From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
From the Telegraph:
A giant net zero hydropower station is to be built on Loch Ness under Ed Miliband’s plans to shore up Britain’s energy security.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, said it was minded to approve three new net zero projects on Scotland’s lochs to help provide backup power at times when wind or solar generation falters.
The Scottish schemes will see surplus electricity from wind farms used to pump water from lowland lakes into others further uphill. Water would then be released and naturally run downhill, spinning turbines and generating power at times of need in the process.
The Loch Ness scheme is promoted by Statera, a subsidiary of Swedish investment giant EQT Infrastructure.
It would use Loch Kemp, in the hills above Loch Ness, as the upper reservoir, with a dam built to expand its capacity. Underground pipes would connect it to Loch Ness.
The Loch Ness scheme would see so much water shunted up and down the surrounding hills that levels could rise and fall by 2ft to 3ft a day. Critics say this would wreck its ecology.
Brian Shaw, the chief executive of the Ness District Salmon Fishery Board, said: “It’s absolutely crazy to have a world-renowned, iconic lake like Loch Ness subject to these harmful schemes. It will turn it into a tidal lake, damaging the shoreline ecology with the plumes of turbulent water from the pipes, damaging the water quality.”
Full story here.
Once again we see the trashing of the environment for no benefit at all.
This Lock Kemp scheme will store about 5 GWh, which will only be enough to keep the grid running for about 5 minutes. It’s half the size of Dinorwig, which plays a role in helping to meet demand at peak times.
Neither these two, nor the other pumped storage projects planned for the Scottish Islands will be of any use during a two-week Dunkelflaute.
The cost of Loch Kemp is around £1 billion, which the public will end up paying for one way or another. On top of that is the cost of constructing an underground cable to the existing Foyers Switching Station 5 miles away, creating more environmental damage.
None of these pumped storage sites would be needed if we did not have the proliferation of intermittent wind power.
All this insane environmental destruction to “save” a climate construct that nobody actually lives in.
Scotty, beam me up!
Captain, sensors detect no intelligent life on this planet.
The village must be destroyed to save it. /sarc
1 billion? And the rest.
Maybe it comes with a bullet train option?
It’s always a million miles from where it’s needed and they will destroy the loch to save… the planet.
Has Nessie been consulted? Scottish citizens need to insist upon consultation with its most famous reptile.
Shouldn’t an ‘endangerment study‘ be completed first???
they already did and concluded that if it is not built it will endanger their bank accounts.
Someone would actually have to see her first.
Not so. There are areas forbidden to use because someone claimed to have seen an endangered salamander there 15 years before.
I think they spoke to that other reptile, Miliband.
Has it been established to be a reptile? Not a big eel? More (government funded) research is needed and perhaps as usefully spent as on net zero for the UK.
“Nessie” sightings are most likely Greenland sharks who occasionally find their way into the loch from the North Sea. The combination of scaleless skin, large size, and a small easily missed dorsal fin makes it easy to mistake for something monstrous in the water.
Love the picture.
Finally a headpost image that’s not AI!
Yes I wonder who took it?
Bigfoot when he was on vacation.
Elvis, Adolf, and JFK were there too.
Sounds like Snowy Hydro I & II in Australia. Expensive boondoggle.
Nessie appears to have her “You say what?!” face on.
More like “We are not amused!”
Oh, I thought Naomi Oreskes was taking a dip.
You really have the hots for her.
I try not to look that closely, but I’m pretty sure her neck isn’t that long.
Once again, we absolutely must destroy the planet to save earth.
See link https://lochkempstorage.co.uk/
After some research, it seems that the proposed Loch Kemp storage system might be able to supply about 250MW for around 10 hours, or a higher output for a shorter period. The cost of building such a facility would be in the £1.5BN to £3.0BN range. Not sure this would be good value for money.
Output rate is limited to turbine capacity. Is that specified?
If it lasts as long as the original pumped storage system at Ffestiniog it will be good value for money. I visited the Ffestiniog Power Station at Tanygrisiau when I was at grammar school in the mid-60s not long after it was opened, it’s still going strong. The nearby Trawsfynydd nuclear power station which was opened about the same time was closed down in 1991.
Ffestiniog sure wasn’t build to use wind and solar..
