Does the UK need solar electricity?

I am not against solar PV panels in other countries where the pattern of demand is different, but in the UK our peak heating demand is in the winter time when solar power is low. Wind on the other hand peaks in the winter too so is a natural fit for our demand pattern. But does wind generation really match our demand well, or do we need mix of other types of generation? The answer was not as clear cut as I expected.

The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain – review

The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain - a history by Simon Taylor.
UIT Cambridge. 2016

As an engineer or scientist it is easy to focus on the technical merits of different low carbon technologies, but financial, economic and political considerations are vital too – especially when it comes to nuclear power. In fact it seems that commercial considerations trump technical ones very often. If you want to know why we started rolling out the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor back in the 1960s, even though it was more expensive, unproven and turned out to be far less reliable than the US Pressurised Water Reactor – read this book. If you want to know how it is that the design we plan to build (if it ever happens) at Hinkley Point C is also unproven - the first four installations are all vastly delayed and running over budget due to construction problems - then read this book. If you want to know how government policy evolved from reliance on the free market with ‘no public subsidy’, to controversial price and loan guarantees, read this book.

Insurance and climate change

It was reported on Friday that the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere recorded at the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii now exceeds 400ppm - for the first time in the history of mankind, the first time for at least 3 million years [1]. I find this news alarming, though not surprising. I don't often agree with Prince Charles about anything but I am with him when he says that we can't wait for absolute certainty before acting to fix our climate [2]. Although scientists can never be 100% sure that any particular weather event is due to climate change we do seem to be getting rather more of them recently and some industries are affected more than others, the insurance industry for one: John Coomber, on the board of Swiss Re and current chairman of ClimateWise, an association of insurance companies, says: 'Swiss Re’s estimates show that since the early seventies global insured losses specifically attributable to climate-related disasters have jumped from an annual $5 billion to approximately $ 60 billion in 2011'. ClimateWise members are worried and they aim to get something done about it [3].

Energy crunch time for the UK

Last night I listened to Alistair Buchanan, chief executive of OFGEM, giving a talk using a presentation written in November last year called "Will GB's lights stay on and will the gas keep flowing: a look at the next decade". You can download the slides from OFGEM here. Alistair is standing down in June this year after 10 years; he declined an offer to extend his contract by two years and I can't help wondering if this is because he doesn't like his medium term forecasts of plummeting levels of spare capacity almost certainly leading to an increased dependency on gas and higher prices. The crunch arrives in 2015/2016.

How to balance electricity supply and demand using renewables (in the USA)

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the USA has published a study [1] showing several scenarios in which 80% of their electricity consumption comes from renewable sources by 2050. This is the most detailed plan I have yet seen: they modelled how demand could be met from a mix of mainly renewable sources from hour to hour using statistical models of regional weather patterns. It is interesting to look at the mix of renewable technologies they have selected, how they allowed for the intermittent availability of wind and solar power, and whether or not the same strategies could work here.

Smart meters will save us money, if we take advantage

The load on the electricity grid varies through the day. In January, the peak load is a bit over 50 GW at around 6pm whereas the minimum at around 6am is nearer 30 GW as you can see in the graph below.  The peak is a rise of about 5 GW from 3pm which is about 200W per house. As the days get longer in February and March the peak shifts later and lower.

2011: mean weekday demand: 1st week Jan, 1st week Feb, 1st week Mar [2]

This pattern is consistent and so predictable and can be allowed for but the shift away from fossil fuels will make this more expensive to achieve in future. We need to shift the loads to even out the peaks and troughs. At the moment some people have a dual tariff with lower costs overnight to encourage them to shift loads to off peak but you have to have a second meter and it is isn't easy to change. Smart meters will make more flexible tariffs possible and this should be greatly to our advantage.

Nuclear power plants aren't just for base load

It is more than 2 weeks since my last post which is very poor - I do apologise. I plead pressure of work! Not only have I started a fascinating but horribly time consuming paid research project but I am also preparing for my first radio broadcast - I and my friend Roger Frost are putting together a fortnightly science program on Cambridge 105 community radio station. Fingers crossed you will be able to catch our debut on Sunday at 1.30pm. Wish me luck!

Back to this blog. I did promise to comment some more on the Adam Smith Research Trust report 'Renewable Energy Vision or Mirage'. The report looks at whether or not renewable energy sources are a good way to address our energy security issues - with cheap fossil fuels becoming more and more scarce. The overall conclusion is that the only renewable technology with significant capacity is wind, but this is too expensive as well as being too unreliable to be useful, at least without an energy storage capacity which we don't have and won't have any time soon. Instead, the report advocates heavy investment in nuclear power. You may recall from my last post that the 2050 pathways model predicts that a mainly nuclear strategy would be slightly cheaper than a mainly renewables strategy, purely on cost grounds. Neither that nor the Adam Smith report discuss environmental costs, which are an entirely different issue.

The most interesting thing in the report for me, though, is the fact that nuclear power stations can react to changes in power demand, just as fossil fuel power stations can, at least as long as the changes are fairly gentle. Previously I was under the impression that nuclear power can only run at a steady rate because changes in load damaged the fuel rods. This would mean they are only good for base load, not load following demand. It turns out that this is not exactly true any more, because a great deal of effort has gone into designing power stations that are more adaptable.