Beelbeebub

To break his arguments down by section 1. He makes the mistake that declining N.Sea production is a choice - it isn't the rate of decline is slightly modifiable but not to any significant degree. We are arguing over the green line or the red line. He also makes the mistake that our high gas and electricity prices are due to us deliberately running down our production. Aside from my point above, they are high due to the high price of gas and the international price of gas is not changed by the UK output. The price is set by the international markets and those are (nominally)supply and demand. Even at best, our output is too small to change the international price. It should be noted that the rise in electricity prices and gas prices was very closely correlated in 2022 because a much larger proportion of our electricity came from gas. In 2026 the rise was much less direct because less of our electricity comes from gas. He talks about the supply chains for renewables being dirty and having emissions. This is a variation of the landman rant (and the "EV's will never pay back the carbon used in making the battery" argument before that). Study after study shows wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are all net negative for carbon well within their lifetime. It also ignores the carbon and pollution from fossil fuel extraction as a comparison. 2. He talks about "what happens is the gas prices fall?" Well, they will eventually for a while,until the next crisis. Then they will fall again until the next crisis and so on. So far we have had 2 massive "once in a lifetime" shocks in the current decade -that we are only half way through... Does anyone want to bet Trump doesn't do something stupid I'm the next 2 and a bit years. What would happen to oil prices if the world's largest oil producer suffered massive political instability? Say a the kind caused when a leader who loses an election tries to cling to power using a paramilitary police force or even elements of the armed forces.... Who wants to say that is fantasy land? 3. He seems to get mixed up on the cost of capacity. With renewables capacity is a more statistical figure than gas plants etc. With ccgt plant the peak cavity is easy. Just an engineering question -"that plant, at full chat, will produce 2GW of electricity." With renewables there is a theoretical capacity - what if everything was perfect, but that's only a few % of the time. A better question would be "what is the 95% available capacity" ie the level it can produce 95% (or whatever arbitrary figure you want) of the time. So my 11kwp solar array has a 95% figure closer to 1kw (during daylight obviously). Essentially we will have to dump a load of capital into building these assets. Once e have built them they will provide cheap energy for decades. Or we could kee the capital and dole it out to buy oil and gas as we need it. That's our choice. Right enough for now....

To drag back to the original topic. The article about the solar farm was emotive (as all anti ones are) invoking the loss of "prime" land that was actually not particularly prime. The second article made the "gotcha" observation that renewables do it always produce at their peak output.... Not news and built into the calculations. This is why we need considerably more peak capacity than our nominal maximum. This is the calculation every one with solar panels makes. I have 11kwp of panels on an 9kwh inverter feeding a house that runs about 500w continuous and peaks at maybe 7kw if we really try. Why have I got so many panels? Because it means they produce enough to power the house even in sub optimal conditions (most of the time) It's the same with our national capacity -we will prob need something like 2 or 3x our nominal peak demand, so north of 120gw peak. Will we ever see that demand? Hopefully not! But it means that the system will still be able to provide a significant amount of our national demand even when operating at 20, 25% of maximum

The author ignores the enormous hump in the blue and orange line that occured during the COVID epidemic but absolutely didn't show excess deaths from COVID.....😁 But @Spinny to address the graph fully you need to understand what was done They took all the previous years (usually omitting COVID)and effectively produce a smoothed average. If you visualise a smooth line running through *the middle* of the bundle of lines that's the baseline. You then look at the number of deaths in the target period Vs that theoretical baseline -as you can see the 2026 line is towards the upper end of the "bundle" hence there are "excess deaths". The difficult but is to differentiate between excess deaths that are abnormal and excess deaths that a normal (ie natural variation). Clearly the COVID lumps were abnormal (🤫) but the heatwave deaths, much harder to call. It is highly likely there were excess deaths, there always are when it is hot or cold. It's likely that there were more excess deaths as the temperature for hotter. But the exact number, to a corpse, will never be known.

I mean I read through it and there wasn't much wrong. Personally I would have used less precise % given the inherent uncertainty in these methods. I wouldn't say "39%" i'd say "around 1/3" I wouldn't say "59%" Icd say "over half" But apart from that there want anything controversial - I mean we broke multiple records are saw exceedingly high temperatures even for August and Europe saw even worse. We would be daft to ignore this event even if we escaped it.

Sorry what do you base "it's a lie" on? Obviously it's impossible to compare the counter factual of no heatwave, but the practice of looking at what the expected death rate in June would have been in most summers and then looking at the actual death rate to compute a difference is fairly well established. It's some for every major public health intervention. For example the recent news about the drop in cervical cancer deaths amongst girls due to HPV vaccinations was done by a version of this method. We do the same when a report comes out about how many extra deaths are caused by a cold winter. Your entire rant rests on the notion that the met office statement about extra deaths is a deliberate untruth on their part. If the number is calculated using mundane regular methods we use for every other similar situation then your entire point collapses. Extra deaths caused by an unusually long hot spell is exactly the sort of information the met office should be providing.

"journalist" has come to mean something different these days. Once it was someone committed to finding and explaining facts and complex topics. Now it includes columnists writing opinions, partisan press releases, commercial press releases (every single one of those 'new poll suggests' articles) and even those idiot "auditors" (any idiot with a go pro and chip on their shoulder) who call themselves "citizen journalists".

