Prepare to live with ‘intermittent electricity supply’
In March 2011, the UK’s Daily Telegraph carried an article quoting Steve Holliday, the then chief executive of National Grid, saying the days of permanently available electricity may be coming to an end.
Holliday was quoted as saying “families would have to get used to only using power when it was available, rather than constantly.” and “We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”
The use of the word ‘cheaply’ has become something of a joke, as since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, UK electricity bills have almost trebled, to pay for vastly expensive and unreliable wind and solar farms.
This is the Telegraph article.
It took perhaps longer than Steve Holliday expected, but we now seem to be seeing the start of intermittent electricity supply. In Birmingham where I live, we have had three short power cuts this year so far, and last year, the Hornsea wind farm tripped out following a turbine failure at a gas plant, leaving a significant area of England without power for several hours.
In that instance, the safety systems at Hornsea did exactly what they were designed to do; in the event of a sudden increase in demand, what is known as a ‘shock load’, they disengaged from the grid. It has been argued the safety systems should not have had that facility built into them, as it made the situation worse, but that is what was done, and a lengthy power outage was the result.
We were very lucky the drop-out of Hornsea did not cause a ‘cascade failure’, which could have seen other generating stations trip out or fail in sequence, which would have left most of the UK without power as the grid collapsed. Had that happened, it would have taken at least a day to get all the supplies synchronised with each other again before power could be restored.
For clarity, the UK national grid consists of four stages of supply. The biggest pylons from power stations carry 400kv; that is 400,000 volts. Spurs off that to cities at large switching stations drop the voltage to 132kv. Further substations in cities drop that again to 11kv, and local small substations provide the final drop to three-phase 415v for industry and single-phase 240v for housing.
The current average daily demand in the UK is around 30gw. In the summer months that drops to around 25gw, and in the winter it can go as high as 40gw. This means we have to have a constant reliable supply of electricity to meet the demand.
At present, we can generate a maximum of 15gw from wind and 10gw from solar. Both of those are of course dependant on the weather. This year so far, the maximum I have seen recorded from wind generation was approximately 12gw during February. On calm days, wind generation can be less than 1gw. The daily average so far this year is around 5gw.
Solar starts generating around 6am, rises to a peak between noon and 2pm, then drops off to zero by sunset. The maximum recorded from solar generation so far this year was just under 8gw at the end of May. The average daily solar generation so far this year is around 4gw.
You can see daily monitoring of all methods of electricity generation in the UK on the Gridwatch website here:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
The so-called ‘greens’ want to eliminate coal, gas, nuclear, and even hydroelectric generation, so if we were to have a constant electricity supply using only wind and solar generators, we would need to cover virtually the entire land surface of the country, and all around the coastline, with wind turbines and solar panels. Even then, I suspect we could not have electricity constantly because of the vagaries of the weather. What electricity that was available would have to be prioritised to hospitals, industry, supermarkets, sanitation and fresh water pumping stations, the emergency services and government buildings, so street lighting and residential areas would be the last to be supplied.
If future governments stop us using gas to fire central heating, and we have only an intermittent electricity supply, people will be unable to adequately heat their homes or prepare hot food, and deaths from cold, particularly in the winters, would skyrocket.
In 2001, the EU proposed the Large Combustion Plant Directive, which aimed to reduce carbon emissions throughout Europe. It came into effect on January 1st 2008, and allowed plants that did not comply with the strict emission limits to opt-out, whereby they could operate for a further 20,000 hours or until 2015 at which point they had to close.
In 2008, the UK had 21 coal-fired power stations. Now we have just four; Drax, Kilroot, Ratcliffe and West Burton. Together they can produce 5.8gw at full output. In the last few years, they are usually only brought online during the winter months. However, during this summer, they have been online several times due to colder than expected weather, low wind generation and the loss of part of the nuclear generating capacity for several weeks due to reactor maintenance and refuelling.
Drax has been working on their move away from coal for some time now. Four of the six units have been converted to fire Biomass, the first in 2013 and the most recent in 2018. Plans are in hand to convert the remaining two units to gas as part of a larger expansion project.
Kilroot and the nearby gas-fired Ballylumford power stations were sold to the Czech firm EPH in April 2019. They have both faced closure over the last few years. Kilroot has announced plans to replace the coal-fired boilers with gas boilers in the future.
Ratcliffe is fully compliant with current emissions regulations, and there are currently no plans to close it.
West Burton has a capacity agreement until September 2021, and owners EDF have confirmed they will operate the plant at least until then.
