Peter Miller writes in WUWT Tips and Notes:
There has been a major fire tonight at Didcot B power station in the UK – this plant provides around 3% of the country’s electricity.
In addition, an abnormal amount of the UK’s nuclear power stations are currently down for maintenance or repair.
A cold winter will bring widespread black outs in the UK and with it the long overdue realisation by the lumpen proletariat that an energy policy reliant on intermittent, unreliable, expensive wind power is totally insane.
Bishop Hill notes:
News is breaking of a major fire at the Didcot B gas fired power station in Oxfordshire. From the photos, this a big one which will put it offline for a long time. The station’s cacacity is 1300MW or thereabouts, so it represents a pretty serious erosion of the UK’s already paper-thin safety margin. Time to start praying for a mild winter.
Meanwhile:
Winter 2014 set to be ‘coldest for century’ Britain faces ARCTIC FREEZE in just weeks
WINTER 2014 is on track to be the coldest for more than a CENTURY with Britain just weeks away from a crippling ARCTIC FREEZE.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/520672/Winter-weather-2014-UK-forecast-cold-snow-November
Better hope Bardabunga doesn’t blow. Will be a cold winter if it does.
I think Bardabunga ia an acid-type volcano that produces magma rather than dust. It is less likely to “blow”.
I’m sorry, I don’t often say this, but the headline of this article is complete nonsense. It is a classic case of catastrophic thinking, something I understand skeptics here are usually quick to accuse others of. If you want to see the state of UK power supplies vs generation and where that power comes from you can monitor this site http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk .WUWT can be a a really useful site, although I fundamentally disagree with some of the ideas, but please, don’t morph into an environmental version of the Daily Mail which breathlessly announces catastrophes ever other day.
Agreed.
But I had this article as an Inverse Guardian story, not a Daily Mail-lite.
The spelling in the headline, you see.
Are you this Gareth Phillips, a Director at Policies for Sustainable Development?
If so, you are definitely part of the problem in the UK’s future energy supply, not part of its solution.
“I fear for the future of humanity in the face of climate change. If a drought in Russia can trigger the Arab Spring, then I hate to think about what prolonged variations in climate can trigger. Historically, periods of great civil unrest were triggered by poor agricultural yields, famine and hunger. Such events today spell untold misery for the people directly effected and threaten the peace and security of everyone else – including my children.”
He thinks that a drought in Russia triggered the Arab Spring?
Interesting idea.
To be honest, I think we’ve dodged the bullet on this one, in terms of losing generating capacity this winter.
Looking at the photos above, there seem to be three heat exchanger units damaged. That’s out of 16 for each of the two units on site ( a quick look at Google Maps will show you the overall installation). Assuming the damaged units can be isolated – highly likely – it’s at most going to involve a relatively small reduction in capacity at just one of the two CCGT units of Didcot B. Probably no more than 60-100MW.
The decision to run the Heysham I and Hartlepool AGRs is more significant in terms of total capacity loss – With one reactor at Heysham with one boiler out and the remainder running at lower temperatures, output from that unit is likely to be down by 30% or so – 200MW. A 20% reduction on the remaining Heysham I reactor and the two at Hartlepool amounts to 120MW/reactor – so a total reduction in capacity of about 500-600MW.
National Grid was quoted about a couple of months ago as stating there was 3-6GW of margin at anticipated peak demand, which if I remember rightly was about 57-58GW. With this, the Heysham/Hartlepool capacity reductions, the loss of a 500MW unit at Ferrybridge, and the less publicised turbine fire at Ironbridge, about 1700MW of that reserve is now not going to be available this winter.
We now look like being on system margin as low as 2.2%.
System margin as low as 2.2% seems razor thin to me, but at least there is margin. But does this calculation include all the “green” output actually working well during the winter? In other words, can we trust the figures given?
m/”But does this calculation include all the “green” output actually working well during the winter?”
No. Grid routinely gives wind a “firm rating” of about 8-10% of nameplate capacity, which is what would be used in their capacity calculation. It gives solar no capacity credit at all.
And yes, 2.2% is extremely thin.
For what it’s worth, I do expect there’ll be a number of occasions where heavy industrial users will be expected to reduce load over the winter. I don’t anticipate power cuts to domestic users though.
