From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-by-fuel-type
Electricity demand peaked even higher yesterday evening at nearly 48 GW, and with low winds today, power supply will be tight again tonight.
We will no doubt muddle through again, but nobody in the media seems to be pointing to the elephant in the room; the fact that demand for electricity will start to rise rapidly as we transition to heat pumps and EVs.
The Future Energy Scenarios, published by the National Grid last year, projected that peak demand would rise to 65 GW in 2030, and 81 GW come 2035:
https://www.neso.energy/publications/future-energy-scenarios-fes
Even with both the 9 GW of interconnector capacity and our full CCGT fleet working flat out, we would be lucky to get 50 GW currently. (On Tuesday I/C s ran at about 6 GW because of outages).
Yet there are no plans to build new gas capacity, the output from Hinkley C will barely offset the shut down of older nuclear plant and extra wind capacity planned could only supply a couple of GW at most on a windless day like today.
And this will not simply be a matter of an odd hour of peak demand. The FES already assumes that a lot of demand smoothing will take place, EVs charging at night and so on, so the daily range will be much less than now.
In the last 24 hours, demand has averaged 39 GW. On a pro-rata basis, that 81 GW in 2035 is likely to be at least 67 GW.
According to the FES calculations, for instance, in 2035 residential heat pumps will draw 40 TWh a year, about 8 TWh a month in winter. That works out at 11 GW , and probably a lot more in really cold weather. And that assumes they are run evenly over 24 hours a day, an optimistic assumption.
EVs will also add significantly to electricity demand during off peak.
It is therefore likely that daily demand will exceed 70 GW in cold weather. While pumped storage and batteries might help out for an hour or two in early evening, they will need recharging afterwards, so will contribute nothing over 24 hour periods.
Instead we will still need at least 70 GW of dispatchable generating capacity.
At the moment we barely have 40 GW.
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That is the policy, energy from anywhere but here.
“energy from anywhere but here.”
Trouble is, that if every state does that… there will no no electricity from anywhere.
And almost EVERY STATE has already adopted that way of thinking.
“Even if We can’t produce it here, someone can somewhere and we can procure it from them”
Whatever state recovers it’s senses first, is going to make a killing selling reliable power to everyone else.
France is already there with its fleet of nuclear plants.
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No kidding, so your solar panels and windmills will have to do double duty during the day.
Which means you will have to have twice as many.
What’s going to happen when someone decides to build an AI Data Center?
They won’t. Means lost jobs building it and running it. Lost to elsewhere in Europe?
With luck, this may turn out to be the straw that breaks the anti-CO2’s back.
Exactly- something never mentioned by the greens and the MSM.
Double Duty won’t necessarily be required just Dedicated Facilities (overcapacity) for recharging batteries and pumped storage
“Over capacity” or “Double Duty” just exactly what
is the difference beside there isn’t any difference?
We have to keep repeating the quiet part out loud – every aspect of ‘green’ energy relies on ‘fossil’ fuels.
YES! And yet the greens deny it.
It is therefore likely that daily demand will exceed 70 GW in cold weather.
I think it is pretty cold in Nottinghamshire now. Daughter just sent me this snap of a swan trying to find a bit of water on the Retford Canal.
Nice clear blue sky day for the solar panels though.
On a winter sunny day at our latitude solar produces very little. Around 3% of the daily total.
Net Zero is insane.
Especially when you consider that nations like China and India and others will offset any CO2 reductions made by the UK.
The UK is bankrupting itself for no good reason.
The only solution to reduce CO2 and not go bankrupt, is for rabid CO2-phobes to go with nuclear power plants, and forget the windmills and solar.
But, of course, reducing CO2 is also insane. We need a campaign to get more CO2 into the atmosphere, to generate more plant growth.
I agree, but something has to be done to get the CO2-phobes off the windmills and solar, which are a cancer to the electrical grid. Nuclear fits their bill.
The CO2-phobes are in control. They need an alternative to windmills and solar.
The alternative is for the US to buy Greenland to ship refugees and green/woke folks
A true bargain.
