Re: energy in UK

On 17/04/2025 12:36 am, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 16 Apr 2025 11:39:57 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 16/04/2025 00:17, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:04:37 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
>

UK national infrastructure has been privatised and robbed blind by
vulture capitalists since the 1980's. It isn't just electricity that is
problematic London's water supply was in dire danger of going bust too.
>
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66051555
>
It is ultimately all about very clever financial engineering to load the
balance sheet with debt and pay handsome dividends to foreign owners.
>
Penny wise and pound foolish for the the UK.

>
There will never be enough batteries to power even a tiny country like
the UK,  to keep people alive through a few weeks of cold, dark, still
weather.

>
I'm inclined to agree. But provided that you use nuclear power
generation for the base load you only need about 60GWhr of battery
storage to time shift night time electricity to cover the daytime.

 Why build insanely expensive and dangerous battery farms so you can
run the nukes at 200% capacity half the time and 0% the rest?

You don't. Nuclear reactors can't be run intermittently. You've got some leeway when they are first built, but as the fission products build up in the fuel rods the burn rate becomes less and less adjustable.

We're lucky to have a good deal of hydro and lots of natural gas, both
easily tunable to varying loads. Power is very reliable here.
 

UK BESS operators should be limited to having a substation capable of
recharging their storage capacity at the C/8 rate so that they can
recharge during the slack hours (2200-1800) in winter and then resupply
at peak times (0900-2100) major evening peak is 1800-2100. In summer it
is much less of a problem - the system really creaks in winter.

 Fine, let someone do that without subsidies.

Renewable power (wind and solar) have been the cheapest sources since they got big enough to supply an appreciable proportion of national energy budget. They don't need subsidy. It took a lot of capital investment to get enough of them to get there, and its going to take more to provide the pumped hydro and batter storage to deal with the fact that they are intermittent sources, but that's investment - not subsidy.

They like to charge at C/2 to exploit the pricing algorithm glitches and
isn't all that good for the batteries.
>
It would take an impossibly large battery storage capacity to handle a
long becalmed event in mid winter. The numbers that NESO bandy around
for UK net zero by 2030/50 (delete as appropriate) are pure fantasy.

 Socialist and communist governments substitute politicians for
engineers.

Margaret Thatcher was actually trained as a chemist and she was neither socialist nor communist, but her energy policy was still remarkably daft.
Politicians of all stripes tend to believe what suits them and what they believe they can sell to the electorate. Donald Trump's ideas about tariffs are remarkably disconnected from reality.
<snip>
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney