We have just had a period where wind energy plummeted leading at least in part to sky high energy prices and twelve energy companies going out of business.
We ought to do both, and the two together likely won’t be enough to sate current demand, so more than that: electricity is about a fifth of total energy use in the UK at the moment.
Yes, because Hinkley Point C was such an unmitigated success.
It will be interesting to see how the UK actually plans on executing this.
The only plausible way forward would be to duplicate Hinkley Point C basically (the 2nd phase has come in much cheaper than the first as they were able to reuse design and gained knowledge), but that would mean the UK energy industry is run by the Chinese and the French.
I’m not sure if Global Britain is actually prepared for that.
As an advocate for nuclear power, it amazed me that the UK gave EDF the go-ahead for Hinkley C given the Finnish experience (11 billion euros, about 3x the original budget and getting on for 10 years late) with the same reactor design. At least Olkiluto is sort-of producing power now.
Oh, and EDF in the UK really are the pits. Why anyone pays over the odds to use them is beyond me (it may be different for industrial users, but for consumers it's hard to imagine there's a worse choice). At least they won't go bust [0] being goverment backed.
OL3 is not yet producing power, apparently turbines didn't like spending a decade waiting for use and need some maintenance. Current estimation is that reactor will be started in January 2022 and regular electricity production will start in March.
The UK didn't put all their nuclear eggs in the EDF basket, it's just that the other companies offering to build new nuclear plants were even more of a disaster than EDF. At least they managed to actually complete a reactor build recently; if I remember rightly the other candidates went bankrupt.
It is regrettable that industry could not do better. But I can see some sense from the government perspective. Ultimately you get a big investment in British industry. And eventually a very reliable baseload generator. And people will blame the electricity companies for high prices not the government. And ideally the next build is at a lower strike price. Offshore wind was also very expensive in the early days but now has much lower strike prices. Ultimately the biggest hurdle to development is commercial risk and electricy prices need to match with that risk. Better to pay a lot than pretend that nuclear is super cheap. The UK energy sector is never going to be cheap! But it maybe can get less risky and cheaper.
The UK should build dozens of Rolls Royce SMRs each year, and setup a factory line for them with multiple in simultaneous construction. If we value our civilization, we would be building hundreds of units a year for use across the Western world.
470MW per unit, 2 years to build, 2 years to install. 1.8 billion pounds each. With just 64 units, combined with some renewables and storage (ideally allowing EVs to smart charge/discharge based on grid conditions), the UK would be completely energy secure for 115billion pounds.
As someone pointed out before on HN, various NATO countries, US especially, churn out small reactors for their navies, apparently with great success. These reactors are built on time, roughly in budget, work, and aren’t failing all over the place.
That’s a fair few data points showing that SMRs ought to be very viable. Just... not here yet :)
The navies also use fuel enriched up to the level of a nuclear weapon, supposedly about 97% for the US navy [0] making more energy dense designs possible. Weapons-grade are usually said to be above 90%. Wouldn't want those reactors placed in unstable regions.
The Wikipedia article is worth a read for some considerations [0]. If you haven't read section 3 of the Navy's Applied Engineering Principles manual [1], that's a good place to start thinking about what highly enriched uranium buys you in your core design. To my knowledge, you can't really read about the many safety systems attached to and around the Navy reactors.
> but that would mean the UK energy industry is run by the Chinese and the French.
Traditionally, the UK has had no qualms about letting foreign companies run key industries. As long as they get run cheaply, the government and the consumers are happy.
Oh, this needs to be made into a caricature: "After the completing the Brexit plan without any meltdown, I pledge to solve the climate challenge in the same way!"
Yes France has a large Nuclear infrastructure and much of that is comming close to end of life. They are actively trying to get the EU to recognise Nuclear fission to be recognised as a green energy supply. If they can't achieve that then they will risk falling foul of the EU renewable/green targets - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/70/renewa...
So without that, getting projects going and export of energy (of which France does more than most) all hang upon fission getting that green label approved by the EU.
Equally hydrogen may well prove a very economical method of storing electricity and for Nuclear plants (both types) the ability to turn them off and on per demand is something they can't do. So the ability to store that excess in off-peak in hydrogen and then converting back on-demand into electricity does seem like a viable solution if cheaper alternatives are not available. Not sure how they cost compare with lake dam energy storage - though that storage option for on-demand production is not cheap and equally limited by topography and land along with ecological impacts. So lots of hidden costs and upfront costs for those.
Macron announced doubling down on nuclear because a poll said 51% of people were in favor of it. But don't forget this is Macron, he can say the contrary at any time, especially if a new poll say a majority of voters are against it. So don't bet too much money on it.
He let Fessenheim (one nuclear plant) close one year ago. And the nuclear plants he announced are a new kind of plants that we don't know how to create yet. (And he refuses to take position to open new plants with the current technology)
Fusion reactors activate their structure and can leak tritium gas which is a nuclear contaminant.
Any fusion practical designs will require a liquid lithium cooling blanket that will breed the necessary quantities of tritium. They therefore share the weakness of other metal-cooled fast breeder reactors, which have proven exceptionally difficult to operate, since the highly reactive coolant will catch fire or explode upon contact with water or air.
Since the coolant is radiologically active, any such 'nuclear' incident will be regarded by the press and population just as bad as the Monju issues or the Superphenix.
I suspect many will be on the fence looking at how fusion goes as that's getting closer and closer each day and once that becomes a reality in your energy grid production - fission will fall out of favour like a stone.
Fusion is getting slightly closer every 20 years. A fusion power plant approaching anything like a fission power plant's output is still at the very least 30 years away (EUROfusion's timeline says 2051). And that will probably be the most expensive power plant in history, even ignoring all the money poured into ITER.
That gives at least 100 years before Fusion can become a major part of power generation in any significant part of the world, and this is assuming current projects achieve all their milestones on time, which historically is extremely unlikely. And this also assumes that it's even possible to reduce the cost of a ten million kelvin plasma held in place by 12 kelvin superconducting magnets, covered in a pool of liquid lithium.
The parent compliments one apparent position ("rationality") and insults another, which only inflames conversation. What are these positions? Who specifically is saying what, specifically? What is your analysis?
I get that it's cool to demean certain kinds of activists, if the implicit point is about trendiness.
France only has nuclear plants because they were built a long time ago. Except the EPR in Flamanville, there is no other projects to build nuclear plants. And they closed one, one year ago (The ones announced by Macron, are just politic tactic to gain votes in the next election, and are not real yet).
Their goal is 50% nuclear by 2035. From an economical point of view that's probably better than trying to keep todays levels, since they have to replace some old plants with newer ones and then the economics no longer make sense. Hence Macrons political move towards SMRs.
I disagree, France is being completely rational here. There is a better mix of power that is possible now than in the 1970s, because of technology advancements. A lot has happened in the past 50 years.
It's a demonstration of rationality? No one builds new nuclear power plants because they can not compete on price. Hinkley Point C will produce power at $145/MWh. That is crazy. At that kind of price point, you are better off building an interconnect to Norway and straight up importing hydro power.
Think about the kind of lifetime and investment that comes with nuclear. You start a new plant project today. It might produce power in 15 years, for some 30+ years to make it economical. Who the fuck wants to bet $20B+ on solar not supplanting our entire power generation within some 45 years?
Because that is what you are saying: build new nuclear, because even half a century from now, we won't have the storage technology to make solar and wind work. That's the bet.
Yes, because current cost is not set in stone and with mass production cost goes down. With removing redundant regulation, cost goes down. With inherently safe reactor designs cost goes down. I bet that if coal plants hand to offset the environmental externalities, it would be way more expensive. Setting the price from that plant is like saying that reusable rockets could not be competitive because the space shuttle was more expensive than the non-reusable alternatives.
