Pan-European 'Supergrid' Could Cut 32% From Energy Costs (techxplore.com) 219
A European wide 'supergrid' could cut almost a third from energy costs according to a new study from the UCD Energy Institute. TechXplore reports: Evaluating the capabilities of Europe's energy network, the study, commissioned by SuperNode, found that a pan-European transmission system would reduce energy costs by 32 percent compared to the current approach. The 32 percent cost reduction identified is borne primarily from the expansion of European power flows -- derestricting them to allow the location of renewable generation to be optimized, thereby significantly decreasing the total installed capacity. While this scenario proposes an increase in transmission capacity, the costs were found to be insignificant compared to the cost savings in generation investment over the same period.
This study was an extension of work carried out by SuperNod, based on their Energy Scenario for Europe 2050 modeling -- which aims to predict future energy trends across the continent. Its modelling work, validated and extended by the UCD study and facilitated through ConsultUCD, demonstrates the net benefit of large investment into the development of new transmission assets to ensure more efficient utilization of Europe's renewable resources; highlighting bottlenecks where investment is required, such as higher levels of grid storage. [...] Another key finding from the UCD study is that the existing transmission system is not fit for purpose for Europe's energy future. Without accelerated investment in infrastructure, Europe will face challenges with load shedding, generation curtailment and excessively high emissions. The failure to achieve decarbonisation targets will not just undermine international climate efforts but will adversely affect Europe's economies and ability to compete on a global scale, the report notes. The study has been broken into two parts (PDFs).
This study was an extension of work carried out by SuperNod, based on their Energy Scenario for Europe 2050 modeling -- which aims to predict future energy trends across the continent. Its modelling work, validated and extended by the UCD study and facilitated through ConsultUCD, demonstrates the net benefit of large investment into the development of new transmission assets to ensure more efficient utilization of Europe's renewable resources; highlighting bottlenecks where investment is required, such as higher levels of grid storage. [...] Another key finding from the UCD study is that the existing transmission system is not fit for purpose for Europe's energy future. Without accelerated investment in infrastructure, Europe will face challenges with load shedding, generation curtailment and excessively high emissions. The failure to achieve decarbonisation targets will not just undermine international climate efforts but will adversely affect Europe's economies and ability to compete on a global scale, the report notes. The study has been broken into two parts (PDFs).
Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Interesting)
"Another key finding from the UCD study is that the existing transmission system is not fit for purpose for Europe's energy future. Without accelerated investment in infrastructure, Europe will face challenges with load shedding, generation curtailment and excessively high emissions. The failure to achieve decarbonisation targets will not just undermine international climate efforts but will adversely affect Europe's economies and ability to compete on a global scale, the report notes. "
Here's the interesting thing: the implication of moving to renewables and Net Zero is that you have to redo the transmission system. Its not an option.
The closer the Eiuropeans (including the UK) get to planning Net Zero, instead of just talking about it, the more social and infrastructure implications emerge.
This one is about redoing the transmission network. The latest UK information is another one, its that the utility companies there are talking about implementing smart meters to measure power use every half hour, and implementing differential prices according to total demand. We have already heard that the plan is to put car chargers and heat pumps on smart meters, so they can be turned off as needed to protect the grid at peak demand times.
All this is coming out because they are planning to, at the same time,
(1) move electricity generation to wind and solar
(2) move home heating to heat pumps and cars to EVs
They have a grid which cannot be moved to wind and solar in its present state, if done it will not meet current demand, and without a huge expansion cannot handle the increased demand from the proposed move to heat pumps and EVs.
It can't handle the current demand because of intermittency. Its not possible economically, or probably logistically either, to install enough storage. All the attempt would do is increase use of gas powered backup.
You want to see this in action, look here: https://gridwatch.co.uk/WIND [gridwatch.co.uk]
All this is best considered as the social or financial cost of moving to wind and solar, just becoming clear. What its going to mean is that the financial risk of peak demand surges, currently borne by the supplier via the spot market, is going to be transferred to customers. At the same time, their access to the power they need to charge cars or heat homes will be curtailed via the smart meters.
The UK and the EU are going to be poorer, colder, darker and less mobile. And the effect on the global climate is going to be zero.
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So you start by observing that as people work towards a challenging objective they identify challenges and have to face them.
That much is obviously true.
You then anounce, completely unsupported :
And the effect on the global climate is going to be zero.
So was that just a troll or are you going to back it up?
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I'm sure you feel like that is really sticking it to Poettering, but all you are doing is making sure that a lot of people will just discount your post.