It was built purely to make sure the local Trawsfynydd nuclear power station and other local COAL fired power stations, could keep operating all day at a reasonable level when demand was low.
It uses 39% more electricity (when pumping the water back up to the Llyn Stwlan) than it actually produces.
I visited Ffestiniog itself (twice), you apparently just looked it up on Wikipedia! The extra energy provided by the hydro is at an efficiency of just over 70% compared with the 30% efficiency of a coal plant operating at high load, at lower load the coal plant is even less efficient. Consequently operating the plant at higher load at night and using that extra output to pump the water up to the higher reservoir so that extra electricity can be generated at high efficiency when demand peaks is economically sound.
“…might be able to supply about 250MW for around 10 hours…” and if pigs had wings they might be able to fly. Why is it that with today’s technology and engineering expertise when it comes to renewables it’s always guesses and using nameplate capacities instead of real world usage?
It is dispatchable at nameplate capacity as long as the upper reservoir water lasts. Just like a battery where the MW nameplate is the maximum discharge rate.
The generation would immediately start to decrease as the level decreases in Loch Kemp. Hydro generation is based on the height difference between the two water bodies.
The notoriously turbid water in Loch Ness could hardly be made worse by water plumes. If even 1 foot of water level change is somehow damaging the ecology, how that that ultra-sensitive system survive wind and waves? Is there no wind in Scotland?
What does all that turbidity do to water pumps?
Not much. Wastewater plants have pumps designed to pump sludge.
Turbidity is small particles suspended in the water. Some of those particles are living critters.
I’d be more concerned about introducing critters to the receiving waters that aren’t native to them.
Wind can drop the water level and then raise it 2-3 feet a day?
It shows the cost of storage.
Net zero power station.
In a disturbing sort of way, that makes sense.
On average, it produces no power.
That’s because, in physics, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ultimately, pumped-storage schemes are not even a zero-sum game.
But I suppose that this will be using remotely-generated power that’s got nowhere to go to generate more power that’s got nowhere to go and thus using up some of it in the process.
In general, pumped storage systems lose some 20-40% of the power needed to pump the water into them.
“planned for the Scottish Islands”
Did you perhaps mean, “Scottish Highlands”?
Mmmmmm, slight difference.
Note that pumped storage consumes 20-30% of energy throughput. Not cheap.
How is this going to produce electricity? Loch Ness is not a river they can dam. Will take huge amounts of electricity to pump water up to higher lochs. This is nothing more than blatant stupidity, and destructive of the local ecology they claim to be the sole protectors of.
It is standard pumped hydro storage, used all over the world. The loch links to the North Sea via the River Ness, which flows through Inverness. I can’t comment on the particulars of this plan, but pumped hydro makes a lot of sense where there is cheap excess power at times of low load and a need for rapidly available peaking power at times of high load, and the location is good. In the US, such facilities were built to use mostly nuclear power overnight. I suspect the pumped hydro in Scotland started out the same way.
“cheap excess power” No such thing.
When nuclear power was more common and plants ran flat out 95% of the time, yes, there was cheap excess power overnight. Now, we have shut down so much baseload capacity that there probably isn’t cheap excess power in very many places.
Stop playing childish word games, that is how climatards and environtards have screwed up energy production, agriculture and manufacturing.
A loch is open to the open sea and the floor is at the level of the sea bed – deep.
There can be no natural lochs side by side with significantly different tidal levels. The LOCKS are artificial enclosed sections of waterway which go from an upper level of a waterfall or dam down in steps to the waterway at the bottom.
I know what a lock is, and what a loch is. The only point that matters is the massive amount of electricity required to pump water from lower level to higher level in order to produce a TINY amount of electricity. You can’t pedantic your way out of the climatard hole you are standing in.
You should look up some of the pumped hydro storage facilities around the world and check out the stats.
Again, expending a vast amount of electricity to pump water up hill to let it run down hill to produce a tiny amount of electricity is stupid. Build gas, coal, nuclear and REAL hydro electric generation plants and stop playing childish word games.
No one but you is playing “childish word games”. Pumped hydro storage is a real life technology that works well in right settings. It has been around for 50 years. If you took the time to educate yourself instead of insulting people you would look less like a fool.
Expending a vast amount of electricity to pump water up hill to let it run down hill to produce a tiny amount of electricity is stupid. That it has been done a long time does not change how stupid it is. But hey! Stuck on stupid it is.
