ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION and Green Fantasies

[marchesarosa]

bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/2/25/the-green-the-crooked-and-the-incompetent.html


The green, the crooked and the incompetent
Feb 25, 2013

Leo Hickman tweeted a link to this fascinating set of minutes from the September meeting of the DECC Science Advisory Group (SAG). SAG features several familiar names, including John Shepherd, David Mackay, Stuart Haszeldine and David Warrilow.

The whole document is worth a look, and it's only seven pages long. We learn much of what is worrying DECC's scientific advisers, for example the horrific (but presumably distant) prospect of low energy prices:

John Shepherd pointed out that whilst energy efficiency policies are required, they risk being ineffective while energy prices are low. Other SAG members observed that incentives such as a substantial price on carbon were needed to promote innovation and reducing carbon intensity, and it was vital to avoid carbon lock-in.

There is no sign that any of the assembled intellects noted that wind energy locks in the use of gas as a means to provide power when benign (i.e. still) weather conditions prevail.

The discussion also encompassed smart meters:

It was agreed that there is a need for much more work to be done to better understand consumer behaviour both now and with improved controls, as there is high potential for unintended consequences. Even simple devices such as easily and remotely programmable room thermostats (see above) could be very effective. An important innovation would be improving and reducing the costs of heat meters. Experience elsewhere where heat is sold directly (e.g. with district heating schemes) could be helpful. David MacKay expressed his desire to set up a research programme to trial innovations in the area of smart thermostats and heat meters, with the aim of reducing costs.

Your central heating in the hands of the green, the crooked and the incompetent - that's quite a scary prospect. Smart meters will be with us starting at the end of next year.

[aubrey]

Feb 12, 2013 10:42:25 GMT marchesarosa said:

Ah, now you are changing the subject, aubrey! Wise man. You were on shaky ground before mixing up tax break and subsidy.

I suppose you also have difficulty with tax cuts, too? That's when the state decides to TAKE LESS from its citizens. It does not involve any "giving" at all. It is simply allowing citizens to KEEP MORE in their pockets. Whether that is a wise decision is another matter entirely.

Next year we in London will be losing a bunch of fire stations and 500 odd firemen; but we'll get a 7p a week council tax cut. So I do have a problem with tax cuts, yes. I always preferred to pay more and have good services, etc

But this has nothing to do with taxing citizens. It's companies avoiding paying what even the Tories reckon they should, if they want to operate here and take advantage of our services (NHS, etc).

Of course, the Tories will make anti-tax avoidance noises but still make it easier for companies to avoid paying.

[marchesarosa]

Eco madness and how our future is going up in smoke as we pay billions to switch from burning coal to wood chips at Britain's biggest power station
By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
PUBLISHED: 22:44, 8 March 2013

There could be no better symbol of the madness of Britain’s energy policy than what is happening at the giant Drax power station in Yorkshire, easily the largest in Britain. Indeed, it is one of the biggest and most efficiently run coal-fired power stations in the world. Its almost 1,000ft-tall flue chimney is the highest in the country, and its 12 monster cooling towers (each taller than St Paul’s Cathedral) dominate the flat countryside of eastern Yorkshire for miles around.

Every day, Drax burns 36,000 tons of coal, brought to its vast site by 140 coal trains every week - and it supplies seven per cent of all the electricity used in Britain. That's enough to light up a good many of our major cities But as a result of a change in Government policy, triggered by EU rules, Drax is about to undergo a major change that would have astonished those who built it in the Seventies and Eighties right next to Selby coalfield, which was then highly productive but has since closed.
As from next month, Drax will embark on a £700 million switch away from burning coal for which it was designed, in order to convert its six colossal boilers to burn millions of tons a year of wood chips instead.
Most of these chips will come from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,600 square miles in the USA, from where they will be shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Britain.

The reason for this hugely costly decision is that Drax has become a key component in the so-called ‘green revolution’ which is now at the heart of the Government’s energy policy. Because it burns so much coal, Drax is the biggest single emitter in Britain of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas supposedly responsible for global warming. The theory is that, by gradually switching to wood — or ‘biomass’ as it is officially known — Drax will eventually save millions of tons of CO2 from going every year into the atmosphere, thereby helping to prevent climate change and save the planet. Unlike coal, which is now demonised as a filthy, planet-threatening pollutant, biomass is considered ‘sustainable’, because it supposedly only returns back to the atmosphere the amount of CO2 it drew out of the air while the original tree it came from was growing.