And, even if I am wrong and really, nuclear is more expensive, so what? Compared to the alternative of having our societies collapsing because of climate change, a 3x on the price of energy would be money _very_ well spent.
Also, if nuclear really is that non performant, it would be _awesome_ for renewables. They would actually be attractive economically and we would see more of them, not less.
Kill hidrocarbons all together. Leave the free market so sort out the alternative if you really care about cost.
Nuclear is the one way to solve carbon emissions with nothing but money. Renewables, storage etc, these are not quite solved problems. But we could just throw money at nuclear and get it done. The world was once building reactors like there’s no tomorrow, surely we could restart that.
Yeah it’s expensive but so is sea level rise and dealing with hurricanes.
And safety? Pollution from burning coal kills so many people every year, I’m slowly beginning to think nuclear safety is a bit if a non issue, even it a plant blows up every now and then.
One thing I will object to though - the claim that "one way to solve carbon emissions with nothing but money" - mostly because money is a proxy for human effort and physical resources. "Just money" is not really a thing, at least how I see it. An human effort is a great thing to spent and physical resources as well, but there is a cutoff point where "just money" doesn't cut it, because the underlying resource that money is supposed to buy is simply not enough of around. But that is not the case with nuclear energy. So sorry for the deviation.
I guess it depends on how you price reliability. Solar is cheaper but then factor in the cost of storing solar for 24 hours and it stops looking cheaper. Of course if you are OK with the power not being reliable then you don't need the battery.
> At that kind of price point, you are better off building an interconnect to Norway and straight up importing hydro power
Except there isn't enough hydro power in Norway to replace France's nuclear production, so looking at the current spot price of a non-scalable resource like hydro doesn't tell you much. That's the problem with hydro -- there are only so many resources to exploit. I'm also not going to touch how you value energy independence, but there is a value to it. Of course importing oil is not energy independent, but you can import oil from many countries, so that is more resilient than a fixed interconnect to Norway.
What France could do is try importing LNG or coal or oil, but if the restriction is low carbon power, then you are stuck with nuclear or having the lights go out. This reality is why Germany is importing gas and using coal, and complaining about nuclear isn't going to change that reality.
> factor in the cost of storing solar for 24 hours and it stops looking cheaper.
Engineering research on grid-scale storage has barely begun. It's really no more than ten years old, except for pumped hydro. Before that it was just ideas and concept studies.
Already storage is cheaper than gas peaker plants for some short-run uses according to Lazard.
And there are some promising, cheap technologies for other uses (longer duration): iron-air batteries, aluminium-air batteries, latent heat and sensible heat storage (air liquefaction; hot rocks), various flow batteries.
Look at the trends, not what the costs were two years ago. Once someone starts to look into this stuff properly, the costs go down quickly.
Edit: and if the perovskite R&D comes up with the goods, we'll have dual-layer (2x output) PV panels for the same cost (or less) as single-layer Si panels.
Hinckley Point does not need to be economic by far. It is more about nuclear weapons. UK as a country needs a new reactor to keep its nuclear arsenal. They made that clever deal to let the energy market subsidize the military.
The U.K. didn’t start down the nuclear path because of environmental issues, it went that way because it (a) wanted atomic weapons, and later (b) the power struggle between coal mining trade unions and the Thatcher Conservative government (the strikes were part of broader issues at the time, but nuclear energy was part of the response to that).
I’ve read the suggestion that the anti-nuclear-power activism in the west was stoked by the USSR precisely because of (a). No idea how true that is.
Anti-nuclear opposition was indeed primarily against nuclear weapons, until Chernobyl. But the idea that it was backed by the USSR is without substance, a slur that's always made against anyone vaguely left wing without substantiation.
The aim was bilateral (or occasionally unilateral) disarmament, because at that time we were all worried that the world might be destroyed at four minutes notice. The long slow problem of global warming was a lot further away.
Even today, this is why nobody likes the Iranian nuclear programme, and why Israel airstriked an earlier Iranian reactor.
It's a shame UK left EU. All help would be welcome against Germany's lobby to continue burning fossil fuels and spewing the resulting GHGs into atmosphere. If they had been still in, I'm sure UK would have stood with France, nine other EU countries, and the various expert groups' assessments for classifying nuclear power in the EU sustainable taxonomy.
On a trip to a school in Bristol, southwest England, Johnson told baffled schoolchildren: "I promise to get world leaders to cut greenhouse gases and save the planet."
He later held up a signed, leaf-shaped piece of paper on which he had written his pledge.
Whatever the outcome, I'll be very happy to hear about Johnson's pledge after the COP...
I'm pretty sure parent is being sarcastic. Boris Johnson is the guy who literally goes 'uh, I think' when asked how many children he has[0]. He's not big on commitments of any kind.
[0]: for the record, it's supposed to be six, but some people say seven.
this is for me is a net plus. children of politicians (even how many) should not be a thing, and i’m actually very impressed that when faced with so many questions regarding his children, over so many years, this politician chose the high road. very few choose this route (see basically the whole US establishment).
I sympathise with your desire to separate the private and the public, but where somebody is a deadbeat dad to the point that they seem genuinely unsure how many kids they have, you would question whether they are responsible enough for the job, even if they weren't as feckless and flippant as Boris Johnson.
As conservative prime ministers go, he'd be one of the better ones in recent memory if it wasn't for awful timing. The UK had about twice the death toll as france and germany in the last couple of years, and it's hard not to blame that on Boris, and those around Boris, essentially being the wrong guys for the job. When it's serious, you need serious people making the decisions, and I don't think anybody, Boris included, genuinely thinks he's a serious person.
Failing to turn up to 5 COBRA meetings on the bounce could account for Johnson's failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation he was dealing with. Preferring to be spoonfed reassuring pap armchair experts like like Cummings show a clear lack of judgement.
Well, yeah. He's clearly not a particularly technically-minded or diligent kind of person. I don't think anybody thinks he is, Dominic Cummings said that BJ is actually pretty conscious and self-aware about this.
I think the UK was kind of a perfect storm where Boris was both the least suited prime minister for a crisis in recent history, and the british state resources were really depleted after a decade of austerity - which also wasn't particularly good for the health of vulnerable people in general.
I'm not really particularly anti-Boris specifically, though. The nice thing about him is he clearly doesn't really care about politics. He's not a hardcore ideologue like Osbourne, or Javid, or even Blair. He's just interested in ratings, polling, and power. So I think his political program is probably better than Cameron's was, for instance, just because he's a populist, and the british public generally has more common sense than the british elite.
In general, a useless head of state isn't too bad, if you have a good state apparatus that gets all the real work done while they basically entertain the public. That's what Boris was supposed to be. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and a majority of the people surrounding him turned out to be morons.
And that'll make Europe dependent on Russia. Doesn't sound much of a problem to me but down here, Putin is seen as a somewhat bad person. So, Europe will have to bow to him to have not too expensive gas, I'll have a lot of fun hearing our politicians telling that, poor them, they have to negotiate with him :-)
On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them and fosters cooperation in other areas. Germany doesn't buy the US narrative that Russia should be treated with hostility at all costs.
> On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them
No, it doesn't.
Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.
The CDU has a wing that still depends on old coal-burners for their jobs. Shutting down nuclear was their idea of keeping those folks “working” for longer while solar and (especially) wind were spooled up.