Each cell of the cooling tower is in parallel to its neighbour in the water system. Even if they have lost 5 cells as suggested once they have confirmed there is no damage to adjoining systems they will be able to get up an running again. As the weather gets colder the loss of the cells will probably have little or no effect given they are designed to provide full load in the summer.
Returning the damaged cells to service will take some time but I doubt this will have a lasting impact on security of supply.
They blew up three cooling towers in July this year. Google maps is out of date.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/video/2014/jul/27/didcot-power-station-cooling-towers-demolished-video
They probably regret that now!
It’s okay, we don’t need energy. Energy is a luxury, not an essential. We can live without it. Just need a few more blankets, that’s all. [/sarc]
Yes, when the power goes out I can simply throw a couple of spare blankets on my PC and stay connected to the web.
We’ve prepped for a hard black winter –
2 small gensets + 1,000 liters of fuel,
battery powered LED lighting
3x 20 liters drinking water barrels, rest of water will be rainwater/snow
always keep plenty of tinned food in (just in case)
& 2 freezers full
You forgot the 10,000 rounds of ammo. Or are you keeping that secret? 🙂
“realisation by the lumpen proletariat”
‘Scuse me! I take exception to that.
I think you’ll find that most of the bill-paying suckers that faithfully pay their electricity bills have been watching an endless procession of dimwit politicians sloping their collective shoulders on power-station renewal/replacement for several decades now. Frankly we can’t actually do anything about it: if we withhold payments we’ll get cut off, and if we vote in another set of dimwits they seem to continue the same policy. I’ve lost hope.
However, if by “lumpen proletariat” you meant the House of Commons, then please ignore the previous paragraph.
Nuclear plants typically schedule outages for refueling and maintenance in the spring and fall, particularly in the US, when the relatively mild weather (not too hot, not too cold) means less demand for electricity. October is in the middle of outage season, so it should be no surprise that several nuclear power stations are offline right now.
True. But, once an outage has started, you can’t put them back together again very quickly!
Theoretically, you could — say, in an emergency — but practically, no. It doesn’t make economic sense to do so. It’s better just to get the refueling, maintenance, and inspection over, so that the plant can run reliably until the next outage, which in the US is typically 18 months away.
Looks like 5 planned outages and 3 unplanned. Only 7 units up and running. Two are scheduled to come back online this week. Barring any unfortunate circumstances surrounding the boiler inspections, several more should be back online in the next month or so.
Regarding the margin, I understood that UK had recently made a decision to construct another unit (or 2?) at Hinkley Point. Of course, with the current rate of construction, you’re probably looking at a decade before it’s producing power.
From the outside, though, it doesn’t surprise me that UK has a thin margin. It’s a fairly small market to go installing lots of excess capacity…
rip
Who is conflagrating the problem now.
It was a cooling tower not a power generator.
They do not need all of them in the winter cold.
The winter may be cold but winter off 62 was colder.
No sun shine for 12 weeks. and the ground frozen to 3foot depth.
Water pipes frozen, water in gas pipes freezing and blocking the gas.
Diesel coagulating in fuel pipes.
People slipping and breaking bones on the accumulated ice on pavements.
Nope been there done that….. Nothing to see please move on.
http://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
Dungerness -dead
sizewell – half dead
hunsterton – half dead
heysham 1 – dead
hartleypool – dead
so reliable this nuclear stuff!!