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I see... just like Walmart, and Comcast, Google, and Amazon, any of which have annual budgets bigger than more than half the countries in the world.
Re:Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here's the interesting thing: the implication of moving to renewables and Net Zero is that you have to redo the transmission system. Its not an option."
Here's another interesting thing: rebuilding the grid and maintaining it will provide good jobs for workers drawn almost exclusively from whatever local community is nearby. These are jobs that will not be outsourced, and unlike the United States, EU labour laws defend workers rather than reducing them to minimum wage slavery.
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:3)
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Interesting)
while still providing the much needed economic stimulus.
We have full employment and high inflation. The last thing we need right now is more economic stimulus.
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The problem is that a lot of jobs are now gig economy or similarly low pay, low security, low benefits. There are a lot of people who are employed but want a better job.
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Who told you the number of "gig" jobs was large? My guess would be maybe 3-5% in a large metro area, and completely negligible everywhere else. Feel free to provide some stats to support your assertion that gig jobs are propping up our employment numbers.
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Only have "full" employment because lots of people don't want to work shit jobs at low wages.
Recent example: The shortage of truck drivers. There are lots of truck drivers who don't want to work long hours at low pay. They used to be highly unionized which protected wages and working conditions. Now they are only offered jobs at low pay with abusive working conditions. Average turnover is 95% annually since the jobs are so bad.
Inflation exists because corporations are raising prices.
For example: Oil prices
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fucking hilarious how right wingers try to gaslight their economics
The decades following the new deal highlighted growth of American middle class and wide spread economic benefit
The decades following Reagan's trickle down saw the decline of the middle class and money moving into the hands of a few billionaires
But never mind reality, they will hand wave and scribble on cocktail napkins and lie on fox news... to the benefit of their corporate masters
This one is simple, the US (along with EU) MUST rebuild infr
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:2)
No, the decades following WWII saw that because America was the only intact industrialized economy not shattered by war. It had jack shit to do with the New Deal.
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Ah, a Keynesian.
By your logic, vandals breaking streetlights and windows is a "positive economic activity".
The only people who believe that nonsense are senior politicians and policy officials who get re-elected by spending tax dollars on such stupid make-work projects.
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By your logic, vandals breaking streetlights and windows is a "positive economic activity".
Except in this case, the windows are already broken, we just aren't fixing them.
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So how much exactly do you think lineman and construction workers in the US are paid?
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"Here's the interesting thing: the implication of moving to renewables and Net Zero is that you have to redo the transmission system. Its not an option."
Here's another interesting thing: rebuilding the grid and maintaining it will provide good jobs for workers drawn almost exclusively from whatever local community is nearby. These are jobs that will not be outsourced, and unlike the United States, EU labour laws defend workers rather than reducing them to minimum wage slavery.
Whether the costly implementation of a transmission network is reasonable depends on the costs and benefits. Saying that it's not a reasonable option would imply an even greater level of insanity to the transition from kerosene lamps to electric lighting and the required costly implementation of the original electric transmission network.
The putative benefits include putting a dent in global warming, reducing air pollution, and decreasing political stresses due to lowered reliance on foreign energy sources
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of Europe is aiming to move to 15-minute measurement periods.
UK seems to be going for "load shedding by force" by your description.
In the Nordics on the other hand we're starting to see peak power charges. That is, your standing charge is determined by your peak use the last year. This gives a real incentive to not run your 11kW car charger at the same time as your 9kW electric Sauna and 4kW of Oven with Christmas ham cooking, especially not if it's cold outside and your heatpump is eating 12kW just to keep the house warm.
I'm manually setting my heatpump to produce warm water for shower during the cheapest hour of the day. I'm hoping in the future to have a raspberry pi fetching weather reports and price forecasts so it could bump up the house temperature a bit before it gets cold and power gets expensive, and then let temperature indoors slide down a little bit during the cold period.
It's overall somewhat nontrivial to manage heating by heatpump. Let's say you let indoor temp drop down while you're at work. In order to raise the temperature again, the heatpump is going to have to work harder. When it does that it's less efficient. The efficiency loss might or might not negate the power saved when you were at work.
Already now with just manual measures like running dishwasher and laundry at night with their built in timers, my average electricity rate would be lower than the average wholesale price of electricity.
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Already now with just manual measures like running dishwasher and laundry at night with their built in timers, my average electricity rate would be lower than the average wholesale price of electricity.