No AC required.
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Instead of waiting in warm Mexico, they get to wait in cold Greenland for processing a few years, before being shipped back to their countries.
.
That would stop a lot of them from even considering coming to the US
Increasing CO2 by 100% Reduces Radiative Cooling to Space by an Imperceptible 1%
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/increasing-co2-by-100-reduces-radiative-cooling-to-space-by-an
By van Wijngaarden and Happer
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Clouds and Upward and Downward IR Radiation
Clouds have a large effect on upward IR radiation from the Earth surface.
Greenhouse gases also have this effect, but to a much smaller extent
For example, during clear skies, if CO2 ppm were to instantly double, upward IR radiation would increase by only 1%
During cloudy skies, downward IR radiation from clouds is about 340 W/m^2,
During clear skies, downward IR radiation is about 260 W/m^2
Why all the fuss about CO2
We need much more of it
We Are in a CO2 Famine
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/we-are-in-a-co2-famine
By Willem Post
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Atmospheric CO2 ppm, human plus natural, it is near the lowest level in 600 million years.
Highly subsidized CO2 sequestering schemes and Net Zero by 2050 schemes are super-expensive, ineffective suicide programs.
Crops in open fields, with CO2 at 420 ppm, require fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and much machinery to have high yields/acre.
Crops in greenhouses, with CO2 at 1200 ppm, require minimal chemicals, have 2 to 3 times higher yields/acre
https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-dioxide/increased-plant-productivity-the-first-key-benefit-of-atmospheric-co2-enrichment/
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Plants are on a starvation diet with CO2 at 420 ppm
The image shows plant growth at 420 ppm; at 420 +150; at 420 +300; at 420+450
Always a great image.
Fortunately it will only be “Disinformation” for 10 more days.
It’s a very old experiment. At the time, AMB, or ambient, was about 350ppm if I recall correctly. Today’s ambient falls somewhere between the first two pictures.
“The alternative is for the US to buy Greenland to ship refugees and green/woke folks
A true bargain.
No AC required.
.
Instead of waiting in warm Mexico, they get to wait in cold Greenland for processing a few years, before being shipped back to their countries.”
There’s a good idea! 🙂
The U.S. already has Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to hold law breakers, and Texas is voluteering a lot of land to be used for corraling border law breakers.
The cold treatment would be the best, though.
Even with such a sudden change in direction on the generation side, building enough nuclear generation by 2030, or 2035 is probably not possible.
,
It is perfectly possible if the political will is there and te country were put on a wartime footing. It should be possible to do 5-6 small nuclear plants a year or more, and smacking up emergency gas plants is not that hard either.
Once poeole realise that renewables are a blind alley, and simply reject them, we can do what is needed.
But they are running massive propaganda campaigns. Only one party rejects them, and that is Reform
If nothing else, the safety regulator will stop this happening. For each nuclear power station, there are years of regulations to be addressed; they may not be completed before Hinckley goes live. The next one, Sizewell, is close to identical to Hinckley but, because it is in a different place and adjacent to another sort of power station, it will also take many years of work to satisfy the regulator. This will also apply to new, small modular power stations – the fact that they are small will not, I think, stop them having to satisfy the full panoply of safety requirements.
Then, better start ASAP.
How long does it take to get a windmill farm up and running? Not overnight, that’s for sure.
Building one nuclear reactor will be the equivalent of building a lot of windmill farms.
Miliband et al’s idea of going green involves a lot of needless self-flagellation – for the lower orders, that is.
Silly strat! It’s not needless, it’s the entire point. Surely it’s obvious even to millibrain that little Blighty isn’t going to affect global CO2 concentration in any sort of a meaningful way.
Wrong!
“The UK is bankrupting itself for no good reason.”
The UK is bankrupting itself for very good reasons..to show how politicians make useless administrators and even worse employ jobsworths to prove it.
‘While pumped storage and batteries might help out for an hour or two in early evening,….’
An hour or two? We need a week at least, if you are going Net Zero.
We have been given a warning that there is only about a week’s storage of gas in Britain at present.