Sizewell B
Last updated: 17 Oct 2014 13.56hrs
Generation (MW) data as at: 17 Oct 2014 11.30hrs
.Reactor 1 Turbine Generator 1
Offline
-7 MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service w/c 08-Dec-14
.Status Statutory/refuelling outage
Next statutory outage On outage
Turbine Generator 2
In service 601 MW
Status Nominal full load
Next statutory outage Oct-2014
Hunterston B Reactor 1 Turbine Generator 1
Offline -7MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service w/c 08-Dec-14
Status Statutory/refuelling outage
Next statutory outage On outage
Turbine Generator 2
In service 601 MW
Status Nominal full load
Next statutory outage Oct-2014
Hunterston B
Generation (MW) data as at 17 Oct 2014 11.30hrs
Reactor 3 Turbine Generator 7
In service 289MW
Status Low-load refuelling
Next statutory outage Oct-2015
Reactor 4 Turbine Generator 8
Offline -24MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service w/c 03-Nov-14
Status Unit shut down to address turbine bearing high vibration
Next statutory outage On outage
Heysham 1
Reactor 1 Turbine Generator 1
Offline -10MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service31-Dec-14
Status Shut down for boiler inspections
Next statutory outage Jun-2016
Reactor 2 Turbine Generator 2
Offline 0MW
Shutdown category Non planned
Expected return to service 09-Nov-14
Status Shut down for boiler inspections
Next statutory outage Apr-2015
Hartlepool
Reactor 1 Turbine Generator 1
Offline -3MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service 22-Nov-14
Status Statutory outage/boiler inspections
Next statutory outage On outage
Reactor 2 Turbine Generator 2
Offline -5MW
Shutdown category Non planned
Expected return to service 09-Nov-14
Status Shut down for boiler inspections
Next statutory outage Jan-2016
Dungeness B
Reactor 21 Turbine Generator 21
Offline -18MW
Shutdown category Planned
Expected return to service 20-Oct-14
Status Off-load refuelling
Next statutory outage Mar-2017
Reactor 22 Turbine Generator 22
Offline -18MW
Shutdown category Non planned
Expected return to service 21-Oct-14
Status Unit shut down following a boiler feed pump fault
Next statutory outage May-2015
Yes, as you highlight, they’re mostly planned shutdowns. This is the middle of outage season, when the demand for electricity (and price of electricity in a deregulated, merchant environment) is at one of its lowest points of the year.
These are old nuclear stations that should have been decommissioned years ago. The maintenance issues are hardly surprising, really.
The problem is not these shutdowns. The real problem is Tony Blair, who said in 1998 that we needed new nuclear power stations – but then prevaricated for 12 years because he would not make any difficult decisions. Tony Blair wanted to be nice to everyone, to get reelected, so refused point blank to make any difficult decisions.** So he deliberately let the nation go to pot.
Ralph
** Blair went to war in Iraq because George Bush knew about Miranda. You will need a knowledge of astronomy to work that one out.
Whilst I personally hope we DO have power cuts this winter (it’s the only way to make the bulk of the British public wake up to the situation), Richard North (EU Referendum) is constantly banging on about the considerable reserves provided by STOR. This is the cunning plan to build lots of distributed diesel & gas powered generation, and utilise the backup generators already installed in large buildings, hospitals etc. According to him there won’t be any cuts, but as far as I’m aware none of this plan has been put to the acid test yet. That moment may be getting closer!
I bought some fresh fuel and tested my small genset last week, and I’m assembling a selection of batteries & lights, plus inverters to keep fridges & freezers cold. We have gas cooking and central heating – the latter has dedicated battery, inverter & changeover switch to power the controls and pump…
I work on and around cooling towers, as did my father for many years. It’s too early (too little information is out that is correct and accurate) to make a real conclusion, but I’ll add my three cents to the discussion anyway. Just realize that they are assumptions and cautions, NOT engineering-level conclusions.
A hyperbolic cooling tower works based on the difference in expansion as the outside air is drawn in the “gap” between ground level and the tower’s round outer surface. In the gap, we place tens of thousands of linear feet of sloped boards and baffles. The outside air crosses the hot water flowing (splashing down) across these baffles , is heated up and picks up large amount of humidified/highly-ariated water drops! – then the newly warmed air heads up the inside of the cooling tower by natural draft. No large fans means a considerable power savings over the year, BUT it requires some careful combinations of average and minimum and maximum air temperatures; minimum, maximum and average air humidities; average and maximum wind speeds, nearby terrain, the required heat exchange rates needed for the water at the peaks in mid-summer and at the peaks of mid-winter. Add to the problems are the “visual” impact of large cooling towers, and they are not appropritae in many areas. In general, if a nearby river or bay is available, it is almost always the preferred heat exchange source.
A fan-driven cooler is lower, less expensive to build (but more expensive to run), less visually obnoxious, and and takes much less time to build. At higher interest rates in earlier times, the shorter construction time of a fan-driven cooling row can pay for a lot of fan motor expenses!
