Britain in two-week coal-free record | Hacker News Reader

Britain in two-week coal-free record

bbc.com

24 pointssohkamyung8 comments

Green washing at a national level. Biomass instead of coal is not necessarily better [1] and the source is very questionable [2].

[1] https://www.ecowatch.com/chatham-house-biomass-study-2288764...

[2] https://theecologist.org/2017/apr/10/no-drax-theres-nothing-...

Note over that time Britain is importing on average something like 1.5-2.0GW from France and ~1GW from the Netherlands. And producing on average about 15GW from gas. (Not sure how much oil is still used.)

Very little oil. The French imports are effectively surplus nuclear, as I understand it, while the Netherlands imports are more mixed.

We do have a lot of gas still.

Gas is a fine stop gap (less CO2 emitted and cleaner emissions) until you have more renewables, battery storage, and HVDC transmission lines from other countries with renewable and nuclear reserves.

Burning coal is overall much worse for the environment and people, but in terms of climate change, it might not be much better than coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947

> As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

While tragic, it did prompt California to require utility scale battery storage replace the gas turbines that used that storage facility.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/aliso-canyon-em...

> CPUC President Michael Picker said the battery projects were deployed with “unprecedented” speed and cooperation among stakeholders.

> “I was stunned at the ability of batteries and the battery industry’s ability to meet our needs,” said Picker, speaking at the launch event yesterday for Tesla’s battery system at SCE’s Mira Loma substation in Ontario, California. “This was something I didn’t expect to see until 2020. Here it is in 2017, and it’s already in the ground.”

For reference, total time before Brown's emergency order and this battery storage facility turning up was just 1 year.

That means that importing Dutch and French power is still cheaper than the cheap coal they could be burning. Sounds like a win to me.

c 10% imported from France (largely nuclear), Neds and Belgium

UK sourced: 30% gas 22% wind 16% nuclear 14% solar 7.5% biomass

all roughly https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

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