The K M Links Game - March 2025 Week 4...
Quizzes & Puzzles44 mins ago
Here's What You Get For £200Bn
On days like today I like to take a glance at how electricity demand is being met. Here's what I discovered a short time ago:
A measly 1% of current demand for electricity is being met by wind generation (and solar obviously nil). And you didn't misread my heading: this has cost consumers and taxpayers a cool £200 billion. Never mind. Mr Miliband wants to spend four times as much again on what is quaintly termed "renewables". So that will bump it up to 4%.
Should Mr Miliband be encouraged? Or should he be persuaded to give up work and apply for sickness benefits because of "mental health problems"?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.“The impression you gave was the 1% costs £200 billion and claimed that four times that cost would produce 4% of renewables.”
Apologies if it wasn’t clear. The impression I’m trying to give is that the country has spent £200bn on kit which at times provides as little as 1% of the UK’s electricity demand. This is perfectly correct and if that kit is quadrupled it will provide, at times, as little as 4% of demand.
Alternative arrangements must be made to produce power during those times (which are not at all rare and even if they only occurred once a year, those arrangements must still be in place).
“You must be aware renewables does not mean only wind so that "4%" is false”
The £200bn I mentioned was solely that said to have been spent on wind power. Solar power is said to have consumed another £100bn. You may find other figures bandied about as, unsurprisingly, nobody seems to know for sure how much has been spent, but £200bn or thereabouts for wind seems to be mentioned quite frequently.
I am aware that “renewables” includes other sources. Solar produces no output at all during the night so never contributes to meeting current demand during that time (and very often produces little during daytime). The other components of renewables are hydro (which produces around 1% and is unlikely to change significanly) and “biomass” – aka burning wood in Yorkshire sourced mainly from across the Alantic. This is also unlikely to change and in any case cannot be considered “renewable” by anybody reasonably proficient in the English language.
Yes, wind and solar generated power can be stored. At present the UK has nothing like the capacity required for security of supply and neither has it sufficient excess of production in the wind and solar sectors anyway.
Of course moving to sources which are not reliant on fossil fuels is a good idea (though I am not sure that sequestrating farming land to cover with solar panels is). But Mr Miliband’s mania to completely decarbonise the grid by 2030 is never going to be achieved and there is no point in the rush anyway.
Gas will be required for many years because almost all new capacity that is being provided is unreliable. With that in mind it is beyond belief that he will not countenance the exploitation of gas from domestic sources.
NJ, the £200 billion hasn't been spent yet.
The period the government is looking at is from this year to 2030.
"We estimate that Clean Power 2030 could require around £40 billion of investment on average per year between 2025 to 2030. This includes around £30 billion of investment in generation assets per year, estimated by DESNZ, and around £10 billion of investment in electricity transmission network assets per year, estimated by NESO[footnote 2]. These estimates are in 2024 prices, undiscounted, and rounded to the nearest 10 billion. Figures include imports where inputs are purchased from overseas."
It seems odd to round to the nearest ten billion since that could be a difference of four to five billion and it's not an insignificant amount.
"NJ, the £200 billion hasn't been spent yet."
As I said, Corby, figures are hard to pin down. But the UK has more than 11,000 large wind turbines. Costs vary considerably but the minimum cost is £3m and those offshore can run to £12m each. That is just for the turbine. On top of that are infrastrucure costs (considerable for offshore installations) and maintenance.
It's quite easy to arrive at very substantial sums which have already been spent on kit which, very often, provides next to nothing..
