Gas shortage

[Joeboy]

The fines if electricity supply is broken made me doubletake!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63118574

[dan_b]

I heard on the radio yesterday that the Met Office long term forecast for the winter is for it to be colder than in the last few years, and also to be relatively low wind. Which would be the worst combination for us if we're also going to be gas constrained.

This winter could be really, really bleak. Batten down the hatches everyone.

[Moxi]

I remember when I was working at British Energy (now EDF), they typically worked on £750m per day in lost revenue, this was a combination of the imbalance charge, opex costs, and lost generating revenue.

Little wonder that a nuclear station staff level swells from around 500 staff to 4,000 people when the station is on statutory outage - the drive to be back on the "bars" is intense.

Moxi

[marshman]

))

[Oldgreybeard]

I am tempted to get a small, quiet, generator, just in case the worst happens. Running something like a 2kVA generator for a few hours a day would give us enough to get by. If push came to shove I could re-wire the heat pump so I could run it directly from a generator, if the grid went down for an extended time. The battery EPS will power the lights and essentials like the water pump, but would struggle to run the heat pump as well.

[Stinsy]

I have considered similar!

A little "briefcase" generator can easily keep your fridge/freezer running, together with a few lights, laptop, etc.

However, in reality, I think these stories are dramatic, they'll keep the grid up nomatterwhat!

(feel free to bookmark this post and crow should I be wrong..)

[Swwils]

Isn't there a far wider problem brewing entirely separately from the war? Like entire EU electricity shortages... Its explained nicely by Alexander Stahel.

The EU grid is massive, its more than 500million customers and 2600 TWhs a year. If you add on synchro countries like the UK its over 3300 TWh. No matter what we need to match generation with this consumption at the nominal frequency, you cant store energy in the grid. There is absolutely no argument against this physics. If you want to measure how the grid is doing, you chart the frequency; it is a direct measurement of the careful balance between generation and consumption; its balanced to 20mHz corridor. If you go outside of this you either need to shut down the grid or damage stuff.

The load and generation forecasts are big big tech, 1/4 hour, 1 hour, day auctions between 1000's of participants. Amazing it works at all. When we get it wrong, frequency incidents happening for various reasons have to be fixed immediately; these incidents are increasing as the more wind & solar arrives on the grid.

Renewables are not dispatchable sources of energy from the point of view of the grid; who thinks second by second, minute by minute. In 2021 Jan 8th and July 24th say scale 2 incidents on the EU grid. Its obvious that the grid is trending towards an incapability to match load with generation. Already many and more countries are becoming net importers... YTD the grid is already at 2000 Gwh of import, which mostly came from Norway, UK and Sweden.

There would be no issues if no-one on the grid was a net importer; Italy (30,000 GWh import YTD), Austria (8000 GWh import YTD), Hungary (9000 GWh import YTD) are the biggest. The general situation:

Dutch use alot of gas, but they can source it locally. Hopefully they dont run out.

Hungary, uses alot of gas but they do not have local sources of it; hence becoming more of an issue given recent events.

Italy closed its nuclear reactors in the 1990s and never replaced the generation, relies on gas which as OP in this post has suggested may become problematic and last of all they do not have even 1MW offshore wind.

Austria has hydro, but the recent heatwaves have significantly effected outputs, they generally relied on Germany. From 2010 onwards this generation has not been replaced.

Even Switzerland, who should be organised have not replaced their 2 old reactors - which in the next 10 years will see them lose 6TWh of generation.

Slovakia completed 2 new reactors after a 17 year campaign. One is still not yet connected.

Finland is the same story. Started 2003, finally connected 2022.

Belgium went gangbusters on offshore wind, but has 50% of its generation locked to old reactors...

Some larger issues that are problematic because of this net importer landscape:

France and UK reactor outputs are problematic. France should be able to output 450TWh a year, but it doesn't; close to 60% or about 300TWh for various reasons. To deliver the forecasted 300TWh there are some BIG hurdles, like overcoming some corrosion issues. Frances nuclear output was very similar to a hydro profile (heat waves), which is not great. At the same time, France became a net importer ytd, for the first time in decades. This is simply nerve wracking. They also run reactors in UK and Belgium, and the output profiles are similar. The UK fleet has had the lowest output since 1980's. German reactors were output capacity factor of near 90%; but that's what we turned off, after just 20 years on the grid. Nuclear is the most reliable (for the grid) source of energy known to mankind.


