France and Germany: Electricity and Emissions

There is a question at the bottom of this post - maybe you have an answer.

The vast majority of French electricity is generated from from nuclear and hydro-electricity. There are only residual amounts of electricity generated from fossil fuels.

You can see live data on French electrical generation Here At GridWatch. Below is a snapshot taken today.

In the snap shot, along with coal at 0.01GW (0.02%) France is using gas to generate 0.68 GW (1.4%) and Oil 0.13GW (0.27%)

So in France electrical generation from fossil fuels account for less than 2% of production.

But how does this relate to emissions?

For simplicity I'll leave out the real nasties like Sulphur Dioxide and Nitrous Oxide and just deal with Carbon Dioxide. When we compare these figures with Germany (see below) the real nasties would be just about in the same in country to country proportion as the Carbon Dioxide.

From The EIA FAQs here (and a little bit of maths) we know that electricity generated from coal produces about one Tonne of Carbon Dioxide for every MWh of electricity.

Over the day, from burning coal to make electricity, France dumps 10 x 1 x 24 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. Or 240 Tonnes

From gas (550Kg/MWh) they dump 670 x 0.550 x 24 or 8844 Tonnes.

Finally today oil (816Kg/MWh) will dump 130 x 0.816 x 24 or 2545 Tonnes.

In total today, from producing electricity from fossil fuels, France will dump 11629 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. So say: 12000 Tonnes max.

Now let us look at Germany. To reduce emissions and do away with its nuclear fleet, Germany has invested hugely in a plethora of wind turbines and solar panels. But its generation is still dominated by coal, with no real prospect of any significant reduction.

The German daily generation data is presented as a graph and the live graph can be found Fraunhofer interactive chart here. A snapshot is below

First of all, notice that Germany is actually using the dirtiest fuel known to man as base load (thats lignite or brown coal). Also its remaining nuclear fleet still adds about 9 GW.

Useage of coal and lignite averages out over the day at around 31GW. Gas averages out at about 2GW.

Although Lignite is significantly more polluting than hard coal I'll treat it all as hard coal for simplicity. Although Oil use is significantly above that in France we'll ignore it as it gets buried in the rounding as the rest of Germany's fossils fuel numbers are so large.

31GW of coal generation will over the day, produce 31,000 x 1 x 24 or 744,000 MWh and will dump 744,000 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. Gas produces 2000 x 0.55 x 24 = 26,400 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. So say 750,000 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in total.

So, today in the real world, Electrical generation in Germany will dump somewhere around (750000/12000) 62 times more Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere than Nuclear France.

Of course, Germany 82.5M has a larger population than France (64.5M) So per capita the

emissions ratio is less, at about 50:1

But just think on that.

In Energiewende obsessed Germany, every time an electric kettle is boiled to make a cup of coffee, 50 times as much Carbon Dioxide is released as when a kettle is boiled in nuclear France.

So tell me, who has the more valid solution to the emissions problem?

Energy Policy and the Scottish Letter

The letter below appeared in The Scotsman (Here) on the 27th April. To say it ruffled a few feathers would be an understatement.  It is perhaps the most succinct yet powerful indictment of the energy supply policy being pursued in these islands yet published. You will notice it is signed by a star chamber of power generation experts.

On the Scotsman link there is also the "alternative" view. It is signed by those who gain most from this catastrophe of an energy policy. It is the usual spin and obfuscation hiding the emptyness of their position. Have a look. See what you think.
Then read the comments on these two letters. From these comments it sounds to me like the Scots have had enough.

Here is the letter.

[quote]

NO developed economy can function without a reliable and economic supply of electricity but with present UK policies we have been warned that within a few years there will be a risk of power failures while increases in prices to consumers will rise by more than 50 per cent by 2025.

On a standalone basis the situation in Scotland would be even more disastrous. The huge investment required to remedy the neglect and wishful thinking of recent years will require two decades or more to take effect and in the run up to the May elections we urge all political parties in Scotland to put the future of our electricity supplies at the top of their agendas.