To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.
renewables are not big enough in a huge industrial and developed country like Germany
Hysterical shutdown of nuclear plants following Fukushima lead to the gap being covered by fossil fuels
also while US have very cheap gas from the domestic industry, Europe is constrained by a couple of pipelines and shipments and market fluctuations, so it didn't replace coal
Your charts show lignite holding stable, hard coal declining, nuclear declining, natural gas increasing slightly, and renewables expanding tremendously.
Renewables provided 45% of Germany's power production in 2020, and 41% in 2021 H1.
More recently Germany has become a NIMBY country when it comes to building more wind power. From the outside it appears a lot of the easy wins have already taken place for wind in Germany, and once they began building closer to residential areas, people have gotten increasingly upset about it:
"Wind power is Germany's most important source of clean energy. But wind turbines have become contentious here, as more and more people protest against them being built near where they live."
"Germany has set some of the most ambitious goals of any nation for shifting from fossil fuels to greener energy. Now the centerpiece of that push—onshore wind power—is slumping, prompting the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the bankruptcies of wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers. Wind power, often seen as a clean, abundant energy source, has faced growing bureaucratic hurdles and acrimony in communities out to block the erection of new turbines. "
They are compared to all the countries bigger than them. But compared to other Western European countries, not so much.
Merkel’s CDU has been popular because they offered stability, but there’s an understanding in Germany now that the country has fallen behind in critical areas like car electrification and grid storage technologies.
No, but people love their misinformation (in both directions). Coal and gas are slowly going down in Germany. Germany built a new coal plant 6 years ago only to shut it down this year. The real problem is that renewables aren't being built fast enough.
This development is probably only feasible because UK left EU. EU has too much debate going on to be pragmatic about solving the climate challenge. They are blind with renewables (which are all good, but will take 3x or 4x more decades to develop) to actually fix the climate.
Oh yeah, blame "nuclear", the science, for a mistake of a socialist regime.
* One one side no regulation, people living in fear of their superiors, money being drawn and sent to compete on the race to the moon and other reasons.
* On the other side "nuclear", which is based on science, and had about 6 decades of evolution in safety, regulations, etc. since Chernobyl was first built.
That was exactly what I was referring to when I said the EU is blind to science. And, yes, I read 2 papers and watched many videos, as well as follow the news for about the last 5 years of the safe confinement construction. I still hold the same opinion as my original comment.
> The Heat and Building Strategy, to be published alongside the wider net zero review, will include a new 2035 target for a ban on fitting new domestic gas boilers.
Man, I'm glad this is included but the scientific reality is that we need to move much much faster than this.
For reference, even if we perfectly replaced every gas furnace at the end of its functional life starting today with a non-polluting heat pump, we'd still be on track for 2 degrees of warming.
We need gas bans on new houses NOW or at the VERY least create major up-front discounts for heat pumps.
Why is a ban on gas furnaces so important, when you can burn coal in your stove and oil for heating and both are still very common (at least here in germany)?
I thought gas is way better than coal or oil, because it burns cleaner?
Totally agreed! But for me I'd love to strike the word "eventually" from the sentence. At this point we're in such deep shit that we have to move more quickly than "eventually" in my opinion. :)
It's far better to emit NO pollutants in your home (and cars!) than to emit less, especially since polluting home infrastructure is replaced every ~15 years and pollutes for its entire lifetime.
Here in France, most furnaces are electric, a few use gas, and some stovetops use gas but they are becoming more rare, as it's cheaper to simply not include gas in a building.
It's very surprising to me that people are still burning coal in their home, outside of very rural areas. Same thing with oil (except with cars of course).
Ah, in the US gas is the most common and I'm not sure about the UK — just going off what the article mentioned.
But yeah, my understanding is that burning gas in your home produces less CO2 than burning coal or oil, but they ALL pollute (and gas often has methane leaks from pipelines which is worse for warming than CO2). Whereas a heat pump emits nothing, is ~3x more efficient than gas combustion, and will increasingly cause no emissions as the grid is powered by renewables.
It's far better to emit NO pollutants in your home (and cars!) than to emit less, especially since polluting home infrastructure is replaced every ~15 years and pollutes for its entire lifetime.
Are all properties suitable for a heat pump though? That's the question. My understanding is they are basically aircon units running in reverse, which means outside heat radiators?
If you can't fit a heat pump, resistive heating should work fine, but it will be more expensive to run. It would obviously put more load on your renewable grid, so you'd want to put heatpumps wherever possible, but at least it's better than burning gas/oil/coal for heat.
> Are all properties suitable for a heat pump though? That's the question.
Generally, yes, but of course it always depends on specific circumstances.
Read up on heat pumps! They're really cool. And yes they're like air conditioning units that can cool and also heat. In addition to heat pump space heating there are also heat pump hot water heaters and heat pump clothes driers and it seems both are more efficient and non-polluting.
It feels magical that they can pull heat from outside in the winter, but that's what they do! The more recent units can even do it in very cold temperatures.
Residential coal heating is extremely rare in the US[0], to the point where it occasionally gets a human interest story whenever a reporter runs into someone who uses coal. Most of America uses gas, some newer buildings and the south uses electricity, and wood handily outnumbers coal. The roughest equivalent we have here is oil heating, which is really only common in the northeast. It’s my understanding that that’s being phased out, because it’s unpleasant to live with.
I don’t even know where I’d go to buy coal, to be honest. For most of America the closest we get to the stuff is a charcoal grill.
0 - 130,000 households two years ago, half in Pennsylvania.
"I don’t even know where I’d go to buy coal, to be honest. For most of America the closest we get to the stuff is a charcoal grill."
Well here in germany in winter time, you can buy 10 kg packs in allmost every supermarket. Probably a side effect of the still big ongoing open coal mining.
But its gotten quite rare in comparison, when I was a child, it was common for many houses, to have coal in the basement and regular getting a truck for resupply. Now it is mostly for additional heat.
That’s genuinely shocking and horrifying to me. Outside of coal mining areas, it’s viewed as a dirty and inferior fuel here in America. The idea of there being just stacks of the stuff where I buy my food is pretty hard to accept for me.
Outside of a specialist delivery company (“high quality bituminous”, heh), I’d have to travel to a feed & seed store in the nearby farm country to buy coal for heating ($9 for a 40lb bag of anthracite). They’re out of stock, but it’s not clear to me if that’s because of supply chain issues, or because nobody ever actually wants it in my area.
Meanwhile firewood is super easy to get. It’s available everywhere, including in huge stacks outside our grocery stores. I can even buy it from my city at $90 a cord, but it needs to be split.
It is. I lived in a small town in a river valley some years ago: you couldn't open the windows in late afternoon, when everyone started to burn their dirty fires.
You say that, but the EPA has been slowly tightening emission rules for wood burning stoves. Just this year the EPA is beginning to reduce the allowable soot emissions for stoves from 4.5g/h down to 2.0g/h. Old stoves are obviously a problem, but they’re getting measurably better with time.
The model I’m considering purchasing has an actual catalytic converter in it, just like a car, to ensure combustion is as complete as possible.
Unless you can wave a magic wand and make alternative sources of energy sufficiently cheaper (or make people sufficiently richer, two sides of the same coin really) people are going to heat with wood where that is economically favorable.
"The government is at present drawing up plans to subsidise electric pumps with grants of £5,000 for air source heat pumps and £6,000 for ground source heat pumps."
Right now seems to be a perfect time to announce such large subsidies on heat pump installations. For two reasons:
1. A lot of people in the UK have actually had their savings grow because of covid. Not being able to spend on holidays and going out etc (I realise some have not fared so well).
2. The current crisis in gas.
I think they're going to be swamped with people who want to take advantage of this. I don't think they're going to be able to keep up with the demand. I'm personally going to be on top of it as soon as it becomes available.
