“ These three farms combined have a max capacity of 1.5GW and will meet the power needs of around 450,000 homes”, hmmmmm, are you sure about this as a) you are assuming 1.5GW when in reality Solar produces less than 60% of stated production, and more importantly, b) the bulk of electricity is used after 1630hrs, in the Northern Hemisphere this means that we have passed maximum solar output therefore the amount of energy available drops down dramatically meaning that unless large batteries are used to store (added cost), then most of the energy produced will not be available when required to light, heat domestic homes, provide electricity for entertainment, recharge BEV’s, mobiles, tablets, laptops- oh, and let’s not forget about the six months when we have little to no sunshine aka late Autumn, Winter, early Spring- or do we hibernate?, Solar, Wind are intermittent top up energy sources and should not form the backbone of any Energy Security proposal until someone can get the Sun to shine 18yrs per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year- ditto Wind, then and only then will we have a secure energy source.
Your argument is confused and based on outdated or false information/propaganda.
Solar actually only has 10% capacity factor in the UK. At an average household use of 2700kWh pa, we'd expect the panels to produce enough for 500k homes. It's a metric to bring understanding, not to be taken literally, it is obviously not capable of providing 24/7 power, neither is nuclear, coal or gas (which require maintenance and suffer breakdowns).
The UK will never rely significantly on solar as wind resource is so good here, but the key thing to note is that wind and solar are not well correlated, so lulls in wind are oftentimes during peak solar production times. The grid of the future also incentivises daytime use of electricity eg. plugging your car in at work and heating/cooling during day hours will be very cheap.
There's nothing more insecure than relying on gas imports from other countries, which the UK already does. There will remain for a long time still backup gas generation until it is replaced by hydrogen or other long term storage. So there is no need to whip up fears about energy security.
The average home is going to be using a lot more electricity under net zero. Even limited EV use would add 3MWh/year per household. Heating at least another 5MWh/year. It really should not be used as a unit of energy. We should conduct the conversation in terms of national consumption in TWh/a. Then it becomes clear just how much lowering of living standards is being assumed, especially when we look at total primary energy consumption.
Sure, I mean you can talk about it however you like, households today, households in 2050, TWh/a doesn't help the public understand.
"Lowering of living standards" and "total primary energy consumption" oof. Propagandist talking points, I'm not going to engage further. Total primary energy is irrelevant due to the inefficiencies of fossil fuel energy.
Honestly can't believe you'd be pedantic on the conversation about households and then say we should be looking at total primary energy.
The "household " unit of energy is highly variable and ill defined. It keeps changing according to who uses it and for what purpose. It was popularised by OFGEM as a way of masking just how much energy costs and particularly electricity costs have been rising.
There is no difficulty with talking about £3 trillion of national debt, and there is equally no difficulty about talking of national electricity consumption falling from 400TWh/a before we started deindustrialising and price rationing to 270TWh/a currently. Putting the figures in the national context is vital if we are to make rational decisions about our energy future. Obfuscation is about taking bad decisions and papering over them.
High penetration of wind and solar always leads to higher energy costs. California and Germany are prime examples. The public wants cheap, reliable energy. Without very cheap storage, renewables will always be expensive (due to the backup required).
Your last reference cited storage in MW (power output). This tells us nothing and is a common mistake. Storage should be specified in MWh (energy storage).
If Germany and California continue on their current course, I bet their energy costs will increase, not decrease, in the future.
The LOCE of wind and solar is misleading. It doesn’t account for the costs required to integrate intermittent and unreliable sources into the grid. Without weeks or months of cheap storage, the grid must pay for both the unreliable energy sources and the various backup sources required to provide reliable power.
My references would be Energy Bad Boys, Gordian Knot News, Doomberg, Shorting the Grid, etc.
The only real solution to the CO2 problem is nuclear but that will require regulatory reform.
Storage needs to be cited in both MW and MWh. As it relates to peak shifting, MW is more relevant and the norm at the moment is 2 MWh/MW - see footnote 3 in the article I shared.
There is little question at the moment that going from 90% to 100% RE would be more costly - but costs continue to come down, tech continues to innovate, and regardless, the cost of not achieving net negative is going to be far, far more.
Anyway, your idea that wind and solar are not useful is not supported by leading energy experts and current global practice. And don't come back with the subsidies argument, please, even without subsidies wind and solar + BESS come out ahead of nuclear.
