Hiya Gus. Not exactly sure what you are asking, but if you mean keeping up with additional demand, then there are two parts to this (after first displacing FF's with RE).Mr Gus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 1:01 pm At around 5 Gigawatts of power *potential* how does that fit with need (use) versus the population growth curve?
Basically how much does industry need to continue functioning post thatcher decimation? & proposed expansion?
(For example, a uk "giga" battery production facility ..as we move towards wider spread us e of clean & green people employing industry) ..yeah, I know the pre-existing one has been costly & effectively dumped.
And, point for reference, some neer do well will doubtless push public coffers for an Sarf / essex based hydrogen facility stating it to be purely green production, which will likely be grey or worse at point of production, ..so how much would industrial equivilents of current oil & gas "refineries" plus their mobile distribution networks need from that chunk of estimated production power?
So we actually have falling demand for leccy, and that's been the case for a decade now. This is down to improvements in efficiency.
Secondly, we will have rising demand in the future, possibly near future as we move to leccy for transport and space heating. So we can expect about 150% more demand by 2050, but it'll be a slow start.
Back to those offshore wind farms that Dan has listed, they total around 7GW, so expect annual generation at a cf of about 50%, so 3.5GW. That's roughly 10% of current demand. A similar amount (~7GW) was approved just in the last CfD auction. So we are looking good to continue displacing FF's as we've done at about 3.5%pa, for the last decade. Looks to me now as if the rollout (under CfD's) has now accelerated, with perhaps ~5%pa for the second half of the 2020's*. So we should be close to 100% 'net' low carbon by 2030**. Yes we'll still be burning gas, but by 2030 we should also be a net exporter, hence the 100% 'net'.
From 2030 to 2050, if demand grows by 150%, then that's +7.5%pa. I'm not trying to belittle this, but I'd suggest we are on target to grow leccy, via RE deployments at that rate. Also, it's crucial to remember that that will no longer necessarily be a subsidy based AGW fighting mechanism, but simply supply and demand, now that RE costs are competitive with gas generation (where gas was before the price spike). So if we want more leccy, companies will be more than happy to rollout more generation, and sell it to us.
Hope that makes sense, sorry if it has nothing to do with what you were saying.
*Note I'm suggetsing that CfD deployments are approaching 5%pa, but there will also be deployments outside of CfD's, as there are already today.
**Only rough calcs, but we entered 2022 with ~35% of leccy from FF's, mostly gas. Depending on how we count 2022-30, or 2022-29, we have 8 or 9 years. So if we continue to grow, that gives us a rough range of RE deployment of 8x3.5% to 9x5% pa, so 28% to 45%, so looking reasonable.
