An Expensive day in April.

The 30th April 2017 was a Bank Holiday Sunday in the UK and consequently the use of electricity was very low.

By chance it is also a Goldilocks day for wind and solar. Not too much wind but windy enough to provide a high output. The icing on the cake was that the wind speed was pretty constant across the day. Solar meanwhile has a nice day too with cloudless skies.

The day has been lauded far and wide as the day the UK was supplied with more power by renewables than by all other sources combined. When averaged over the day, the subsidised renewables (wind, solar and biomass) contributed 41% of the total energy used.

I wondered how much this Goldilocks day cost the UK taxpayer in subsidies.

The Electric insights website (Here) gives us a lot of information.

Here is a snapshot of the full day of generation from 30th April.

Knowing a few of the details of the subsidy regimes and the average generation per technology over the day we can get a rough idea of how much this golidlocks day cost, both for actual electricity generated and for wind, solar and biomass subsidies.

All of existing RE generation (bar the shouting) is subsidised by the Renewables Obligation (RO) or for smaller generators by the Feed In Tariff (FiT). CfD's (contracts for difference) are yet to apply to operational generators, but they are unlikely to reduce the total cost by much (if anything).

Bear in mind  RO and FiT subsidies are NOT the full price. The fullprice is (subsidy + selling price).

Currently one ROC is worth £45.58

Interestingly the RO for ground level solar (1.2 ROC/MWh) is almost the same as the latest total FiT price (generation + export) for small arrays.  Which means I will assume all solar gets the same subsidy of 1.2 ROCs/MWh (actually this is an significant underestimate of the subsidy due to a number of reasons - but I'll use this to err on the side of caution with this rough calculation)

Large scale wind has two separate ROC subsidies - one for onshore (0.9 ROCs/MWh) and one for offshore(1.8 ROCs/MWh). Offshore is far more productive per turbine than onshore while there are more onshore turbines than offshore. So a happy medium is to place the average ROC subsidy at 1.35 per MWh( (onshore + offshore)/2)

There is also some embedded wind which is subject to the FiT scheme. But per MWh this works out at approximately the same level of subsidy as our average for on-shore and off-shore.

Roughly working out the subsidy per technology for this single Goldilocks day:

Wind. 
The average power output over the day for wind was 8.8GW So the total energy generated was (8.8 x 24) just over 210GWh. Our subsidy  per MWh is (1.35 x £45.58) or £61.53 per MWh. So the subsidy on 210GWH amounts to £12,921930.

That is (as near as dammit) £13 million for the day

Solar.
Obviously solar only works during daylight so although there was a glut at midday of around 5GW, when averaged over the day the output was a more modest 1.5GW or 36GWh. The subsidy cost is 1.2 ROCs per MWh.

That comes out roughly £2 million for the day.

Biomass
Biomass power averaged 1.4GW over the day producing 33GWh of energy. Biomass gets one ROC per MWh.

The subsidy for this single day was just over £1.5 million.

So the total subsidy was £16.5 million.

How does this compare with the total generation cost?

Now the average payment (ex-subsidy) for all generators over the day was £32.43 per MWh and the average total power was 28.4GW.  So the total cost (ex subsidy) for all the electricity generated (28.4 x 24 x 32.43) was about £22 million

Bear in mind that my back-of-a-fag-packet subsidy calculation of £16.5 million uses the latest (and smallest) FiT rates.

It is pretty clear that when you include the hidden ROC and FiT subsidies this single day of 41% penetration by Wind, Solar and Biomass came close to doubling the wholesale price of electricity.

Yet on this sunny, windy, and expensive day in April, there was also an elephant in the room.

It is an elephant whose name environmentalists dare not speak. An elephant that is shunned, ignored or pilloried.

That elephant is the UK's existing nuclear power fleet.

One that April day it continuously provided about 25% of our power or 7.3GW. It does this day in day out 24/7. Not just when there is a Goldilocks day.

There were no emissions and for existing nuclear, there are no subsidies.

The Trouble with Energy Storage

Energy Storage - The Holy Grail for intermittent electrical generators.

Reading the tweets and articles from the wind and solar industries (and their avid followers) you could be forgiven for thinking that large scale energy storage was a done deal. Something that just needed the bureaucrats in Westminster or Berlin or Washington to rubber stamp.

Sadly though, large scale wind/solar energy storage is not only not a done deal it is not even on the horizon. Even if it was it would still be very far from being a “solution” to intermittent and dilute electrical generation. But more on why that is in a later post.

First of all lets be clear about what I mean by energy storage.

