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Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

The UK government has just stopped off-shore wind turbine growth for the next decade, delayed their ban on internal combustion engine cars another five years, cancelled the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway extension and said they’ll put that money into roads instead.

Great.

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It is unfortunate, but there are paths to success without UK policy encouraging it. Viking Link [1], a 1.4GW electrical interconnector between Great Britain and Denmark, comes online by end of year (it has already been added as an asset in the ENTSO-E electrical market transparency platform). At the same time, their last coal fired generator [Drax North Yorkshire] will be retired within the next year [2] (I emailed Drax to get a rough closure date, reply pending). Less than a million vehicles a year are built in the UK and about 2 million vehicles a year are sold in their market, compared to a global market of ~80M units/year. Importantly, those coal generators need to be demolished as soon as possible after decommissioning to prevent turning them back on (advocacy call to action: if you live near a decommissioned coal generator, push to have it demo'd unless there are very firm plans to convert them to high efficiency fossil gas generation).

Therefore, you would only need to find economic linchpins or similar points of leverage in the UKs fossil gas supply, automative supply chain and marketplace, and petroleum supplies to force a more rapid transition despite neglected policy. The rest of the global market will drag the UK, as California does in the US with regards to automative fuel efficiency standards.

A successful EV future depends on the continuing rapid expansion globally by Tesla and BYD [3] (as well as smaller players of course, if they can ramp expeditiously), not politicians or older constituents who could not care less about a future they won't exist in.

(also important is deploying as much inexpensive low carbon energy generation as possible as fast as possible, but is a topic for another thread [4])

[1] https://www.viking-link.com/

[2] https://www.drax.com/press_release/drax-ends-half-a-century-...

[3] https://www.statista.com/chart/30758/most-popular-plug-in-el...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924

>The UK government has just stopped off-shore wind turbine growth for the next decade

Any links? Last time I check they have huge amount of work going on in that area.

(I can't find where I got "decade" into my head). They didn't announce a policy change on the matter, but they have auctions for companies to bid for guaranteed electricity prices every couple of years, the most recent one this year. The government were warned that their guaranteed price is too low considering recent inflation and supply chain increases and no bids were expected for offshore wind power, they did nothing, no companies bid in the last auction, so there won't be any new offshore wind power built this round. The next auction date doesn't seem to be announced, there is an announcement that they might become annual so it could be next year. (Having companies' offshore skills idle the next year or two seems likely to lead to knock-on delays if future auctions are bid for and won).

From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66740920 - "Dan McGrail, the chief executive of industry group RenewableUK, told the BBC: "Industry has highlighted to government on several occasions that this auction has been set up in a way which is very unlikely to secure the capacity we need to stay on track to meet the government's own target of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050 [up from 13.66GW now]." and also "Labour's shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC: "This is just the latest episode in the Tories' 13 years of failed energy policy. They broke the onshore wind market by banning it, they undermined the solar industry by removing the feed-in tariff, and they caused chaos in the home insulation market with their failed schemes."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - "the lack of offshore wind will be a blow to the pledge to deliver 50 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030 compared with 14GW today."

So you can either think that was incompetent or malicious. And when trying to decide you can look at the mentioned de-facto onshore wind power block the Tories put in since 2015 ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66715141 ) and the previously announced ban combustion cars by 2030 which they pushed back to 2035 while talking about a new ban on solar panels on farmland ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-66863110 ). Or maybe their Return to Office policy ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61145692 and https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/get-back-work-office-britai... ) which.

And you can see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-redirects-hs2-funding-... about the HS2 rail, and wonder to yourself why the "Spiralling HS2 costs" were something the government could not cope with, but the "faster journey times, increased capacity and more frequent, reliable services across rail, buses and roads" are something they will be able to deliver. When part of the HS2 plan was to move intercity trains off the local lines and freight off the roads, leading to more frequent reliable road and bus journeys. "billions to fix potholes on the country’s roads" - first, we know what causes potholes; heavy vehicles moving frieght". And this is more reliable bus journeys from the government which brought us "Buses in 'crisis' as 3,000 routes reduced or scrapped" in 2018 ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44681974 ) and killed off 20% of bus services in the last year ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66442599 ).

