From January 2016, another nuclear power station goes off line, closed forever never to produce power, thankfully, and with planned outages of other stations, and recent closure of Ironbridge and others we are heading for a power shortage according to media reports.

While off the coast of wirral and norht wales we have lots of lovely wind turbines, a huge solar park at Toyota in deeside and a few coal and biomass power stations locally.

Discuss.

At this point anything is

The UK needs to build stuff, but there will be short term pain because successive people have not made decisions.
Build nuclear for baseload use renewables for the rest

Build nuclear for baseload use renewables for the rest

All fine and dandy until you conclude that renewables aren’t that good at peak shaving (tidal/hydro excepted).

What we need is a bit less squeemishness about local environmental consequences and a few more big dams in Wales or the highlands.

In the short term throw up some cheap CCGT’s to deal with the peaks.

Lol plan A would be all nuclear, the renewables are just to appease the rest

Everybody is frightened of making a decision, airports, motorways, power stations, railways, it all takes years to decide on anything and mean time our infrastructure just gets more and more out of date,

turn off STW

Perhaps some proper outages will make people realise that they ought to be using less, besides wondering how to generate more?

Start getting your solar PV fitted and your house set up for no electricity.

This power shortage issue has been predicted for at least 15 years. Various governments have not taken action due to protests from vested interest or another, not least the narrow minded general public. We all want a power supply but we don’t want a wind farm, nuclear plant, solar farm, waste to energy plant, biodigester, Biomass plant, coal fire power station, gas fired power station, water mill and anything else that keeps the computers burning.

If it were me I’d have spent the last 10 years allowing all the micro generation possible rather than the diesel generators (and gas) that have just been sanctioned to take up the power gap in 2019/20.

Onshore wind is OK.

Offshore wind too expensive.

Go nuclear with hydro and tidal to top it up. River Severn Barrage would be a good start.

Just import it from elsewhere, or if it gets bad then the National Grid will tell some heavy usage industries to shut down.

There doesn’t seem to have been much of a strategic energy policy in the UK for decades, that won’t change until the lights go out IMO, as no one wants power stations situated near them, so they never get built.

Just on the Ironbridge Power Station closure..

I lived there for years, love the place.

In a recent consultation on the closure and environmental impacts, the AONB board ( and World Heritage Site Board) issued out a survey on whether the towers should be pulled down and the site returned to nature.
The overwhelming response was to keep the towers up and the rest of the site cleared and returned to nature..

For some reason (and I agree) the towers form an integral part of the valley, almost iconic.

As for the power shortfall, all I ask is you turn your TV and Kettle off when I need the power.
Cheers 😉

Thorium reactors…

Thorium reactors

mattyfez – Member
Thorium reactors…

See thats lovely, it’s a great idea. Got any plans that we can build tomorrow? See this is where we have been for too many years. Lets try this, lets try that why not the other….

Stuff needs doing today.

Part of the solution is not to keep thinking big power generation but a mix of smaller and local power generation. Have a look at what the Brighton Energy Coop is doing, this can be copied in every city town and village all over the country. Big power into the national grid is very wasteful of the power generated, though we need it we need to get ourselves closer to what we need and realise how valuable a commodity electricity is. A change in habits of when to run various items like dishwashers, washing machines etc if we used them on a windy day and we could see or were aware that power was coming from the windmill down the road.

I know I’m being a bit “in perfect world” but this sort of thing is done in other European and Scandinavian countries as well as on or two Scottish Islands.

Start getting your solar PV fitted and your house set up for no electricity.

Great, loads of electricity in the middle of the day, **** all in the evening when I get home. They don’t ‘generate all your own electricity’ as the marketing puts it, they generate electricity for someone else, and then a coal fired power station runs your TV and heating in the evening.

It’s not the worst idea ever, but people only do it because subsidies massively distorted the market. If it were actually traded on the market with the rest of the electricity it would be worth peanuts because you have no idea if you’ll have any to sell next month.

There’s actually farmers running gas powered generators feeding into the grid making money by being able to meet peaks in demand when the electricity is worth more than the gas required to run them. They then use the exhaust fumes and rejected heat to keep poly tunnels warm and photosynthesis rates high.

Lol plan A would be all nuclear,

Until when? – theres know recoverable uranium to last about 90 years at the current rate of consumption – if we increase the amount of power we produce with nuclear then we’re going to get to our next fuel crisis really very quickly indeed. Build too many and the useful life on new reactors will be shorter than the time it takes to decommission them.

So whats ‘plan A part two’? The plan for power after we’ve exhausted nuclear but still have the costs of cleaning it up?

Until when?

From January 2016, another nuclear power station goes off line, closed forever never to produce power, thankfully, and with planned outages of other stations, and recent closure of Ironbridge and others we are heading for a power shortage according to media reports.

So a 40-50 year plan A isn’t a bad idea is it? That should be enough time to get some solid stuff worked out. I love the idea of long term thinking, problem is we have been engaged in long term thinking with no doing.

You could probably reduce peak demand by 20% if we introduced variable rate pricing on an hourly basis and get people to adjust the time they do their washing / drying to when we have surples capacity.

Well Germany have just fired up a Fission reactor….

Big power into the national grid is very wasteful of the power generated

No it isn’t, and it happens to allow the country to change as demands change, as you can route the electricity where needed.

Solar isn’t great in large parts of the country. Last time I was in Ikea Glasgow they had charts showing the electricity their roof mounted solar power produced and it pretty much failed to run the shop almost everyday bar a few days in peak summer.

Have any of you seen the recent settlement information from the 2020 capacity market auction? The number of diesel engine peaking plants that have won 15 year contracts is staggering. If this continues THAT’S where our back-up power for the next 20 years is going to come from.

