HVDC Interconnectors

[Oldgreybeard]

Small update.

AQUIND may not yet be totally dead - the developers have had a Judicial Review Hearing at the High Court of then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng's decision to kill the AQUIND Interconnector.

This has upset the good folk of Portsmouth as they seem to be quite opposed to the whole scheme.

We'll see what Mrs Justice Lieven has to say in due course.

I wonder why this has caused such a stir in Portsmouth?

[Fintray]

Small update.

AQUIND may not yet be totally dead - the developers have had a Judicial Review Hearing at the High Court of then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng's decision to kill the AQUIND Interconnector.

This has upset the good folk of Portsmouth as they seem to be quite opposed to the whole scheme.

We'll see what Mrs Justice Lieven has to say in due course.

I wonder why this has caused such a stir in Portsmouth?

Kwasi must be popular after more than £1m in donations made by Aquind Limited director Alexander Temerko, to the Conservative Party.
Just goes to show a bung of that size and Aquind still didn't get what they wanted, who can you trust nowadays!

[openspaceman]

I've often thought it would be nice to have one of the portable nuclear generators we had at Harwell, when I first started work. They were completely sealed steel finned things that would output around 50W to 100W (IIRC) for many decades. Be neat to have one as a home battery trickle charger, although I dare say the H&S mafia might not approve. I think these things used Sr90 as the heat source, with the heat just coming from normal radioactive decay.

I want one !

Hoping in the future for a similar output from a home fuel cell using something like ethanol or hydrogen.

The 1960s Harwell Stirling oscillating generator I mentioned in an earlier thread was originally to be powered by decaying Strontium 90 and deployed in spacecraft, it was later repurposed to run on propane and used on buoys by the Irish version of Trinity House in the mid 80s.

90% of the heat into the house 10% into electricity, no good for OGB as he would get too warm.

[Oldgreybeard]

90% of the heat into the house 10% into electricity, no good for OGB as he would get too warm.

[Moxi]

Not to stray off the subject too far but in response to the idea of lots of SMR's al around the country:

Do the SMR 's fuel with HEU ? If so that's a massive proliferation risk and will require a massive increase in the Nuclear Constabulary.

If you pop a lot of micro reactors around the country and subsequently have a war with someone then you have offered up a simple way to contaminate the majority of the country with dirty material by allowing these facilities to be bombed. I doubt the SMR's will carry sufficient mass concrete protection to ensure a bunker buster bomb wouldn't split them wide open?

As we saw in the Ukraine, solar, wind and other green energy is the way forward - cheap, quick and easy to replace and costs less than the munition used to try and destroy it.

Interconnectors have a place in transmitting power from areas that have to areas that need and perhaps if people are prosecuted for war crimes relating to damage of civilian infrastructure, we will have less to be worried about - but there will always be people who care not about the consequences.

Moxi

[dan_b]

Considering it's a buried cable, it's mostly about NIMBYIsm regarding the cable route and the disruptions that would be caused during construction.

https://stopaquind.com/route/

Small update.

AQUIND may not yet be totally dead - the developers have had a Judicial Review Hearing at the High Court of then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng's decision to kill the AQUIND Interconnector.

This has upset the good folk of Portsmouth as they seem to be quite opposed to the whole scheme.

We'll see what Mrs Justice Lieven has to say in due course.

I wonder why this has caused such a stir in Portsmouth?

[Oldgreybeard]

Not to stray off the subject too far but in response to the idea of lots of SMR's al around the country:

Do the SMR 's fuel with HEU ? If so that's a massive proliferation risk and will require a massive increase in the Nuclear Constabulary.

If you pop a lot of micro reactors around the country and subsequently have a war with someone then you have offered up a simple way to contaminate the majority of the country with dirty material by allowing these facilities to be bombed. I doubt the SMR's will carry sufficient mass concrete protection to ensure a bunker buster bomb wouldn't split them wide open?