In a way, all current thermal generation and hydro depend on “energy storage” The difference between energy storage at (say) a coal plant and a wind farm is that the coal plant stores its energy pre-generation (i.e. as raw fuel) whereas a wind turbine has to convert its energy into a non-electrical form after excessive generation in order to store it. So the wind turbine has to convert its excess energy into some form of fuel to be stored for later use. The coal plant simply does not use the fuel until it is needed.

(by the way I am using coal plant here because it is a good comparator – not because I am a fan of coal generation – I prefer nuclear)

Typically the front runners for renewable energy post generation fuel storage revolve around two technologies:

1. Pumped hydro (pumping water up hill into a reservoir)
2. Or as is the fashion - in some form of Battery.

Pumped Hydro.

Pumped hydro is an old and proven technology. It existed a long time before the current wind/solar obsessions. Originally pumped storage facilities ( like Dinorwig in Wales) were built to store energy when the price was low (typically at night) and then sell that stored energy at peak demand (when prices were high). Using this model, pumped hydro works very well. It is a profitable and very worthwhile addition to the Grid.

But things change when you try and use it to store excess solar and wind energy. You essentially break the pumped hydro economic model, especially with solar PV. (See Speigel Online article here )

You have to buy in energy when prices and demand is high while sacrificing your profitable market as well. Then you then have to sell on when prices and demand is low.

It does not work. Even if you created some subsidy regime to support this broken model, the number of potential pumped hydro sites are very limited anyway.

But at least, individual pumped hydro sites can store relatively large quantities of electricity.

Although UK pumped hydro could not deliver the energy quickly enough to actually take over the whole UK grid, they do hold enough energy to power the entire UK grid for about 1 hour. 

While that may not sound much, it is overwhelmingly better than any form of battery storage.

When we get to battery style storage the practicality and price viability of large scale energy storage falls off a very high cliff.

Batteries

The biggest battery in Europe is in Leighton Buzzard in the UK. It can store 10MWh of electricity. It could (say) store half the output from a single small 10MW wind farm running at maximum output for two hours. It cost £20 Million. An average UK demand is around 30GWh. So this single battery would power the entire UK grid for about 1.2 seconds.

OK, you may say – let us distribute/duplicate it and use a cheaper technology After all why not have a cheaper 10MWh battery for every (say) 5 wind turbines? You know - Spread it out a bit.

Lets look at the (arguably) most viable and cost effective large scale battery technology available today – Vanadium Redox flow batteries.

(Incidentally - this is VERY clever technology and has many potential applications – I am not knocking the technology – only the application) .

Flow batteries store the energy in the electrolyte. The consequence of this is that theoretically the only limitation to the their storage capacity is the amount of electrolyte you can to store. 

Currently Vanadium Redox batteries store about 20 Wh per litre of electrolyte. So for 10MWh you need to store around 500,000 litres of highly corrosive Sulphuric Acid based electrolyte.

Lets say technical innovation decreases that by a factor of 10. You would still need to pump/store/process 50,000 litres or nearly 100 tonnes of electrolyte. 

That is for 10 MWh. Or 1.2 seconds of nationwide supply.

So, why not just store more electrolyte? Simple eh?

But remember, this stuff is lethal. It is massively corrosive and is a liquid. Then remember this is one SMALL wind farm.

Multiply that by thousands of wind farms. Then avoid killing anyone or regularly risking massive environmental pollution. That really is a challenge!

Of course there are other technologies (Lithium-ion being the other main and more expensive player) but whatever you look at, the problems of large scale energy storage are immense. They are effectively intractable.

Remember, what I have discussed above is the LATEST and most promising technologies. On Twitter people often eulogize about lead-acid batteries or compressed air, but really their capabilities are far below pumped hydro or flow batteries.

But Tom Murphy on his appropriately named blog Do The Math has done a very good analysis of a theoretical (USA) National Lead Acid Battery and its practicalities On this Link

A very interesting post on the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) on  storage with RE has been written by John Morgan  On This Link

Large scale post generation energy storage is not viable.

Bit even worse – not only is it not viable, it is also potentially very, very (and appallingly) dangerous.

But more on that in another post.

(Here I am not considering issues with charge/discharge rates, resource availability or lifetime cycle expectancy – they all just make things worse)

Prof David MacKay on the Laws of Physics

Prof David Mackay FRS is Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

He is also the author of  the famous (and free) "Sustainable Energy (Without the Hot Air)" . The whole book (12Megs) is available HERE

But he has also recorded a number of lectures on the viability and practicality of renewables, particularly he has focussed on the land areas needed to meet specific goals. These are goals that meet specific energy requirements. Here he is talking about systems that are other than window dressing or merely fashion statement technology.