As the last remaining coal plants are facing closure to reduce our ‘carbon emissions’ in the misguided belief it will help ‘save the planet’, it puts more strain on the gas and nuclear generating capacity, This is utterly stupid for two reasons; firstly, because human emissions of CO2 amount to just three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions (the other 97% coming from natural processes), and secondly because CO2, a trace gas of just 0.04% of the total atmosphere, does not drive temperature anyway.
The bottom line is yes, if the current policies being pursued are continued, in another 20 years at the most, we will have to live with having no electricity more often than we have it.
Societies are supposed to progress, but this will be just the opposite, we will be regressing to where we were in the 19th century, with the attendant reduction in public health and lifespans.
About the author: Andy Rowlands is a British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘
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Alan
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I worked for the CEGB when the objective was to design, build and operate a reliable power system. I do not recognise the industry that I worked for and the union that represented us is even worse. That seems to have been taken over by environmentalists. The CEGB was over cautious and so energy costs would have been higher than they should have been. After privatisation costs came down, mainly because gas was allowed as a fuel and competition slowly became established. Now the industry is worse than it was when nationalised. Government taxes, regulations and energy policies determine the cost of energy and to use a phrase by Obama when he was doing the same damage to USA energy supplies – “energy costs will skyrocket”. That was an understatement, he forgot to say that supplies would be limited and California is now experiencing just that. High prices and shortages will be the norm. Working from home won’t be possible without electricity.
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EDMH
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UK reported Weather Dependent Productivity 2019
Onshore wind 24%
Offshore wind 31%
Solar PV 10%
Combined 22%
What do these productivity numbers mean?
Think about electricity generation as an ordinary business that you have to manage. It provides a product which should be of consistent high quality and which is vital to all the other businesses of your Nation.
*But on average more than half of your labour force only turn up on 1 day in 5. And you don’t really know which day that might be. Quite often even if they do turn up, they walk out when they feel like it in the middle of the shift.
*But the unions insist that if they do turn up you have to employ them, laying off the guys that can work productively full-time and cutting their pay.
*And worse than that, almost to half of those guys only turn up 1 day in 10. And those ones usually arrive on days when you are not likely to need them but you still have to pay them in full. Anyway, they always go home by the evening, the time of your maximum demand.
*These workers get tired quickly and retire and need replacement a third of the way through a normal working lifetime.
*The unions also insist that you pay them about 10 – 12 times as much as your ordinary productive workers. Quite often you have to pay them not to work at all.
*When you have a real breakdown, these guys can’t help you out to reinstate the service.
*And when these guys do arrive, they cause difficulties with quality assurance, severe industrial disruption and they, at a whim, can suddenly close down your production altogether. If they do manage that there is huge economic damage across your Nation.
But apart from your personal professional responsibility as a manager to provide a good quality of service, in the end the extra costs don’t really matter to you, either the Government or rather the Taxpayer picks up the tab or you can just pass the costs on to your customers: they don’t have any real choice because you have a monopoly for the supply of the product.
This is the scale of business problems faced by Electricity supply managers that the ill-informed decision to opt for collecting dilute and irregularly intermittent energy from the environment and calling it “Renewable”. The problems can only get worse as your policy makers insist that more Weather Dependent Renewables are used by your industry.
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/uk-eu28-renewables-productivity/
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Boris Badenov
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Those numbers are pure fantasy, wishful thinking, paper numbers not real. The real numbers are a small fraction of that. Wait until you see that the windmills fail at half their expected life expectancy. We in California are undergoing the same nonsense, blackouts and higher energy costs and they try to load up the system with MORE electric users. We are fortunate to have an abundance of Natural Gas but our ‘leaders’ don’t get that much of a kickback from the drillers.
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MattH
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Hi EDMH.
Your analogy is of such brilliant, comprehensive clarity that it is due a positive acknowledgement.
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Dean Michael Jackson
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Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Rowlands’ article isn’t hyperbole. In fact, he understates the Marxist destruction of the West’s economies, the result being the destruction of Western Civilization. I already punched the shocking costs involved with the Marxist ‘Green New Genocide’ operation, including other critical facts regarding ‘climate change’ not directed to our attention:
The astronomical cost of shifting to non-carbon based energy sources would literally send humanity back to the Stone Age, with consequent population decline; annihilation of the species, per the Satanic purpose for destroying the globe’s economies. Let’s make this abundantly clear by noting the shocking cost for just one critical component of the United State’s energy needs:
STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE
The United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve is currently at 635.2 million barrels of oil. 635 million barrels of oil equals 1,079,123,092,000 megawatts. 1,079,123,092,000/100 = 10,791,230,920; 10,791,230,920 X $3.6 billion[1] = $3,884,831,310,000,000,000,000,000,000 (octillion).