“Again, expending a vast amount of electricity to pump water up hill to let it run down hill to produce a tiny amount of electricity is stupid.”
Yes it would be, but that’s not what’s happening! You’re producing some excess energy at peak efficiency at times of lower demand to pump the water up to the reservoir in order to generate almost the same amount of electricity at a high rate at periods of peak demand.
Oh, Gawd! The stupid, it burns. Too bad it can’t be harnessed for something useful.
“The Scottish schemes will see surplus electricity from wind farms used to pump water from lowland lakes into others further uphill.”
If the wind mills are nearby to the loch, would a windmill driven pump be more efficient than an electric pump?
Likely not as the wind turbine is on top of the mountain while the pump is way down at the lower reservoir. You would need a shaft drive hundreds of feet long.
Some years ago, here on this site, there was an article on using windmills to pump water–lots of water–out of Dutch polders. It wasn’t strong enough or fast enough, and the Dutch engineers ended up using huge steam driven pumps. As I recall, the pumps (one or more) are in a museum in Haarlem (?) and the polders in question are now runways for Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.
I’m not against pumped hydro storage but am curious about how long it takes to fill the planned reservoir and how long it takes to empty it to the unusable stage. It seems like a one shot deal in time of need and when needed to refill isn’t that the same time it needs to produce electricity?
It all depends on the size of the reservoir and the size of the turbines.
“This Lock Kemp scheme will store about 5 GWh, which will only be enough to keep the grid running for about 5 minutes.” And how long to refill/recharge the reservoir is what I’m curious about. Yes it’s like a battery, but batteries have recharge cycles/times. Like I said, it’s a one shot deal in time of need at a huge expense and environment damage.
It would not be expected to keep the entire grid running for any amount of time; it would be expected to augment baseload power when there is a shortfall. The projects I worked on were designed to recharge at night (low load) and discharge at peak times. It is very site specific and case specific. The reason one project did not go through was that the finances did not work. The cost to purchase off-peak power was too high and the price to sell peak power was too low.
It is like a battery not a generator. A storage system.
The pumped hydro system I referred to above, Ffestiniog power station, has been operating since the mid-60s, it typically pumps uphill for ~6 hrs at night and generates at times of peak demand for ~4 hrs. It also has the advantage of being able to respond very rapidly to sudden changes in demand, an extra ~350 MW of power in less than a minute.
So Mad Ed wants to become the Loch Ness Monster? Once again, our midwit and halfwit climate “elites” make decisions that any self respecting Hollywood screenwriter would sneer at as too improbable by far!
Just get Trump to say, “It’s a great idea, I love it.” That’ll be be the end of it.
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
Dinorwig wasn’t built for intermittent sources, it was built for permanent high output sources – basically to let nuclear stations be run flat out all the time, then used to in-fill load fluctuations caused by sudden high demand. My engineering mentors were the engineers who designed and specified Dinorwig. Its a very impressive piece of engineering
Definition of “brain fart.”
Someone comes up with what is touted as a brilliant, original idea.
Someone else takes it and rushes to build/implement it.
Nowhere in the process is any critical thinking applied.
While this may not be the case here, if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck…
There are so many, many better ways to generate the needed electricity that do not obliterate the environment, I suspect that definition applies.
Idiocy, clearly, has no bounds. Einstein was right.
When the wind farm crew was telling everyone how cheap wind power is did they ever consider the cost of this?
I know the answer. I see it all of the time. Someone wants capital for a pet project. They understate costs knowing that they will become sunk costs at some point and any additional costs not included at the original estimate will appear incrementally sufficient to continue the project.
If this was included at the start you never would have pursued it. End result; the higher cost has been locked in.
The big difference, though, is these “pet project pursuers” can get fired when costs greatly overrun what was originally sold. Government pinheads never get fired.
When I was a junior engineer I worked on a pump storage project. It had a 900′ vertical shaft 36′ in diameter (with a 2500′ horizontal shaft out to the pump/turbines). Some loon decided it had to be inspected to close the contract. I was the only one willing to be lowered down the 900′ shaft. It was fun.
Did you have to go all the way to the wicket gates for each penstock?
Government must get out of the energy production and transmission business. They really suck at it.