LnP

@Beelbeebub, we agree on the required policy outcome, decarbonisation. I described a market driven policy framework for achieving that: Carbon tax to incentivise insulation and renewable electrification - heat pumps, BEVs, etc. The same technologies you advocate. Carbon border adjustment mechanism to control the export of our carbon emissions and to stem the loss of our industrialised businesses. CfDs for North Sea oil and gas landed in the UK so that oil companies take the risk on recoverable reserves. You described things you don't like or think are irrelevant, North Sea oil and gas, and you picked some climate "winners", things you like: Reduce demand (insulation and public transport) electrifiy heating (heat pumps) Electrify transport (EVs) Increase local electricity production (winds, solar, nuclear, storage etc) But what's your proposed policy framework for achieving these things? Subsidies? Picking winners often leads to wrong outcomes. Maybe you missed some important ones off your list. And subsidies don't always work. You don't have to read far into this forum to hear about problems with the £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme subsidy. When the Climate Change Act was drafted in 2008, some people advocated picking biomass as a renewable generation winner, but look where we are now. The cost of wind and solar fell so far that they became unexpected winners. Happily, the act was written in a way which allowed those technologies to emerge and succeed. The framework I proposed (not my invention by the way!) would allow new technologies and solutions to emerge. So, what's your proposed policy framework?

@Beelbeebub your points are all well made and I agree that criticising an energy policy as "woke" is unhelpful. It seems to me though that politicians are making energy policies based on culture rather than market forces driven by science and economics. I guess that's just democracy. I think we all agree that we are going to continue to need fossils as we make the energy transition, the question is where should the fossils come from. The current UK administration has decided that they are going to prevent them coming from the UKCS by restricting new licences. That's a cultural decision responding to expectations of parts of the electorate who haven't been presented with an alternative way of dealing with the climate change aspects. An alternative approach would be to manage the transition by reducing fossil consumption using carbon taxes, including a carbon border adjustment mechanism, rather than constraining supply by not issuing licences. We should grant licences with fixed prices for fossils (like renewables CfDs) which are required to be landed in the UK. That would avoid our exposure to geopolitical upheavals, albeit on an admittedly possibly small contribution. Regarding how much is there to be extracted, let the oil companies take the risk on that. Regarding how much of it has suitable quality (mainly sulphur content I think) to be refined in the UK, again let the oil companies take the risk. If the price and volume is right and with the certainty of the CfDs, they will modify their refineries to handle it (install hydrotreaters). This would allow market forces to help us through the transition in a way which possibly reduces the cost and even reduces climate impact by avoiding shipping fossils around the world. Apologies that I'm to some extent repeating something I said before, but now with a different emphasis 🙂.

Nice post and I love the pictures but please can we kill the myth that renewables are not eco friendly because of the materials used in their construction. The data speak for themselves. See my earlier post. CO2e, per kWh of energy produced over the life of the asset for your onshore turbine is 12 g CO2e and to produce the same energy from e.g. natural gas it's 458 g. That includes the embedded carbon in the concrete.

I suppose anybody who wants wind turbines to be built and for the electricity they produce to be affordable. CfDs reduce risk for the generators. Without them, generators would be asking higher prices for their electricity to reflect the risks they would be required to take on. Yes, it does stack up, hugely. The parameter you need to look at is the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, measured in grammes of CO2e, per kWh of energy produced over the life of the asset. Results as follows (median values of the assets they studied): Coal: 1004 g Natural Gas: 458 g Solar PV: 53 g Offshore wind: 18 g Onshore wind: 12 g Nuclear: 6 g (Clearing the Air, Hannah Ritchie, data source UN Economic Commission for Europe, 2021) According to Drax Group who operate the Lanark and Galloway run-of-river hydro schemes, located in south-west Scotland, it generates 126 MW. Yes, that's nice but it's not going to get us far in the energy transition. The latest allocation round for offshore wind (AR7) procured 70 times that capacity, 8.4 GW. So what? The embedded CO2 in the blades is taken into account in the above life cycle numbers. It's just a waste disposal issue. Same or worse for end of life fossil assets, many of which contain far worse materials - asbestos, mercury and other heavy metals, spent catalysts, etc.

