Sat Feb 27, 2016 2:04 pm

Dominic wrote:
pete wrote:
Dominic wrote:
None of the tree huggers ever stop to consider that a windmill requires more energy to manufacture and install than it will produce in it's lifetime. IMHO that deems it useless. No one in their right mind would say "I am going to start a business that will only ever turnover £1M, but will cost £2M to start up".

Just my 2p from listening to engineers involved in building the things. :blackeye
Sorry mate that's simply not true. OK you could, in theory, site one so badly that it didn't make any power - perhaps inside a building, miles from the grid - but if they are sited properly it only takes a few weeks to cover their manufacture costs. I don't know who you've listening to but maybe they were drunk...
Was not talking about the costs in terms of money (although used the business case as an example). Fact remains, they do require more energy to build than they will ever produce. On that basis they will only ever take energy from the grid and never fully repay it.
All this comes from
Thomas Homer-Dixons book Carbon shift wrote:The concept of net energy must be applied to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and photovoltaics. A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it? At a good wind site, the energy payback day could be in three years or less; in a poor location, energy payback may be never. That is, a windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.
As with most things people only quote the bit they want that makes the point that fits in with their agenda. That s then repeated by other people as it reinforces their viewpoint.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by neil » Sat Feb 27, 2016 2:12 pm

BiggestNizzy wrote:
Dominic wrote:
pete wrote: Sorry mate that's simply not true. OK you could, in theory, site one so badly that it didn't make any power - perhaps inside a building, miles from the grid - but if they are sited properly it only takes a few weeks to cover their manufacture costs. I don't know who you've listening to but maybe they were drunk...
Was not talking about the costs in terms of money (although used the business case as an example). Fact remains, they do require more energy to build than they will ever produce. On that basis they will only ever take energy from the grid and never fully repay it.
All this comes from
Thomas Homer-Dixons book Carbon shift wrote:The concept of net energy must be applied to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and photovoltaics. A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it? At a good wind site, the energy payback day could be in three years or less; in a poor location, energy payback may be never. That is, a windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.
As with most things people only quote the bit they want that makes the point that fits in with their agenda. That s then repeated by other people as it reinforces their viewpoint.
No matter what the payback time is our isn't, you can't control or accurately predict the output from a wind turbine, therefore it can't be used as base load or topup. All that does is adds uncertainty into the already complicated supply system.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by BiggestNizzy » Sat Feb 27, 2016 2:56 pm

Power is a big problem for future Scotland
  • Name -Capacity (MW) -% of total -Commissioned
  • Longannet -2,400 -20.8% -1972
  • Peterhead -1550 -13.4% -1980
  • Torness -1,364 -11.8% -1988
  • Hunterston B -1,288 -11.2% -1976
  • Cruachan Dam -440 -3.8% -1965
  • Whitelee -322 -2.8% -2009
  • Foyers -300 -2.6% -1974
  • Robin Rigg -180 -1.6% -2009
  • Sloy -152.5 -1.3% -1950
  • Grangemouth -130 -1.1% -2001
Longannet is closing next month as it failed to win a contract from the national grid.
Hunterston was due to shut this year but has been extended to 2013

The SNP have been short sighted when it comes to nuclear power as far back as 2008 when they sided with the greens and lib dems to vote against building nuclear power plants north of the border. Power is a reserved issue but planning is devolved.
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by robin » Sat Feb 27, 2016 3:15 pm

I understand wind is unpredictable and variable, but I suspect you can use wind power as a factor in your calculations though, if you have enough energy storage to be able to even out short term variation in output. Long term variation in output, such as seasonal, will need to be dealt with differently - but it may be that electricity consumption of certain types are also seasonal and thus drops in demand cancel drops in output; would be more relevant if more people used electricity to heat their homes, of course.

The German meta-study (that being a study of studies) found a >1 EROI [considering only active sites] - meaning the farm produces more energy over its lifetime than it consumed to build. In fact the number is much greater than 1, but the issue here is only whether it is more than 1 or less than 1.

Pete - The hydro plant complements the reactor ... the vicar compliments the actress .. they are homonyms.

Mike - do you have any numbers to back up the Spain thing - that's almost doable in that there are vast areas of land that either are or will become uninhabitable but that will have a lot of sun shine; easily the size of Spain. The current plans to build an (experimental but functional) fusion reactor are consuming cash at a phenomenal rate. 15 billion in and we're not really very far with the project; I suspect the final cost will triple to 45 billion euro (it's the way of these projects ;-)). So whilst I support the development of fusion reactors, were it possible to make efficient solar panel setups to product, it would seem more likely to deliver, more proven to maintain.

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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by mwmackenzie » Sat Feb 27, 2016 3:22 pm

Mikie711 wrote:The solar panel area required is roughly the size of Spain but would require world wide agreement. Interesting blog here with the figures.
Have you seen the solar roads that some dude was developing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU

Problem is with the congestion we have 90% of the time they'd be covered up with a car or truck lol..

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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by Ferg » Sat Feb 27, 2016 3:59 pm

IMO the negative position to Nuclear is going to cost us in the long run. For now Fusion is the only immediately available option, and by the way very safe these days, but we should be placing ourselves as an economy as major contributors to research. Look what going on in Germany for instance http://www.ipp.mpg.de/16900/w7x

In the non nuclear space there was also the plans for tidal bays that were published last year with a huge yield potential. The futures bright but we need to be investing as a country, attracting and growing the expertise to put us at the forefront of energy solutions.

I like the idea of all new houses being built with solar. That doesn't have to be photovoltaic, even using for hot water would reduce the total energy footprint required as a whole. :thumbsup

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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by robin » Sat Feb 27, 2016 5:42 pm

Ferg wrote:For now Fusion is the only immediately available option
You mean fission I think?
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Re: Scotland's Electricity base load from 2030

Post by David » Sat Feb 27, 2016 5:42 pm

I am surprised no one has linked to this yet . . .

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/


If you follow that on a regular basis it's not long before the basics of power general become obvious.

The base load can be generated by any means provided you can guarantee it. We could have green sources with so much over capacity that the base demand was always satisfied. But that would also mean each wind generator useful contribution to the grid would have to be a fraction of its generating capacity and there lies the energy in/energy out dilemma. We would be building a power source that had a runaway cost structure.

Maybe that's a cost worth paying, but I suspect the risk of nuclear power is more politically acceptable when realities start to dawn.
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