Yes, we are going to need low-capacity peaker plants for a long time. That is not the hammer blow to cost of energy that you think it is. Everyone loves a sceptic, but the sceptics usually aren't looking at the full picture.
We need both nuclear and expanded wind and solar roll out. And green hydrogen production and storage.
Renewables need a lot of supporting infrastructure. National Grid are planning some £200bn of additions over the next decade at the transmission voltage level simply to be able to connect up wind and solar. The bill for storage is going to increase dramatically if there is any attempt to dispense with dispatchable backup. Probably the biggest cost, not often discussed, will be the cost of power wastage/curtailment because storage economics rely on frequent turnover of storage. Once you are going beyond a daily turnover into interseasonal and interannual storage tge economics become infeasible. The result is that most of the incremental output of incremental renewables becomes worthless, and the real cost of useful output becomes a multiple of the claimed levellised cost. This happens very rapidly with solar where production is dominated by middle of the day in summer months.
There are good reasons why subsidies to solar were heavily cut back before this effect took hold.
We are and will be electrifying more and more, so not all additions to grid are intrinisic to renewables. But sure, transmission is expensive, curtailment is a cost. The economics of interseasonal and interannual storage don't add up? Source please? This green storage is still being developed (tech, storage, production etc) and for a longtime will just be natural gas. Because they're so rarely used, it doesn't matter how expensive the electricity is per MWh. Only the total cost per annum is relevant.
It is not disputed that RE requires more transmission infrastructure over greater distances, that it requires more storage costs, etc. This doesn't invalidate its use case nor does it make it an expensive system.
Even if you took the view, that I believe is largely unsupported, that we must go nuclear, the obstacles to nuclear roll out are even more so than RE rollout. Especially when it comes to time.
The Royal Society calculated that we would need of the order of 100TWh of hydrogen storage for an all renewables grid. Even if we achieved the holy grail of £100/kWh (£100bn/TWh) for battery storage the cost of the facility would be £6 trillion allowing for conversion from hydrogen to power - every 10 years because batteries degrade: completely unaffordable if it were feasible, but it would require a multiple of global grid battery production.
The round trip from power to hydrogen to power is somewhere between 25% and 40% efficient. That means that to recover the cost of input power it must be sold at 2.5-4 times the price, plus the costs of the system. Another way of looking at that is that the round trip losses would be of the order of 100TWh/a at current demand levels in a renewables grid, and there would be further substantial curtailment/wastage because it will never make sense to try to capture the rarer hours when output surplus is closer to maximum, since the facilities required would have a very low utilisation. All this power generation has to be paid for, as do all the other facilities required: electrolysers, cavern storage, hydrogen based CCGT, transmission and pipelines to enable it all. Given that we got no bids for offshore wind at £100/MWh in AR5, and wind farms have been cancelled in the US at ~$140/MWh it is clear that the input cost is not going to be much cheaper than the average CFD payment which is currently £150/MWh across all CFDs. The resulting cost is more than 9 times the cost of CCGT, inverting the silly claim made by Ember and the Labour Party.
I write this from under the largest solar array for a few miles. Solar is idea for factory roofs as we are at work during daylight and over a year the contribution made to our electricity usage is big. However, there are many days when the sun does not shine and when we need the power most for heating during the winter it makes very little contribution. Solar farms are unsightly, a form of environmental plution in theirr own way and a criminal misuse of agricultrual land and not one should be built before every factory roof in the UK is fully utilised. There is also a lie at the core of the usual figure trotted out about bhte number of homes that will be powered, this is at full capacity which is rarely hit and will only be for a very short period every day and from a domestic point of view the time when the power is needed is when the sun has either gone down or is at its weakest. The only beneficiary of solar farms are the land owners who do very nicely out of allowing developers to put them on their land so that artificial targets can be met quicker by virtue signalling politicianss, without any thorught to a truly sustainable future.; The approval of these so;ar farms is an abomination.
solar is the very worst of renewables and that is saying a lot as they are all bad, practically and technically.
Let me ask you, large scale solar farms also include storage. As the average output of solar is about 11% of installed capacity (When new, they deteriorate with time) and for four months of the year solar output is very low, how is this expensive storage to be charged so as it can be deployed as required.
The market for virtually instant grid supply to meet demand spikes pays very high prices because supply is low. Tell me, if you owned such a solar installation, would you not use grid power to charge the battery when demand is low and sell dearly when demand is high.