Not to get you depressed, but given the amount of momentum involved there is absolutely no way we will meet our climate targets. It's game over on that front, the best you can hope for is damage limitation.
That I agree with. But the illusion that we're going to get through this unscathed if we all just pull together is at this point in time more harmful than helpful.
I'd add to that that we're already scathed! The higher temperatures have already affected the oceans, wildfires, droughts, and increased intensity for weather patterns like hurricanes.
A further alternative to heat pumps is hydrogen fired boilers. Heat pumps work well in well insulated houses, with large radiators, which aren't attributes of much existing UK housing.
Boiler manufacturers are already designing hydrogen boilers. The question is, how much existing infrastructure can be used to transport hydrogen.
I think we should be able to get to 20% hydrogen at least sooner rather than later, which is being supported by modern boilers.
Why do you say heat pumps only work in well insulated houses with large radiators? Heat pumps are ~3x as efficient as the best gas furnaces so why would you need a better insulated house?
Also, the problem with hydrogen is how do you produce it? Probably with renewable energy, right? So why would you waste all that energy converting from renewable electricity to hydrogen then burning hydrogen (which is not super efficient anyway)? Might as well just use the renewables to power your heat pump. Plus, heat pumps already work at scale whereas hydrogen needs a lot more work before it's ready for primetime.
> Why do you say heat pumps only work in well insulated houses with large radiators?
Because heat pumps operate at a lower flow temperature than boilers. Smaller radiators designed to operate at hotter temperatures won't bring your house up to the target heat temperature operating at lower temperatures. They often need replacing. [1]
Trials of heat pumps in existing UK housing have found it difficult giving away heat pumps for free, because of all the extra work required for them to operate properly in the house. [2]
> Heat pumps are ~3x as efficient as the best gas furnaces so why would you need a better insulated house?
Heat pumps in comparison to conventional boilers are meant to be on all the time at a lower temperature, as they take a long time to bring a house up to target temperature.
They depend on good insulation, otherwise the heat never accumulates, similar to if you leave a freezer door ajar, it will never freeze.
> So why would you waste all that energy converting from renewable electricity to hydrogen then burning hydrogen (which is not super efficient anyway)?
At times, renewable energy drives electricity prices negative. We haven't got many ways to store this when it happens, converting water to hydrogen would be a good candidate, which can be delivered using existing gas infrastructure.
> Plus, heat pumps already work at scale
Not in existing UK housing, which would require major changes (insulation, underfloor heating, larger radiators), before they work.
Yeah, so your argument assumes that retrofitting radiators with heat pumps is the only way to install. Not true! You left out mini-splits which efficiently heat rooms and have the added benefit of being less expensive and disruptive to homes than under-floor heating.
The reality is that we don't have time to wait on unproven technologies like hydrogen boilers (which gas boiler companies are using to try to delay their inevitable demise). We don't have time to wait on an non-existing hydrogen infrastructure. Despite what you say, heat pumps are working at scale today around the world and individuals can go buy them now and successfully heat and cool their homes.
But hey, I'm not a fundamentalist — whatever works! We need all solutions very fast in order to mitigate damage. If part of that is hydrogen then great! It just seems unlikely to scale at the required rate.
> Yeah, so your argument assumes that retrofitting radiators with heat pumps is the only way to install
It's not an argument, I'm just relaying what heat pump installers need to change in order for the pumps to work.
The system also needs to provide hot water.
> The reality is that we don't have time to wait on unproven technologies like hydrogen boilers
They're not unproven, 20pc hydrogen ready boilers are being sold today.
> Despite what you say, heat pumps are working at scale today around the world and individuals can go buy them now and successfully heat and cool their homes.
That some people have used heat pumps to successfully heat their homes was never disputed.
They're just not the panacea they are made out to be for UK housing.
For a poorly insulated house, it's better to fix the insulation than to do lossy and expensive conversion to/from hydrogen, not to mention investment in storage or transport, when at the end of the day the expensive hydrogen will be mostly wasted due to lack of insulation (costing yet more of the expensive hydrogen).
Conversion to hydrogen need not be expensive. In the UK sometimes electricity prices turn negative on very windy days, and hydrogen can be stored.
Pilot schemes are already using hydrogen blend with gas using existing infrastructure. [1]
I've nothing against more insulation, but the UK has a lot of old housing, which isn't always easy to insulate to heat pump standards. In particular areas where the weather is often driving rain, cavity wall insulation can destroy the house. [2]
Good thing the gas price spike has concentrated minds.
My parents live in France. They have to replace their 40 year old gas furnace, and were originally planning on replacing it with a 30% more efficient condensation gas furnace, but the French government gave them subsidies for a heat pump instead. They get heating that is powered by stable French nuclear power and are not exposed to volatile natural gas prices, the French reduce their dependency on gas imports from the distasteful Algerian, Qatari or Russian governments, everyone wins.
It's still work in progress. Finding the installers wasn't hard, but my parents are old and the options are complex, so it took them a while to select the vendor and heat pump.
Right now they are awaiting government approval for their application (it's been very popular and they are swamped, and even had to increase the budget allocation). They also had to do preliminaries like upgrade their electrical connection and add 3-phase wiring in the home, as well as build a concrete platform outside the house to stand the heat pump on.
The heat pump itself should be a drop-in replacement that uses the existing hot water radiators (which means it can't be used as A/C, unfortunately).
Between this and gas boiler bans I can only assume bojo is trying to sink green targets by setting unrealistic, intentionally unaffordable and very unpopular ones.
Good. Bloody good in fact. If we can get ahead of everyone in making the Rolls Royce SMRs we could sell them to the rest of the world and maybe have some hi-tech high skill jobs in the UK.
Nuclear still makes sense now. We can't just aim to have our current electricity needs be filled by renewables, we need to plan for even more electricity for vehicles and industrial processes that currently depend on fossil fuels. Not to mention the large amount of residential furnace and water heaters that also depend on fossil fuels. And if we're ever going to start really sequestering carbon, having excess energy from nuclear is going to help a ton.
Carbon sequestration makes more sense for intermittently-available renewables since it can happen when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and doesn't need massive battery storage otherwise.
Nuclear makes much more sense for base load electric needs for homes and industry.
Carbon sequestration is inefficient if you are doing it on diffuse CO2 in the air, as opposed to a concentrated stream from an industrial process like a cement factory. Battery electric storage, or redox flow batteries, or even hydrogen are more likely to work in remote locations.
Boris Johnson isn't doing it because it makes sense, but for political benefits. Who benefits? Who is making money?
10 years ago I thought nuclear was the clear answer - that we should do a moon-shot style massive project to develop a new generation of reactors and build them worldwide. I'm not against nuclear.
But there's an important political dimension also, and to talk as if it's decided on technological merits is to implicitly spread the BS.
Because it works, today. Sure, it's hard to build and expensive, but that's much better than being nonexistent as grid-scale "green" technology is today.
I think you've got that reversed. Grid scale wind solar and storage are dominating all new equipment on the grid. Check out the interconnection queue for ERCOT or PJM, the few competitive markets where there's public information like that, and where the choices are made purely based on profit, rather than the preferred whims of crafty utility executives that get guaranteed profits and don't have to pay for bad capital allocations.
In contrast, new nuclear is nearly impossible to build. Nobody even wants to attempt to build it unless they get massive blank checks from governments to backstop all the massive cost overruns. Even China, the one country that has the capability to build big things still, is only building a tiny tiny fraction of nuclear in comparison to their massive renewables builds.
Building new nuclear in the UK means either going with designs that have proven to be very difficult to construct, like the EPR, or going with completely unproven SMR designs, that are the last ditch effort to save nuclear as an energy source.