Can you imagine the panic if we only had enough gas to help out for an hour or two?
It might come to that with this lot.
Yeah, they have the UK on the verge of blackouts right now, and the weather isn’t even that extreme.
The next arctic cold blast may be more than the UK grid can handle.
Don’t feel too bad in the UK though, these CO2-phobes are even putting American electrical grids in danger because of this insane desire to replace reliable power generation with windmills and solar. The UK is not the only place where fools are in charge.
I’d say our fools are “world class”.
I would have to agree, but our fools are coming up fast! 🙂
I did a back of a fag packet calculation based on a news article recently on a newly approved BESS in Scotland
£800mm for 2 hours.
So lets assume if we have a grid outage it takes 12 hours to restore supply
So we need 800mm x 3 = £2.4 billion – for 4.5mm homes.
There are around 30,000,000 homes in the UK.
So – to keep the lights on we need to spend 2.4billion x 6.6 = £15.8 billion pounds.
This is before we consider the standby power requirements for factories, hospitals, other public use buildings……
There are no grid-scale battery solutions that make any kind of sense
now – if the supposition is we need 7 days supply we need £15.8 x 2 x 7 = £221 Billion
not.going.to.happen
We are governed not by leaders or responsible and experienced followers of excellence, but by virtue signalling idiots who really cannot do even basic adding up let alone common sense. Starmer is current idiot in chief with plenty of other morons in Westminster ready to take over.
They have been warned and still they carry on ‘saving the planet’ like the gormless idiots they are. This isn’t going to end well.
We have a technocratic-managerialist lawyer in charge. He does rules and regulations, he doesn’t do politics as we know it.
Story Tip: This morning CNN.com has introduced a new climate change term. They first state that “California is uniquely susceptible to the worst of what human caused climate change is throwing at us”, then comment on the flooding in Feb 2024, then the drought in late 2024, then describe this with the new term “WEATHER WHIPLASH”.
Greens love a bit of S & M…
Especially the two pound black-ribbed nobbler.
Weather Whiplash – yet another ‘disaster’ term to do eyerolls to, then forget.
Well as with all things that are fiddled with by the ArtStudent™ and political classes, they will continue to Believe until it fucks up, royally. And people vote in some party with the guts and ability to tackle the real problems.
In the case of the UK, Miliband is likely to bring about that sea-change.
If the fool would persist in his folly, (and Miliband is the greatest fool this side of Jane Fonda) he would become wise…
Sigh, Unfortunately we will have to sit back and suffer while he does…
“And people vote in some party with the guts and ability to tackle the real problems.” Haha.., Its never going to happen. Parties are the problem. They will never be the solution. Their absence is though, that sanity may reign.
Britain’s Net Zero experiment is CRUMBLING before our eyes | MGUY Australia
“The UK grid is barely coping with cold weather, no sun, and no wind. Without reliable base load power, the grid is propped up by foreign gas…”
I’ve been watching MGUY’s channel lately. He’s a UK engineer now in Australia.
It might be crumbling but there’s no change in policy and there isn’t going to be any change in policy.
Answers on a postcard….
Wait until after the second power outage…there will be a change then
I sincerely hope so
I think at least one United States electrical grid is barely coping with keeping the lights on.
The Southwest Power Pool operator said the other day that they think they will have sufficient electricity available for the current winter storm depending on how the wind behaves! So I assume that if the wind does not behave properly, there is going to be trouble on the grid.
And this particular winter storm is fairly mild. There’s a lot of snow, but the temperatures are not bad, in the 20F to 35F range. Yet we are on the verge of a big problem if the wind doesn’t blow.
What kind of condition is our grid going to be in when the inevitable arctic cold front comes sinking down into the United States? The way the operators are talking, they won’t be able to handle it.
Last summer the SPP operator put out an alert saying they thought they could handle the hot temperatures, but would have trouble if the temperatures were hotter. Those hot temperatures they were referring to were in the range of 105F for a couple of days. This is fairly mild summer weather for this area. It’s not unusual for us to get temperatures in the 110F to 115F range and they last for more than a couple of days. It doesn’t sound to me like my grid is going to be able to function in extreme weather, the way it was able to do before the introduction of windmills and solar.