Also given that any extra demand on our grid means an increase in gas generation it indicates to me that the gullible public and authority are being misled, due to their wrong perception that all generation is equal and solar, therefore, is a good idea.
I'm not an expert on solar power, and this may sound a bit naive, but wouldn't it be a great idea to run a line of solar panels along the central reservation of motorways, and along both hard shoulders? At the very least they could power all the streetlights, and a lot more I would have thought.
They would also be relatively easy to clean, by some specialised vehicle tootling down the motorway rather analogous to a mechanical road sweeping vehicle, with of course suitable moving lane closure precautions behind it for safety.
Yet another advantage is that with suitable security cam coverage, which is presumably already fairly widespread on motorways, the panels would also be fairly secure against theft, or at least theft without being able to readily identify the culprits.
Solar at this sort of scale is utterly bonkers in the UK. Complete waste of money (it has virtually zero marginal value). I implore you to read Robert Idel's Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity and compare solar cost in the two places he looks at (Texas and Germany) to see the enormity of the disparity.
Solar has a lot of utility but only in the right circumstances. Supply (solar radiation) and demand (midwinter not midsummer) is uniquely awful in northern Europe (only a tiny percentage of the world's pop. is at our latitude, Chicago has two-thirds more sun than London). Ideas plausible but extortionate in most of the world such as load shifting supply to meet demand with batteries is hopeless here.
“ These three farms combined have a max capacity of 1.5GW and will meet the power needs of around 450,000 homes”, hmmmmm, are you sure about this as a) you are assuming 1.5GW when in reality Solar produces less than 60% of stated production, and more importantly, b) the bulk of electricity is used after 1630hrs, in the Northern Hemisphere this means that we have passed maximum solar output therefore the amount of energy available drops down dramatically meaning that unless large batteries are used to store (added cost), then most of the energy produced will not be available when required to light, heat domestic homes, provide electricity for entertainment, recharge BEV’s, mobiles, tablets, laptops- oh, and let’s not forget about the six months when we have little to no sunshine aka late Autumn, Winter, early Spring- or do we hibernate?, Solar, Wind are intermittent top up energy sources and should not form the backbone of any Energy Security proposal until someone can get the Sun to shine 18yrs per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year- ditto Wind, then and only then will we have a secure energy source.
Your argument is confused and based on outdated or false information/propaganda.
Solar actually only has 10% capacity factor in the UK. At an average household use of 2700kWh pa, we'd expect the panels to produce enough for 500k homes. It's a metric to bring understanding, not to be taken literally, it is obviously not capable of providing 24/7 power, neither is nuclear, coal or gas (which require maintenance and suffer breakdowns).
The UK will never rely significantly on solar as wind resource is so good here, but the key thing to note is that wind and solar are not well correlated, so lulls in wind are oftentimes during peak solar production times. The grid of the future also incentivises daytime use of electricity eg. plugging your car in at work and heating/cooling during day hours will be very cheap.
Battery costs continue to decrease, so shifting solar to the morning and evening peak will not only be possible, it will be profitable. In fact, UK already has 30GW of battery storage with planning permission (https://www.renewableuk.com/news/660775/Pipeline-of-UK-energy-storage-projects-grows-by-two-thirds-over-last-12-months.htm) - usually only 2 hours, but enough for that peak shifting.
The conditions are different, but I'd strongly recommend reading David Osmond's work modelling the Australian grid based on real-world data: https://x.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1810892131260834209
And this short update on battery storage in California and Texas: https://youtu.be/7PCPU97GaCs?si=Hk8Yi-TXI-ucFl0K
There's nothing more insecure than relying on gas imports from other countries, which the UK already does. There will remain for a long time still backup gas generation until it is replaced by hydrogen or other long term storage. So there is no need to whip up fears about energy security.
The average home is going to be using a lot more electricity under net zero. Even limited EV use would add 3MWh/year per household. Heating at least another 5MWh/year. It really should not be used as a unit of energy. We should conduct the conversation in terms of national consumption in TWh/a. Then it becomes clear just how much lowering of living standards is being assumed, especially when we look at total primary energy consumption.
Sure, I mean you can talk about it however you like, households today, households in 2050, TWh/a doesn't help the public understand.
"Lowering of living standards" and "total primary energy consumption" oof. Propagandist talking points, I'm not going to engage further. Total primary energy is irrelevant due to the inefficiencies of fossil fuel energy.