As we saw in the Ukraine, solar, wind and other green energy is the way forward - cheap, quick and easy to replace and costs less than the munition used to try and destroy it.

Interconnectors have a place in transmitting power from areas that have to areas that need and perhaps if people are prosecuted for war crimes relating to damage of civilian infrastructure, we will have less to be worried about - but there will always be people who care not about the consequences.

Moxi

Although the idea of only having wind, solar and other RE is extremely attractive, a look at UK weather patterns shows it's a non-starter for keeping the grid going during winter, even if we covered all the land and sea area we have with it. We have long (as in several days at a time) periods in winter with virtually no wind (Wednesday and Thursday last week for example), so even if we had five times the wind generation capacity we have now it would still just be five times bugger all. Same goes for solar, plus solar generation periods in winter are barely longer than 5 or 6 hours per day. We've not yet cracked reliable tidal power, and to do so is going to mean some pretty big, and time consuming, civil engineering projects. We can't import much more electricity either, as the world in general doesn't have a surfeit and we don't have the North to South infrastructure capacity to transfer power from cable entry points to the North and West of the UK. Again, building that infrastructure is slow and costly (because every man and his dog will complain about it for years, before it gets going - think HS2).

We need something to free us from the tyranny of being reliant on imported gas, and we don't have many choices.

[dan_b]

The 2GW Western Link has already enabled a lot of additional transmission capacity.
The UK National Grid will be installing 4GW of additional North-South HDVC Transmission lines to enable more power to be shifted from Scottish, and Northern Offshore Wind Farms down South. Should be done by 2029.

This from National Grid:


"The development of the first 2GW link will be led by SHE-Transmission and National Grid. It will originate from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and terminate at Drax in North Yorkshire, England.

The second 2GW subsea HVDC link will be led by SPT and National Grid, and it will run from Torness, Scotland to the Hawthorn Pit Substation in Durham County, England."

[Moxi]

We need something to free us from the tyranny of being reliant on imported gas, and we don't have many choices.
[/quote]

I agree we need something thats reliable and free's us from gas imports. The thing is we have masses of just such a reliable green energy source - trouble is the government wont get on with it!

As an island nation we have no end of tidal opportunities available to us from sub-sea turbines to tidal impounding barriers. We understand tides and the offset of tidal ranges around the UK means that we could benefit from constant generation on a simply massive scale IF we just got on and built them.

Moxi

[Oldgreybeard]

I agree we need something thats reliable and free's us from gas imports. The thing is we have masses of just such a reliable green energy source - trouble is the government wont get on with it!

As an island nation we have no end of tidal opportunities available to us from sub-sea turbines to tidal impounding barriers. We understand tides and the offset of tidal ranges around the UK means that we could benefit from constant generation on a simply massive scale IF we just got on and built them.

Moxi

The snag is that we often just don't have "masses of just such reliable green energy". If we did, then the solution would be relatively easy. a look at the UK winter weather stats shows we don't have the potential to generate much wind or solar at times, so no matter how much capacity we installed we still wouldn't have enough. Then there is the capacity over-match versus investment problem. No company is going to install wind or solar that is going to sit idle for 95% of the time, just to be turned on when we need every bit of it we can get.

We could accept turning the grid off, or using routine and regular rolling power cuts on cold, still, winter days, perhaps, but I doubt that would be considered acceptable by anyone.

Tidal offers the best very long term solution, but we've been working on it for my entire lifetime. Salter's Ducks were going to be the answer 50 years ago, but like every other tidal scheme we tried in the UK they weren't reliable. A Severn barrage is our best hope, but that's been well and truly kyboshed over the decades for sound environmental reasons. What we're left with is a handful of small scale projects that will take decades to iron the bugs out of and scale up.

Whichever way you look at it we need something to provide enough generation for nights when there is no wind, and days when there is no solar. Batteries or other energy storage may help, but we are a long way from having enough capacity, and like building excess wind to cope with dips, the economics get a lot worse the more we build (because the arbitrage margin decreases to close to zero).