What's the UKs storage plan for renewables? For pretty much every country building renewable, they've all been super quiet on the storage side.

I haven't heard or looked for anything, and I don't think any such technology exists at reasonable prices to do grid scale storage for an entire country (but maybe it could! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197012 ).

Browsing around on OpenInfraMap I have seen some grid scale battery storage, e.g. https://openinframap.org/#9.74/51.6119/-2.1051/L,P,S Minety 150MW battery down as 266MWh storage capacity so there are some around.

There's independent company Octopus Energy which pays ordinary people with solar / battery / wind turbines to export energy to the grid, and if you're an interested geeky customer you can download the half-hourly pricing so you can tune your system to import cheap power and export at peak times; they do this to encourage rollout of renewables - https://octopus.energy/press/octopus-energy-doubles-payments...

Lithium batteries unfortunately aren't storage for a grid, they're...capacitors. They add buffer to stabilise the grid and allow transition between sources.

Without any form of meaningful storage (eg pumped hydro) the UK grid will be in trouble.

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/difference-between-battery-an...

You are fundamentally incorrect and either do not understand what a capacitor is or are unwilling to use the correct language in an attempt to prove a point...which unfortunately undermines it. Additionally, smart grids are already capable of transitioning between sources and solar or wind with battery storage are more cost effective than fossil fuel generation today: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/04/15/wind-solar-power-now-th...

Sorry I should have said LIKE a capacitor in terms of function. You are correct they are not a capacitor in terms of design and function. I'd have expected people here be able to understand that.

Fundamentally, at a grid level, lithium batteries can't provide what the average person considers "storage", that is running the grid from said storage. When people hear lithium battery, they think of a phone or laptop - the battery is the sole source of power for 6-12 hours.

On a grid however, lithium batteries provide very short duration stabilisation from "noisy" supply, absorb spikes in generation and boost troughs.

You cannot cost effectivly power the grid from lithium batteries on a still night. Pumped hydro etc are needed to cover prolonged periods of low supply (and absorb prolonged periods of oversupply).

Dinorwig in Wales is pumped hydro and stores 9.1GWh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Cruachan in Scotland stores 7GWh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station

Ffestiniog in Wales stores 1.4GWh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station

Foyer at Loch Ness exists, can’t quickly see how many Wh it stores.

Coire-Glas is proposed and could double the existing electricity storage apparently, which would make it huge, but not yet approved https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-650...

Still, powering a country though a cold dim calm winter is a lot of power; the UK uses around 800GWh/day of electricity, not counting gas/energy for heating. To store a week or a month or a winter of that is not a solved problem.

Interesting. I have a few friends working inside the industry and UK government on the exact issue. Will likely bring this topic up next time I meet them. Because this paints a very different picture to what I have been told.

Is this really what we want? Is this really going to work? What will be the consequences? Have they been discussed?

2030-2049 all remaining airports close all shipping declines to zero, no flying for 2050, and after electric planes may fly.

https://i.imgur.com/hLJAqGQ.png

Populism at work, no surprise since Brexit was tze same thing.

Tories are a disgusting bunch, they found out being against ULEZ was a vote winner so now they've gone "We love cars!", naked manouvering in hopes of winning those votes and staying in power.

Just like Brexit, the fuckwit Goehring but dumb Nigel Farage was going to steal Tory votes, so dumb dumb Cameron promised the Brexit vote to keep those votes. And he was too chickenshit to ignore the results of the referendum although the government was allowed to do so (again, for the price of electoral annihilation).

They had a super easy way out of it: another referendum voting for options, or a referendum on any deal. Nobody could agree on what leaving meant and giving the choice to the electorate would have a) been more democratic and b) probably have kept the UK in the EU as every other option got discussed.

>The UK government has just stopped off-shore wind turbine growth for the next decade

surely the power companies can just build them if wind is so cheap

You need permitting to do anything in a developed country.

Power companies won’t build anything unless the government guarantees them a profit. Privatise the profit, socialise the losses. Yay capitalism, right?

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