And soon you'll be able to program your laundry and dishwasher to 'clean this load at whatever time will be cheapest, within the next nine hours'.
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The long-term mantra of energy savings here has always been to turn down the thermostat at night and during the day (if you worked away from home).
This never "worked" as desired for me with cooling, as it seems like it takes too long to re-cool the house down in the late afternoon/early evening when returning from home. Overnight it just made the house stuffy to let the temperature rise a few degrees, plus the system would go into recovery at 3 AM anyway due to the lag in lowering the temperature.
It always
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I helped write the smart energy standard (Score:5, Informative)
Here are three examples of how stupid the UK changes where. Some UK smart meters can turn off the power to the house if the bill isn't paid. They wanted a device where you could "pop down" to the corner shop and get a code that would top up your meter. Of coarse you need a device in your house to enter this code in and I proposed a secure way to create the codes and relay them to the meter. 6 months later I see the UK had mostly adopted my ideas but added extra security to it. This extra security required the entry device to always be in communication with the meter, which meant it had to be plugged in, plugged in in the house where the power is off. The entire conference room laughed when I pointed it out but after the meeting I was actually physically threatened for pointing this out. Some companies said something along the lines of don't rock the boat, if we have a standard to build to the UK government will buy them regardless of whether or not they work. What they said is true, the Scottish utility once got a subsidy to buy devices to monitor home electric consumption. They chose a device that mostly didn't work but it didn't matter, the subsidy was for buying the devices not deploying them.
Screw up number two, inside the smart meters there are is the actual metering device and a separate communication module. The UK government decided that the coms and meter should be made by different companies but couldn't agree on a connector between the parts. As a result they talk wirelessly inside the meter.
Three, the certificates used in the UK are based on EC-QV implicit certificates. These are small, easy to validate and don't have the redundant length parsing vulnerability inherent to ASN1 based certs (e.g.X509). But no one in the UK understood how they worked and they swapped the order of the fields creating a requirement that the hash used be collision resistant. The hash used in the UK and North America is 128 bit AES-MMO. The North American implicit certs though only require 2nd preimage resistance. GHCQ claimed for months my math was wrong but I was eventually able to devise a simple proof of the flaw. Instead of changing the certificates they came back with it "has already been agree, you can't change it". I was on the committee, I sure as heck hadn't agreed to it, little did I know my job was just to help the editor and give the stamp of approval that it was an open standard. They did add an extra field near the start of the certs that would, if unknown to the attacker, prevent them from creating hash collisions but, I found out 5 years later, the entity creating this field was never told the field was for security and are not setting it in an unpredictable way.
There is arrogance, stupidity and corruption in every committee, but the UK has cronyism and they do stupidity with a level of impunity that I've never seen in any other western country.
Re:I helped write the smart energy standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately you ran straight into a part of UK corporate face saving culture there too. To avoid them and their company being "embarrassed" a nasty root of corporate stubbornness has taken hold where certain people will DO ANYTHING to ensure what is presented does not disagree with what they just said. Basically the trick to get around it is to privately agree changes in little informal meetings before the formal meeting, as what is presented there will be fait accompli. The formal meetings are just as much fluff these days.
It's not a good thing and I don't like it but learning to navigate it is a survival skill for UK techs. If you ever want an instructional video watch the old TV show "Yes Minister". [youtube.com]
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Wow, the UK is remarkably like Japan.
Re: I helped write the smart energy standard (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you think brexit happened?
Re:I helped write the smart energy standard (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, the UK switch to smart meters has been a complete disaster. Aside from the spec being rubbish, which you kindly documented in your comment, the whole thing was a mess on the consumer side too.
First they installed SMETS1 meters, which usually only worked with the energy provider that installed them. The next standard, SMETS2, could work with any provider if they could figure out how to get the data. So all the old SMETS1 smart meters need to be ripped out and replaced eventually.
Pre-paid meters have been a problem in the UK for decades, and smart meters didn't improve things at all.
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That is surprising. The IEC 62056-21 protocol already exists and it is usually used either with a RS485 connector or through infrared.
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The UK government decided that the coms and meter should be made by different companies but couldn't agree on a connector between the parts. As a result they talk wirelessly inside the meter.
You've got to be fucking shitting me. How can there be such a stark difference across 100km of water. The Benelux region on the other side of the channel standardised not only this internal requirement (P3 comms link), but standardised communication to an external "consumer port" for smart monitoring (DSMR P1 companion standard published openly so anyone can build a smart meter out of a frigging arduino if they want), but also standardised communication with completely different industries (P2 port) meaning
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We don't need the Europeans, with Brexit we have taken back control and are heading for the sunlit uplands (I am expecting my unicorn in the post any day now).