These damn CO2-phobe fools have all of us on the verge of electrical blackouts.
Woodburning stoves and home generators are in my future. I’m not depending on fools to keep me warm or cool.
Ground source heat pumps YES. Air source NO.
Depends on where you live. Current technology air source heat pumps do a pretty good job heating your house if the temperature is above 40F. They are completely worthless when the air temp gets below 30F without auxiliary heating. Florida, the Gulf Coast and maritime California work.
When all of the 13,246,000 terrace houses in the UK have a heat pump and switch them on in a winter cold spell they may be able to hear the racket in France 🙂
Heat pumps will work in inland SoCal as well, especially if the house has some thermal mass.
There are a lot of circumstances where even ground source heat pumps are of no use.
If the ground water is too deep, or the average size of the lots is too small. Especially true in large apartment complexes.
The UK wind/solar penetration is about 30%.
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At that point, most grids have difficulties maintaining balance, because the wind/solar output is constantly changing in large amounts, especially when it is windy and sunny
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The rest of the electrical system finds it harder and harder to keep up, meaning the whole system becomes less and less efficient, and the electricity price, c/kWh, plus bull manure taxes, fees, and surcharges, goes up EXPONENTIALLY.
.
There are many learned articles on that subject, which show the numbers trend
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I, an energy systems analyst, now retired, predicted that in 2000, when Merkel, who should have known better, PhD in Physics, revealed her super-expensive, disastrous, ENEGIEWENDE, that, after huge investments, and endless trials and tribulations, STURM UND DRANG, and chaos, and blackouts, finally gave Germany, the golden fleece award, the highest electricity prices in Europe
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The UK is right up there with Germany.
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NOTE:
Merkel recently criticized the decision to abandon Russian gas, but she is the main cause of Germany’s present malaise, because:
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1) she and Sarkosy and Poroshenko and Zelensky, etc., had no intention of implementing the Minsk Agreements, which were an extremely good deal for Ukraine, which is now ruined,
2) she shut down the nuclear plants, and
3) she was a big promoter of the super-expensive, disastrous ENERGIEWENDE.
4) she was a big promoter of “refugees” from all over, which set up cultural clashes, crazy people driving trucks into shoppers during Christmas time, and social/economic/political unrest to the point of rendering Germany ungovernable and dysfunctional.
..
In an interview with France 2 TV in December, she called the past arrangement a “win-win situation,” saying it provided Germany with low-cost energy, which is a bold-faced lie, because Germany has the highest electric rates in Europe.
.
She thinks we suffer of amnesia
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/merkel-ruined-germany-ukraine-conflict-hitlerian-censorship-key
Interesting. Maybe no-one had any intention of complying with the Minsk agreements, they were just used by both sides to buy time. “In an interview to Semen Pegov in 2024 former head of DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] Alexander Borodai explained that, in military terms, the Russian intervention in Ukraine should have started already in 2014 but Russia was not ready for that in economic, military and propaganda sense, which is why Russia entered the Minsk Agreements with no intention of complying, but it gave it time to prepare the full-scale invasion.”. From Wikipedia, so needs checking, but DPR doesn’t speak for Ukraine..
We in the US are going to get at least one more intense, wide spread arctic blast in January. It appears it will cover most of the US and we are talking very low temps for a few days. If we make it through this one, at least this winter will be sustainable. Hopefully we do and with a change in Federal policy, we can start to build the baseline up and get out of the woods.
Sorry…
EVs will not add “Off Peak” demand for electricity.
EVs will add nighttime “Peak Shifting” demand for electricity.
Sorry,
EVs will add a nightmare to the grid, and
impoverish EV drivers, and
impoverish the rest of us who are forced to support the EV drivers with huge federal/state subsidies and
public charging systems, and
no interest loans to battery businesses, and
EV manufactures.
