[meldrewreborn]

In the EU they are trying to come up with a policy to limit the price of gas, something they'd like the UK to join (if only to stop the UK negotiating its own deals first (learning the lessons of Covid?)).

Bu one EU minister pointed out that gas was only half the price in Asia and one-tenth the price in the USA.

Why is that? Essentially it comes down to transportation ease. It takes time to develop liquefaction facilities and the tankers to transport the product. The US has the lowest gas prices because of the runaway success of fracking.

The US has at least one and a half million fracked wells, we have just a handful and none operational. The new PM wants more, but crucially say still subject to local agreement. Personally I find the objections to fracking totally ludicrous and lacking in objective rigour. The environmentalists have so far strangled the industry before it could even be demonstrated to be effective. Rural tremors (dramatically called earthquakes by objectors to frighten the natives, would be felt less than city dweller feels from a vehicle going over a pothole.

We have plenty of gas on our own land. Yes it is a fossil fuel and it will need to be phased out eventually. But we have a crisis now and for decades to come. Better to produce our own than be held hostage by the dictator in Moscow. Its time to put national needs ahead of local objections - time to reject the nimby voice.

[Andy65]

I totally agree @meldrewreborn. I don't see why we aren't maximising our nuclear and coal generation (I'm assuming we aren't). Whilst they may not be the preferred options, needs must. Half of the problem here is the ever growing population, it requires more energy to live, more food which means more energy to produce/process, more transport etc, I don't believe that it's sustainable together with the desire to cure the world of all ills.

[meldrewreborn]

@Andy65

Nuclear generation will be stepped up but that's a very long-term solution. Coal is the dirtiest fuel and has been largely, but not completely phased out. It can be made clean by scrubbing and carbon capture and storage (CCS), but in the past these options were only in development and/or too expensive. We're in a new situation now. I think if CCS were to be tried out on real scale it would be sensible to apply it on the Biomass generators (like Drax) which burn wood pellets imported from overseas as their fuel.

[Bennie_R97]

@meldrewreborn I totally agree with you when it comes to coal, I believe that with the new technology and options that we have perhaps I would choose other forms of energy rather than coal. My question with the Biomass generators, would be interested to see how much carbon footprint emission will create to import wood pallets to burn.
@Andy65 When it comes to nuclear energy, my brain cannot stop thinking about the Chernobyl disaster and what the consequences it has had for the Western Countries. Even though it is not renewable, did you know that nuclear energy can be up to 96% of spent nuclear fuel in reactors is recyclable?

Maybe we should approach this from a different perspective, what about mixing nuclear energy with renewable energy? Would that be affordable? Would help with tackling the Climate emergency ?

[meldrewreborn]

@Bennie_EONNext

Since all renewables suffer from the problem of intermittency, there has to be another form of generation that can fill in when the sun doesn't shine and or the wind doesn't blow (even the tides have slack periods. Gas is the ideal fuel for this, but it does emit carbon. The carbon could be captured but has always been viewed as being too expensive to do on a commercial scale. This was when electricity generation was very much cheaper than today. But now Carbon capture and storage could be viable, and it could well mean that gas and indeed coal generation could be regarded as clean technologies.

[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

The game changer for renewables will be battery technologies that can be implemented at sufficient scale and spread around at the right locations to serve population areas with enough capacity to balance out demand across the peaks and troughs of generation.

It is my thought that renewable technologies can provide more than enough capacity for domestic demand if augmented by local and regional storage, subject to a few caveats. Industrial and commercial users are a separate matter. I'm of the view that heavy industry should be on a completely separate 'grid' from domestic energy and industries such as steel making or aluminium smelting should not put any demand on the domestic energy supply. Industry can continue using fossil generation and in fact tend to be co-located with major power stations for the obvious reasons, so it wouldn't take too much engineering to separate the UK electrical system into an 'industrial' and 'domestic' energy grid system. Grids could be cross-linked with interconnects in the same way as countries are so that a surplus of renewable energy could be given to industry and if domestic sources were struggling, they could be topped up in an emergency.

I would set limits for household usage. Calculate an average daily per capita consumption, with adjustments for individual circumstances, and then allocate each household an energy budget, say 10kWh per person per day in winter months and 6kWh a day in summer months. Anyone exceeding that budget would be billed at a higher rate per unit. Anyone coming in below the energy budget would get a rebate. Extra budget can be based on specific needs, medical, disability needs or whatever.