But, remember those boards and baffle plates in the natural draft towers? The ones that – if evr dried out – burn like crazy because of the natural draft of air flowing across them? Same thing happens in smaller, fan-driven cooling plate baffles. Their interiors and fan motors and power supplies and water systems can burn out. And, once burned, it takes a good bit of time to replace everything so it can run again. Big pipes (30 and 36 inch diameters), huge fans (10-20 meter diameter) and balanced aero-deriviative helicopter-sized blades are NOT found in your nearby WalMart or Ikia big-box stores!
If several “boxes” of a set are burned out, it is almost certain that the whole row is out until the piping can be restored. These are run in parallel to get even water temperatures back to the power plant condensers. Huge 1 meter remote controlled valves are NOT cheap, and so few cut-out valves are installed out in the row of fan-driven heat exchangers. Figure if two sets in a dual-tower cooling setup are burned, the whole half-tower is out until it is rebuilt. I could be wrong on that, but P&ID’s of power plant cooling systems are usually not web-accessible either.
Margins? You “want” to run a grid with 10% margin. You “can” run a grid theoretically with only 2% margin, if nothing else ever goes wrong any other place in the grid.
This spokesman is a typical politician – talking to other politicians for their voters through a compliant press “corpse” that has demanded green energy politics – and not design or efficiency – runs power plants.
I’ve often seen manually-operated butterfly valves at individual cooling tower cell inlets (mostly used for flow balancing) that could act as isolation valves in a pinch. It’s been awhile, but I seem to remember 10″ pipe size for the 3-5 multiple cell inlets being fed by a 30″ cooling water header.
Did they buy enough carbon credits to hold that fire? Inquiring minds want to know.
Is the UK grid truly homogenous, such that a single plant’s contribution (or lack thereof) can be described in National terms? Does this impinge the “margin” in temporal surge capacity more than the total “capacity”?
Yes. There are some constraints in transmission capacity between England and Scotland but these are well above the credible export either way; otherwise the Grid’s built and run as a single entity.
3% doesn’t seem alarming. A grid normally has way more than 3% excessive capacity, regardless.
And most of those nuclear plants have capacities not much less than the one that burned. I would doubt that they would schedule refuelings during high consumption times of the year – they almost always schedule those for Spring or Fall (it is Fall, you know). Maintenance of nuclear plants (unless an emergency) always occurs during refuleing down times and those down times aren’t typically going to last any 2 months, which is what would be required for their outputs to be missed. Skeptical about this alarmist
article.
No, not true. Well, all of your individual statements are correct, but the conclusion is not.
3% reserve IS alarming BECAUSE 3% reserve is the lowest a grid ever wants to go! The national grids want 10% reserve DURING all period including the plants down for routine and long-term maintenance. (It would like 15%-18% reserve all the time so when some of the plants go down for routine maintenance the remaining ones can support a 10% reserve.)
At 3% they have no reserve. Worse, because of the high wind capacity over there, the uncontrollable hourly and daily “ups and down” of wind generators will stress (increase the metal fatigue on conventional plants) the operating ones by forcing them up and down in excursions that break steel and castings due to thermal and too-fast heat-up rates. Thus, other breakdowns are MORE likely after long periods of low-reserve power production. And, of course, the green eco-philiacs will NOT let the thermal plants to relax emissions or air permits, so they HAVE TO shut down and restart continually during this period. More stress. More chances of additional failures.
True, all grids worldwide schedule plant outages during spring-fall when demand is lowest. Those outages are seldom less than 4 weeks, often as long as 2 months. A nuclear plant also needs major steam turbine open-and-inspect, open-and-machine, open-and-replace turbine blades, condenser tubes, oil and water pumps, etc. A generator repair period will shut down a nuke longer than a simple refueling, but without the generator upgrades, the nuke is nothing but an expensive teapot.
Power output is missed each hour a plant is down. It does not take a 2-month outage to make its impact felt.
We are not in that good a shape here in the States.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/U.S.-Utilities-Facing-Fuel-Shortage-Problems-As-Winter-Approaches.html
They run the grid in a way it is able to tolerate a power loss from a generating plant of 0.7GW or 1.8GW depending on which part of page 12 you accept:
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/88523/electricitycapacityassessment2014-fullreportfinalforpublication.pdf
The above is the official report into grid capacity etc.
Fig 3 pg 13 shows the capacity of the grid slowly reducing till next year then it starts to rise.
It seems that they are sailing very close to the wind on this, a bit of a shame really because the UK had exceptional reliability in the past.