You're talking about Sizewell C, I was talking about Hinkley Point C. In both cases, though in different ways, the funding model is designed to recover the decommissioning costs from bill payers. I agree though that nuclear power is expensive (Hinkley strike price currently £135/MWh) and that decommissioning costs are a risk. At least the funding models are intended to recover all the costs from consumers. My post though was making the point that renewable aren't cheap either. That's because the system costs don't show up in the e.g. £91/MWh strike price agreed for off-shore wind in AR7. The point I was making was the facilities you mentioned - battery storage, hydro storage, hydrogen - are expensive pieces of kit and will only be required to run when the wind doesn't blow. So their capital costs will have to be recovered from the few MWh of electricity they produce, which makes that gap filling electricity very expensive. And if we want to compare intermittent wind with firm nuclear on the same basis, we have to add the cost of the gap filling to the £91/MWh ... in which case wind won't look so cheap. And that's even before we talk about the cost of the grid upgrades required for off-shore wind. BTW, I strongly support decarbonisation and that renewables will play an essential role. I just like decisions to be made on the right information.

EDF go bust? Wholly owned by the French state. Seems rather unlikely.

I think consumers pay it, not the tax payer, but can you link me to a source for this? As far as I know, e.g. for Hinckley Point C, these costs are for EDF. That's according to the Hinckley Point C Funded Decommissioning Programme, which "sets out EDF’s arrangements for managing and disposing of the plant’s waste and the decommissioning of the site". EDF will build up a dedicated fund during the station's operational life to ensure taxpayers do not bear the cost. All explained here. So as far as I can tell, EDF took this on when they agreed the strike price, which is currently £135/MWh.... which might look expensive when compared to £91/MWh for off-shore wind, but maybe it isn't if renewables generators had to pay the full system costs. Generating power "most of the time" is not good enough. We expect our electricity to be delivered all of the time. It's the gap between most of the time and all of the time which is expensive and should be taken into account when comparing renewables with fossils and nuclear.... as well as the grid costs of course.

When people say renewables are cheap, they are saying they are cheap compared to other types of generation - CCGT and nuclear. But the way renewables CfDs work, it's not a fair comparison for two reasons. Renewables are intermittent, CCGT and nuclear are firm power. A MWh of intermittent energy is worth less than a firm one. If the renewables generators had to provide the facilities to deliver electricity when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine (batteries, back-up CCGT etc), they wouldn't be so cheap. And they are in far flung corners of the country, distant from consumers, with a grid which does not have the necessary capacity. This results in curtailment where we pay them for electricity we do not consume, or incur capital costs to increase the grid capacity to connect the far flung places. The costs are there, it's just that the renewables generators don't have to pay them. Consumers and tax payers pay them. Renewables are a good thing but we need an honest discussion about what they cost.

Maybe you missed reading the patent? 😉

Tech startups don't necessarily plan to build and scale. The founders might be working towards a buy out by one of the big companies. Resourcing up to now will probably be by angel investors and private equity. Importantly, they have IP https://www.lens.org/lens/patent/123-310-151-347-508/frontpage?l=en Fully agree and there's a lot of tech innovation going on in the UK. It looks like this company started out with the help of this innovation centre in Bristol https://www.futurespacebristol.co.uk/about-us/. Cambridge has historically been where a lot of this has been going on but Bristol is up and coming. It's cheaper than Cambridge and with e.g. Dyson and Elvie nearby they have critical mass for engineers. https://nusku.co.uk/news/start-up-secures-1-million-funding-to-develop-new-heat-pump-tech#:~:text=Nusku is a Bristol-based start-up that is,from key people in the energy sector

Might be of interest for people looking to replace a gas combi-boiler with no room for a DHW cylinder and don't want the disruption of up-sizing radiators. https://nusku.co.uk/news/nusku-set-to-turbocharge-switch-to-heat-pumps. It's an R290 heat pump with a high flow temperature so presumably some loss of coefficient of performance. In a recent LinkedIn post, they say: "Benefits include: ➡️Integrated hot water cylinder saves space and installation time ➡️Fewer connections for better reliability and lower maintenance ➡️High temperature heat pump reduces need for radiator upgrades ➡️Future-ready system with built-in smart controls for easy use and optimisation ➡️Engineered for minimal noise and disruption to the home Prototypes are being trialled in homes across Bristol, with wider trials to follow ahead of launch next year"

This article from OEUK addresses several of the points discussed in this thread - how much O&G is left, what would be the benefit of extracting it, how quickly and easily can that be done. OK, it’s a trade body so be ready to fact check, but a lot of it makes sense. https://oeuk.org.uk/policy-versus-geology-new-report-reveals-165bn-choice-facing-north-sea-future/ My sense is that the way ahead should be: Don’t ban new O&G fields. Let the O&G companies take the risk whether they can make the economics work. They have a knack of finding new hydrocarbons and extracting them. New licences should be linked to contracts for O&G landed in the UK at a fixed price, not spot prices. Acknowledge that we have a climate emergency. But manage the progress to decarbonisation not by constricting the supply side but by demand side measures, I.e. carbon taxes and carbon border adjustment mechanism. The system costs of renewables need to be accounted for - their intermittency and required grid upgrades. It’s complicated though. I hope our politicians and civil servants have got their heads round all this, but I’m not sure they do. Other countries looking at us won’t see a clean energy superpower, leading the world. They’ll see our deindustrialisation and the cost to our economy, as evidence that our policies are not working.