> Under the scheme, households will be charged for the cost of the plant via an energy levy long before it begins generating electricity, which could take a decade or more from when the final investment decision is taken.
Hinkley C is up past 15 years construction time, £22Bn build cost and £50Bn electricity purchase guarantee (profit subsidised by the taxpayer in some way). Compared to how many solar panel MW you can buy on the open market at consumer prices for that money, it's terrible value for money, ignoring winter base load concerns anyway.
We're going to have to have Chinese expertise come in and build them for us. "[China] has 38 nuclear power reactors in operation and 19 under construction. It has increased its number of operating reactors by more than ten times since 2000 and plans to bring five units into commercial operation this year alone." - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/how-china-has-become-th... [2017]
No matter how cheap solar power is on paper, it's not much use in keeping British homes heated over the winter - solar panels reliably produce zero power after sunset and relatively little overall due to the shorter days in winter and higher latitude. Any realistic plan for going carbon-neutral has to deal with that issue.
Storage will be plentiful in most homes in the future, at least those with cars. A 50kWh battery will provide several days worth of electricity, even when powering a heat pump in the winter. And if batteries are cheap enough to be in cars and idle 95%-99% of the time, they are definitely going to be cheap enough for daily usage on the grid.
Already, in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage attached to the same inverters as the solar panels. Batteries are on an exponential learning curve for cost. It's not hard to see where the future will be.
Additionally, a mixture of both offshore wind solar will be close enough to provide all of the UK's needs.
If you go and redo David MacKay's energy scenarios for the UK from Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, and use modern costs, the all renewable scenarios look pretty great. If nuclear can chip in and reduce some storage needs during a week long wind lull, that would be great too. But at this point in time we can't depend upon new nuclear to contribute anything to our immediate needs for climate solutions. Game day is here, now, and we have to play with the team of players we have currently.
A country’s energy policy cannot be predicated on vaporware energy storage technology that is “just around the corner”. The UK is pretty good on renewables due to wind power, but this year’s relatively low wind combined with gas price spikes has put the country in a very difficult position.
It's not "just around the corner," it is shipping today and scaling.
It's quite ironic to call shipping storage systems, from the MWh scale to GWh scale, installed all around the globe, "vapor ware" while not pointing out that nobody has ever even shipped an SMR.
This sort of double standard when it comes to evaluating technology has been the source of so much bad capital allocation over the next decade.
But, if you are willing to call storage vapor ware, I will be sure to call SMRs that from now on.
> "Any realistic plan for going carbon-neutral has to deal with that issue."
That's true, but unbuilt nuclear power dreams can't keep homes heated either. We almost can't build nuclear plants. We almost can't politically or socially agree to build them, we almost can't fund them, we can't keep the costs reasonable, we can't keep them to budget or on-target with construction times.
Look at the history of nuclear power in the UK:
Trawsfynydd construction began in July 1959 and both reactors were online by March 1965 with works finished in 1968, for £103M. Bank of England inflation calculator puts that at ~£2.5Bn in today's money.
Sizewell B was first announced in 1969, design reworked in 1974, design reworked and announced in 1980, had a public enquiry from 1982 to 1985, started construction in 1988, finished on schedule in 7 years for £2Bn which is ~£5.8Bn in today's money.
In 2008 the UK gov said new nuclear plants could be built for £2.8Bn. The chairman of EO.N said it could be as much as £4.8Bn.
Hinkley C was announced along with seven other sites in 2010, EDF said the construction cost would be £16Bn in 2012, electricity strike price set at £6Bn in 2013. Site preparation started 2014. Approved by the board of EDF and the UK gov in 2016, scheduled to generate power from the first reactor by 2025. The strike price has increased to £50Bn. The construction cost increased to £20Bn and then £22Bn. This year they've announced a 6 month delay and half-billion price increase due to COVID.
It's the most expensive nuclear power on the planet. It's twice the cost per MW as nuclear power in France. It's been criticised by Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at Oxford University for being too expensive, by an advisor to PM Theresa May for "selling our national security to China", by George Monbiot for being an outdated reactor design even in 2013. It's part-owned by a Chinese company sanctioned by the US government for espionage, it's almost 4x the cost of electricity compared to the design estimates for this kind of reactor. EDF were fined €5M for misleading investors about the costs in 2014. "The UK nuclear regulator has raised concerns with EDF Energy over management failings that it warns could affect safety at the Hinkley Point C power station if left unaddressed" reported The Guardian.
And of the seven other sites announced back in 2008? None of them have had any further development, they've all been shelved.
Is the next one going to be 20 years in development for £40Bn construction cost and £150/MWh and the one after 30 years in development for £55Bn construction and £200/MWh?
Nuclear power advocates are like "we need to have lots of nuclear plants online by the end of the decade, if not sooner; therefore we will have that, no worries". Any realistic plan for going carbon-neutral through nuclear has to deal with these realities. No government is going to blow a trillion pounds on ten Hinkley C's now after COVID19 spending.
well the worst of nuclear power ist not the possibility of an accident, but the radioactive waste. I guess UK doesn't care much about that since they have a history of just dumping it into the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
The generally proposed way to deal with the worst nuclear waste (spent fuel) is to put it back into special reactors or to use special reactor designs to convert it to material with a much lower half life (hundreds rather than 10k years) which can then be stored … somewhere … more feasibly until it becomes safe.
The question is whether the UK can build nuclear faster than they can build sufficient battery capacity to smooth out all that wind power. Neither will be easy.
There is a lot of battery storage projects in the pipeline now, about 20GW. They are mass producable, modular, can be containerised and built very quickly. And we need to scale up battery production anyway for electric cars. If humanity had a tech tree batteries would be a major branch. It is definitely worth pursuing and is not a zero-sum games with nuclear. And the costs have been dropping already quite a bit. It even has the potential to help cover unpredictable nuclear plant downtime.
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They should have learned from the ongoing Hinkley failure. I wonder if the French will be ready to pay for such a debacle one more time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58090533
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/article...
unfortunately this has dropped in 2021 due to low wind.
but a lot more wind farms are planned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
It will be interesting to see how the UK actually plans on executing this.
The only plausible way forward would be to duplicate Hinkley Point C basically (the 2nd phase has come in much cheaper than the first as they were able to reuse design and gained knowledge), but that would mean the UK energy industry is run by the Chinese and the French.
I’m not sure if Global Britain is actually prepared for that.
Oh, and EDF in the UK really are the pits. Why anyone pays over the odds to use them is beyond me (it may be different for industrial users, but for consumers it's hard to imagine there's a worse choice). At least they won't go bust [0] being goverment backed.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/edf-restructuring-eu-idUSL1N...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/15/uk-poised-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
470MW per unit, 2 years to build, 2 years to install. 1.8 billion pounds each. With just 64 units, combined with some renewables and storage (ideally allowing EVs to smart charge/discharge based on grid conditions), the UK would be completely energy secure for 115billion pounds.
As someone pointed out before on HN, various NATO countries, US especially, churn out small reactors for their navies, apparently with great success. These reactors are built on time, roughly in budget, work, and aren’t failing all over the place.
That’s a fair few data points showing that SMRs ought to be very viable. Just... not here yet :)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209223424/http://www.nti.or...
If not, my point stands, I’m not suggesting to copy the designs, rather that mass produced reactors can be viable.
0.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors
1. (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Por...)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/15/uk-poised-t...
Traditionally, the UK has had no qualms about letting foreign companies run key industries. As long as they get run cheaply, the government and the consumers are happy.
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211012-macron-unveils-€...
high time for nuclear to make a comback
So without that, getting projects going and export of energy (of which France does more than most) all hang upon fission getting that green label approved by the EU.