Note: I live in Pitlochry in Scotland. The town sits on the river Tummell, the dam on which generates 15MW. It is the bottom-most dam on the river, hydro-electric stations on which generate 0.2
Re:Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
The UK and the EU are going to be poorer, colder, darker and less mobile
By having power everywhere, they'll be less mobile? Riggght.
By having greater access to power sources across an entire continent, they'll be colder and darker? Iiiiinteresting.
By costing a commodity according to fine-grained supply and demand, and thus reduce the costs to both producer and consumer, they'll be poorer? Fascinating!
They have a grid which cannot be moved to wind and solar in its present state
In 2020, 42% of power in Britain was from renewable sources, so it already HAS been moved over.
Do right-wingers normally have no concept of economics and mathematics?
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:3, Interesting)
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The energy prices for non-renweables in Europe have also been high lately.
Well, golly poo, I wonder why that might be. Could it be because of green idiots shutting down non-renewable power generation capacity before enough renewables to replace them are actually built, causing supply to drop, and thus, prices to increase?
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You don't actually have to wonder, just lookup what happened to gas prices when Nordstream 2 was almost ready, while everyone was getting more nervous about binding even tighter to Russia for energy. Putin shutoff the valve, presumably trying to create unrest, but also underscoring why depending on Russian gas is a very bad idea and why more nuclear and more renewables are needed, quickly.
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Uh-huh. Seen the energy prices in Europe lately? That's how sustainable your fing "green transformation" is. And it'll only get worse. So, let me ask back at you: do the leftists have no concept of economics, mathematics, and most importantly actual, real reality?
If anything, it highlights that you shouldn't be dependent on Russian non-renewables - especially as Putin prepares to expand their occupation of Ukraine from just a part of it, to "more" or "all" of it.
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Uh-huh. Seen the energy prices in Europe lately? That's how sustainable your fing "green transformation" is. And it'll only get worse. So, let me ask back at you: do the leftists have no concept of economics, mathematics, and most importantly actual, real reality?
If anything, it highlights that you shouldn't be dependent on Russian non-renewables - especially as Putin prepares to expand their occupation of Ukraine from just a part of it, to "more" or "all" of it.
Great! Now you're getting it! So, when do we cancel the solar/wind madness that requires Russian gas as a backup for when weather is uncooperative, and go nuclear? ...never? yeah, I thought so. Wouldn't be a greenie if you wanted to actually *solve* the problem, instead of chasing the rabbit.
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Uh-huh. Seen the energy prices in Europe lately? That's how sustainable your fing "green transformation" is. And it'll only get worse. So, let me ask back at you: do the leftists have no concept of economics, mathematics, and most importantly actual, real reality?
If anything, it highlights that you shouldn't be dependent on Russian non-renewables - especially as Putin prepares to expand their occupation of Ukraine from just a part of it, to "more" or "all" of it.
Great! Now you're getting it! So, when do we cancel the solar/wind madness that requires Russian gas as a backup for when weather is uncooperative, and go nuclear? ...never? yeah, I thought so. Wouldn't be a greenie if you wanted to actually *solve* the problem, instead of chasing the rabbit.
Cancelling part of the future is stupid. Of course, that doing so would be stupid doesn't mean you should do other stupid things in lieu of that.. We need more renewables and more nuclear. And on the way to phasing out fossil fuels - which we have to, due to global warming and avoid external dependencies - work harder on getting other suppliers of natural gas, like Norway, to supply Europe instead of Russia.
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Since you're the one bitching about fossil fuels only, blah blah fucking blah, you can BLOODY WELL FUCK OFF AND DIE.
Nobody here is anti-nuclear EXCEPT YOU.
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Since I've given you the calculation for how many Gen 3 nuclear power stations you can build by shutting off fossil fuel subsidies, maybe -- JUST MAYBE -- you've figured out that I'm fine with nuclear. No? You can't be bothered reading and prefer to slander people instead? Listen, I've had enough of your crap for one day, or indeed one lifetime. And, yes, what you are spouting is indeed utter crap.
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> Uh-huh. Seen the energy prices in Europe lately? That's how sustainable your fing "green transformation" is.
Erm, energy prices in Europe have gone through the roof because of gas price extortion, a fossil fuel.
