Ecotricity jumps the shark?

[Paul_F]

Numbers don't even come close to adding up as far as I can tell compared to PV and heat pumps. Can't work out if he's genuinely barking mad or has sold out to the fossil gas industry to try and get a subsidy for his biomass process.

[John_S]

If he were to set up a collection system for lawn clippings during the summer season, I would be happy to sell him mine.

Win Win

[Stinsy]

Ecotricity could have been so much. The idea was there but the execution has always been a dogs dinner. The service station EV chargers that never worked are a good example, great idea ruined by disastrous implementation. This article is a case in point. They clearly profit from gas and are scared of losing margin if we switch to electric heating. Brown/Blue/whatever hydrogen is rebadged fossil fuel, it exists to line the pockets of the oil company executives.

Final nail…

[Paul_F]

If he were to set up a collection system for lawn clippings during the summer season, I would be happy to sell him mine.
Win Win

Claimed output is 28.8 MWh/hectare - solar farms produce about 300 MWh/hectare and because you aren't mowing them all the time are probably better for wildlife. Throw in the impact of heat pumps COP .vs. gas boiler inefficiency, and the output is about 2% of PV per acre.

[Oliver90owner]

It is the burning of fossils that is the problem. Replacing it (or most of it) with bio-methane looks good on paper.

Biggest problem, I would think, for PV is the seasonal shortfall in the winter months. But all the same, grass does not grow much in the colder months, either. Ensile grass for later use?

There will still be lots of boilers, for a long time after the proposed ban for new-builds. Bio-methane should be carbon neutral (apart from husbandry and fertilisers (to maximise the crop)) so gas boilers could continue in use until clearly overtaken by better means of space heating.

I expect there may be alternatives to grass? Weeds seem to grow quickly all year round!

Carbon-neutral methane (if it exists) could be used for power generation for ever and a day? Methane can be stored (not that UK stocks of natural gas are anything to go by, mind!).

Is continual grass trimming better than making a single crop (hay)? Or sometimes a second cut? Straw is burned for power generation - but not a great amount of energy produced in the greater scheme of power generation. The thermal content of hay is likely much better than straw.

Every home should be fitted with solar water heating, too - if practicable

I liked the ~100kW thermal store on the fully charged home energy series (the one with the vacuum insulation). It cannot be too difficult to get the price of the product down to a sensible level?

Heat pumps to move, not generate, energy for space heating must still top the agenda - sooo much better use of leccy than straight resistive heating. But is the difference between night-time cheaper rates actually that much better in the longer term? Using cheap generation to produce hydrogen at the inevitable low overall efficiency might be worse than storing energy in one of those vacuum-skinned heat stores.

There is space for multiple solutions to be trialled. It needs someone more informed than us on the forum to actually model all the possibilities. But not Dale Vince!!!

[Paul_F]

Biggest problem, I would think, for PV is the seasonal shortfall in the winter months. But all the same, grass does not grow much in the colder months, either. Ensile grass for later use?

Round-trip efficiency of storing electricity as hydrogen then burning it in a CCGT is about 25%, and hydrogen is pretty easy to store in bulk (most of the problems are in distributing it to boilers). That still means you can get 2.5x as much energy per hectare from PV and resistive heating as you can from grass to biogas, ~7x with a heat pump. There really isn't any way to make the numbers stack up.

[AE-NMidlands]

Lots of high-output grass-growing nowadays depends on chemical (FF-derived) fertilisers and massive ICE-powered machines used repeatedly on the fields. Besides being monoculture rye-grass - no flowering weeds for insects to feed on...
Resulting in lots of badly-degraded soil too, especially round here where maize for silage is popular: it tolerates massive slurry application (nitrogen loadings) which kills most of the soil organisms. Cue damaged soil structure, minimal water penetration and massive run-off after any heavy rain, quagmire in field when crop harvested late autumn, soil and nitrate pollution of watercourses...

This morning's farming programme (I think) had a bit about a big dairy farm which was integrating things: Grass grown and harvested, zero grazing cattle slurry was husbanded and went into an anaerobic digester (with a bit of their silage grown or saved just for it.) The electricity generated from the gas was used on the farm and exported giving a good income, and the digester "effluent" was a good fertiliser.

Apart from the zero-grazed cattle and the ff-powered farm machinery it sounded quite a good scheme.
A

[CrofterMannie]

There are a few digesters in my area and they aren't without issue. Quite a few thousand hectares have been dedicated to supplying them and it is all prime arable land - they don't want any old meadow grass but usually grow a type of rye bred for energy.
This has caused some problems as 1) it is taking land out of food production and food should really be a priority. 2) it takes a lot of straw of the market in an area where there is limited supplies and high demand from livestock and carrot farmers (again potentially impacting food production)

The fleet of tractors and harvesters that keep the digesters feed uses thousands of litres of diesel a day (possibly per hour), one day VOSA will clamp down on them using red diesel to haul the crops to the digesters and I suspect the bill for white diesel will be crippling.

[Mart]

Just to say, I'm a huge fan of this idea (stress 'idea'). I even had some e-mail exchanges with Ecotricity 5yrs ago about their plans. My main concern was that the area they had given for each grass mill to service meant that the proposed 'fleet' would need more land than the whole of the UK (land not grassland). They explained that the area (15 mile radius if I recall correctly) was not the land area needed, but the max size they wanted to service to minimise transportation, and that the mills could overlap, as the grassland needed was a tiny fraction of that area.

I think they also hoped to be able to meet 97% of domestic space heating gas demand, but that is a future demand, taking into account improved insulation, building standards, and some properties moving away from methane boilers.

Again, just stressing the idea, they would effectively find a simple solution to meeting space heating demand that other methods can't solve quickly or easily. This would also take a significant load off the grid, by using the gas mains and gas storage (not that the UK has much), instead of balancing leccy demand for heatpumps.

Note - I'm a big fan of heatpumps, and we can easily increase the UK's average generation to meet higher average leccy demand, but anything that helps meet peak demand periods during exceptional weather conditions, would make balancing supply and demand far, far easier. Plus of course the storage element here, of moving late summer grass growth, into winter energy supply has great value.

BUT .... that's the theory, the promise, the idea. Sadly very little has happened in those 5yrs, so I've no idea if the idea is still (or ever was) viable. It will require subsidies, but then so does electric heating, and of course so does FF gas heating, simply through the externality costs that are not paid.

Is this idea viable now, I've no idea, but the theory is excellent, and the byproducts of fertiliser, and improved soil quality from adding a grass rotation, could be beneficial. Will it happen, I've no flippin idea, but if it's a goer, then we need to start rolling out dozens per year, not ~1 in 5yrs.

[dan_b]

Don't forget also that the way that Dale is proposing to free up all this land for grass is by ending cattle farming and for the UK to go vegan.
Kind of seems unrealistic doesn't it?

Also, let's not forget if you're still burning stuff you're still creating NOx and PM5 particulates, so this does nothing to improve local air quality.

I wonder how long before Gridserve removes the Ecotricity bit from the Electric Highway altogether. They'll not want to be associated with that kind of baggage.

I also wonder how long Ecotricity will last in the current mass culling of the energy market suppliers?