Germany has shut off 35TWh a year of output. This means in 2023 they will be a net importer for the first time. A massive issue for Italy, Austria and Luxembourg. They are trying to activate their reserves; but this isnt instant. The old coal plants cant source the equipment and of the 16 target plants for restart maybe 2 will get going in the short term. Germany has very little dispatchable electricity output options apart from gas...

Norway's water levels are low - they (nordpool) turned into a net importer of power. Norway are considering cutting energy exports because of low water levels, which could lead to domestic shortages later on. (Elspot 1 and 2, 20GWh Levels are lowest in 25 years, 3 to 5 are fine though. 40Gwh)

If Norway cut exports the EU will face power shortages, its guaranteed.

Ukraine was integrated into the grid in March to provide power support, an amazing effort. But this synchronisation adds frequency risk to the grid.

If it takes 15 years to add nuclear to the grid, we are already late in solving the problem. US and Japan face the same age issue. Can we simply replace them with wind and solar? Unfortunately with current efforts, no. You would need 3,100+ 15MW turbines to replace 19GW of nuclear by 2030. NL installed one such turbine - and that is it. 7 years left and this doesn't account for the unsolved storage problem. Nuclear is simply too energy dense. We world doesn't have the manufacturing capacities to do the turbines. Can renewables do anything then? Yes, offshore wind in the Nordics gets capacity factor near 40% almost as good as coal. But doing solar in Germany? Capacity factor of less than 10% and is a waste of materials from grid perspective.

But at the end of the day, it still needs minute by minute frequency stability. Lets work an example with Germany:

Germany had excess electricity in 2022 ytd but requires peak load assistance frequently. So their generation mix is already incapable to match its load requirements minute by minute. They stabilise with French nuclear imports.

Lets assume all short-term frequency problems disappear and we get our massive amounts of turbines. You'd still face massive grid issues with infrastructure - you'd need to double the HV transmission lines, taking decades. This requires grid-scale chemical storage to convert volatile generation into a dispatchable form of electricity. From the grids perspective, wind and solar has a near zero value; without these transmission or storage issues fixed. Only then could it be measured as secured capacity. This is why Germany relies on a steady flow of imports (even if it is a net exporter for the year) to match load with generation minute by minute.

Can Germany even do it? How much storage is needed to turn the wind into secured capacity? Its about 15Twh of chemical storage. It currently has a few MW. 550GW of chemical stooge must be installed by 2050 in the EU to decarbonise the grid (if the sun shines and wind blows as expected) - a mammoth target - of the 50GW of storage in Europe today, 95% is pumped storage in the alps that takes days to dispatch. They also take decades to expand. Only chemical storage can match frequency issues. Globally we have 4000 MW installed. The scale of the task gets lost on some people.

A Tesla gigafactory would produce enough batteries a year to store 30GWh. But Europe consumes 3,300,000 GWh per year. An annual Gigafactory output could store a minutes of EU power demand.

So the situation is complex and sometimes good ideas can have dangerous consequences.

[marshman]

__

[Andy]

Fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to write that up.

[Oldgreybeard]

I have considered similar!

A little "briefcase" generator can easily keep your fridge/freezer running, together with a few lights, laptop, etc.

However, in reality, I think these stories are dramatic, they'll keep the grid up nomatterwhat!

(feel free to bookmark this post and crow should I be wrong..)

In the back of my mind I still have vivid memories of all the rolling power cuts we had back in the winter of 1970. At that time we had an oil fired Rayburn at home (one of the ones with a drip burner, so didn't need electricity). Losing the power for a few hours a day didn't matter too much, we managed OK with candles and my trusty (and almost as old as me) Tilley lamp (still have the Tilley, always kept in working order, with some spare mantles).

Our freezer and fridge freezer run fine off the battery system if we need to run them for a while in any power cut. I can only assume that they either don't have much of a surge when they fire up or that the inverter is OK with handling short duration peaks like this.

Be interesting if I could get the PV inverter and the Sofar inverter to sync with the generator, so the generator became a substitute grid. I suspect that might be challenging, as I know that the PV inverter does the same as our car and measures the loop impedance before it will turn on. Not sure if a small generator would pass that test or not.