The pretence that our electricity can in future be supplied from renewables, mainly wind and marine, has gone on too long. These matters are not a question of opinion; they are answerable to the laws of physics and are readily analysed using normal engineering methods. All of these energy sources are of very low concentrations and intermittent; they are and will remain inherently expensive and no amount of development will have more than a marginal effect on this conclusion.

Nor can wind and marine energy sources be relied on to provide electricity when it is needed; a recent analysis has shown that for over 30 per cent of the time the output from wind farms has dropped to below 10 per cent of their nominal output and during extremely cold weather has fallen to virtually zero. Furthermore it is unfortunately not correct that marine energy constitutes a vast untapped energy resource on our doorstep; studies (now apparently accepted by government) have shown that at best it could provide only a few percent of our electricity supplies and at costs which, including the necessary back up generation, would be entirely unacceptable to consumers.

Fossil fuelled generation (coal or gas) with carbon dioxide capture and underground storage may yet prove a useful technique but it is important to realise that it is an unproven technology on the scale required; that it may never be acceptable to dispose of such huge quantities of gas in underground storage and at present its costs are too uncertain to gamble on its playing a significant part in our forward energy policy.

So by all means let us have some wind power, development programmes for other renewables, home insulation programmes, heat pumps etc but let us not pretend that all these taken together will substitute for proven generation sources such as coal, gas and nuclear.

And if low carbon is to be the principal driver of energy policy, we can build on Scotland's half century of experience with nuclear, generating some 50 per cent of our electricity requirements, reliably and at low cost.

Scotland needs a balanced electricity system which can deliver economic and reliable supplies; we are at the 11th hour and there is now no more time to lose in getting to grips with this task. There can be nothing more urgent on the political agenda.

Colin Gibson C Eng FIEECCMI Network director National Grid 1993-97)

Prof Ken W D Ledingham FInstP

Prof Colin R McInnes FREng FRSE

Sir Donald Miller C EngFREng FRSE, Chairman ScottishPower 1982-92

Prof Anthony Trewavas FRS FRSE

Prof Jack Ponton FREng FIChemE 

[unquote]

Wind Power, Winter and No Wind

Just a short update on the contribution the theoretical 2.4GW of metered wind generation is making  at this critical time.

Here are some figures from NETA and a little commentary from me.

Using the same data set, yesterday and earlier today, NETA came up with these predictions:

This gives peak output (NOT the average) as 4% rising to 5% of the rated output. The prediction is that output may treble tomorrow. But this will still be only 16% of the total boiler-plate rating - and will peak at 21:00 - just in time for people to start turning in for the night. Even then it is still a shamefully low figure.

If we look at the contribution made by different types of generation :

We see that the contribution from windpower is 0.1%. From the much lauded boiler-plate rating it should be just under 4.5%

That is, the total metered wind-turbine supply in all of the UK, at this time of maximum demand is providing us with 1/1000th of what we need. The boiler-plate rating the wind industry keeps boasting about states it should be about 1/25th.

We have actually been buying 12 times as much as this from the French. Even the pumped storage facility in Wales (usually used to meet short lived demand peaks and to control the mains frequency) provided eleven times as much. Hydroelectricity, of which we have very little, still provided double the wind power output.

It has been like this for days.

Luckily we are not in a position where we are dependant on wind for serious power generation.

But what if we were?

What if we were dependant on wind power or, in this weather, on its spinning reserve? What if the wind power "enthusiasts" get their way and we largely replace coal generation with wind turbines backed up by CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines)

On first look, it appears that it would not matter - during a time like this we simply would be using the CCGT spinning reserve.

Regrettibly it does matter. It matters massively. Dare I say it matters catastrophically. During weather like we are having right now, it would push our dependence on Gas to almost 70%.  We would need to significantly increase the gas transport infrastructure to feed these CCGT stations. Most importantly we would need to stockpile much more gas. At the moment, our meagre 7 day supply relies on the fact that power generation can, over a number of days, maximise use of coal and nuclear and minimise gas. That goes out the window if you need to guard against wind power failing and have no other option but to use gas..

I'll explain fully in a future post. Possibly the next, maybe the one after that. But I havn't got time to elaborate at the moment.