Why we need "Net zero"

[SteamyTea]

3 hours ago, Bramco said:

As a local, it will be the most exciting thing to happen around here for years.... 

I worked near Nottingham when they blew up so cooling towers. We all went outside to watch it.

It went foggy, so only heard the bangs.

Made our factory shake.

[Beelbeebub]

12 hours ago, Oz07 said:

Quarter of a century of reliable power while altering the grid and infrastructure for the next phase of power. Sounds great 👍 

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. 

[Beelbeebub]

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. 

[Beelbeebub]

9 hours ago, Tetrarch said:

 

There is disruption and disruption. The outage last April in Spain that disconnected 31GW of power for 10 hours was caused by renewables and the fact that renewable output isn't managed at the correct frequency as it isn't generated by tunable turbines

 

There is a balance to be struck here, the transition needs to be managed and needs to be proceed at a sensible pace. We have got too far over our skis

 

Regards

 

Tet

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 

[SteamyTea]

I seem to remember, back in 1973/4 that we had an energy crisis, and to save electricity, the three day week was introduced by the government.

Then, in 1984/5 we had the Miner's Strike.

Then, during the 1990's, we had the Dash for Gas, with 35 new gas turbine power stations being built.

 

I am not sure than 'home grown' energy security is any more secure than any other form.

But with wind and solar, we can, if we ignore NIMBYs, plug in to the existing infrastructure a lot easier and quicker.

 

There is a saying, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king” (Eugene O’Neill), surely distributed generation is, by nature, more secure.

[Oz07]

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

Yeh as I say, its crazy we are destroying all this infrastructure. We had a lot of it there. 

 

Can they capture any more of the bad particles nowadays with coal?

[JohnMo]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I seem to remember, back in 1973/4 that we had an energy crisis, and to save electricity, the three day week was introduced by the government.

Then, in 1984/5 we had the Miner's Strike.

Then, during the 1990's, we had the Dash for Gas, with 35 new gas turbine power stations being built.

 

I am not sure than 'home grown' energy security is any more secure than any other form.

 

Started a new job at start of March, offshore gas field, was originally built in late 80s by the government and originally owned by the government. Was used exclusively for gas turbine generators for peak loads.  But when British Gas was privatised it was also.

 

They did in the 80s, no reason why a government couldn't do it again. Drill for Britain, by Britain, and owned by Britain. Then worldwide oil and gas prices don't matter so much.

[Beelbeebub]

9 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Started a new job at start of March, offshore gas field, was originally built in late 80s by the government and originally owned by the government. Was used exclusively for gas turbine generators for peak loads.  But when British Gas was privatised it was also.

 

They did in the 80s, no reason why a government couldn't do it again. Drill for Britain, by Britain, and owned by Britain. Then worldwide oil and gas prices don't matter so much.

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. 

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, Oz07 said:

Yeh as I say, its crazy we are destroying all this infrastructure. We had a lot of it there. 

 

Can they capture any more of the bad particles nowadays with coal?

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 

[-rick-]

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

 

This is a known problem with existing solar/battery/etc installs. The electrical regs were relatively conservative, preferring the new generation to cut out early and delay reconnection. Since new generation got bigger these limits started becoming problematic.

 

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

 

There's more noise on the line than 0.2v, also you might lose several volts on the connection from the grid to the inverter in local cabling. Having a window of 2-3v might help. (Each inverter choosing a value at random within that range every 24 hrs or similar).

 

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

 

Yeh, that's the long term solution, making new energy inverters be grid forming not grid following. I believe this is already happening to a degree, though maybe this will never happen in residential solar, only commercial scale for the reasons of making sure grid workers aren't exposed to unexpectedly live cables. (Having said that they work on live cables an awful lot as it is so maybe worth evaluating exactly where the line should be drawn).

 

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

The dropping of frequency as the grid loads up is entirely a weakness of the old, spinning grid. 

 

It's a key signalling mechanism that is used by modern inverters too, so frequency modification is not going to go away. Victron inverters can vary the frequency of their output to control 3rd party inverters connected downstream. (I think this only works when they are working in a UPS mode, ie, not connected to mains).

[Roger440]

24 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

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 

 

For some reason you have gone a rabbit hole of saying how useless new coal plants would be. Not sure how you got there as the discussion was about the daftness of knocking one, note, one, down. In the beginnings of an energy crisis.

 

Nobody suggested we do and you appear to be arguing with yourself?

[JohnMo]

33 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

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

You can switch on of at will, they do it the time. If you couldn't switch off it wouldn't be safe. A field or several field are connected to one offshore facility. But they are also connected to an onshore hub. They all work together, it's not a 5 mins task to start up a none producing asset,so quite a lot of forward planning is needed.

[Beelbeebub]

42 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

 

For some reason you have gone a rabbit hole of saying how useless new coal plants would be. Not sure how you got there as the discussion was about the daftness of knocking one, note, one, down. In the beginnings of an energy crisis.

 

Nobody suggested we do and you appear to be arguing with yourself?

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. 

 

 

[Roger440]

Just now, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

 

 

 

I know its a "modern" thing to believe that because something is old its no good. Not a line of thinking i use, or understand. In my world, one does maintenance at appropiate intervals to keep equipment working. Which wont be that much if its mothballed. Certainly wont wear out quickly.

 

My point was only ever to keep it as back up. Mothball it in some state of suitable readiness. Rather than blowing it up. Which is utterly dumb.

[Onoff]

Just loving my EV 😉

 

Jump in and look and the range. Then turn the heater setting up and watch the range drop before you've even moved. 

 

Green washing BS. 

[SteamyTea]

6 hours ago, Onoff said:

Jump in and look and the range. Then turn the heater setting up and watch the range drop before you've even moved. 

My diesel can do that as well, just mine makes a lot more noise.