The United States’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 2017 was $19,390,000,000,000 (trillion). Battery storage to replace the strategic petroleum reserve would cost more than 100,000 GDPs!
THERMODYNAMICS AWOL
Climate change mechanics conspires to do away with the physics of the atmosphere, where action and reaction is abandoned. When a new gas molecule is introduced into the dense troposphere, dislocation takes place, where if the new molecule is denser than the atmosphere (contains less heat energy), such as carbon dioxide, the gas molecule sinks displacing upwards the warmer nitrogen and oxygen molecules, thereby cooling the area of dislocation. Conversely, if the new gas molecule has more heat energy than the nitrogen-oxygen based atmosphere (such as methane), the new molecule rises, displacing relatively cooler nitrogen and oxygen molecules downwards, which displaces upwards relatively more heat retaining nitrogen and oxygen molecules, thereby cooling the area of dislocation. Thermodynamics in action in the atmosphere that keeps the Earth cool when increased radiation isn’t the new variable introduced.
SOCIOPATHS IDENTIFIED
The identity of the mass murderers that have co-opted the globe’s institutions identify themselves as Marxists, most being unaware that they are, in fact, manipulated by a top level leadership cadre composed of humanity’s arch enemy’s combatants, Satanists.
Troubled by a personal moral breakdown once freed from parental constraints (a libertine), the man the world knows as a racist and callous and domineering psychopath was formerly a devout and lovely young follower of Christ. Then Marx’s personality changed for the worse, seeking not atheism, but revenge against God and His children on Earth:
“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited,
I know it full well,
My soul, once true
to God, Is chosen for hell.”
…and…
“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet
Full in the face
of the world,
And see the collapse
of this pygmy giant
Whose fall will
not stifle my ardour.
Then will I wander
godlike and victorious
Through the ruins
of the world
And, giving my
words an active force,
I will feel equal
to the Creator.”
Marx wrote those poems AFTER he transferred university from Bonn to Berlin, telling us (1) Marx always remained a theist, feigning atheism; and (2) that we were lied to when told that once Marx entered university that’s when he became an atheist. As for the rank and file Marxists, they’re marionettes, whose strings are pulled by the Marxist leadership class who are actually Satanists; Satanists have been active within our institutions for millennia, as Jesus warned us.
At my blog, read the articles…
SINKHOLE: THE GREEN NEW DEAL’S RENEWABLE ENERGY COSTS ON LOCAL GOVERNMENTS’ BUDGETS
‘House of Cards: The Collapse of the ‘Collapse’ of the USSR’
‘Playing Hide And Seek In Yugoslavia’
Then read the article, ‘The Marxist Co-Option Of History And The Use Of The Scissors Strategy To Manipulate History Towards The Goal Of Marxist Liberation’
Solution
The West will form new political parties where candidates are vetted for Marxist ideology/blackmail, the use of the polygraph to be an important tool for such vetting. Then the West can finally liberate the globe of vanguard Communism.
My blog…
https://djdnotice.blogspot.com/2018/09/d-notice-articles-article-55-7418.html
[1] $3.6 billion is the cost for a 100 megawatts battery. In 2006, during peak power in the summer, Washington, DC used approximately 6,888 MW of power: 6,888/100 MW = 68 MW; 68MW X $3.6 billion = $244.8 billion for Washington, DC to switch from petroleum to renewable energy sources. Washington, DC’s annual budget is $12.8 billion.
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Christophe1946
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It seems that your calculations are not correct :
Firstly, a battery with a capacity of 100 MWh will cost “only” 66.6 M$, knowing that, for example, the Tesla Powerwall battery has a capacity of 15 kWh and an a cost of ~ 10 000 $, all included and installed.
Secondly, with 1 bbl = 6.119 GJ, the amount of 635 Mbbl will represent an energy of 3.8856 EJ = 1.079 PWh. Hence : 1.079 PWh/100 MWh = 1.079 million
1.079 million x 66.6 M$ = 718.6 trillion$ “only” !
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Christophe1946
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Correction !
The final result is correct, but the decimal dot must be moved from 1.079 to 10.79 :
Hence : 1.079 PWh/100 MWh = 10.79 million
10.79 million x 66.6 M$ = 718.6 trillion$ “only” !
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Dean Michael Jackson
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Greater than 94% of the energy contained within nitrogen and oxygen are unaccounted for by the ‘climate change’ narrative, informing us of the massive scientific fraud taking place, the purpose of the fraud to further weaken the West’s economies.
