Beelbeebub

https://www.upliftuk.org/post/just-one-months-gas-supply-from-14-years-of-licensing-by-previous-government. • From 2010-2024, the previous Conservative government handed out hundreds of new North Sea oil and gas licences across seven licensing rounds, which will lead to just 20 new and re-licenced fields. • These 20 developments have the potential to produce – in total, over their lifetime – less than six months of UK gas demand and less than eight months of oil. •To date, they have produced the equivalent of just 36 days of extra gas. They have also produced just over two months (64 days) of oil, however, most UK oil is exported. Now to be fair, this report had been produced by an organisation(s) that is pro energy transition but, let's say they are an order of magnitude wrong. That's still chicken feed.

The point (of this thread, started well before the current ME capers) being that it is unwise for the UK to rely heavily on external energy resources *and* the only sovereign energy resources we have in sufficient quantity are renewable ones. We must reduce fossil fuel reliance, which means - Reduce consumption (insulation etc) - Electrify transport and heating - Increace our renewables generation And you can come to the above conclusion with no reference to "green stuff"

Alot of discussions focus on the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But if we build out a big capacity then even when the fleet is operating at a low % of the peak it's till enough. Sure that means we have far too much on a good day but that's a good problem to have. Obviously we need to build out storage both at a grid level (hydrocand battery farms) and micro - home batteries. If every home had a 5kwh battery we'd have 125Gwh of storage. The evening peak would probably be eliminated. A 10gwh battery (not unreasonable) would do most homes for 24h non heating loads. I estimate you could build a standard mass build house with enough panels and batteries to make it a net generator over the year and not need grid power for half of it for under £10k extra. That frees up a huge amount of capacity for car charging and electric heating. We might need to fire the gas plants up over the winter - but that's still alot less gas burnt

There are half a dozen or so still to be demolished coal plants. How long and how much money do you think it wil take to bring them back online, even if we assume no equipment has been removed or demolished? We'd have to check and refurbish everything - where do we get the engineers and parts? We'd need to restock the coal - from where, how do we transport it? All this is doable but will take time, probably years and lots of money And then, we can't have coal plants sitting around doing nothing. We need, ideally to habe them as an active (if only intermittently) part of the grid. But coal isn't very good (as mentioned previously) at occasional use. It's much better as base load - which is not what we need. The entirety of thr "let's use coal" argument rests on the idea we have vast reserves. But we don't. And we don't have an industry to get at those reserves anyway. I wonder, even if you went back to a decimated coal town, how many people you'd get signing up to"work down pit" (said in Yorkshire accent). I can get the idea that gas could have a place as occasional use plants - especially in the nationally owned, vertically integrated with the gas fields model. But coal isn't a good fit. The money spent maintaining the coal plants would be better spent on upgrading the did to reduce capacity constraints, increacing storage (say another pumped storage facility) or building more renewable generation.

The point is all the existing plants are old. The youngest is over 40 years old and Radcliffe is nearly 60. The oldest plant I can see on Wikipedia was not quite 70 years at end of life. So we can assume RoS had a few years left at best.

From what I can tell the last coal plant built was 1995 and the newest undemolished coal plant is 1983, so they are pretty ancient. And as someone mentioned coal plants are not very flexible, which makes them a fairly crap and inefficient match for renewables

That sort of vertically integrated setup where the gas is never sold on the open market might work. Maybe you can answer this - can gas extraction beveadikybramled up and down. Ie is a gas well similar to a tapnonce drilled where we can turn the flow down to zero, then restart it again by opening the tap or once the flow starts do we have to keep it flowing. If the former then it could be debzibke to drill a new field amd connect it up exclusively to be turned on to supply some gas backup plants. That way the relatively small size if the reserve is less important as we rarely use it. Of course that implies we massively reduce gas demand - by the "Net zero" polices of heat electrification and increacing renewable generation.

There is no reason that renewables (wind, solar and battery) cannot generate and maintain frequencies and voltages. It is just that in Spain they were mostly set to follow voltages and frequencies. Unlike a rotating generator renewables can produce voltage and frequency independently. You could have an inverter provide a rock steady 50hz regardless of current and voltage. The dropping of frequency as the grid loads up is entirely a weakness of the old, spinning grid. If we were building a renewable only grid we could hold 50hz. In fact, I bet that adding spinning ac generators to such a system would be an issue as suddenly you have a device that might start to drag the frequency down in overload.. The iberian blackout exposed some weaknesses in the way Spain was integrating renewables into the grid not intrinsic issues with renewable generators

I wonder if the instability contribution from rooftop solar was due to large numbers of inverters going off line at more or less the same time as the upper voltage limit was reached as they all have the same limit. Likewise if they all had the same reconnection timeout (the report mentions a 180 second delay plus startup check time) you could get a situation where significant (at least locally) chunks of generation is switching off then back on. Maybe if inverters were required to have a subtle (say +/-0.2v) random variation to their nominal cutout voltage you wouldn't get whole blocks tripping out the instant a magic number was hit. Likewise if there was a random delay before reconnect (180-240sec) the capacity coming back online would be more gradual. IIRC there is something in the ethernet protocol about each node waiting a random time before resending is there has been a packet clash to avoid exactly this sort of unintentional synchronisation.

Except we'd have to build a load more coal stations *and* all the infrastructure to supply them (coal trains from the mines, mines, miners) and, assuming they aren't on old sites, the new grid architecture. And then you'll have to get approval for new coal burners. I imagine locals will be less than happy about a new combustion plant opening up next door. I remember going gliding near Radcliffe on Soar back in the late 90's during a mild inversion. As soon as you got to a certain altitude (towed) you got above the "cap"amd could see the brown fug surrounding the station. Lovely.