Carbon taxes are paid by consumers. They increase the price of the commodity. If the price is higher due to the carbon tax, people will buy less. That's a demand side measure.

Respectfully, no it isn't. Fully agree we do need to decarbonise. The point here is that HMG are driving decarbonisation by trying to manage the supply side of the energy chain - not issuing licences in the North Sea. Better would be to drive it by demand side measures, e.g. a carbon tax. Then we can leave it to the oil companies to figure out how much is there and whether they can get the stuff out economically. There needs to be a cost of carbon which reflects the environmental damage it does. Dieter Helm's suggestion is that the carbon price should move inversely to the price of oil, which seems like a good idea.

Listen to this Dieter Helm podcast... high industrial electricity prices are causing deindustrialization of the UK economy. Energy consuming industries are leaving - chemicals (we now have just one ethylene plant, Grangemouth, left in the UK, after Mosmorran and Wilton closed), ammonia (all now gone from the UK), cement and steel. New investment is not coming in. At the same time, our consumption of these materials hasn't decreased so the CO2 emissions from the UK might have dropped, but they're just being released somewhere else. "To restore industrial competitiveness, Britain needs permanent, structural reform to electricity pricing—not short-term fixes. This requires three big changes: charge industry based on long‑run marginal system costs rather than loading full network costs onto them; reform the electricity market by moving away from gas‑set wholesale prices towards a capacity‑based “equivalent firm power” system that properly accounts for intermittency; and index carbon prices inversely to oil and gas prices to stabilise overall energy costs. Together with improvements in gas storage and long‑term gas supply contracts from the North Sea, these reforms would deliver predictable, globally competitive energy prices to support both existing industries and the more electricity‑intensive sectors of the future." The long term gas supply contracts he talks about are how to address the often quoted reason why drilling in the North Sea won't help gas pricing or security, that the gas is traded at the spot price on world markets. It doesn't have to be like that. When North Sea gas production started in the late '60s and '70s. The Gas Council, on behalf of British Gas (nationalised state gas company at the time), entered into fixed price contracts with the producers for gas which had to be landed in the UK. There's no reason why new gas drilling licences couldn't be granted on similar conditions. That's essentially how it works with renewables CFDs. Locally produced natural gas is much better for the environment that liquifying it to LNG in the US or the Middle East, shipping it over here and then vaporising it again. He also makes the point that renewables are not cheap. They appear cheap because the generators don't have to pay the full system costs - intermittency and grid capacity. To compare intermittent renewables with firm power from e.g. a CCGT, the renewables should be required to provide and pay for the batteries or whatever. Regarding grid capacity, the UK consumes about 45 GW. 60 GW of firm power generating capacity from a few power stations, situated close to consumers, used to be sufficient to deal with peaks. We now have 120 GW peak renewable capacity spread around the grid, remote from consumers and still they doesn't provide all our electricity. Despite that, in the latest off-shore wind auctions (AR7), we had to contract for a strike price of £91/MWh. Renewables aren't cheap.

The problem with using curtailed renewable energy to generate hydrogen (or ammonia) is that the kit is expensive. The capital cost has to be amortised over the small amount of MWh it will produce, so the cost of that electricity will be high. That's especially hard to justify if the generation has been curtailed due to grid capacity, in which case the money would have been better spent debottlenecking the grid to reduce the curtailment. There are those who would say that any plan involving hydrogen as an energy vector is doomed to failure due to poor economics. And this will never be fixed by new or improved technology. It's inherent in the thermodynamics. ... Hope my comment makes sense. I jumped in on this thread and haven't read all 24 pages 😀.

If you use an architect who isn't familiar with timber frame, is there a risk that they will make mistakes because they won't understand the specific detailing requirements of timber frame? I've seen the Potton Architects Guide, and it comprises 143 drawings. Isn't there is a lot of scope for mistakes by an architect having to read that and understand it? Is this an interface, between the timber frame company and the architect, with scope for errors which is best avoided?