My view is that what’s needed, (or rather has been needed for about the last 15 years) is R&D into large capacity storage so we really could move to a large percentage of renewables without fossils back up plant.

And I’m speaking as an engineer in one of the largest CCGT plants in the country.

mattyfez – Member
Thorium reactors…

See thats lovely, it’s a great idea. Got any plans that we can build tomorrow? See this is where we have been for too many years. Lets try this, lets try that why not the other….

Stuff needs doing today.

Well the Chinese and Indians are planning to have Thorium plants running within the next 10 years. We just have to hope they are successful or we’ll be competing with billions of Chinese and Indians for the last reserves of fossil fuels.

Well Germany have just fired up a Fission reactor….

No they haven’t. They’ve not even tried it out yet, and it won’t ever produce any power.

Well Germany have just fired up a Fission reactor….

I think we’re going to need the power for more than a millionth of a second.

Nuclear. I know there are some in the industry advocating a return to fast breeders (and no not for bombs).

Well Germany have just fired up a Fission reactor….
No they haven’t. They’ve not even tried it out yet, and it won’t ever produce any power.

One of my worst nightmares is that we end up with an energy policy based on the ideas of people who don’t know the difference between fusion and fission.

Another important area for R&D is long distance transmission without significant power loss.

AEB and others have been developing some HV DC system that would allow power stations to be “shared” across timezones. You could then ensure that all the power can be used, rather than large power stations “ticking over” when nobody is using the power.

The UK has had a very successful Fusion research program for years, but it is still a long, long way away. ITER isn’t even built yet.

hammyuk – Member
Well Germany have just fired up a Fission reactor…

no they haven’t, they turned all their fission reactors off after Fukushima.

they’re working on a Fusion reactor, but then, who isn’t these days?

And as already mentioned, at best we’re decades away from the first fusion power station. we need plans that we can start building today.

These are the current GB interconnectors:

2GW to France (IFA)
1GW to the Netherlands (BritNed)
500MW to Northern Ireland (Moyle)
500MW to the Republic of Ireland (East West)

Well the Chinese and Indians are planning to have Thorium plants running within the next 10 years. We just have to hope they are successful or we’ll be competing with billions of Chinese and Indians for the last reserves of fossil fuels

So hoping for 10 years time, stuff needs to be started today to sort out the capacity problems.

footflaps – Member
You could probably reduce peak demand by 20% if we introduced variable rate pricing on an hourly basis and get people to adjust the time they do their washing / drying to when we have surplus capacity.

We do for big users, and we are into Triad warning season,

URGENT
TRIAD WARNING ALERT

This is notification that we do anticipate there could be a triad half-hour during any of the following periods:

Date: 15/12/2015
Times: 16:30 – 17:30
Periods: 34 – 35

NEWS:
Forecast demand is anticipated to reach expected triad levels at this time of year

Period 34 – 49,744 MW (Transmission system demand forecast)
Period 34 – 48,493 MW (National demand forecast)

Period 35 – 50,066 MW (Transmission system demand forecast)
Period 35 – 48,860 MW (National demand forecast)

Commentary: Despite temperatures being above seasonal normal, national demand is set to be very high.

We can get up to 18 of theses warnings between the beginning of November & the end of February, of these 18 3 are for real and if your using big numbers during those times its very expensive around £35 Kw !!
We also get charged a higher distribution cost between 14:30-19:00 about £10,000 a month over the usual energy cost for that time.

Just for reference last months bill was £91,500

dragon – Member
Big power into the national grid is very wasteful of the power generated
No it isn’t, and it happens to allow the country to change as demands change, as you can route the electricity where needed.

Sorry you are wrong have a read:
EFFICIENCY IN ELECTRICITY GENERATION – Eurelectric
http://www.eurelectric.org/Download/Download.aspx?DocumentID=13549

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/06/energy-green-politics

Just for reference last months bill was £91,500

Thats a lot of power for a house in cheshire to be using for christmas lights.

Obviously decimal point in wrong place 😳

also from a customer last week who works in turbines got me thinking about the whole energy shortage, even switched off nuclear power station take huge amounts of power just to stay safe, and Trawsfynydd and Wylva also supplied the night time power to pump water up hill at ELECTRIC MOUNTAIN, Dinorwig.

and we have 3 pumped storage facilities in north wales Stwlan, Dolgarrog, and Dinorwig

Why not just let the voltage on the grid drop as demand increases? Many countries have a mains voltage of 220V.

Yeah, let’s not worry about known significant environmental consequences in order to make a tiny improvement to a different part of the environment. Where do you plan to put these big dams anyway? We simply don’t have the natural hydro capacity to make a significant dent in our power requirements.

Nor will big dams in Wales or a Severn barrage help at all with the current crisis – if they were even being pushed forwards now they wouldn’t produce any power before the first of the new nuclear power stations. I’m far from against renewables, but the only ones which stack up are tidal (for which we have a huge capacity) and a smallish % of capacity through wind – which needs to be situated in the right places.

the only ones which stack up are tidal (for which we have a huge capacity)

So you don’t think the Severn Barrage is a good idea but you want tidal?

By tidal I assume you mean the seabed turbines?

There is a massive flaw with seabed turbines, you need to install them in very high current areas, such as the Pentland Firth. You also need big construction vessels to install the huge machines.

Heavy offshore contsuction in high current areas is EXTREMELY difficult and very expensive.

It makes far more sense to use barrages and the power of gravity.

Yep, please explain why the Severn Barrage would be environmentally poo..

Loss of wetlands for migrating birds

Loss of scouring of a large part of the estuary requiring constant dredging.

Vast amount of embedded energy in the concrete and steel.

That’s why tidal lagoons are the new plan.