When the wind does not blow and sun ....

[Ken]

For 7 days ? we have had little wind and for 12 days? little sun . Good job we still have gas. It is nearly impossible to build enough storage etc to get over these kind of periods and certainly not of the kind we are building. Storage produces nothing.

This is before the EVs, HPs and data centres.

No good just burying our head in the sand the country needs answers. At these times it looks like we need two complete systems one running on gas and one running on RE.

NESO seem to think they have cracked it if they get down to 5% gas/yr. Ehm. The only reliable interconnector is Norway.

[Swwils]

Not just the UK with issues.

mFRR up activations in multiple bidding zones including peat and gas in Finland and coal, gas, oil in Denmark.

[dan_b]

This has been a big Dunkelflaute for sure and yes you're absolutely right it's going to become and increasingly important factor in the whole of Europe's energy supplies as we see bigger and bigger shares of renewable generation in the mix.

Some solutions already exist to some extent so "just" needs a lot more of it - on the one side- more hydro and pumped hydro, more BESS, , much more geothermal, more tidal, probably yes more nuclear and more longer distance interconnectors that are far enough away to link to a completely different area (think the previously absurd ideas of linking to Morocco and the US!)

on the other side - more adoption of demand side flexibility and a general understanding that electricity is sometimes a scarce resource - more efficiency savings - more insulation, less lighting around in general?

[Swwils]

You can't scale batteries to the sizes the grid needs. That's literally technology that does not exist, let alone economically viable.

You mentioned the crazy interconnect, well saying we can battery our way out of it is kind of a very similar statement.

I'm not saying that Bess wouldn't be very profitable, it would be. But that is a fundamental indicator of a poor system. Scaling it up becomes very problematic especially in the face of weather events.

Hope that makes sense.

The deeper argument to be made is that if you enter into a flexible energy civilisation, can that even work?.History and intuition tell us that access to cheap energy is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization if you like it or not.

[Mart]

For 7 days ? we have had little wind and for 12 days? little sun . Good job we still have gas. It is nearly impossible to build enough storage etc to get over these kind of periods and certainly not of the kind we are building. Storage produces nothing.

This is before the EVs, HPs and data centres.

No good just burying our head in the sand the country needs answers. At these times it looks like we need two complete systems one running on gas and one running on RE.

NESO seem to think they have cracked it if they get down to 5% gas/yr. Ehm. The only reliable interconnector is Norway.

Lots of fun ahead.

I'm not worried actually about the amount of energy needed, that will simply be a matter of scaling up generation, all over Europe. The issue is really one of %age. If it helps at all, then that (optimistic) 5% gas target for 2030, is roughly equal to gas providing 100% of our leccy for 18 days pa. [Purely as an example, not at all possible.]

Gonna be a problem reaching this, but at least we have options. Not saying they will/can happen, but those HVDC ideas from relatively predictable sources (Iceland, Morocco and Canada) total around 12GW. Obviously RE overcapacity, eventually, but even so, lows are lows.

Then there's LDES (long duration energy storage), I'm less and less confident about H2 storage, due to all the losses, especially if used for thermal generation, or fuel cells, if the heat loss can't be used. But CAES (compressed air energy storage) has promise, and potential for many TWh's, but it will cycle so rarely, I suspect this will need to be state owned, or state supported (such as a CfD like contract).

As Dan suggests, we also have demand management, and energy efficiency, but I suppose 7-14 days is a big, big problem. Perhaps some production could shut down entirely for a week or so, but that sounds unlikely, I can only think of one example, perhaps fertilizer production, that relies on on-site H2 production from electrolysis, but reaching now.

Perhaps thinking of that 5% gas again, is the best way to look forward, how about 50% gas supply for 36 days pa? [Again just to help put it in context.]

Oh, and there's also CCS for that net figure, but I ain't going down that route, unless something dramatic and impressive happens, which I doubt.

[dan_b]

You can't expect one technology to do everything. But the combination of multiple existing technologies that we already know how to build will go a long way. Deploy deploy deploy. Then if we end up in a situation where for 2 weeks a year we have to fire up some old gas plants, then at least for 50 weeks of the year we haven't.

And then you can talk about CCS to abate those gas emissions at that point. Yes that means those 2 weeks will be eye-wateringly expensive. But so be it.

Don't forget also that fossil fuels require a ridiculous amount of other fossil fuels to extract, refine and move, and then a ridiculous amount of it is wasted as heat and noise. So actually we don't need nearly as much energy from renewables for electrification of everything than we do to replace all the dino juice that we consume.

You can't scale batteries to the sizes the grid needs. That's literally technology that does not exist, let alone economically viable.

You mentioned the crazy interconnect, well saying we can battery our way out of it is kind of a very similar statement.

I'm not saying that Bess wouldn't be very profitable, it would be. But that is a fundamental indicator of a poor system. Scaling it up becomes very problematic especially in the face of weather events.

Hope that makes sense.

The deeper argument to be made is that if you enter into a flexible energy civilisation, can that even work?.History and intuition tell us that access to cheap energy is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization if you like it or not.

[Ken]

Yes all those things help but all of those added together do not get to 50GW peak/1000 GWh per day EVERY day as at present and this is only electricity not total energy which is multiple times bigger.

For me the only thing i can come up with is a fuel that we make in the sunny and windy times that we use/burn in the lean times but this a colossal change in mindset and i do not see anybody thinking about it at the level it needs to be.

In short i think everybody is looking through rosy glasses.

The answer largely lies in prime energy that is clean eg nuclear,geothermal and all types of hydro and tidal.

The avg size of a geothermal plant is 37MW so to get to 50GW production we need 1351 plants
There is not enough hydro/tidal
We do not have the wherewithal at many levels to build nuclear at that scale including decommissioning.

Look at this http://euanmearns.com/uk-electricity-pa ... and-solar/
Whilst i do not agree with his nuclear preference the RE option is sound IMO but just take time to think about the quantities of RE being talked about, multiples of what we have now.

[Moxi]

Hydrogen enrichment of natural gas for CCGG was mentioned in the NESO report. The missing element is Tidal - not weather dependant - forecastable decades in advance and nailed on certainty - plus as an added benefit we have excellent locations available to deploy assets to recover this valuable energy source, we have many of the raw materials required and we also have the national capability and engineering know how.

All we lack is the gumption to get on with it - apparently

Moxi

[dan_b]

Wasn't all that long ago (1990s) that coal was the single largest source of generation on the grid. Now it's gone completely.

[Swwils]

Yeah and look at the energy price, we are very lucky we don't make anything here.

We also need to be very careful with the "we can make it OUR way!" Mindset, unless we want magnox again.

Anyone who has worked with spinning things, or things at sea know that tidal will be a money hole.

If money wasn't an issue we could just burn the co2 out of the atmosphere.