Re: energy in UK

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?

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.

>
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.

>
Our grid system will fail soon but I live in the northern region that
will still have power (and mains water) when it all goes to pot. NESO's
long term decadal master plan is for two or more very long DC cables in
the North Sea for the Russians to sabotage as and when they like.
>
https://www.neso.energy/document/315516/download
>
Page 7 (and elsewhere) - warning it is very long and tedious stuff.
Volume and pretty pictures makes up for useful technical content.
>

People can keep warm by snuggling around burning lithium batteries.

>
The big snag with Lithium batteries is their nasty tendency to catch
fire spectacularly. A guy at nearby Newcastle University is an expert on
such incidents - there isn't any good way to put such fires out either.
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jby0uyL78YU
>
Skip to 12 minutes in for the juicy bits
(starts with a chemistry lesson)

Cool. Not literally.

>
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


Google auto-complete is great. All you have to type is 

lithium b

to see the fires.