It's evidence that our green transformation needs to hurry the fuck up because we can't rely on cheap fossil fuels anymore. It's the exact opposite of what you're claiming - it's the reality of the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels; we can no longer produce them in sufficient volume in our own
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But you knew that, and like every leftist you are just deliberately and knowingly lying through your teeth.
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Of course the dumbasses at the top of my country object, while they cheer for fossil gas being counted as "renewable" as well (the irony).
Fortunately other EU countries have lesser anti-science idiots in charge at the moment. And while nuclear isn't cheap, it's pretty solid at providin
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I am nitpicking but they have classified it as "green" and not "sustainable"on the account of its very low CO2 emissions. The is no "sustainable" label in the taxonomy. But there are caveats and the parliament can vote against by a 50% vote. Also the Austrian government has found nothing better to do than to declare they would challenge it in court.
The inclusion of fossil gas in said taxonomy also comes with caveats. They must emit less than 100g of CO2 per kilowatt hour which is physically impossible unles
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I mean even if they managed to efficiently separate the carbon from chemical bond with the hydrogen atoms, seeing some recent report on methane leakage from what looks like natural gas extraction sites, this isn't something that should be incentivized.
I base this on the claims made here: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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You are an idiot.
The EU does not "classify" any energy source.
And nuclear is not renewable. Or do do you think Uranium or Thorium renews itself?
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Idiots don't care about the point and rather argue only about semantics.
The ironic point that is lost on you (even though I stated it in the original comment) is the current German government thinking that natural gas is the "greener" choice over nuclear for the problems at hand.
But if you compare actual environmental damage and impact on climate from various power source, it should be obvious how ignorant the German government is
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Or do do you think Uranium or Thorium renews itself?
Well, as long as supernovae are a thing, it technically does.
Re:Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK already has a wholesale electricity market that varies cost based on supply, not demand, it's been running successfully for years.
The intention with Smart Meters and flexible tariffs is to reflect that wholesale cost to customers which then results in their usage better reflecting the available supply. Multiplied across millions of homes that will dramatically change demand and potentially avoid peaks in the first place, or reduce them to the point that storage can balance it. You can do it with smart devices today, EV chargers, battery smart inverters and similar. We already have tariffs that reduce during off-peak times and may even go negative at points so consumers are being paid to use electricity, smart devices poll the provider and flex usage based on that.
If you have inflexible need for electricity then it's not going to be turned off, that is nonsense, it'll just cost more. If you have a car that sits for 12 hours but takes 4 to charge then why would you care if it's smart charger moves the charging time around? If you have a well insulated house then why would you care if the heating stops working for any given 30 minute period and the temperature drops by 0.2 degrees. We're not at that point today with the UK housing stock or vehicle fleet, but this is a long term approach.
Storage is not the solution for intermittency, it's for local balancing. Running the entire grid from stores while the wind drops is not feasible. The current approach is a mixture of HVDC interconnectors, flexible usage, nuclear baseload, diverse generation sources and financial drivers to reduce the time that carbon creating generation methods are being used.
Yes there will be a cost to this, the current belief is that the cost of doing nothing will be far higher. If you don't believe that then no doubt the investment won't seem worthwhile.
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If you have a car that sits for 12 hours but takes 4 to charge then why would you care if it's smart charger moves the charging time around? If you have a well insulated house then why would you care if the heating stops working for any given 30 minute period and the temperature drops by 0.2 degrees. We're not at that point today with the UK housing stock or vehicle fleet, but this is a long term approach.
Because you know very well that once leftist totalitarian assholes get back into power then all those "optional" saving measures will stop being optional and start being mandatory, especially with infrastructure already in place.
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That'd be the Gulf Stream, not the jet stream.
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You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood how this is going to work. Nobody will be colder or poorer, quite the opposite in fact.
For example, you are wrong about smart meters being about to turn off heat pumps and car chargers. In reality, it might turn them on early. With a reasonably well insulated house you can shift heating and cooling by 30 minutes or an hour, and then coast through the high demand period. The thermostat will turn the heating off, not the smart meter, because the house is already ni
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:2)
Re: Collateral costs of going to renewables (Score:2)
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They allow households to use energy when there is least demand & at its cheapest
A healthy dose of pessimism is always useful in these instances. In the UK we had Econ7 or White Meter in Scotland which was sold to people as a way to use cheap night-time electricity to charge up storage heaters and heat their homes during the day. But what actually happened was that the day rate was raised so high that the average family lost out by a considerable amount for the audacity of wanting to make a cup of tea or watch TV "when electricity was at its most expensive."