Honestly can't believe you'd be pedantic on the conversation about households and then say we should be looking at total primary energy.
The "household " unit of energy is highly variable and ill defined. It keeps changing according to who uses it and for what purpose. It was popularised by OFGEM as a way of masking just how much energy costs and particularly electricity costs have been rising.
There is no difficulty with talking about £3 trillion of national debt, and there is equally no difficulty about talking of national electricity consumption falling from 400TWh/a before we started deindustrialising and price rationing to 270TWh/a currently. Putting the figures in the national context is vital if we are to make rational decisions about our energy future. Obfuscation is about taking bad decisions and papering over them.
High penetration of wind and solar always leads to higher energy costs. California and Germany are prime examples. The public wants cheap, reliable energy. Without very cheap storage, renewables will always be expensive (due to the backup required).
California and Germany are prime examples of early adopters.
It doesn't take a genius to look at the cost curves https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth and see that early adopters were paying much much more.
They have done us a great service. But using them as examples of cost is fallacious.
Storage costs continue to decline and use expands (https://youtu.be/7PCPU97GaCs?si=Hk8Yi-TXI-ucFl0K, https://www.renewableuk.com/news/660775/Pipeline-of-UK-energy-storage-projects-grows-by-two-thirds-over-last-12-months.htm), while fossil fuel costs will head in the other direction, maybe not today, but as soon as they embody appropriate negative externalities with carbon taxes, we will see.
Your last reference cited storage in MW (power output). This tells us nothing and is a common mistake. Storage should be specified in MWh (energy storage).
If Germany and California continue on their current course, I bet their energy costs will increase, not decrease, in the future.
The LOCE of wind and solar is misleading. It doesn’t account for the costs required to integrate intermittent and unreliable sources into the grid. Without weeks or months of cheap storage, the grid must pay for both the unreliable energy sources and the various backup sources required to provide reliable power.
My references would be Energy Bad Boys, Gordian Knot News, Doomberg, Shorting the Grid, etc.
The only real solution to the CO2 problem is nuclear but that will require regulatory reform.
Storage needs to be cited in both MW and MWh. As it relates to peak shifting, MW is more relevant and the norm at the moment is 2 MWh/MW - see footnote 3 in the article I shared.
There is little question at the moment that going from 90% to 100% RE would be more costly - but costs continue to come down, tech continues to innovate, and regardless, the cost of not achieving net negative is going to be far, far more.
Anyway, your idea that wind and solar are not useful is not supported by leading energy experts and current global practice. And don't come back with the subsidies argument, please, even without subsidies wind and solar + BESS come out ahead of nuclear.
Yes, we are going to need low-capacity peaker plants for a long time. That is not the hammer blow to cost of energy that you think it is. Everyone loves a sceptic, but the sceptics usually aren't looking at the full picture.
We need both nuclear and expanded wind and solar roll out. And green hydrogen production and storage.
Obviously in much more favourable solar conditions, but have a read of David Osmond's work modelling a 99% RE grid. https://x.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1810892131260834209
Renewables need a lot of supporting infrastructure. National Grid are planning some £200bn of additions over the next decade at the transmission voltage level simply to be able to connect up wind and solar. The bill for storage is going to increase dramatically if there is any attempt to dispense with dispatchable backup. Probably the biggest cost, not often discussed, will be the cost of power wastage/curtailment because storage economics rely on frequent turnover of storage. Once you are going beyond a daily turnover into interseasonal and interannual storage tge economics become infeasible. The result is that most of the incremental output of incremental renewables becomes worthless, and the real cost of useful output becomes a multiple of the claimed levellised cost. This happens very rapidly with solar where production is dominated by middle of the day in summer months.
There are good reasons why subsidies to solar were heavily cut back before this effect took hold.
We are and will be electrifying more and more, so not all additions to grid are intrinisic to renewables. But sure, transmission is expensive, curtailment is a cost. The economics of interseasonal and interannual storage don't add up? Source please? This green storage is still being developed (tech, storage, production etc) and for a longtime will just be natural gas. Because they're so rarely used, it doesn't matter how expensive the electricity is per MWh. Only the total cost per annum is relevant.
It is not disputed that RE requires more transmission infrastructure over greater distances, that it requires more storage costs, etc. This doesn't invalidate its use case nor does it make it an expensive system.
Even if you took the view, that I believe is largely unsupported, that we must go nuclear, the obstacles to nuclear roll out are even more so than RE rollout. Especially when it comes to time.