Equally hydrogen may well prove a very economical method of storing electricity and for Nuclear plants (both types) the ability to turn them off and on per demand is something they can't do. So the ability to store that excess in off-peak in hydrogen and then converting back on-demand into electricity does seem like a viable solution if cheaper alternatives are not available. Not sure how they cost compare with lake dam energy storage - though that storage option for on-demand production is not cheap and equally limited by topography and land along with ecological impacts. So lots of hidden costs and upfront costs for those.
He let Fessenheim (one nuclear plant) close one year ago. And the nuclear plants he announced are a new kind of plants that we don't know how to create yet. (And he refuses to take position to open new plants with the current technology)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-58911210
So nuclear in 2035 may have a different default definition of thinking in which fusion supplants fission what we currently use.
This is a post about electricity production. "Have" would mean "producing at least 1 GWe commercially by a for-profit enterprise".
Any fusion practical designs will require a liquid lithium cooling blanket that will breed the necessary quantities of tritium. They therefore share the weakness of other metal-cooled fast breeder reactors, which have proven exceptionally difficult to operate, since the highly reactive coolant will catch fire or explode upon contact with water or air.
Since the coolant is radiologically active, any such 'nuclear' incident will be regarded by the press and population just as bad as the Monju issues or the Superphenix.
https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurescrapping-m...
Let‘s hope many more countries will follow suit.
[EDIT - fixed as per comment below - thank you]
That gives at least 100 years before Fusion can become a major part of power generation in any significant part of the world, and this is assuming current projects achieve all their milestones on time, which historically is extremely unlikely. And this also assumes that it's even possible to reduce the cost of a ten million kelvin plasma held in place by 12 kelvin superconducting magnets, covered in a pool of liquid lithium.
I get that it's cool to demean certain kinds of activists, if the implicit point is about trendiness.
France is far from being rational on this topic
Think about the kind of lifetime and investment that comes with nuclear. You start a new plant project today. It might produce power in 15 years, for some 30+ years to make it economical. Who the fuck wants to bet $20B+ on solar not supplanting our entire power generation within some 45 years? Because that is what you are saying: build new nuclear, because even half a century from now, we won't have the storage technology to make solar and wind work. That's the bet.
And, even if I am wrong and really, nuclear is more expensive, so what? Compared to the alternative of having our societies collapsing because of climate change, a 3x on the price of energy would be money _very_ well spent.
Also, if nuclear really is that non performant, it would be _awesome_ for renewables. They would actually be attractive economically and we would see more of them, not less.
Kill hidrocarbons all together. Leave the free market so sort out the alternative if you really care about cost.
Yeah it’s expensive but so is sea level rise and dealing with hurricanes.
And safety? Pollution from burning coal kills so many people every year, I’m slowly beginning to think nuclear safety is a bit if a non issue, even it a plant blows up every now and then.
One thing I will object to though - the claim that "one way to solve carbon emissions with nothing but money" - mostly because money is a proxy for human effort and physical resources. "Just money" is not really a thing, at least how I see it. An human effort is a great thing to spent and physical resources as well, but there is a cutoff point where "just money" doesn't cut it, because the underlying resource that money is supposed to buy is simply not enough of around. But that is not the case with nuclear energy. So sorry for the deviation.
> At that kind of price point, you are better off building an interconnect to Norway and straight up importing hydro power
Except there isn't enough hydro power in Norway to replace France's nuclear production, so looking at the current spot price of a non-scalable resource like hydro doesn't tell you much. That's the problem with hydro -- there are only so many resources to exploit. I'm also not going to touch how you value energy independence, but there is a value to it. Of course importing oil is not energy independent, but you can import oil from many countries, so that is more resilient than a fixed interconnect to Norway.
What France could do is try importing LNG or coal or oil, but if the restriction is low carbon power, then you are stuck with nuclear or having the lights go out. This reality is why Germany is importing gas and using coal, and complaining about nuclear isn't going to change that reality.
Engineering research on grid-scale storage has barely begun. It's really no more than ten years old, except for pumped hydro. Before that it was just ideas and concept studies.
Already storage is cheaper than gas peaker plants for some short-run uses according to Lazard.
And there are some promising, cheap technologies for other uses (longer duration): iron-air batteries, aluminium-air batteries, latent heat and sensible heat storage (air liquefaction; hot rocks), various flow batteries.
Look at the trends, not what the costs were two years ago. Once someone starts to look into this stuff properly, the costs go down quickly.
Edit: and if the perovskite R&D comes up with the goods, we'll have dual-layer (2x output) PV panels for the same cost (or less) as single-layer Si panels.
I’ve read the suggestion that the anti-nuclear-power activism in the west was stoked by the USSR precisely because of (a). No idea how true that is.
With Germany going off nuclear, they become increasingly dependent on Russian gas.
The aim was bilateral (or occasionally unilateral) disarmament, because at that time we were all worried that the world might be destroyed at four minutes notice. The long slow problem of global warming was a lot further away.
Even today, this is why nobody likes the Iranian nuclear programme, and why Israel airstriked an earlier Iranian reactor.
That all said we are hosting COP26 climate summit - though like many - the Queen sums up what we all think: - https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britains-queen-irritated-by...
On a trip to a school in Bristol, southwest England, Johnson told baffled schoolchildren: "I promise to get world leaders to cut greenhouse gases and save the planet."
He later held up a signed, leaf-shaped piece of paper on which he had written his pledge.
Whatever the outcome, I'll be very happy to hear about Johnson's pledge after the COP...
It's the actions I'll measure upon, not the promissory notes of intent.
[0]: for the record, it's supposed to be six, but some people say seven.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/general-...
He has never taken the high road in his life.
As conservative prime ministers go, he'd be one of the better ones in recent memory if it wasn't for awful timing. The UK had about twice the death toll as france and germany in the last couple of years, and it's hard not to blame that on Boris, and those around Boris, essentially being the wrong guys for the job. When it's serious, you need serious people making the decisions, and I don't think anybody, Boris included, genuinely thinks he's a serious person.
I think the UK was kind of a perfect storm where Boris was both the least suited prime minister for a crisis in recent history, and the british state resources were really depleted after a decade of austerity - which also wasn't particularly good for the health of vulnerable people in general.
I'm not really particularly anti-Boris specifically, though. The nice thing about him is he clearly doesn't really care about politics. He's not a hardcore ideologue like Osbourne, or Javid, or even Blair. He's just interested in ratings, polling, and power. So I think his political program is probably better than Cameron's was, for instance, just because he's a populist, and the british public generally has more common sense than the british elite.
In general, a useless head of state isn't too bad, if you have a good state apparatus that gets all the real work done while they basically entertain the public. That's what Boris was supposed to be. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and a majority of the people surrounding him turned out to be morons.
Isn't Germany a world leader in implementing renewable energy?
Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
Then they decided to shut them all down; and that they urgently need a new gas pipeline - Nord Stream 2 - to import natural gas from Russia.
Doesn’t sound very carbon neutral to me.
No, it doesn't.
Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.
To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.
Hysterical shutdown of nuclear plants following Fukushima lead to the gap being covered by fossil fuels
also while US have very cheap gas from the domestic industry, Europe is constrained by a couple of pipelines and shipments and market fluctuations, so it didn't replace coal
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Renewables provided 45% of Germany's power production in 2020, and 41% in 2021 H1.
however
nuclear capacity fell by 8GW
natural gas grew by 4GW
and the charts only explain the capacity
unlikely the renewables can replace nuclear in that sense
of course, saying that the historical shutdown of nuclear was replaced by fossil fuels I mean in the same and following year.