As from next month, Drax will embark on a £700 million switch away from burning coal for which it was designed, in order to convert its six colossal boilers to burn millions of tons a year of wood chips instead
The truth remains, though, that coal is still by far the cheapest means of creating electricity. But the Government is so committed to meeting its own and the EU’s targets for reducing Britain’s ‘carbon emissions’ that it is now going flat out to tackle the problem on two fronts — both of which forced the changes at Drax.

First, the Government wants to use a carbon tax to make burning fossil fuels such as coal so expensive that, before too long, it will become prohibitive for power companies to use them. A new carbon tax will be introduced in three weeks’ time, and applied to every ton of carbon dioxide produced during electricity production. The tax will start at a comparatively low level, but rise steeply every year so that, within 20 years, the cost of generating electricity from coal will have doubled and it will no longer be economical.

Second, the Government is determined to boost all those ‘carbon neutral’ — but currently much more expensive — means of making electricity, such as wind farms, nuclear power and burning biomass. It hopes to achieve this by offering a host of subsidies, paid for by every household and business through electricity bills.

What forced Drax to embark on the switch from coal to ‘biomass’ was ministers’ decision last year to give any coal-fired power station which switched to ‘biomass’ the same, near-100 per cent ‘renewable subsidy’ that it already gives to the owners of onshore wind farms.

Tackling the problem: The Government is determined to boost all those 'carbon neutral' - but currently much more expensive - means of making electricity, such as wind farms, nuclear power and burning biomass

When the experts at Drax did their sums, they could see how, if they stayed with coal, they would gradually be priced out of business by a carbon tax which will eventually make their electricity become twice as expensive. In terms of hard-headed realism, the Government was giving them little choice.

But it is hard to overstate the lunacy of this Drax deal. To start with, some of those environmentalists who are normally most fanatically in favour of ‘renewable’ power are among those most strongly opposed to the burning of wood as a means of producing electricity.
Campaigning groups, such as Friends of the Earth, scorn the idea that wood chips are ‘carbon neutral’ or that felling millions of acres of American forests, to turn trees into chips and then transporting those chips thousands of miles to Yorkshire, will end up making any significant net reduction in ‘carbon’ emissions.

Their criticism chimes with the view of Sir David King, formerly the Government’s chief scientific adviser, who this week told Radio 4’s Today programme that when the full ‘life cycle’ of these wood chips is factored in, he doubted there would be any real saving in carbon dioxide emissions.

Drax disagrees with this, although what King had in mind was all the additional emissions arising from the laborious processes required between the growing of those millions of trees in America and the moment they go up in smoke. The trees must first be felled, then turned into wood chips in two dedicated plants that Drax is building in America. The chips have to be transported in huge ships thousands of miles across the ocean to Yorkshire ports, then ferried in huge railway trucks to the power station.

Even then, before being pulverised into powder ready for use, the wood chips must be stored in giant purpose-built domes, where they need to be humidified in order to prevent spontaneous combustion — to which wood is 1,000 times more prone than coal. This has already given rise to disastrous fires in other power plants that have converted to biomass, such as one which recently caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage to Tilbury power station in London.

As Drax admits, all this means that to generate nearly the same amount of power from wood as it does from coal will cost between two and three times as much, meaning that its fuel costs will double or treble — so that the only thing to make this possible will be that massive subsidy, which will eventually be worth over £1 billion a year.
This is hardly good news for us electricity users. We have already seen bills go up by over £1 billion a year because we are being forced to subsidise the use of wind farms. In the years to come, with these vast subsidies going to Drax, they will soar ever higher.

Yet while consumers are being hammered, government ministers are delighted by Drax’s decision to convert to wood chips. This is because it will result in a significant contribution towards meeting an EU-imposed target, which commits Britain to producing nearly a third of our electricity from ‘renewables’ within seven years. At the moment, we produce only a fraction of that figure, way behind almost every other country in the EU. Despite the huge subsidies that have been spent on wind farms, their contribution is negligible. On one windless day this week, for example, the combined output of the UK’s 4,300 wind turbines was just one thousandth — a mere 29 megawatts — of the electricity we need.

