Solar outstrips coal in past six months of UK electricity generation | Hacker News Reader

Solar outstrips coal in past six months of UK electricity generation

theguardian.com

66 pointsiamflimflam122 comments

Excellent news. There's a bit of a thumb on the scale because of the seasonality of both solar and UK demand, but it shows that the feed-in-tariff regime was an effective way of getting solar buildout.

The other factor is that EU directives ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Combustion_Plant_Directi... ) are hard for the old 50s coal plants to comply with, and they're operating at the end of their lives on imported coal since the dismantling of the UK coal industry.

There is also the slightly bonkers scheme to run Drax on imported wood.

I always mention http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ when the subject of energy comes up on HN, as it's such a great resource and a neat little web toy. But it doesn't show solar because there's no central live metering. Currently 60% gas, 20% nuclear, 5% coal, the rest wind and imports.

I alluded to the solar metering in my other comment. Here is what it says on the G.B. National Grid Status site.

> This is the total demand of the entire country (plus or minus exports) less any unmetered generating sources like wind (about half as much as is shown on the meter) and solar installations (average about 0.25GW, mostly in summer).

> As no solar PV to date is metered centrally, we cannot show real time figures on solar PV power yet. It appears only as a mid-day dip in overall demand, on the demand graph.

There is data for France (but the quality may be dubious): http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

> This is the metered solar farms. Yes, don't ask me why there is 10MW at night, a fact that is airbrushed out of RTE's user friendly website...

Hmm. Has France managed to build any CSP-with-storage?

Comments on TFA mention this site for solar monitoring: https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/

(Note: it doesn't work well with Safari, use Firefox)

"Serving 11.3 % of GB demand". Not bad at all, for a cloudy island famous for all-year rain.

Thanks for that, a nice addition to the data.

I think climate change has, for the moment, been 'kind' to us in reducing the famous rain. The downside is the south of the country is now short of water in summer and parts of the uplands are prone to flooding ...

Sigh.

>Annual mean precipitation over England and Wales has not changed significantly since records began in 1766. Seasonal rainfall is highly variable, but appears to have decreased in summer and increased in winter, although with little change in the latter over the last 50 years. [0]

>The results suggest that there have been trends towards more protracted high flows over the last 30–50 years, but that this could be accounted for as part of climatic variation rather than climate change. There is no statistical evidence of a long–term trend in flooding over the last 80–120 years. Thus, although climate change could be influencing floods, direct analysis of flood records does not yet provide proof. [1]

>The adjusted record shows no trend in reported flooding over time, but there is significant decade to decade variability. [2]

>A rising population, more households and greater wealth have led to an ever greater demand for water, putting the limited supply in the south of England under stress. [3]

So no, if we like an evidence based approach, climate change has not had any measurable effect on precipitation, flooding or water shortages in the UK. These are basically seasonal variations exposing infrastructure weaknesses.

[0] p12 : http://www.ukcip.org.uk/wp-content/PDFs/UKCP09_Trends.pdf

[1] http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/360/1796/1327...

[2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2014.950581

[3] http://catchments.nerc.ac.uk/issues/crisis/index.asp

Good news. Now we need to deploy more grid scale batteries or other storage. We have the technology (just as we do for electric vehicles). It just needs scaling up and that's now a political/economics problem.

Solar doesn't show on the UK grid stats [^0] but it does on the French one ([^0]/france). There's an app that shows what this means in terms of CO2e [^1].

I wrote a piece on electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells recently [^2]. Another option could be to synthesize methane [^3] using the Sabatier reaction (as NASA does on the ISS [^4]). If this is burnt with CCS (underground storage or to grow plants in greenhouses) then it would remove carbon from the atmosphere.

[^0]: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk

[^1]: http://gridcarbon.uk

[^2]: https://unop.uk/on-electric-vehicles

[^3]: http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/mars_presentation.p... (slide 40)

[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction#Internationa...