If Germany keeps betting big on renewable after that and it's currently producing 41% it's a different story
"Wind power is Germany's most important source of clean energy. But wind turbines have become contentious here, as more and more people protest against them being built near where they live."
https://www.dw.com/en/the-germans-fighting-wind-farms-close-...
"Germany has set some of the most ambitious goals of any nation for shifting from fossil fuels to greener energy. Now the centerpiece of that push—onshore wind power—is slumping, prompting the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the bankruptcies of wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers. Wind power, often seen as a clean, abundant energy source, has faced growing bureaucratic hurdles and acrimony in communities out to block the erection of new turbines. "
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-push-for-wind-power-en...
Merkel’s CDU has been popular because they offered stability, but there’s an understanding in Germany now that the country has fallen behind in critical areas like car electrification and grid storage technologies.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eu-co-finances-...
Which might account for why they are reticent about nuclear.
* One one side no regulation, people living in fear of their superiors, money being drawn and sent to compete on the race to the moon and other reasons. * On the other side "nuclear", which is based on science, and had about 6 decades of evolution in safety, regulations, etc. since Chernobyl was first built.
That was exactly what I was referring to when I said the EU is blind to science. And, yes, I read 2 papers and watched many videos, as well as follow the news for about the last 5 years of the safe confinement construction. I still hold the same opinion as my original comment.
Man, I'm glad this is included but the scientific reality is that we need to move much much faster than this.
For reference, even if we perfectly replaced every gas furnace at the end of its functional life starting today with a non-polluting heat pump, we'd still be on track for 2 degrees of warming.
We need gas bans on new houses NOW or at the VERY least create major up-front discounts for heat pumps.
I thought gas is way better than coal or oil, because it burns cleaner?
So gas is the bigger problem to resolve. We need to get rid of them all eventually.
Totally agreed! But for me I'd love to strike the word "eventually" from the sentence. At this point we're in such deep shit that we have to move more quickly than "eventually" in my opinion. :)
It's far better to emit NO pollutants in your home (and cars!) than to emit less, especially since polluting home infrastructure is replaced every ~15 years and pollutes for its entire lifetime.
It's very surprising to me that people are still burning coal in their home, outside of very rural areas. Same thing with oil (except with cars of course).
But yeah, my understanding is that burning gas in your home produces less CO2 than burning coal or oil, but they ALL pollute (and gas often has methane leaks from pipelines which is worse for warming than CO2). Whereas a heat pump emits nothing, is ~3x more efficient than gas combustion, and will increasingly cause no emissions as the grid is powered by renewables.
It's far better to emit NO pollutants in your home (and cars!) than to emit less, especially since polluting home infrastructure is replaced every ~15 years and pollutes for its entire lifetime.
Generally, yes, but of course it always depends on specific circumstances.
Read up on heat pumps! They're really cool. And yes they're like air conditioning units that can cool and also heat. In addition to heat pump space heating there are also heat pump hot water heaters and heat pump clothes driers and it seems both are more efficient and non-polluting.
It feels magical that they can pull heat from outside in the winter, but that's what they do! The more recent units can even do it in very cold temperatures.
I don’t even know where I’d go to buy coal, to be honest. For most of America the closest we get to the stuff is a charcoal grill.
0 - 130,000 households two years ago, half in Pennsylvania.
Well here in germany in winter time, you can buy 10 kg packs in allmost every supermarket. Probably a side effect of the still big ongoing open coal mining. But its gotten quite rare in comparison, when I was a child, it was common for many houses, to have coal in the basement and regular getting a truck for resupply. Now it is mostly for additional heat.
Outside of a specialist delivery company (“high quality bituminous”, heh), I’d have to travel to a feed & seed store in the nearby farm country to buy coal for heating ($9 for a 40lb bag of anthracite). They’re out of stock, but it’s not clear to me if that’s because of supply chain issues, or because nobody ever actually wants it in my area.
Meanwhile firewood is super easy to get. It’s available everywhere, including in huge stacks outside our grocery stores. I can even buy it from my city at $90 a cord, but it needs to be split.
It is. I lived in a small town in a river valley some years ago: you couldn't open the windows in late afternoon, when everyone started to burn their dirty fires.
Actually, between people burning whatever looks wood-like and coal, I'd probably prefer the coal.
The model I’m considering purchasing has an actual catalytic converter in it, just like a car, to ensure combustion is as complete as possible.
It's 2021. Burning wood makes no sense from a global warming and certainly not from a public health perspective.
A badly started coal fire? That is bad.
The problem in the UK is that many houses are very old and poorly insulated. Passivhaus basically needs to be the standard (if it isn't already).
"The government is at present drawing up plans to subsidise electric pumps with grants of £5,000 for air source heat pumps and £6,000 for ground source heat pumps."
1. A lot of people in the UK have actually had their savings grow because of covid. Not being able to spend on holidays and going out etc (I realise some have not fared so well).
2. The current crisis in gas.
I think they're going to be swamped with people who want to take advantage of this. I don't think they're going to be able to keep up with the demand. I'm personally going to be on top of it as soon as it becomes available.
Boiler manufacturers are already designing hydrogen boilers. The question is, how much existing infrastructure can be used to transport hydrogen.
I think we should be able to get to 20% hydrogen at least sooner rather than later, which is being supported by modern boilers.
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/hydrogen
Also, the problem with hydrogen is how do you produce it? Probably with renewable energy, right? So why would you waste all that energy converting from renewable electricity to hydrogen then burning hydrogen (which is not super efficient anyway)? Might as well just use the renewables to power your heat pump. Plus, heat pumps already work at scale whereas hydrogen needs a lot more work before it's ready for primetime.
Because heat pumps operate at a lower flow temperature than boilers. Smaller radiators designed to operate at hotter temperatures won't bring your house up to the target heat temperature operating at lower temperatures. They often need replacing. [1]
Trials of heat pumps in existing UK housing have found it difficult giving away heat pumps for free, because of all the extra work required for them to operate properly in the house. [2]
> Heat pumps are ~3x as efficient as the best gas furnaces so why would you need a better insulated house?
Heat pumps in comparison to conventional boilers are meant to be on all the time at a lower temperature, as they take a long time to bring a house up to target temperature.
They depend on good insulation, otherwise the heat never accumulates, similar to if you leave a freezer door ajar, it will never freeze.
> So why would you waste all that energy converting from renewable electricity to hydrogen then burning hydrogen (which is not super efficient anyway)?
At times, renewable energy drives electricity prices negative. We haven't got many ways to store this when it happens, converting water to hydrogen would be a good candidate, which can be delivered using existing gas infrastructure.
> Plus, heat pumps already work at scale
Not in existing UK housing, which would require major changes (insulation, underfloor heating, larger radiators), before they work.
[1] https://www.imsheatpumps.co.uk/blog/can-i-use-radiators-with... [2] https://www.housingtoday.co.uk/news/major-challenges-in-pers...
The reality is that we don't have time to wait on unproven technologies like hydrogen boilers (which gas boiler companies are using to try to delay their inevitable demise). We don't have time to wait on an non-existing hydrogen infrastructure. Despite what you say, heat pumps are working at scale today around the world and individuals can go buy them now and successfully heat and cool their homes.
But hey, I'm not a fundamentalist — whatever works! We need all solutions very fast in order to mitigate damage. If part of that is hydrogen then great! It just seems unlikely to scale at the required rate.
It's not an argument, I'm just relaying what heat pump installers need to change in order for the pumps to work.
The system also needs to provide hot water.
> The reality is that we don't have time to wait on unproven technologies like hydrogen boilers
They're not unproven, 20pc hydrogen ready boilers are being sold today.
