U.K. Electrical Demand High.

Well, it does mean that, sort of !

There is in fact a little more leeway than the above suggests. Wind power though inherently very variable can in practice provide 1Gw reliably, it is often a great deal more than 1Gw (7.5 Gw right now) it is however very rare for wind power to drop below 1Gw at this time of year.

Imports can also be relied upon to a degree, cables suffer damage and the converters break, but it is virtually unknown for ALL the import capacity to fail at the same time.

Given that on a good day more than 1/4 of our generation can be from  these unreliable sources and that demand can be cut back from certain industrial customers almost at the touch of a button, it is not as perhaps as precarious as it sounds.

None the less we are at or near  the point where a loss of one large power station or a couple of interconnectors would indeed be a serious matter . As the older coal and nuclear stations get dismantled or mothballed, the reserve capacity of traditional generation is  certainly reducing.

It is quite fun to see where in GW the amber line used to be even just five years ago, Red is the new Amber...
Archive snapshot of December 2014 - 5 years ago not quite to the day...

Indeed, but the max available from coal now, is less than the level they were running on that day, that represented only about 50% of the peak coal  capacity back then, and the whole country amber warning, running out of power, was about 10GW higher than the equivalent warning threshold today. Luckily demand is below either figure.


All I am saying is that there has been a lot of change of available generation mix in the last 5 years, and the trend will continue for the next, and the limits will move too. Phasing out coal will look like a picnic compared to the pain to start phasing out the gas turbines, but I am very sure that day will come.

I think you are being over optomistic Mike. Switching off Industrial customers is a big deal, and I know because I used to work for one. They will not do it until every one is sure that our backup generators had the full load and were stable, phased and happy. The cost to them if there was a problem was very high because you could pretty much write off a days production and perhaps another day to fix the problems. In fact we used to run on diesel every afternoon in parallel with the mains anyway because the voltage was usually low otherwise. In the amber region there is a big risk of grid failure if a station drops out, or anything happens to the supergrid like a cable breakage due to an aircraft accident. The risk may seem small, but a 5 GW change would probably be sufficient. The weather is quite good at the moment but if there was a problem and we had some more snow the situation could easily get out of control. We need a great deal more nuclear to get the situation under control, but that is probably 20 years away. Welcome to green Britain.

davezawadi:

We need a great deal more nuclear to get the situation under control, but that is probably 20 years away. Welcome to green Britain.

Good job Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are  back on the agenda then

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/smr-export-market-rolls-royce-consortium/


Regards


OMS

 

I am not sure what fraction of the current load is supplied under interruptible contracts, but the fact the rates exist and are a significant fraction of the firm rates, not almost give away, suggest there is an appetite for it in some businesses. Equally, any industry that loses any production under loss of power should be on a firm contract, not an interruptible one.

I can imagine that companies offering all day parking with car charging with hi/lo current rates would be an expanding area that should be added to that sort of load management pricing regime.

I also agree, we need more generation and if we are to be reliant on wind, sun and rain, then also more storage, and in really serious amounts, equivalent to days of generation, removing traditional capacity and not replacing it is unwise.


It is telling (see another post today) that at some US car charging stations they are adding very large local batteries (the Tesa offering is the Megapack, the building block unit is about 3 megawatt-hrs worth of Lithium cells and a megawatt of 3 phase inverter ! ) to augment the incoming supply as a demand smoothing measure, and by the look of it, it is not really working well enough.



edit  megapack article

And the price of lithium is rocketing $9000 / tonne for Li2CO3.

OMS


I did suggest on another forum that it might be a good idea to consider using the nice packaged units made by Rolls Royce for the Queen be used for land based generation.I was soundly condemned as being daft. Given this is now being considered could I be now considered as a visionary?

John Peckham:

OMS


I did suggest on another forum that it might be a good idea to consider using the nice packaged units made by Rolls Royce for the Queen be used for land based generation.I was soundly condemned as being daft. Given this is now being considered could I be now considered as a visionary?

Visionary ? not really John - we've played about with SMR's for a few decades or more - as you say engines for boats minus the boats ?

https://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/18021450.small-nuclear-power-station-consortium-targeting-cumbrian-sites/


Regards


OMS