LeSving wrote:
Probability of what exactly?
LeSving wrote:
Let’s assume that there is no wind or sunshine anywhere except Germany (just to pick a large country).
Or any other unlikely situation that opponents to wind and solar power dream up.
Germany alone paid close to 7 billion Euros to clean up the mines in Eastern Germany which supplied the Soviets with Uranium.
That’s a statement on how Russia does things (how Russia does almost everything, actually, when it comes to the environment); not applicable to doing things right.
And the sea around Sellafield is apparently not so clean as it is looking as well.
That’s hearsay… and if it was an issue it would be fixable too. There was activity there decades ago, and not applicable to doing things today.
Nuclear is the best we have. The alternative is to feed Putin and then spend the “money saved” on dealing with the fallout 
/DISCLAIMER:
This is gonna be a long rant, but I have spent a lot of time on these issues on an industrial scale (with my own money, not with “free” grant money of some government or other institution that just wants to “have done something”) and have come to a couple of realizations that are very depressing. If you want to stay in a happy bubble, feel free to skip to the next post.
I have spent a lot of time and money working on projects to get energy independent in my company (geothermal, hydrogen, photovoltaik, solar, huge batteries, biomethan, etc.), but nothing that is discussed at the moment works in a fashion that can be scaled up enough to be a viable option for the future without ridiculous amounts of subsidies and the nations won’t have enough money or credit to do the subsidies to scale in the next couple of years. Hydrogen was my very big hope, but it is not feasible and will get ever more unfeasible with rising costs for energy (sadly), not the other way around. I am still doing the things that are subsidized enough for it to be financially viable (like doing big solar installations and biomethan pipelines, etc.), but it can’t be done on a big enough scale in a small timeframe.
We are building a lot of substations in our area (my company does that as well) because the grid can’t handle photovoltaic on a big scale and those substations help in the closer environment, but the grid as a whole will never truly handle a big scaled pv-production without throttling the total input because we are only building inputs that are not manageable, but we desperately would need outputs that can be adapted very very fast (2 minutes to change from turbine to pump in a hydro dam for example) to stabilize the frequency of the grid. But that can only be done with huge machines of some sort and we don’t like them in our neighbourhood/backyard so they won’t get approval. Better to destroy the world a little faster than not being able to have my house in the green without neighbors and in undisturbed nature (except for my own house, but that is pretty and I was here first after all).
The ugly truth is that in europe as a whole there are no true alternatives to natural gas and after the winter of 2023-2024 when the first citizens of europe had a couple of degrees less in their homes we will frack everywhere without asking anyone anymore for permission. The land will just be taken by the government for the benefit of its people or we will have anarchy. At least in Austria and Germany there is absolutely enough natural gas and we will use it!
For example in Austria we would “only” need 14-16 billion euros to have the infrastructure and machines to frack natural gas in the northeast of Austria. Enough for the next couple of decades (5-6 decades at least). That amount of money is nothing compared to the amount of financial and social pain we will have without cheap energy and people will vote for whoever tells them that they have simple answers to complex questions. Getting the natural gas we have in about 2-3 years of work and being independent afterwards will be a very simple answer indeed.
Humans as a group are not intelligent enough to do anything “smart” that will hurt us a little today so we don’t have to hurt a lot tomorrow. And we especially won’t be hurting more than the next guy because “why should we and not the other guys?”.
It has been very easy to do “green” things for the last couple of years because money wasn’t worth anything due to free credit and globalization (i.e. china working so we in europe can sit on our lazy a**es and feel that we deserve our rich society). Both free credit and globalization have stopped and will not return in the foreseeable future (20-30 years at least, but that is just guesswork), so we will have to face the reality of what we are able to produce by ourselves (not a lot, I am afraid – otherwise people would not call it inflation, but correction).
“Everyone” is looking for employees and many don’t realize that “everyone” who should work actually does work. There simply aren’t enough people so the ones we have just don’t work enough and are not efficient enough to do everything we want to be done/produced for our “need” of luxury goods apparently as a basic human right. At the same time “everyone” spends money they don’t have and will never have on goods to make them happy so all companies are overbooked and are looking for ever more people to get all the jobs done fueled by borrowed free money that should have never existed in the first place.
We will have to shrink our economy to the people we have and not the demand that “was” fueled by credit. Those people will then earn a living and will spend that money in an economy that consists of them and no-one else. So there will be a new equilibrium of money, people and economy. It just won’t be as big as it used to be when the rest of the world worked for us, so we weren’t bothered with work and therefore had enough time to enjoy all the luxury.
The price of goods will be defined by the amount available and in our 30 hours workweek-world we just don’t produce enough for it to go around. It’s gonna be the time of people who still are comfortable working 40-50 hours a week, taking up responsibility and who have a drive to do things well just to do them well. You know.. the way our fathers and grandfathers used to think when they built this economy that enabled so many people to have a standard of living that 80% of the world can’t even imagine. It will be a tough time for everyone else until our mindset has changed back a couple of decades.
The battle against a warming earth is absolutely insane because we would have had to start a couple of decades ago and not just now with a timeframe of a few years to stop anything significant in global warming.