> Despite what you say, heat pumps are working at scale today around the world and individuals can go buy them now and successfully heat and cool their homes.
That some people have used heat pumps to successfully heat their homes was never disputed.
They're just not the panacea they are made out to be for UK housing.
Pilot schemes are already using hydrogen blend with gas using existing infrastructure. [1]
I've nothing against more insulation, but the UK has a lot of old housing, which isn't always easy to insulate to heat pump standards. In particular areas where the weather is often driving rain, cavity wall insulation can destroy the house. [2]
[1] https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/hydrogen-blending-wh... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-42165358
My parents live in France. They have to replace their 40 year old gas furnace, and were originally planning on replacing it with a 30% more efficient condensation gas furnace, but the French government gave them subsidies for a heat pump instead. They get heating that is powered by stable French nuclear power and are not exposed to volatile natural gas prices, the French reduce their dependency on gas imports from the distasteful Algerian, Qatari or Russian governments, everyone wins.
Was it hard for them to physically change out their gas system for the heat pump? Was it hard to find installers or units?
Right now they are awaiting government approval for their application (it's been very popular and they are swamped, and even had to increase the budget allocation). They also had to do preliminaries like upgrade their electrical connection and add 3-phase wiring in the home, as well as build a concrete platform outside the house to stand the heat pump on.
The heat pump itself should be a drop-in replacement that uses the existing hot water radiators (which means it can't be used as A/C, unfortunately).
Replacing all those boilers will be very unpopular, it will require a huge amount more electrical capacity and infrastructure alone.
It's also very unlikely any new nuclear power will be available by 2035 the first target date.
Spending the same money/political capital on cutting cars or flights or renewables would get a lot more co2e reduction a lot faster...
SSE however done agree and think we can get by with only renewables. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/offshore-power-will-fail-... Non paywalled https://archive.is/2021.07.25-233934/https://www.thetimes.co...
Also, afaik renewable energy is advancing quickly. Nuclear made more sense a decade ago. Why switch to it now?
Nuclear makes much more sense for base load electric needs for homes and industry.
10 years ago I thought nuclear was the clear answer - that we should do a moon-shot style massive project to develop a new generation of reactors and build them worldwide. I'm not against nuclear.
But there's an important political dimension also, and to talk as if it's decided on technological merits is to implicitly spread the BS.
In contrast, new nuclear is nearly impossible to build. Nobody even wants to attempt to build it unless they get massive blank checks from governments to backstop all the massive cost overruns. Even China, the one country that has the capability to build big things still, is only building a tiny tiny fraction of nuclear in comparison to their massive renewables builds.
Building new nuclear in the UK means either going with designs that have proven to be very difficult to construct, like the EPR, or going with completely unproven SMR designs, that are the last ditch effort to save nuclear as an energy source.
We're going to have to have Chinese expertise come in and build them for us. "[China] has 38 nuclear power reactors in operation and 19 under construction. It has increased its number of operating reactors by more than ten times since 2000 and plans to bring five units into commercial operation this year alone." - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/how-china-has-become-th... [2017]
Already, in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage attached to the same inverters as the solar panels. Batteries are on an exponential learning curve for cost. It's not hard to see where the future will be.
Additionally, a mixture of both offshore wind solar will be close enough to provide all of the UK's needs.
If you go and redo David MacKay's energy scenarios for the UK from Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, and use modern costs, the all renewable scenarios look pretty great. If nuclear can chip in and reduce some storage needs during a week long wind lull, that would be great too. But at this point in time we can't depend upon new nuclear to contribute anything to our immediate needs for climate solutions. Game day is here, now, and we have to play with the team of players we have currently.
It's quite ironic to call shipping storage systems, from the MWh scale to GWh scale, installed all around the globe, "vapor ware" while not pointing out that nobody has ever even shipped an SMR.
This sort of double standard when it comes to evaluating technology has been the source of so much bad capital allocation over the next decade.
But, if you are willing to call storage vapor ware, I will be sure to call SMRs that from now on.
That's true, but unbuilt nuclear power dreams can't keep homes heated either. We almost can't build nuclear plants. We almost can't politically or socially agree to build them, we almost can't fund them, we can't keep the costs reasonable, we can't keep them to budget or on-target with construction times.
Look at the history of nuclear power in the UK:
Trawsfynydd construction began in July 1959 and both reactors were online by March 1965 with works finished in 1968, for £103M. Bank of England inflation calculator puts that at ~£2.5Bn in today's money.
Sizewell B was first announced in 1969, design reworked in 1974, design reworked and announced in 1980, had a public enquiry from 1982 to 1985, started construction in 1988, finished on schedule in 7 years for £2Bn which is ~£5.8Bn in today's money.
In 2008 the UK gov said new nuclear plants could be built for £2.8Bn. The chairman of EO.N said it could be as much as £4.8Bn.
Hinkley C was announced along with seven other sites in 2010, EDF said the construction cost would be £16Bn in 2012, electricity strike price set at £6Bn in 2013. Site preparation started 2014. Approved by the board of EDF and the UK gov in 2016, scheduled to generate power from the first reactor by 2025. The strike price has increased to £50Bn. The construction cost increased to £20Bn and then £22Bn. This year they've announced a 6 month delay and half-billion price increase due to COVID.
It's the most expensive nuclear power on the planet. It's twice the cost per MW as nuclear power in France. It's been criticised by Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at Oxford University for being too expensive, by an advisor to PM Theresa May for "selling our national security to China", by George Monbiot for being an outdated reactor design even in 2013. It's part-owned by a Chinese company sanctioned by the US government for espionage, it's almost 4x the cost of electricity compared to the design estimates for this kind of reactor. EDF were fined €5M for misleading investors about the costs in 2014. "The UK nuclear regulator has raised concerns with EDF Energy over management failings that it warns could affect safety at the Hinkley Point C power station if left unaddressed" reported The Guardian.
And of the seven other sites announced back in 2008? None of them have had any further development, they've all been shelved.
Is the next one going to be 20 years in development for £40Bn construction cost and £150/MWh and the one after 30 years in development for £55Bn construction and £200/MWh?
Nuclear power advocates are like "we need to have lots of nuclear plants online by the end of the decade, if not sooner; therefore we will have that, no worries". Any realistic plan for going carbon-neutral through nuclear has to deal with these realities. No government is going to blow a trillion pounds on ten Hinkley C's now after COVID19 spending.
Links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawsfynydd_nuclear_power_stat...
- https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/what-do-civ...
- Abimelex ↗ well the worst of nuclear power ist not the possibility of an accident, but the radioactive waste. I guess UK doesn't care much about that since they have a history of just dumping it into the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... dan-robertson ↗ The generally proposed way to deal with the worst nuclear waste (spent fuel) is to put it back into special reactors or to use special reactor designs to convert it to material with a much lower half life (hundreds rather than 10k years) which can then be stored … somewhere … more feasibly until it becomes safe. jl6 ↗ The UK has incredible wind resources, but just look at the variability of output: 7952 ↗ There is a lot of battery storage projects in the pipeline now, about 20GW. They are mass producable, modular, can be containerised and built very quickly. And we need to scale up battery production anyway for electric cars. If humanity had a tech tree batteries would be a major branch. It is definitely worth pursuing and is not a zero-sum games with nuclear. And the costs have been dropping already quite a bit. It even has the potential to help cover unpredictable nuclear plant downtime. [dead] atc ↗ Very pleased with this. Finally some sensible energy approach
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
The question is whether the UK can build nuclear faster than they can build sufficient battery capacity to smooth out all that wind power. Neither will be easy.