Does this Reolink guide help?

I did it on my first house which I bought in 1976. The title wasn't registered so there was a bundle of title deeds. The building society's solicitor spotted that there was a plan missing from the bundle from when it had been sold by the builder to the first purchaser. It had changed hands twice since then and none of the solicitors involved in those transactions had had a problem with the bundle. If I wanted the mortgage, I had to find the plan. I knew the name of the builder from the deeds. They had ceased trading but I found the name and address of the company secretary from records at Companies House. I managed to track him down and he had a copy of the plan in his safe!! All this of course with no internet and all done by phone calls and letters. It took a lot of time and effort. Wouldn't happen now as titles are registered, but there is perhaps a lesson to be learned. I suspect the building society's solicitors might not have looked so closely at the bundle if they had been dealing with another solicitor. Maybe they wanted to teach me a lesson. I wonder whether, if you diy your conveyancing, you will get less cooperation and maybe some nit picking from the professionals you have no choice but to deal with. Anyway I did learn my lesson and I wouldn't do it again!

I have some outside LED lights which are switched by an outside switch. When the light switch is in the off position, there is a small red neon light in it which comes on so you can find the switch in the dark. When the switch is in the off position, the outside lights do go off but continue to glow dimly. I'm not an electrician, but as far as I can work out, the reason is as follows. The circuit is wired with no neutral to the switch. The neutral is wired directly from the consumer unit to the lights. The live goes from the consumer unit to the switch and the neon light is wired in parallel with the switch. When the switch is off (open), the LED lights allow enough current through so that the neon illuminates, but this also causes the LEDs to glow. Obviously when the switch is closed, the current takes the easier route through that and the neon goes off. I suppose that it would have been possible to wire live and neutral to the switch box so that the neon could have its own neutral. That would stop the LEDs glowing but the neon would be on all the time, which I wouldn't mind. I wish the electrician had discussed this with me before he wired up the circuit. A general question to those who know ... I suppose wiring up lighting circuits with no neutral to the box is cheaper and that's why an electrician might do it. I'm sure it complies with the regs doing it that way, but are there other disadvantages apart from my glowing LEDs? Is it better to have a neutral in the switch box as well as a live? What about if e.g. you want smart lighting?

The onerous unilateral undertaking which most LPAs require you to sign if you want to claim the self builder exemption to the requirement to demonstrate 10% increase in biodiversity, the Biodiversity Net Gain obligations. The UU locks you into not being able to sell your house for three years after completion without permission from the LPA, with no definition of the circumstances under which they might relieve you of these obligations. As well as having to accept the onerous UU obligations, people claiming the self build exemption had to pay the LPA their legal fees to execute the UU, typically ~£1000. It appears there will now be a new small sites exemption. I imagine that it might now be possible for people who have entered into the self build exemption to switch to the small sites exemption .... but I expect they will have to pay the LPA their legal fees to make the switch! BNG makes complete sense for a development of 1,000 homes, but was not thought through for self builders and small sites.

Hallelujah!! More detail here.

Listen to Dieter Helm's lecture "System costs of low carbon energy". It's because of system costs. Approximately 50% of UK electricity is now supplied by renewables. Although the marginal cost of renewable electricity is low, and it still looks good value when you include amortised capital cost (to get a "levelised cost"), it's the system costs which make it expensive. I hope I summarised his arguments correctly ... When we had a few large coal, gas and nuclear powers stations, which delivered "firm" power, we had a generating capacity of 60 GW. We now have a capacity of 120 GW, not because the demand has increased. In fact demand has decreased. We need that extra capacity because of intermittency. Renewables are distributed around the country and the grid wasn't built for this so we get curtailment. We still pay for the electricity even though we can't use it. The wind farms are in the wrong place. Generation is in the North Sea off Scotland and the demand is in the SE of England. It costs to transmit it. He paints a rather bleak picture. We have the highest price industrial electricity in the developed world, which is why our manufacturing industries are voting with their feet. Just in the chemicals world, Ineos Grangemouth, ExxonMobil Fife ethylene plant, the CF Fertilisers ammonia plants at Ince and Billingham ... etc all gone or going.

Indeed. The European Heat Pump Association track the stock of heat pumps per 1,000 households (the number installed) - 632 for Norway vs 19 for the UK. They also track the number of sales per 1,000 households - respectively 48.1 and 3.5. They have more and are still installing more.