It's not that smart meters co
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It is time to take personal responsibility for your own energy needs.
I've done that. What I've done is:-
- Got rid of natural gas from the property
- Installed a heat pump [1]
- Installed 33kWh of battery
- moved to a tariff that supplies power from 100% renewable sources AND charges £0.04 between 00:00 and 05:00 [2]
- got rid of my ICE and gone to an EV[3]
- Installed solar. As I type this post, the power from this is charging my batteries.
[1] The Air Source
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If you're happy with your setup, fancy dropping some manufacturer and installer names? I'm having real problems discovering reliable and trustworthy suppliers in the green energy field.
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"And the effect on the global climate is going to be zero."
Actually not.
It will be, in fact, negative. All these solar systems each need a large number of additional transformers, and inevitably this means more tiny leakages of the insulating fluid used in that equipment. Unfortunately, that fluid SF6, is 24000x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and lasts airborne for 1000 years.
Just the leakage from the systems in EU alone in 2017 was equal to a MILLION cars on the road for a year.
From a source that i
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Almost every commercial-scale solar/wind installation has backup natural gas generation (Texas excluded). Most electricity is sold to the grid on long-term contracts. Those same gas generators can be spun-up to provide electricity in situations where there is unanticipated demand. But that's rarely a problem in
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The existing grid was designed around large power plants. Power was distributed from them to users.
The future grid needs to be designed to incorporate a large number of smaller distributed energy sources... solar, wind, batteries, etc. These provide energy distributed broadly in space and time.
The existing grid is/was very inefficient since demand fluctuates widely during the day (and season, weather, etc.) but the large fossil and nuclear plants take take days to change their output.
The future grid can be
rise to "a level of respective incompetence" (Score:2)
That sounds like one of Parkinson s Laws
Theorized by C Northcote Parkinson
Its not just storage and transmission, either (Score:2, Interesting)
I should add, that the problem of capacity is not just about having enough storage. Its also that when you have a calm period and draw on the storage, you have to recharge it afterwards, at the same time as you meet the regular demand.
So this means that you need to well oversize the wind and solar plant in order to both meet demand when the wind comes back, and at the same time charge up the storage for the next time it goes out.
Another collateral consequence is also emerging in the UK. Its that a huge am
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A lot of this is supposition or hyperbole. Charging drivers based on road usage has been something rumoured for literally a couple of decades a
Re:Its not just storage and transmission, either (Score:4, Insightful)
So this means that you need to well oversize the wind and solar plant
No, it means you just need more capacity overall. Each site will be sized according to availability of energy and land ownership rights.
Most likely much of the capacity will come from the North Sea and other off-shore wind farms.
You would not have thought that the consequences of moving to Net Zero to save the planet would include tracking every single mile everyone drives, making it impossible to charge your car or heat your home between 5 and 8pm, and exposing you to the fluctuations of the spot electricity market for the power you need to cook dinner or take a shower or make a cup of tea.
Fortunately none of that will happen.
For per-mile taxing they will simply use the odometer reading at the yearly test every vehicle must go through to ensure it is safe and meets emissions standards. In the UK it's called an MOT, and it's mandatory. No need to track where the vehicle is the rest of the time.
You will be able to charge your car or heat your home during peak times, it will just cost you more. Fortunately we have already figured out how to use timers to delay charging and heating to cheap times, and insulation retains the heat over the expensive parts.
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They don't need an excuse to install trackers in cars, if that's what they want. In fact they already have pretty effective tracking of cars - the police have a large number of surveillance cameras with number plate recognition software. So do many other organizations, e.g. if you drive into London they use them to make sure you pay the congestion charge.
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Well, no. You don't have to track every mile everyone drives. And road pricing hasn't been talked about in years.
It'll be possible to charge your car or heat your home at ANY time of day, even if local supplies don't exist, because, you know, not all of Europe shares identical environmental conditions or the same timezone.
Wow! You've learned economics, maths AND geography, all in one day! What a pity you hadn't learned them in school and saved us from your deluded right-wing rants.
Oh yes, Ireland, and Portugal are one hour later, and Baltic states, Finland, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are one hour ahead. Makes such a fucking huge difference, and will definitely power us through the night. Or are you suggesting we should depend on Russia or Belarus for energy even more? Such a bright idea! Are all leftists this stupid or just you?
Study by "SuperNode"... (Score:3)
Fortunately this study is from an independent agency, without any financial stake in the game. Just kidding:
Do they really claim they can ship systems of superconducting transmission lines whose costs will be "negligible"?