Good. The problem of course is that you still need the coal generation capacity for winter, and if you hardly use it other times, it becomes really expensive for the capacity it's providing.

And its still subsidized which is great if you own a house with a south facing roof and have a few grad to spare - you used to be able to get around 8% taxfree guaranteed for 20 years.

What has outstripped coal for baseline production?

There used to be millions of coal miners in the UK before Thatcher, millions. Can anyone imagine the renewable sector hiring so many people, working long shifts and doing physically hard work? That coal mining is now done the global capitalist way but there are people still digging coal. A switch to coal is valuable in that people no longer have to have such a risky occupation. It is a shame this is not seen as a benefit and that it is all about CO2.

If harnessed properly, a mass-switch to renewables could generate millions of jobs at very little cost for the public purse: installers, maintainers, manufacturers, auditors, developers for smart grids, etc etc etc... but you'd need a smart government writing smart laws to push people down that road.

The current bunch finds it so much easier to just cut a huge check to EDF and China to build an obsolete, centralized big-ass plant. Benefits to occupation levels will be zero outside of Hinkley. We have no sustainable solution for nuclear waste, and one more terrorist target. Facepalm.jpg

>If harnessed properly, a mass-switch to renewables could generate millions of jobs

There are excellent reasons why it shouldn't. Jobs are a cost of doing something, not a benefit.

Exactly, currently UK unemployment is at an 11 year low. The employment rate is the highest it's been since 1971. We should be looking at how to upgrade people to better, higher paying jobs in internationally competitive sectors that increase national wealth, not downgrading to low skilled manufacturing and physical labor.

I don't see any appetite to move to an economy not based on mass-employment - not among current elites and certainly not among the current UK government.

The actual economy doesn't give a fig for the appetites of 'the current elites' - whatever that means, but that's not the point, the point is that it is bad to move to an energy supply model that creates a large number of additional jobs because that means it is likely to be more expensive than the current one. It also carries the opportunity cost of the value that labour could add by doing stuff other than keeping the lights on for the rest of us.

Generating jobs is easy. If generating jobs were the goal, unemployment would be zero, internationally.

If by 'before' you mean in 1920, when mining employment peaked at around 1.2 million. In 1970, 5 years before Thatcher was elected there were around 300,000. [0]

To your second point, I come from a mining background, you can find my name on many pit disaster monuments and you can take it from me that that benefit is very much recognised.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Ki...

There hadn't been a million jobs in coal mining since the 1920s. By 1979 there were about 200k coal jobs left. The tax payer was subsidizing coal to the tune of £1.3 billion a year, just under 1% of total national GDP, not including the increased costs to power and steel industries that were prevented from using cheaper alternatives.

When Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.”

Coal was fatally wounded in the 70s when the industry became more heavily subsidized, less productive (by 6% in 5 years) and failed to implement any meaningful modernization or reform programs (Plan for Coal). By the 1980s it was just too late to save it.

How refreshing to come across someone who understands the economics and doesn't just blame Thatcher.

It helps alot with these things to read the newspaper from the older times when the issues first came about. There's lots of reason lost in history books and on the information we would typically read up on.

Last week i was going through 1880s articles, and got reason to why banks aren't 'unlimited liability partnerships'. The realities were, they were in the early 1880s. Then one Scottish bank failed and the courts went after widowers and simple retail investors who owned the shares to get claim back assets for depositors for the failed bank. Apparently taking money from widowers then was absolutely terrible. They allowed banks to become limited liability companies shortly after.

Not the best to repeat that today, as bad as limited liability banks can be, it would be worse for them to sue household investors to reclaim deposits, particularly when they can't enforce accountability in the company, being such small investors.

Today if the idea ever caught hold, that old 1880s newspaper would shed light.

I can never forgive Scargill. He could have offered to buy the loss-making pits for £1, run them as workers collectives. Instead he betrayed the Revolution by turning worker against worker (i.e. the workers in other industries taxed to pay his cronies).

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