I don't agree with this point. But in both cases the maximum grid load is the same as it's demand driven so the grid doesn't need to be bigger. The only difference is the location of the generators is different so some additional work is needed to get the power from it's new source. National grid have identified the current weak links (a big one being on the Scottish borders) and are upgrading them. Another is on the east coast and one across Wales. The cost of these upgrades is expected to add about £50 to bills but save about £40 in curtailment related costs. The last point: yes we will have to add things like storage. Current rates for domestic storage are less than 5p per kWh (£50 per Mwh) I suspect grid scale is less. That's on top of the input electric cost, which would generally be near zero (the whole point of storage). As an aside the capacity of all the EV's currently on the road (5% of all cars now) is about 60Gwh. That could,with the right V2G infrastructure yield as much as the nuclear plants under construction for several hours. They would be the ideal peaker plants.

The French submarine reactor, which is a sub 20% enrichment design, is about 3m diameter and 5m height. So comparable to a large abnormal load like a big transformer or a wind turbine nacelle. It could be road transported (albeit with some restrictions) Obviously the safety margins for military vessels are somewhat different to civilian use. But if the "reactor factory" near a deep water shipyard the ships could come in, have the reactor craned out ,new one dropped in and be on their way. This is essentially what happens to nuclear subs except it:a all about more fraught with the whole 'cutting open the pressure hull' thing. All that said, i'm far from convinced that nuclear powered shipping is going to be a thing.

Yeah, the current "small' reactors are bloody huge. But *if* we could get them to container sized then the logistics of removing them to refuel them becomes much much easier. If they were placed where they could easily be craned out rather than having to do major surgery (refueling nuclear subs involved cutting the hull open) then swapping them out would be not much different from unloading a container ship.

I agree - people willing to regurgitate the oil industry line about climate change being a hoax and a communist plot to destroy our economy can have a lucrative career with think tanks, the speaking circuit and providing papers so politicans can cite 'peer reviewed research' , whilst the scientists diligently studying ocean currents, atmospheric temperatures, rainfall patterns, climate models etc live precariously from academic grant to academic grant.

And the high peak prices are something we already deal with - consumers get a fixed price which is above the absolute lowest but also caps the peaks which can get very high.

Yes, that's why the price per Mwh for a plat with 5% or 30% utilisation is higher than one with +90%. But but it's cheaper to run a plant for 4 months at about £150 Mwh than a plant for 11 months at £100Mwh Btw this is exactly what China is doing with coal. There's lots of 'but china are building coal plants!' but little mention that the utilisation of those plants is falling. It's china's energy security backup because they have lots of coal, but the growth in their demand as they electrify is coming from renewables

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UK production of oil and gas I have - can you tell me how many are in operation today? 2 - one in china that took just over 11 years to build and floating one in russia that also took 10 years to build. And there are 6 or so under construction with intended in service dates sometime before 2030. Ideally we would have gone ahead with the various reactors we had planned back in the early 00's and have several up and running by now, but we seem to be very bad at nuclear construction in the UK. I'm not convinced we will get any better in the timeline we need. We have 2 under construction (hinkley C and sizewell C) with a combined capacity of around 6.5 GW coming online in 2030 and late 2030's. But that only covers the loss from the 5 existing plants shutting down before 2030, and as they are AGR's they are going to be difficult to life extend - not impossible, they will be about 40 years old at planned shutdown and the design has been extended to 50 years at other sites. Without a time machine, nuclear isn't going to dig us out of the hole. Except when they don't keep prices down. Several years ago our gas and elec prices rocketed because a politician 1,500 miles way decided the country next door was his. Our gas and oil prices recently shot up because a politician 3,000 miles away got mad at a country 3,000miles the other way and started flinging bombs about and suddenly, ships with oil bound for us turned round in the ocean and headed to china and the far east because they outbid us. Environmental issues aside, oil and gas are very shaky foundations. We struggled in ww2 for oil. We struggled in the 70's for oil. This isn't going to get better but they don't - they offer (in effect) fixed price deals for capacity. Those prices are lower than a new build gas plant can offer (and that was before the higher gas prices). And whilst there may be a security issue with inverters made in china, in the sense they could be controlled from abroad - and there are strong arguments that the uk or at least europe should be making it's own inverters or at least the software running them - the fact the panels are made in china is irrelevant. Once you have bought them they are yours, they are dumb bits of silicon and glass that create a voltage when illuminated. That's it. Once you have bought them they will last for 25 years or so, churning out power every day. A barrel of oil, on the other hand, can be used one. Then you have to buy a new one. You realise we have wind turbines, right? They tend to do well in the winter. And if the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesn't blow - what will we do? Burn gas in CCGT plants exactly as we do now. The difference is we will be burning gas for a month or two a year rather than all year round. The future energy mix will have nuclear, wind, solar (etc) lots of battery capacity and a good chunk of CCGT plants with gas storage for the times when we need them.

if the SMR was a container sized device that just needed hookup to (ship) power grid, monitoring and cooling - i could see it working if electric drive was used. Then, as you say, the module could be craned on/off fairly easily and exchanged for a factory fresh unit whilst the old one went back to be refueled.