Re: Study by "SuperNode"... (Score:2)
I was wondering a bit why you needed a study, when you could have the current electricity markets rerun a year worth of auctions algorithm except have them set interconnect capacity to infinite.
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Not necessarily Eurosceptics. The link you provided mentioned Brussels. The limitation of 5G there for fear of imaginary health impacts was pushed by the green "ecolo" party. And ecolo isn't Eurosceptic. Anti-science though.
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The national grids are already connected via interconnectors we do need more of them. In Ireland we tend to use around 6000MW at peak and 3000 MW off peak. We have interconnectors which add up to 1000MW and work both ways. When we have excess Wind Energy it effectively expands demand and allows more Wind energy on the grid, wind is variable but reasonably predictable. There is a series of auctions taking place at 24 hour 12hours and 6 hours in the day. The latest forecasts are made about an hour before th
Magic fairy dust (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this journalist know English? After reading that about three times, I can figure out what he meant, but what a tortured sentence.
In a nutshell: If one installs more transmission capacity, the need to build *new* capacity will be reduced. Which isn't saying much, because demand is going through the roof. Where I live, more than 50% of new cars sold are EVs. Heating systems in new builds are heat pumps instead of oil. And some countries (Germany, for example) are turning off their nuclear plants.
Renewable energy still doesn't make the cut. There are times - maybe once or twice a Winter- where almost all of Europe simultaneously has bad weather. A massive cold front with cloud cover and snow (or rain, in the south). Solar power = zero. During storms, wind power is also often unavailable, because wind speeds are too high. Where is that power - in the middle of Winter - going to come from? Magic fairy dust?
European energy policy is currently pretty dumb...
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Renewable energy still doesn't make the cut. There are times - maybe once or twice a Winter- where almost all of Europe simultaneously has bad weather..
It happened last year, from July through to October, wind speeds throughout much of Western Europe were the lowest since the 1960s with the UK's wind output barely averaging 2GW out of an installed capacity of 25GW. Solar output was also below average. Good luck finding a storage solution that will cover that.
Wind and solar has its place as complementary sources but it's pure fantasy to believe you can power Northen European nations solely from something so intermittent and unreliable.
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Re:Magic fairy dust (Score:5, Informative)
Because some forms of renewable energy are intermittent and some are less predictable than others, you need to over-build capacity. You over-build to the point where you can guarantee you have enough energy all the time.
If you have a very highly connected grid that can move large amount of energy around, you don't need to over-build so much. The more widely distributed the generation is, the less it is subject to local variations in energy availability.
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You over-build to the point where you can guarantee you have enough energy all the time.
That is a fair point only if you do not care about price. Otherwise you need a huge amount of storage (expensive as well but possibly less) or fossil fuels (a cheaper option).
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The cost can be kept low if we develop industries that can take advantage of excess cheap energy when it becomes available. Producing synthetic fuels, desalination, hydrogen production, opportunistic computing (there was an article about it yesterday on /.)...
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Because some forms of renewable energy are intermittent and some are less predictable than others, you need to over-build capacity. You over-build to the point where you can guarantee you have enough energy all the time.
If you have a very highly connected grid that can move large amount of energy around, you don't need to over-build so much. The more widely distributed the generation is, the less it is subject to local variations in energy availability.
Which part of "There are times - maybe once or twice a Winter- where almost all of Europe simultaneously has bad weather" was too hard for you to understand?
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There is enough wind energy in the North Sea to cover all year round, every year. It's just a question of if we want to harvest it all.
The other alternative is to keep some fossil fuel plants around to cover those times. Their emissions can be captured and sequestered, and offset in other ways. Net zero doesn't mean zero emissions, it means that any emissions that are made are offset by some means.
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There is enough wind energy in the North Sea to cover all year round, every year. It's just a question of if we want to harvest it all.
Sure, because the zone of bad weather that covers Europe is mathematically guaranteed to always have a hole for North Sea.
The other alternative is to keep some fossil fuel plants around to cover those times. Their emissions can be captured and sequestered, and offset in other ways. Net zero doesn't mean zero emissions, it means that any emissions that are made are offset by some means.
Carbon capture and sequestration at this scale is magic fairy pixie dust. But I guess anything to avoid going nuclear and actually solving the problem, eh? The point is to chase the rabbit!
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Have a look at historic wind speed at 100m altitude over the North Sea. Let us know when they have ever been calm for a significant chunk of it.