[On March 16 Trump directed the nation to stay home for 15 days(!), his Marxist economic sabotage directive still in play. Immediately following Trump’s directive, governors/mayors declared illegal Executive Orders to lockdown the nation, thereby proving Marxist coordination between Federal/State/Local governments.
No new investments will be taking place because investments require recouping the investments, and with the spectre of the fake COVID-19 returning, or equally fake new pandemics, future lockdowns are in the future, therefore no investments are on the horizon. In short, the United States has been turned into a Banana Republic overnight.]
Nitrogen and oxygen constitute, by volume, 99.03% of the atmosphere’s gasses, while the trace gases account for 0.97%, or just under 1% of the atmosphere’s gasses. If we include water vapor (H2O) in the atmosphere, which accounts for, on average, 2% of the atmosphere’s gases by volume, we therefore subtract this 2% from the atmosphere’s gasses, where nitrogen and oxygen will constitute 97.0494%, and the trace gasses will constitute 0.9506%.
Nitrogen and oxygen don’t absorb much infrared radiation (IR) emitted from the ground, and assuming they absorb 100% of thermal energy from the surface, constituting approximately 5% of Earth’s energy budget, we’re left with a massive energy deficit for nitrogen and oxygen, confirming that those two molecules derive their energy from thermal ground/ocean emissions instead, but since the ‘climate change’ narrative identifies such emissions as not thermal but IR, we have proof that the energy being emitted isn’t IR but thermal because nitrogen and oxygen absorb a miniscule amount of IR.
Nitrogen and oxygen obtain 5.1% of their heat energy from thermal energy emanating from the surface…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/The-NASA-Earth%27s-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared-radiation-fluxes.jpg/1200px-The-NASA-Earth%27s-Energy-Budget-Poster-Radiant-Energy-System-satellite-infrared-radiation-fluxes.jpg
Google: NASA earth’s energy budget graph pictures
…and another .078% of their heat energy from outgoing infrared radiation, leaving an energy deficit of approximately 94.8%.
Since nitrogen and oxygen constitute by volume 97.0494% of the atmosphere’s gasses (when water vapor is included in the calculations making for a more precise calculation), they must therefore retain that volume amount of heat energy, but 18.4 Wm2 only constitutes 5.1% of the Earth’s energy budget of 358.2 Wm2. Nitrogen and oxygen’s absorption of infrared radiation only infinitesimally affects this missing heat energy.
The missing energy levels for nitrogen and oxygen direct our attention to another aspect of the scientific fraud taking place: Misidentified outgoing energy types. IR is assigned an energy magnitude of 358.2 Wm2, and thermals 18.4 Wm2. The opposite is closer to the truth, where IR is assigned 18.4 Wm2, and thermals 358.2 Wm2.
Hence why:
THERMODYNAMICS IS AWOL
Climate change mechanics conspires to do away with the physics of the atmosphere, where action and reaction is abandoned. When a new gas molecule is introduced into the dense troposphere, dislocation takes place, where if the new molecule is denser than the atmosphere (contains less heat energy), such as carbon dioxide, the gas molecule sinks displacing upwards the warmer nitrogen and oxygen molecules, thereby cooling the area of dislocation. Conversely, if the new gas molecule has more heat energy than the nitrogen-oxygen based atmosphere (such as methane), the new molecule rises, displacing relatively cooler nitrogen and oxygen molecules downwards, which displaces upwards relatively more heat retaining nitrogen and oxygen molecules, thereby cooling the area of dislocation. Thermodynamics in action in the atmosphere that keeps the Earth cool when increased radiation isn’t the new variable introduced.
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Finn McCool
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Nice one, Andy.
I remember Longannet power station closing in 2016 due to a £40 million connection charge to the ‘National Grid’. Apparently this was because of its distance from the South of England. Sheer madness!
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Andy Rowlands
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The day I emailed this article to PSI, Birmingham where I live had four short power cuts during the evening.
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MattH
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Hi Andy. All you need is one of those fusion plants in your backyard. Initial budget is only 15 billion (unsure if that is euros or dollars) so affordability should be not a problem for you. If they get the thing to work you may have to upgrade the size of your back yard. Would they research fusion if solar, wind, and burning green wood and foliage was going to do the trick.
That graphene looks interesting.
Regards. Matt
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Andy Rowlands
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Haha good one Matt 🙂 I’ll go build me a cold fusion plant, and while I’m at it, a zero-point and an over-unity power source as well 🙂
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MattH
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Perfect for you with your particle physics training and knowledge.
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