This is the big thing. Rather than plow money into fossil fuels, plow the same money into renewables - build more. Over capacity is a good thing. It provides more security, more days when all demand can be renewable and the inevitable periods when it is sunny and windy, we wil find ways to use that...

There is some logic to this position especially if the plant has life left in it. There would be cost associated with the moth balling. I did wonder if they could be retro fitted to burn plastic waste granules. We (as is oft pointed out) still need plastic made from oil. Recycling seems to be rather hit and miss for various reasons. Why not collect the plastic from things we need plastic for eg some food packaging, medical devices, machine parts etc. Process them into fuel pellets for stock piling at Drax, Radcliffe etc. These might run a few days ie weeks a year as backup for low wind, low solar periods or extreme demand. They would be hellishly expensive and rather high carbon but if it's 10 days a year and the rest of the time it's cheap, ckwan renewables.... Thats OK.

The tech is reliable sure. Security and abundance.... Not so much. As discussed ad nauseam the UK reserves are dwindling and the nature of the oil and gas industry means almost no nation can be secure against external supply shocks. The US is the largest producer and a major net exporter and *still* energy prices are rising. Interestingly, the two European nations who have seen the least disruption to electric prices are France (nukes) and (drumroll) Spain (renewables and some nukes. They are seeing rises of petrol/diesel/gas/heating oil etc because you car/boiler still needs to use the specific molecules it was designed for but the electric bits of their economy are plugging along with less disruption.

I did a calculation in this thread. If we were to replace our oil and gas use with coal (ie electric cars and heatpumps powered by coal power stations) we would have about 25 years of coal using the upper estimates of coal reserves. So yes, short term we could move back to coal but we would need to reopen the mines and find miners, then build a bunch more coal stations and then still have a plan for what to do by the late 2050s early 2060s

The 50% fall from current production I refer to (ie 25% of today's consumption) assumes we discover more reserves and licence them. Obviously if you assume we discover even more reserves you can make the graph do whatever you want. We could imagine the UK becoming the world's largest oil and gas producer and make our plans based on that,im in the same way I can assume my money problems will be sorted by a hitherto unknown billionare relative dying and leaving it all to me.

There is a concerted campaign for more north Sea oil drilling licences. The line being fed (I assume as it"s popped up in a few places) is "there are 500 million barrels of oil in Rosebank" The bit *never* said is that the UK uses 1.5million barrels *per day* so we are arguing over (at best) 1 years supply. Given realistic extraction rates it might produce maybe 10% of the UK supply for a decade. Hardly a game changer. Of course, we can stretch that out by reducing our demand for oil (and gas) by doing things like insulating our homes, switching to electric vehicles and other transport modes, using heat pumps etc. All things called "Net zero"

Or more likely - your inverter shuts down as it tries to power the entire local grid.

Predictably, the electricians are up in arms about this. The Uk's electrical wiring is apparently too different and so very fragile, compared to other countries, so we will all die in a shower of sparks and fire. I would be interested in the safety data from other countries where this is more popular.

I don't know the cost differential between Lng carriers and onshore storage. Potentially a bit more resilient through geographic distribution though the offload facility is still a single point of failure. On the plus side it would be very quick to ramp up capacity as we already have the infrastructure in place. All we need to do is buy and crew (or even lease) some carriers and that's it. I don't know how many hours /days of supply a single tanker provides

Would the same logic apply to Lng carriers?

The only way I can see the gas plan working would be if the "company" (nationalised) owned the gas fields, storage, transport and power plants - basically farm to for for electricity. Not impossible but there are probably any number of pitfalls. As for coal, we wpiod need to open mines and I don't think we have the expertise. I did wonder if we use waste incinerator plants as our "dark and still weeks" backup. Basically I'm not sure how much plastic actually gets recycled but we do need virgin plastic for alot of things eg medical and food packaging. So why not store the shredded waste for burning when we need it. Yes it would release carbon but the amounts would be much smaller and we wouldnhabe less plastic waste in the enviroment.

With some waht impeccable timing the UK climate change committee has released a report that (amongst other things) looks at the costs of "Net zero" vs the costs of staying as we are today. https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/supplementary-analysis-of-the-seventh-carbon-budget/ The TLDR is that the cost of NZ is about £4bn a year or £100bn to 2050. The cost of a single oil crisis (eg the 2022 one) is £40bn to treasury (fuel bill support) and an estimated similar amount to households and businesses. All in all they conclude the cost of NZ is about equal to a single oil crisis and we are on our second this decade. Again this is an argument for NZ that makes no reference to climate change.

I'm not sure how it goes back down for a while unless Iran announces it's surrender (or that it will not hinder ships transiting the strait). It's going to be very hard for the US can defend the 100+ ships a day moving through. Even if the Americans packed up and went home tomorrow, what is the incentive for Iran to reopen the strait? Maybe they'd get a taste for being the troll under a vital bridge and start charging a toll - after all, what will the America's be able to do? Bomb them?

Texas petrol prices rose by about 10p a liter or 20% due to the supply shock caused by the recent stupidity. A state that produces over 5m barrels a day but consumes less than 3m in total (all fossil energy Inc coal) in c country that is the world's largest exporter of oil and gas... is still not insulated from a war on the other side of the planet interrupting oil supplies. So what chance does the UK have even if it could somehow increace oil production? Do you know what hasn't changed? The cost of producing a Mwh of electricity from wind and solar.

Either/or If you piped a bypass on both the flow and return ports then you could set the system to be a buffer, flow side volumiser, return side volumiser or entirely absent with just a few valve changes... 😁