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Which part of "There are times - maybe once or twice a Winter- where almost all of Europe simultaneously has bad weather" was too hard for you to understand?
In case you mean: bad for energy production, then we have to correct you. Winter is best time for wind.
And in case we get the nice Russian high pressure zone, it is superb for solar too.
Did you ever spent a winter in Europe? Oh, which part? London? Well, I would suggest to look on a map how big Europe is ...
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Does this journalist know English?
It says at the bottom: Provided by University College Dublin ... so think of it as the revenge of the Irish for 800 years of Anglo Saxon oppression and the slow and painful ongoing death of the Irish Gaelic language.
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Where is that power - in the middle of Winter - going to come from? Magic fairy dust?
Part of the answer to that is: another European country. If, say, Germany is suffering from the February high pressure zone above Scandinavia, Ireland and southern European countries are not. There must be a cold front somewhere with a lot of wind, and the high pressure zone is usually sunny. That is why a multinational supergrid makes a lot of sense.
Last year we had the coldest temperature in decades (due to that same high pressure zone), but I did not need to switch on the heating, because the massive amo
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Renewable energy still doesn't make the cut.
That sentence doesn't mean what you think it means, or you're ridiculously overstating the case; either way, prepare for ridicule. That means it doesn't get to be on the team, which is very much incorrect; it obviously has a place in our generation schemes.
Where I live, more than 50% of new cars sold are EVs.
It's not going to be too much longer before new cars sold actually improve grid stability by putting power back into the system when needed.
Heating systems in new builds are heat pumps instead of oil.
Good! They are three times as efficient as just burning the oil for heat. Even if you burn it in a power plant to r
Interestingly, solar power is never zero. (Score:3)
Interestingly, solar power is never zero or close enough to zero in the course of a day. I have a 10kW nominal solar roof (going on for over 10 years now, never cleaned or serviced it). It is not an "optimal" installation as it faces W/E and uses the inexpensive "hybrid/poly" Renesola Virtus II panels. The June average daily production is about 56kWh, while the worst month is December when it drops to an average of 15kWh/day (weather, worse sunlight angle + much shorter days). What I find surprising though,
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European energy policy is currently pretty dumb
Maybe, but the good thing is there isn't an European energy policy, really. The EU energy market is a regulatory framework, yes, but apart from that, the whole thing is ideologically pretty fragmented. Not necessarily a bad thing. France lobbied heavily for nuclear to be classified as renewable, now is building new plants [politico.eu]. In varietate concordia.
with the side benefit... (Score:5, Insightful)
...of allowing countries who impulsively, shut off their actual sources of power leaving them largely beholden to the natural gas controlled by a sociopath, to be absolved of the real consequence of those choices.
Win-win, I say.
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If you mean Germany, they have been working towards it since the turn of the millennium. It was hardly an impulsive decision.
French go Atomic Powered, Germans will go Also (Score:4, Interesting)
North Africa will be covered in solar panels and a hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbon (from carbon dioxide capture) will flood the world with cheap transport fuels of all types.
With sufficient baseline covered at least the northern EU wont freeze if that gas supply ends up not cheap and reliable. The industry of EU can be stopped by an external player, must feel good to be in that place.
Solar roofs will just about offset the needs of the consumer EV market for all but the most high rise of regions. The public EVs such as buses and trains already are accounted for as baselines.
The rest of the EU industries collectively are becoming more energy efficient per unit of GDP as to make Global warming commitments carbon heavy industries are being exported at a rate now matching NA exceptional rate. The rich are putting the dirty into 3rd world nations, what else is new.
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The French are in a difficult position. Nuclear is basically corporate welfare. In fact it's so bad that EDF is part owned by the government and dependent on it to survive. The cost is very high, but for the moment they want to keep the existing plants going while they try to transition.
Meanwhile EDF blunders along. Their latest effort with nuclear is going sideways. New plants delayed by at least a decade, and the one in China has revealed a design flaw that now needs to be corrected mid-way through the co
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EDF has always been government owned. Same as CEZ in the Czech Republic.
EDF is caught in a shitstorm of EU competition regulations: They have to sell about 25% of the electricity they produce at their production prices (very low thanks to nukes), or fixed by decree (42E , things get slightly complicated at 100TWh), to resellers who then sell them at market prices, whatever that means at this point. ("Loi Nome" from 2010) . It's theft.
France got itself in a pickle because in their case their EDF monopoly was
France going nuclear (Score:2)
Political web weaving (Score:2)
But energy is already cheap (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be (Score:2)