Re: energy in UK

On 16/04/2025 15:36, 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 can't ramp nukes up and down fast enough daily to cope without causing other problems (and we have nowhere near enough of them). They are incredibly slow to build and UK lost most of its capable nuclear engineers over a decade or so ago. Efforts keeping the last remaining ones still operational are getting a bit scary.
When I was at school there was a big surplus of them (nuclear engineers) most of whom ended up as bad physics teachers. A product Harold Wilson's white heat of technology "electricity too cheap to meter" initiative.

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.

Power in the UK for the moment is reliable, but they have been skating on *very* thin ice for a long time in winter (roughly two decades of prevarication).

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.
 

>
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.

The main damage was done by the Tories - a right wing party.

I'm fighting a plan to build the world's largest BESS on my doorstep.
It would be hard to find a worse spot to put one. We are sat on the
choke point where the 400kV lines are routinely overloaded in winter.

 We had a pretty big lithium battery fire here recently.
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/01/23/moss-landing-lithium-battery-plant-fire-vistra/77912642007/
 nice video:
 https://apnews.com/article/battery-storage-plant-fire-california-moss-landing-7c561fed096f410ddecfb04722a8b1f8

I know. The Moss landing fire in January got the attention of all our neighbouring parish councils out to a 5 mile radius. My friends who work in Silicon valley could smell it burning from about 20 miles away. A lot more help was forthcoming after that event.
Our BESS will be ~10% bigger than Moss Landing if it goes ahead. Vistra doesn't exactly have a stellar safety reputation but the company doing ours is a start-up with no track record at all on any scale!
Rather brave to try and do three of the worlds largest BESS within 20 miles of each other. The one on Teesside actually makes engineering sense - it can buffer the offshore windfarms that come ashore there...
https://www.renewableinstitute.org/plans-unveiled-to-construct-a-1-billion-battery-storage-facility-in-the-north-east-of-england/
However, the entire Teesside regeneration scheme is all a bit dodgy.
--
Martin Brown