But when Drax has completed its conversion to biomass, it will be capable on its own of generating 3,500 megawatts, reliably and continuously, and contributing more than a quarter of our entire EU target for the use of renewable energy.

The theory is that, by gradually switching to wood - or 'biomass' as it is officially known - Drax will eventually save millions of tons of CO2 from going every year into the atmosphere

Questions: Sir David King told Radio 4's Today programme that when the full 'life cycle' of the wood chips is factored in, he doubted there would be any real saving in carbon dioxide emissions.Yet the very fact that the Government is so desperate for this switch away from CO2-emitting fossil fuels brings us face to face with another devastating and much more immediate consequence of its energy policy.

This month sees the closure of several of our remaining major coal-fired power stations. Plants such as Kingsnorth in Kent, Didcot A in Oxfordshire and Cockenzie in Scotland (capable of generating nearly 6,000 megawatts a year — a seventh of our average needs) will stop production as a result of an EU anti-pollution directive. This means that, to keep Britain’s lights lit, we’ll soon be more dependent than ever on expensive gas-fired power stations.The trouble is that our gas supplies are becoming ever more precarious. Only this week we were told that Britain has just two weeks’ worth of gas left in storage — the lowest amount ever.

So quickly have our once-abundant supplies of gas from the North Sea dwindled that we are increasingly dependent on expensive imports from countries such as Qatar and Algeria and, to a lesser extent, Russia — supplies on which we cannot necessarily rely at a time when world demand for gas is rising fast.

The tragedy is that, listening to our politicians such as Ed Davey, the Lib Dem Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, it is only too obvious that they haven't the faintest idea of what they are talking about. Given this fact, it is hardly surprising that Alistair Buchanan, the retiring head of our energy regulator Ofgem, recently warned that our electricity supplies are now running so low and close to ‘danger point’ that we may face major power cuts. Some of us have been warning about this for years, having watched the reckless hi-jacking of our energy policy by the environmentalists’ hostility to fossil fuels.

Crucially, what many people forget is that if we do have major power cuts, this will not be like the ‘three-day weeks’ Britain had to endure in the early Seventies. Back then, the country managed to get by, as people lived and worked by candlelight or huddled over coal fires. But, today, 40 years on, we live in a world almost wholly dependent on constant supplies of electricity. Computers power everything from our offices and factories, to cash machines, to the tills and freezers in our supermarkets, to the traffic lights and signalling systems which keep our roads and railways running.

The fact that Drax is having to go through ridiculous contortions to stay in business is a perfect symbol of the catastrophic mess our politicians of all parties have got us into. It is all very well for Government ministers to be obsessed with wind farms and other ‘renewable’ energy sources, but the fact is that the wind is often not blowing — so we need the constantly available back-up that will soon only now be available from gas-fired power stations. And the great irony on top of all this is that gas itself will be subject to that rapidly escalating new carbon tax because, like coal, it is a fossil fuel — although, admittedly, it produces less carbon dioxide when burned.

The result of this dog’s dinner of an energy policy is that, on the one hand we can look forward to ever-soaring energy bills, while on the other hand we will have crippling power cuts. The tragedy is that, listening to our politicians such as Ed Davey, the Lib Dem Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, it is only too obvious that they haven’t the faintest idea of what they are talking about. They live in such a la-la land of green make-believe that they no longer connect with reality — and seem unable to comprehend the national energy crisis now heading our way with the speed of a bullet train.

The fact that Drax, our largest and most efficient power station, is having to go through these ridiculous contortions to stay in business is a perfect symbol of the catastrophic mess our politicians of all parties have got us into — all in the name of trying to save the planet by cutting down our emissions of carbon dioxide further and faster than any other country in the world.

Germany, which already has five times as many wind turbines as Britain, is now desperately building 20 new coal-fired stations in the hope of keeping its lights on. The first, opened last September, is already generating 2,200 megawatts; nearly as much as the average output of all of Britain’s wind farms combined.

China, already the world’s largest CO2 emitter, is planning to build 363 more coal-fired power stations, without any heed of the vast amount of emissions they’ll produce.