An economic nightmare that would debilitate the US economy
Given there are 40M existing vehicles in the UK and likely 42M by 2030 replacing them all with EVs will create a new overnight demand timeline as 1/7th plug in every night. 42M x 1/7th is 6M charging every night. That’s 6M – 60-80KWh battery packs recharging every night to recharge every car weekly. This equates to overnight demand increasing by 360,000,000 – 480,000,000KWh (360-480GWh) new overnight demand every night to recharge 1/7th of the proposed EVs with a 1 to 1 replacement.
That’s just private vehicles
Then there’s …
Busses
Taxis
Commercial Vans
Semi Trucks
Farm Vehicles
Business Vehicles
Fire Trucks
Ambulances
Police Cars
Utility Vehicles
Commercial Fleets
Etc..
During the winter, night time is already the peak.
Yes it is but the nighttime peak won’t decline at 11pm not until 3 or 4 am
UK citizens should not ruin their lives worrying about blackouts
Think positive
A blackout is an adventure
A blackout will lower your electricity bill
A blackout will reduce CO2 emissions
CO2 emissions are very dangerous
Scientists say CO2 emissions will kill your dog
If you love you dog, you will hope for a UK blackout
Electricity is overrated
The UK had no electricity in 1850
There is no record of people in 1850 complaining that they had no electricity. People were tough back then. Now they worry about almost everything: Blackouts, CO2, Russians, Keir Starmer, Ed Miliband, King Chuckles, etc.
Elect Reform leaders and get rid of those Labour Losers to make the UK great again.
Snark…Snark…Snark…SNARKGASM
It is less and less clear that EVs are going to be the wave of the future, regardless of what PMC/elitist governments want.
From a recent Mark Miller talk at Hillsdale College:
1) The 1000 pound battery in a Tesla requires 500,000 pounds of rock to be moved and processed. The processing and moving, including shipping over seas, all involve fossil fuels.
2) Because of the above as well as large amounts of power in building the batteries themselves, the range of possible emissions from an EV is very wide with the upper end being more emissions than an ICE vehicle over its lifetime. There is reason to believe that the actual emissions are closer to the upper end than the lower, because China is the largest builder of EV batteries and also the largest coal burning nation.
3) While many people think electricity is cheaper to move than fossil fuels, reality is the opposite. Due to massive capital and overhead costs, electricity is 5x to 10x more expensive to move than the same energy via fossil fuels.
4) EV “exponential growth” is bullshit. The advent of the sports car in the form of the Mustang was 100x faster than EVs. So were mini-vans. So were SUVs. And all of these occurred without subsidies.
5) EV subsidies go primarily to wealthy people using EVs as a second or third or fourth car. This is stupid. 30% of vehicle emissions come from 10% of the drivers – the vast, vast majority of these are not wealthy people but tradespeople and salespeople. Subsidizing them to use lower emissions vehicles is far more sensible.
A Mustang is not a sports car, a Triumph Spitfire was a sports car.
I am not old enough to know firsthand, but it seems to me that a Mustang was a sports car compared to what else was for sale at the time. The Corvette, the Thunderbird etc etc were basically 2 seater convertibles. The Triumph 1960 Herald may have been fast but looks pretty rickety.
Never mind ev’s and heat pumps, it’s data centres and AI that are going to bury the current grid.
They require steady power, as from nuclear, definitely not highly subsidized, dysfunctional wind and solar.
That is why, in-the-know, realistic business people are building their own power plants, as in Germany, etc.
Not highly publicized, because it would rain on the wind, solar, EV, heat pump, bull manure government/media hyped parade
No surprise there after all it looks like here in the US most politicians are failed lawyers, and the reason they got a law degree was they were bad at math. Even simple arithmetic eludes them. My guess much the same for the UK.
Decades ago, I had a friend, now dead, who was a lawyer, studying for his MBA
His verbal scores were above 95 percentile, my verbal scores were 65, but my math scores were 95, and his 65.
Lawyers and engineers just are opposite people
Never on the same wavelength, except when BS-ing
Very nice Paul. Remove subsidies, tax preferences, mandates and let people use what works best for them.