Something like 45% of all solar panels in use in the UK are of Chinese origin. 80% of all solar panels in the World are of Chinese origin with something like 17% coming from Vietnam, Malaysia or Thailand where China has set up solar firm export hubs. These panels have, as yet, no known recycling value or even a way to dispose of them safely and have a limited life span of 25 to 30 years at best. Some fail much sooner due to poor quality manufacture. The vast majority of these Chinese solar panels are made using coal as the source of fuel for their power hungry construction. Forced labour is also used in the danger to health construction methods. The Uk is set fair to become the dumping ground for millions of these less than eco friendly, and low priced due to dubious labour force practices, after America imposed tariffs on the import of them. Milibrain will scoop them up and cover the Country with them unless he is stopped. They may well turn out to be more of a bio hazard than internal combustion engine or gas turbines with no way of disposing of them. Perhaps they will burn and we can produce electricity with them when we have none.
"Common sense alone tells me this is nonsense."
At the time of my OP it was perfectly true (which is the poin I wsa making). I provided the "Gridwatch" information to support that. Winds fell light at around 10am on 19th and wind power remained at less than 5% for almost all of that day. Many times during the night of 19th/20th March the amount It provided was less than 1%. It was not until around 11am on the 20th that it exceeded 5% again. For 24 hours wind provided less than 5% of demand - often considerably less.
"Trying to safeguard our grandchildren's future seems highly commendable to me, whatever the cost."
And do you think "decarbonising" the UK's electricity supply within five years will do anything to secure that?
"NJ is so gullible, he'll believe anything as long as it appears to confirm his Luddite views."
As I’ve said at least twice, the amount renewables provide over the course of (say) a year is not relevant to my point, which is that quite often, and for long periods, they provide next to nothing.
This country may, at some point, have installed renewable capacity to meet all demand (though I doubt very much it will be by 2030). But even if I does, there will be the periods I mentioned above where virtually no power is being produced by them. Some other source will be necessary. The only alternative sources this country has are nuclear and gas.
For considerably less than the cost of providing as much renewable capacity as Mr Miliband wants to see, it could instead have embarked on a hefty programme of nuclear power station construction which could have met all demand 24/7. But it didn’t’ for reasons that are not entirely clear, particularly as the UK was among world leaders in that technology.
As a result, that just lleaves gas to fill these gaps. That is not likely to change by 2030, however much of other people’s money Mr Miliband commits to his crusade.
My attitude is not Luddite. There is nothing wrong with moving way from fossil fuels, though the main reason is because they will eventually run out rather than anything else. But the transition needs a measured approach which is sadly lacking the current government strategy. At present all the strategy is achieving is exporting the emissions “saved” in this country to countries where they are not so prepared to jeopardise their energy security and economy.
As an aside (though quite an important one) the 6.8% of the renewable total that is produced by burning wood in Yorkshire needs to be extracted from that total. Only someone who is partial to imaginative – bordering on fraudulent - accounting would accept that practice as “renewable”.
To add to my answer about storage, that doesn’t seem to be going too well.
In 2024 UK consumers paid more than £1bn to wind turbine operators to switch their equipment off, losing an estimated 6.6 terawatt hours of electricity. These payments followed on from the £945m paid in 2022 and £779m paid in 2023.
This is because the UK lacks the infrastructure to transport the power from where it is generated to where it is required, having too few turbines where power is needed and too few where it is not.
There was no strategic control over where wind turbines proliferated and many promoters of wind farms sited them where there is most wind (in northern England and Scotland) to maximise income. When there is unusable excess they take their turbines out of service and are paid to do so. So we have the absurd situation where Scottish wind farms are paid to turn off when it’s windy, while simultaneously paying gas-power stations in the South to turn on to cope with demand.
These payments are forecast to soar to £6bn by 2030 unless changes are made. Energy providers would like the government to allow them to shift to a regional pricing system, which they say would incentivise more wind farms to be built closer to where power is needed. But this is unlikely to happen as cheaper electricity in some parts of the country would jeopardise their quest for a “net zero” grid by 2030.
The entire business is an utter fiasco and you really could not make some of it up. It requires somebody with bit more pragmatism and a lot less ideology to take it by the scruff and sort it out. Unfortunately all we are lumbered with is Mr Miliband.
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