It would be way better to invest all that money into technologies that help us live in a world that is 2,5 degrees warmer instead of using that money to make our tax-base (i.e. industry, because that is where almost all of the tax-money comes from) unable to compete on a global scale and therefore destroy our ability to fund, invent and scale future technologies making the warm world inhabitable again. The rest of the world won’t be doing it our way, so in europe we will loose in a big way.
But in our media we have grand fantasies of just “green tech-ing” our way out of this dilemma and that way everything will stay the same in terms of comfort und luxury available.
Just this week I was on a convention where the big grid-people of Austria and the government (who owns most of those companies in some sort) declared: “no worries, we just have to invent the solution we don’t know yet, perfect it and then scale it up to a global level and get everyone to do it the same way. So we actually have already solved the issue because we know how we would go about it.” If we had another 20 years to start the process they might be right.
When it hurts enough so we truly have to do without certain amenities (maybe in 2 or 3 years) we will do a full stop on environmentalism and do whatever it takes to get it back and vote for whoever promises us to “get things right again”. Our kids will have to solve the problem, but we can’t be bothered today.
In Austria people are now turning on their electrical appliances (like pumps for the pool) during the night because they want to feed the electricity generated by their solar panels into the grid instead of using it themselves because that way they get more money than the subsidized electricity costs them. Batteries in homes are being disconnected for the same reason. This is how we as humans think – first me, than my dog and then maybe some starving kids on another continent.
We are out of options and time and due to a lack of food on a global scale (not europe) next year we will be forgetting the environmental problem for another couple of years nonetheless (recent reasons for delaying the solution to global warming: first covid, then Ukraine war, now energy, next food-shortage).
Please look up a chart of CO2-emissions over the last 200 years and have a very close look at the year 2020 when the world stopped in a way unimaginable before. The dip in that year was at least visible on the chart, but orders of magnitude too small to matter. Since then we emit more CO2 every year and there is no stopping it because the absolute majority of people don’t want to waive their “right” on luxury whatever that might be as long as it is technically possible to have it (SUVs, travel, heated pools, new iPhones, living outside of cities in small villages and driving everywhere by car, eating foreign food out of season, drinking bottled water even though you have perfect tap water, etc.).
This world will burn as long as there is free will, because nobody wants to be the first to not have/do anything they had/did up to this point in time (because all the luxury goods in this world haven’t been enough to make us happy, so a little more is certainly needed). Our Fridays-for-future-kids will live happily without airline travel as long as youtube is free. That is true up to the point in their lives when they can afford to travel and then that will be ok again (“it’s just me and I worked two days this week already so I deserve this vacation from my very busy work and I can post a video about it afterwards”).
The “good” thing is that without globalization there will be a lot fewer goods in this world and that will reduce CO2-output at least a little. Without enough fertilizer (made with natural gas) there won’t be enough food for this world so in the long run there will be fewer people and that is actually the only way to reduce CO2-output substantially (sad as this will be).
I am sorry to burst your bubble, but there is a reason we don’t have a solution yet on the horizon that is done to scale in a free market. The solution hurts too much so we waste our time and money on things we “want” to do and not on things we “need” to do. That is human nature and there is nothing anyone of us can do about it. As an individual and for our immediate private gain we are able to do the things we need to do. As a group we just want want want more than the next guy. That’s why we don’t work for free – only for compensation in the future and feel cheated doing it because we never get enough for our troubles.
So, in conclusion: Suck it up, it’s gonna get warm!
But be a little relieved (with a little bit of self loathing): it will be worse everywhere around europe (except maybe the US since they already went into energy independence a couple of years ago) as everyone outside of these two areas already lives in relative poverty. Sadly we will still have enough money to import and then subsequently waste food in europe while kids will starve outside europe.
It is gonna be a tough world. But it already had been a tough world from the beginning up to 1945 and now we will see that reverse to a certain point. Trump was just the tip of the iceberg. Everyone is gonna say “ME FIRST” and when that happens we tend to get less friendly with everyone that is not “me”. Look to Ukraine for what’s next. Food is actually rather easy due to it’s ability to being transported in huge amounts by ship, but water is gonna be brutal!
The high use of gas to generate electricity in the UK is a direct result of privatisation and had little or nothing.to do with balancing the system
Privatisation was a political decision land did not take into account the commercial factors which also led to the halting of plans for new nuclear power plant.
The UK grid system and its ability to keep pace with political, commercial and technological change has made it one of, if not the best electricity network in the world with an availability in the very high 90 per cents,
and why the National Grid company owns and/or operates grid systems around the world.
The problem is that UK politics swings between privatised and nationalised depending.on.which of the 2 parties are in government.
The problem is that when electricity supply wad opened to.competition in the hope of bringing prices down, politicians ignored the long term and ended up with too few eggs in the basket, or too few tools in the box. Nuclear is one answer but it is not the only one.
Thanks for a great post @asw22.
A few questions:
We are building a lot of substations in our area (my company does that as well) because the grid can’t handle photovoltaic on a big scale and those substations help in the closer environment, but the grid as a whole will never truly handle a big scaled pv-production without throttling the total input because we are only building inputs that are not manageable
Is PV or wind not manageable? I would think both can be controlled very fast. With PV it is all electronic and with wind you control the generator field current / blade pitch.
