Vocal Voices

They will end on April 1st next year. That is an average of about £45 a year from every household and business. It is a lot of money to take out of the system and will probably make some wind farms uneconomic to run. It is also likely to force the cancellation of some wind farms currently in the pipeline.

The news comes on the same day as E.On announced the closure of its gas fired power station at Killingholme in Lincolnshire and the loss of 500 jobs.

Both decisions will reduce the UK's generation capacity at a time when usage is going up. It begs the question: "Where is our electricity going to come from?"

A couple of years ago Ofgem predicted that our energy gap - what we generate and what we use - would fall to 2% spare capacity by this year. This latest news means that we could have a shortfall at peak periods at any time. We are currently not doing enough to replace lost capacity never mind increasing it.

12 of our 14 AGRs will close by 2024 - 10 by 2023 - and the last in 2028. Given they take about 12 years from the first sod being cut to producing electricity we should have started to replace them about four years ago.

Seems that because of the fire at Ferrybridge C, they are closing it in 2016 instead of 2023. That's another 2gw lost. The joke is that they have plans to build a biomass plant there. A whole whopping 68mw....

It's all going to come unstuck in the next two decades. I remember the 1970's and the three day week and no power. We went out and played. I wonder what kids will do in two decades time???

They need a better answer and they should have started 20 years ago due to construction times.

My favourite idea today is billion tonne artificial floating islands connected to hydraulic systems to use tidal rise fall. There is 7 hours of difference in the tide from Scotland to Lands End. Twice a day is enough for baseload power.

Not that they would do it. After all it would be ecological, economical and viable.... Along with river turbines and weirs, they could make a really good stab at renewable.

Plus direct convection hdr geothermal. But, hey, you can have wind power............

I have always thought that 'Tidal' was a great idea for the UK, after all we are surrounded by moving water!

Successive governments have failed to bite the bullet over new power stations, time and time again

One sea operated device I read about some years ago was, I think, a Norwegian idea. It was a bit like a 'Nodding Donkey' in reverse. The boom had a buoyancy tank attached to a piston plate in a cylinder anchored to the sea bed. As the tide rose and fell water in the cylinder was forced through ever smaller outlets to provide power to turn hydraulic motors, which in turn drove electrical generators. This happened on both cycles.

We have an average tidal ranges of ~11 - 12 metres around Britain's coast, though in places it is much higher. We could place 'Piston Farms' all around the coast to provide 24/7 baseload.

We really could! Will it happen? I doubt it

We had the 'Dash for gas' when our reserves were running low - what a brilliant idea that was!

We had no choice but to subsidise wind farms because everyone knew they were unpredictable, intermittent and uneconomic. They were only ever going to be really useful to even out peaks and troughs by pumping water uphill to use its potential energy to generate electricity as it flowed back down. However, we never built that infrastructure as it would have been pip-sqeakingly expensive and suitable sites are few and far between.

So we built huge offshore installations. Nice idea in peacetime, yet unprotectable in times of conflict without a massive navy... one we cannot afford.

I did the math with some help online. Because it's force x distance / time to give kwh, you need astronomical weight to deliver the same kind of baseload power when the movement is 12m, 4 times a day, over a 24 hour period.

I believe that my calculation required a chain of islands 2 miles wide round the entire coast of the UK in order to replace baseload power.

In terms of renewable power and also gravity powered power (which tidal is), it is very easy to underestimate just how incredible the amount of power is that our power stations push out.

For instance taking the most optimistic rating of 30% time availability (7.2 hours a day), for our wind turbines (in reality the UK average is much lower), if you used the most powerful turbines available and placed them at 500m intervals over every inch of the UK, you would just about replace baseload power. When the wind blew. And even then it would not work because there is such a thing as turbine shadow where the next turbine down doesn't get as much power until you are far enough away and that is more than 500m I believe.

The problem is a lack of coherent thinking. If you do _Some_ then you will get Some power. As you do each little bit, the contribution to the grid increases and the additional work required falls. With my Idea, you could prefab it. As soon as the first one goes up, the income is paying towards the next one. Etc, etc.

Never expect our politicians to make sense...

My calcs were somewhat different, but then I was not trying to replace baseload but supplement it. I was thinking more of piston pods dotted all round the coast so that as the tide moved from Scotland to the Channel there would always be some baseload

Suff the thing is we need all sorts of different technologies, including some nuclear, coal and gas, to sort the problem out. We need some breathing space and we do not have it at present.

You mentioned river turbines, weirs and hydrothermal the other day, and they have to be part of the equation as well.

The problem with our politicians is that they have put all our eggs in one basket, which, according to the proverb, is not the brightest thing to do. Go figure.

Workingman wrote:The problem with our politicians is that they have put all our eggs in one basket, which, according to the proverb, is not the brightest thing to do. Go figure.

Indeed.

I just did the calculations again. To create my island, to generate half a gigawatt hour, as baseload power, you would need an island 4km by 5km by 100m depth in the water. At that size, it would need to be incredibly strong to resist storms and heavy wind. In fact it would need a sea wall in at least 150m water.

And that is only one of the 4 generators being decommissioned at ferrybridge.

However, if you take your financial blinkers off for a few seconds, the investment is a one time plus maintenance. Once you have paid it out, your generation capacity is generally free for the next 50 to 100 years.

If we take the 75gw, as the current installed UK capacity with a max peak load in 2014 of 54gw, then you could get away with only putting a 4km wide swathe of islands down the entire length of the UK, assuming 50% efficiency. If we assume, say, 75% efficiency then it would be less.

So, yes, I would think that wind, water and geothermal would also have to play a part along with nuclear, biomass and, for emergency loads, gas and coal.

But, again, as I said, taking off the financial blinkers, making a new set of islands to ensure energy independence forever for the cost of maintenance is a long view, but, in my opinion, worth it.

Just think about all that wonderful pristine ecological space for birds, seals and other creatures...

We currently use ~ 54GW at peak. Imagine that we want to supplement baseload with a modest but guaranteed 8% capacity, 24/7; that would be 4.32GW. That's a couple of Ferrybridges plus some.

Now here's a nice little calc for micro-hydro.

You have a stream with a flow of 3 litres per second and a drop of 50 meters available. What is the gross power potential in watts ?

3 litres per second is 0.003 cubic metres per second)
Power = ( 1000 x Q x h x 9.8 x efficiency) watts.
Power = ( 1000 x 0.003 x 50 x 10 ) watts
Now multiply this result by the expected overall efficiency. (say 60%)
Power = ( 3 x 50 x 10 ) x 0.6 = 900 watts (rounded off)

Tweak the numbers a bit and it is not hard to get this up to 4 - 4.5 kW. Many current installations, the size of a double-decker bus, already provide that.

A site with an array of these would give ~4.5MW at a cost of roughly £600,000.

We would need 4,230 to get our 8% at a cost of £2.6bn, but with no fuel costs, only maintenance.

With thousands of miles of suitable river and stream flows there would be fewer installations than a wind farms and at a fraction of the cost.