The Royal Society calculated that we would need of the order of 100TWh of hydrogen storage for an all renewables grid. Even if we achieved the holy grail of £100/kWh (£100bn/TWh) for battery storage the cost of the facility would be £6 trillion allowing for conversion from hydrogen to power - every 10 years because batteries degrade: completely unaffordable if it were feasible, but it would require a multiple of global grid battery production.
The round trip from power to hydrogen to power is somewhere between 25% and 40% efficient. That means that to recover the cost of input power it must be sold at 2.5-4 times the price, plus the costs of the system. Another way of looking at that is that the round trip losses would be of the order of 100TWh/a at current demand levels in a renewables grid, and there would be further substantial curtailment/wastage because it will never make sense to try to capture the rarer hours when output surplus is closer to maximum, since the facilities required would have a very low utilisation. All this power generation has to be paid for, as do all the other facilities required: electrolysers, cavern storage, hydrogen based CCGT, transmission and pipelines to enable it all. Given that we got no bids for offshore wind at £100/MWh in AR5, and wind farms have been cancelled in the US at ~$140/MWh it is clear that the input cost is not going to be much cheaper than the average CFD payment which is currently £150/MWh across all CFDs. The resulting cost is more than 9 times the cost of CCGT, inverting the silly claim made by Ember and the Labour Party.
I write this from under the largest solar array for a few miles. Solar is idea for factory roofs as we are at work during daylight and over a year the contribution made to our electricity usage is big. However, there are many days when the sun does not shine and when we need the power most for heating during the winter it makes very little contribution. Solar farms are unsightly, a form of environmental plution in theirr own way and a criminal misuse of agricultrual land and not one should be built before every factory roof in the UK is fully utilised. There is also a lie at the core of the usual figure trotted out about bhte number of homes that will be powered, this is at full capacity which is rarely hit and will only be for a very short period every day and from a domestic point of view the time when the power is needed is when the sun has either gone down or is at its weakest. The only beneficiary of solar farms are the land owners who do very nicely out of allowing developers to put them on their land so that artificial targets can be met quicker by virtue signalling politicianss, without any thorught to a truly sustainable future.; The approval of these so;ar farms is an abomination.
Mr Dumitriu,
solar is the very worst of renewables and that is saying a lot as they are all bad, practically and technically.
Let me ask you, large scale solar farms also include storage. As the average output of solar is about 11% of installed capacity (When new, they deteriorate with time) and for four months of the year solar output is very low, how is this expensive storage to be charged so as it can be deployed as required.
The market for virtually instant grid supply to meet demand spikes pays very high prices because supply is low. Tell me, if you owned such a solar installation, would you not use grid power to charge the battery when demand is low and sell dearly when demand is high.
Also given that any extra demand on our grid means an increase in gas generation it indicates to me that the gullible public and authority are being misled, due to their wrong perception that all generation is equal and solar, therefore, is a good idea.
This is a fallacy.
I'm not an expert on solar power, and this may sound a bit naive, but wouldn't it be a great idea to run a line of solar panels along the central reservation of motorways, and along both hard shoulders? At the very least they could power all the streetlights, and a lot more I would have thought.
They would also be relatively easy to clean, by some specialised vehicle tootling down the motorway rather analogous to a mechanical road sweeping vehicle, with of course suitable moving lane closure precautions behind it for safety.
Yet another advantage is that with suitable security cam coverage, which is presumably already fairly widespread on motorways, the panels would also be fairly secure against theft, or at least theft without being able to readily identify the culprits.
Solar at this sort of scale is utterly bonkers in the UK. Complete waste of money (it has virtually zero marginal value). I implore you to read Robert Idel's Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity and compare solar cost in the two places he looks at (Texas and Germany) to see the enormity of the disparity.
Solar has a lot of utility but only in the right circumstances. Supply (solar radiation) and demand (midwinter not midsummer) is uniquely awful in northern Europe (only a tiny percentage of the world's pop. is at our latitude, Chicago has two-thirds more sun than London). Ideas plausible but extortionate in most of the world such as load shifting supply to meet demand with batteries is hopeless here.
Given a choice between food and expensive electricity that can only be used during daylight hours in the summer, I'd choose food every time.
What would have been much better was a move to solar panels on supermarket car parks, farmers barns and all feasible state buildings, etc.
Using good agricultural land is an act of desperation.