India is ready to build 455 new coal-fired power stations to fuel an economy growing so fast that it could soon overtake our own.
If these countries deigned to notice what we are up to in Britain, where this week we lost yet another of our handful of remaining coal mines, they might find it difficult to stifle a disbelieving smile. But the sad truth is that we ourselves should be neither laughing nor crying. We should be rising up to protest, in real anger, at those politicians whose collective flight from reality is fast dragging us towards as damaging a crisis as this country has ever faced.

[marchesarosa]

Just for your information.

This morning wind is producing 4.8% of our electricity, coal 41.6%, gas 27.1% and nuclear 18.9%.

The balance comes from hydro and imports.

[BabelFish]

Mar 16, 2013 10:44:50 GMT marchesarosa said:

Just for your information.

This morning wind is producing 4.8% of our electricity, coal 41.6%, gas 27.1% and nuclear 18.9%.

Trans.

I wish they would hurry up and build MORE windmills.There's not nearly enough.

[marchesarosa]

I vote kiteman be allowed to use wind power ONLY.

See how far he gets on that!

[marchesarosa]

This morning windmills generating less than 3% of our electricity.

[marchesarosa]

This snowy MARCH morning windmills producing a massive 4.8% of our electricity. That's about as good as it gets, folks, in winter, apparently.

[marchesarosa]

Only 3.8% of UK electricity generated by windmills this snowy morning, the 20th March.

[aubrey]

Obviously not enough of them, is there?

How long have they been getting built now? They have a hell of a long way to go to catch up, don't they?

[marchesarosa]

Heavy snow forecast for tomorrow. I wonder what proportion of our electricity needs will be met by windmills tomorrow?

Gueses? 2%, 3% ?

Often very cold weather is accompanied by a stationary anti-cyclonic high pressure area when the wind doesn't blow so when we need power most windmills deliver least. This is nothing to do with how many of them there are, aubrey, but with the INTERMITTENCY of the wind. That's a good word for proponents to renewable energy like wind and solar to take on board because it means they ALWAYS require BACK-UP from CONVENTIONAL THERMAL ELECTRICITY SOURCES - some more important vocabulary for you to learn.

[marchesarosa]

a long way to go to catch up, don't they?

They will never "catch up", aubrey, because of the problem of intermittency. And when you consider that windmills only have a life of 15 years they are a VERY expensive and not at all efficient substitute for thermal electricity generation either in capital terms OR in CO2 terms. Why are you so beguiled with them? Is some other mug picking up your electricity bill?

[aubrey]

Do you think that high power bills are all down to wind turbines? Do you not realise that we'll still be paying for nuclear power thousands of years after the last power station stops working?

(Except that we might find some alien type who thrives on nuclear waste - that must be what they're hoping for. Though I think the Daily Mail would have something to say about alien types coming over here, taking all our waste etc.

I'm going out to get some drugs now.

[aubrey]

Actually, I do like the look of wind turbines. And no, I wouldn't mind having a bunch of them near us.

They remind me of the Signalling devices in Keith Roberts's Pavanne, and of modern versions of the windmills in Herzog's I think it's Signs of Life - -


It Is! I didn't think it was on Youtube, but it's here:



(Watch from about 1.20 in for the windmills; they're amazing.)

[marchesarosa]

SSE (formerly Scottish and Southern Energy) boss Ian Marchant warns of risk of "lights going out"

The boss of the energy firm SSE has warned that "there is a very real risk of the lights going out" in Britain.

Ian Marchant said the government was significantly underestimating the scale of the capacity crunch facing the country.

He was commenting on the company's decision to cut back on power generation at five sites.

The energy regulator, Ofgem, has also warned of an increased risk of a blackout.

In February it predicted power station closures could mean a 10% fall in capacity by April alone.

SSE points out that the regulator did not take into account its plans to cut power generation when the warning was issued and that therefore, makes the warning even more stark.

Ofgem's chief executive Alistair Buchanan told the BBC that Britain "would be very tight on power station capacity in three to five years' time".

...SSE is reducing its energy generation by 2,000MW over the next year. The power stations affected are Ferrybridge, Keadby, Slough Uskmouth and Peterhead. It is also postponing further investment in gas-fired electricity generation until at least 2015...

more here
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21878059



Just hope, Aubrey, that dialysis units have "BACK UP" fossil fuel generators to cope when the lights go out. But maybe you think "the cause" is more important than quality of life?