Hydrogen was my very big hope, but it is not feasible
The UK is still planning to phase in hydrogen into natural gas, gradually replacing it. What is the point of that?
How was hydrogen ever feasible for vehicles?
Wind turbines have a gearing system inside the nacelle, a bit like a constant speed prop. That puts out the frequency required to be synced to the system and feed into it.
PV farms put out DC which is then put through an inverter. It is the inverter that is synced to the system.
The higher voltage part of the National Grid 400Kv makes it more efficient and stable for the transfer of large amounts of electricity over large distances. At the generating end of the grid transformers will step up the voltage. At the other end of the grid transformers step down the voltage. In the UK this is usually to 132Kv for the regional distribution system then as it gets nearer the user it will gradually be transformed down to 415V 3 phase or to single phase 240v. This part often happens in the home or factory.
But in places like Chicago you will see transformers on wooden poles running down back alleys. This gave rise to one epidemiologist claiming that electric fields were responsible for clusters of childhood leukaemia which the media around the world made into a major scare story. IIRC this was back in the 1990’s.
It’s like magic because it all happens so fast.🙂
Peter wrote:
How was hydrogen ever feasible for vehicles?
Why is it less feasible than natural gas-driven vehicles?
At present, on a large scale, it is proving more costly to produce than one can sell it for.
There are also other problems with current methods such as methane and storage.
Renewables could solve some of the problems, but then one has to ask "Is it worth it? What are we gaining that we could not get by a different method.
Hydrogen and fuel cell techology was always the chemist’s nirvana as opposed to the physicist’s nirvana of nuclear fusion. The problem is that both have taken on the characteristics of a drunk making his way home from the bar. 2 steps forward and 1 step backwards.
Meanwhile battery technology is making slow steady steps forward.
Wind turbines have a gearing system inside the nacelle, a bit like a constant speed prop. That puts out the frequency required to be synced to the system and feed into it.
Wind turbines have a “prop governor” to protect themselves but they put out DC. At least the ones around here do. So the grid sync is done electronically, at the end of the DC link. So this is same as PV. I posted a photo of some PV installation further back.
Why is it less feasible than natural gas-driven vehicles?
Neither is really feasible in bulk, for the retail market. Here (well, in London, AFAIK) we have some propane taxis but they go back to some refilling depot.
The UK is planning to gradually change to hydrogen for domestic gas boilers, but initially just as a % so the existing boilers can still be retained. I don’t know how they plan to make the hydrogen, given the general shortage of energy. The UK is trying to look “super green” and “greener than everybody else” and it is producing some cock and bull ideas; for example nobody wants to chuck out their gas boiler especially after they paid a few k for the mandatory condensing type.
Peter wrote:
Peter09-Oct-22 06:4613
Thanks for a great post @asw22.A few questions:
We are building a lot of substations in our area (my company does that as well) because the grid can’t handle photovoltaic on a big scale and those substations help in the closer environment, but the grid as a whole will never truly handle a big scaled pv-production without throttling the total input because we are only building inputs that are not manageable
Is PV or wind not manageable? I would think both can be controlled very fast. With PV it is all electronic and with wind you control the generator field current / blade pitch.
Hydrogen was my very big hope, but it is not feasible
The UK is still planning to phase in hydrogen into natural gas, gradually replacing it. What is the point of that?
How was hydrogen ever feasible for vehicles?
PV indeed can be managed, but only by throtteling it, not by turning it up. So it only works in a world of excess energy to run on it. In the world we actually have we need a baseload (hydro-power, gas turbines, nuclear power, ..).
So if the grid expects the sun to shine tomorrow and the weather forecast isn’t accurate we have to have energy in reserve. Because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to feed enough energy into the grid when the clouds come. In Austria (and as far as I am aware in Germany as well, but I am not totally sure about that) the law states that renewable energy fed into to grid has to be accepted by the grid with a priority before non renewables (coal, gas, etc.). But at the same the the grid-operators need do make sure that there is allways enough electricity and that only works with energy-forms that I can start and stop whenever I want (coal, gas, nuclear to a certain amount, but even that is very wasteful).
Because of that we need to waste energy “just in case” we would need it.
Regarding hydrogen: what does the UK plan to do with it?
I was talking about a means of energy storage for our excess PV and wind in summer time so we have it during night and more importantly during winter in europe. You can’t use natural gas reservoirs (huge caverns in the ground in the case of Austria) for hydrogen-storage due to hydrogen needing special tanks because it is way harder to contain. If we could use hydrogen directly (which is technically possible with enough time to implement) it would be way more efficient, but would still need a factor of 1,5 of inputs to outputs disregarding further losses in handling/storing/machines/grid/etc.
That’s why with rising costs of energy this method will become ever more unfeasable. The volume needed to substantially store energy in hydrogen tanks is incredible. If you compress it to need less volume/tanks you need ever more energy to do that which makes the total energy balance even worse.
There are no perpetuum mobiles and we need to be ok with that.