Gas is being phased out, allegedly, but gas for home heating will still be needed for the foreseeable, but if the gas is not being used routinely for domestic electricity generation, then electricity prices will come down significantly.

Nuclear is a fantastic solution but new nuclear won't come on stream any time soon. Older nuclear should have had the investment to extend it's safe working life. They are spending ten times the money for the next hundred years decommissioning older plants with all the associated hazards and risks, when a tenth of the money spent on extending the life of the older Magnox reactors would have been a better investment in my opinion. Wylfa 1 and 2 in Anglesea and the Trawsfynedd reactors in Gwynedd could happily power the whole of Wales without a single therm of gas being used for generation.

Of course, the downside of Magnox is the ratio of plutonium produced relative to the power generated - power from Magnox is a by-product of the process of creating weapons grade material, but changes to the way the reactors are operated can easily mitigate that to a great extent.

I'm a big fan of nuclear, but smaller, more local modular reactors which are being developed by Rolls Royce are a better solution than huge great white elephant projects that take decades to bring on stream and cost tens of billions to build, and ten times that to decommission at the end of their working life.

A reactor as used in an Astute class submarine could power a city the size of Southampton for twenty years and take up no more space than a couple of shipping containers. At end of life, they can just be taken away for reprocessing and new ones craned into place. To me that sounds much more sensible than behemoths like Sizewell or Hinckley Point which will never generate 'cheap' electricity.

[meldrewreborn]

@retrotecchie

I don't think the public really appreciates the extent of the changes needed. I use a minimum of 5 times the energy in gas as i do electricity. Even with the multiplier effect of a heat pump, my total demand would be three times my current electricity consumption. That poses a huge challenge to achieve that increase in output, and that's before the road transport electrification is undertaken. So the increase in electricity generation required is beyond peoples visualisations.

And the issue here is different to the rest of the world. Battery storage is obviously part of the answer, but i doubt whether it can really overcome the intermittency problem. There will be technological improvements, people will adapt, living patterns will change and prices will increase. Its not a nice legacy to leave to our descendants, but in a way each generation has to deal with the world it is born into - for example I often think the baby boomers had to clear up the legacy of WWII - something they had absolutely no hand in.

[Bennie_R97]

@meldrewreborn and @retrotecchie you both have really great points here. I love reading about things that cam help me be more educated as well 😁

I believe it can be a little tricky when there is a need of a revolution is the way we supply energy on a national scale.
@wizzo227 I know you have a little bit of insights in the matter. What do you think ?

[wizzo227]

One need not be so pessimistic about all the necessary decreases to waste.
Today it was sunny, so I completely recharged my electric bicycle sufficiently for 40 miles and I had the heat pump running for much of the day plus a cheapo electric heater running for a couple of hours, all this for free from rooftop solar panels and design with best-effort sufficiency in mind. For example I don't want to buy a large electric-motorwaycar because I don't have enough land for enough renewables to recharge it. My rooftop solar total in the whole of January (30 days, total kWh at the FIT generation meter) could have refilled a 35kWh car twice, or it could do everything else which I did with that much.

I still used gas heat for about half an hour on this frosty morning and I still used some fossil gas for the fry-up at lunch time.
I am not in favour of expansion of supply to match the maldesigned new houses going up with only fossil gas heat and insufficient or nil solar power.

[wizzo227]

@retrotecchie

A reactor as used in an Astute class submarine could power a city the size of Southampton

The population of Southhampton appears to be 262000 where I looked up census figures. Their total power consumption should make a submarine go really really amusingly fast? I'd have expected Southhampton to be nearer to the biggest possible "small modular reactors " (SMR) being talked about by the Canadians. Since most vehicles in Southhampton presently burn imported petrochemicals which went through Fawley refinery, I think that we should be looking at a full sized nuke or a line of SMR types sufficient to make and reduce enough direct air capture carbon and enough electrolytic hydrogen to fully supply Fawley with Orkney Process hydrocarbons. That process includes some continuous uninterruptible use of baseload electricity (ideally from a big nuke) and considerable pump-while-renewable-surplus-is-available interruptible load, which might be a better use of massive extra renewables build than bigger batteries.