“the UK had exceptional reliability in the past.”
But that was when it was the Central Electricity Generating Board CEGB, that was got rid of by grubby no-nothing politicians.
Politicians should never be allowed to run country’s it should be left to people with skills not 2nd rate PPEs.
Old maxim: Hope for the best – plan for the worst.
Ed Davey maxim: Hope for the best……..er…er… that’s it.
I wouldn’t leave him in charge of a whelk stall.
Do realize that a typical car puts out 50 to 90 amps at 12 VDC. (really 13.8 at full spin). That’s about 500 to 1000 Watts. Plenty to run lights and a small blower motor on a heater (furnace). I have a 1 kW inverter I bought for all of $70 that is ready to connect to the car battery in a major emergency. I travel with a 300 W inverter that is the emergency lighting / laptop / cell charger / etc. power source. Cost was about $30. For less than 1/2 a tank of gas, your vehicle becomes a very large self mobile emergency power station with a very large tank…
Andy Dawson :
you mention a turbine fire. I used to work on both gas turbine roters and steam turbine roters. even rebladed a couple of rows on one. I am a bit adrift about the term “turbine fire” please refine the term. just what burned????? the turbine roter, case or the building??????????
also for the guys that are talking percentages of power more than need in the three percent range being sufficient to keep a national grid up.
go to the website caiso.com it is maintained by the California grid operators and is quite an eye opener. it shows total power available, expected load based on calculations the day before, the hour before and actual load. (by the way they refresh the thing every 6 minutes and the best time to look at it is late in the evening west coast united states time as they refresh from zero at midnight.)
the real eyeopener is the renewable graph. it shows “current wind power, current sun power and a whole bunch of other contributers that the greenies have beaten us into.” no large hydro. that tends to upset the apple cart of politically correct statistics.
keep in mind that all of the graphs have the same scale but that the main graph is sectioned between the big boys and the weird sources because the greenies contribution is so small it won’t show up on the main graph very well.
enjoy
pk
The New England ISO has entertaining eye candy for current conditions. Check out http://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/ for current fuel mix, systems demand, and spot market pricing.
“I used to work on both gas turbine roters and steam turbine roters. even rebladed a couple of rows on one. I am a bit adrift about the term “turbine fire” please refine the term. just what burned????? the turbine roter, case or the building??????????”
mostly the hydrogen coolant in the stator.
“In addition, an abnormal amount of the UK’s nuclear power stations are currently down for maintenance or repair.”
You will embrace wind power or else!!
Thanks for the alarmism, but this is not a big deal.
Although I’m a stay at home Mom, and not an engineer, this is obvious from the newspaper report and the Aerial photos.
1 Didcot B has a capacity of 1360 megawatts. Only half, Unit 1, 680 megawatts was materially affected..
2.) Only Unit 1’s cooling tower was affected. The complex, critical parts of the station were unaffected. .
3 Unit 1’s cooling tower has15 cells, 4 were damaged. Possibly six. The station could probably run with the remaining 9, even during the summer and only suffer a 2% loss of power. During the winter, it can certainly run with 9. Indeed in the winter they likely shut down several anyway, to save the power used by the fans..
4. Its October. Power is not in great demand. They may shut all production for a week or so, just to get organized.
5 Then Unit 1 will remain shut down unit most of the cooling tower can be made operable again. The damaged cells can be repaired later.
For now, they need to demolish the remains, cart away the debris, clean out the water basin, pull and attach new power and instrument cable. If they hurry, they will be done by Christmas.
skorrent1
October 20, 2014 at 10:54 am
I believe the “idiots” referred to are those who voted in Cameron and the other CAGW religionists who brought about the current crisis. It likely includes many of the “poor pensioners”.
I assume you are not in the UK or you would realise that until recently there was zero option if you were not an AGW disciple. Only UKIP is even remotely sceptical of AGW and in many areas that is not a realistic option.
It is also unfair to blame the ordinary person when eve the BBC has become officially a brainwashing organisation for the AGW religion. How many people can undersatand the computer models to see that the claims are outrageous.
Whoops sorry I forgot you cannot edit and correct typos.
Three cooling tower cells out of a dozen. They’ll have that mess cleaned up and at least partial load inside of 2 months.