My favourite quote is:- "I'm not anti renewables but I am pro arithmetic"

The recording is 18 minutes but is well worth a watch (unless you are a green dreamer that is)

Wind and Solar Renewables:- The German Experience

This is about a shocking German report from RWI Essen – the leading German economic research institution

The link to the report (in English) is  Here
The English version of the RWI-Essen website is Here
The wikipedia page on RWI Essen is Here

Why is this foreign report important to us?

In the UK we are at a point of crisis regarding future electrical energy generation. Decisions that should have been made 20 years ago have been avoided.  Arguably, whatever is now decided comes too late. Nothing short of a miracle will now prevent power cuts within the next 10 - 15 years. But unbelievably there are still people in government who, either for reasons of self interest or political advantage, still seek to pursue the current insane renewables agenda. If these people are allowed to prevail then the power cuts, economic dislocation and the consequential casualty list will be considerably worse.

Politicians, green zealots and other assorted wishful thinkers have there heads firmly buried in the sand. In Germany it has been even worse. That is why this German report is so important.

As part of the unending Green propaganda, we continually  bombarded with how Germany have embraced wind and solar. It is well worth cutting though the bullshit and picking up on exactly what the real experience is.

The above RWI-Essen document is a highly reputable study regarding renewables in Germany. This report is now three years old. Nothing has improved. It is (even for me) a shocking expose of the cost and waste of the German experience. I'll quote a few items from it below, but perhaps the concluding paragraph from the executive summary say it all.

[quote]
Although Germany’s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in
the media as setting a “shining example in providing a harvest for the world” (The
Guardian 2007), we would instead regard the country’s experience as a cautionary
tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic
and environmental benefits.
[unquote]

From the Abstract:

[quote]
To the contrary, the government’s support mechanisms have in many respects subverted these incentives, resulting in massive expenditures that show little long-term promise for stimulating the economy, protecting the environment, or increasing energy security.
[unquote]

Some more quotes from the Executive Summary

[quote]
Currently, the feed-in tariff for PV is more than eight times higher than the wholesale
electricity price at the power exchange and more than four times the feed-in
tariff paid for electricity produced by on-shore wind turbines.
Even on-shore wind, widely regarded as a mature technology, requires feed-in
tariffs that exceed the per-kWh cost of conventional electricity by up to 300% to
remain competitive.
[unquote]

[quote]
In the end, Germany’s PV promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a
per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per worker
subsidies as high as 175,000 € (US $ 240,000).
It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion
would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany’s
export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in
other countries such as the US.
[unquote]

[quote]
Claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany’s first-actor status are
unsupportable. In fact, the regime appears to be counter productive in that respect,
stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies.
[unquote]

Clearly, the German experience should serve us as a dire warning rather than an example. Already their energy prices are only second to Denmark. Luckily (so far) for Germany, their industrial base built up from the second world war has enabled them to indulge in this fiasco.  Only a fool would take us down the same debilitating path.

Unfortunately we have no shortage of fools in Westminster.

A Grid Tie Revolution

Or the Law of Unexpected Consequences

One of the most clever and potentially game changing pieces of kit to come out of the mad dash to solar PV is the grid tie inverter.

Is this going to be a whimsical tekkie diatribe? Well, partly. But there is a sting in the tail at the end.

The small grid tie inverter is the piece of equipment that has made domestic Solar PV technically viable.

It is very, very clever.

Due to the fact that reference designs by companies like Microchip are freely available, small grid tie inverters rated at about 250-300W are cheap and plentiful. They cost about £70 -£150 on ebay (p.s. you get what you pay for)

So what is it and why is it so special?

Well, a grid tie inverter, like a normal inverter will turn a DC low voltage source into an AC mains voltage source. So your low voltage solar panels end up outputting mains electricity.

But that has been done for years.

The clever part is that the grid tie does this synchronously with the mains feed into the house.

Why is this important?

Because the grid tie is synchronised to the main frequency, you can use the power output of the grid tie to supplement/replace or even output power to the mains. Without this sychonicity all you would end up with is a lot of sparks and smouldering electronics.

The result of this is that you do not need to abandon a normal electricity supply and go off grid. If for example, when you want to use the washing machine that may take 2KW, your grid tie contributes to that value. You do not need to provide the maximum power your washing machine needs. But anything the grid tie does produce will reduce the amount of power you draw from the grid, thus reducing your electricity bill.

The whole of the current FIT subsidy orgy could not take place without cheap and effective small grid ties.

Currently, in order to claim the FIT subsidy, you need an "approved" installer with "approved kit" that are registered with a trade cartel (er.. sorry i mean trade body) and it costs A LOT of money. Of course it costs everyone else even more to pay your FIT, but that's the way it is.

But what if you don't claim the FIT? What if you set up a system that simply offsets your mains usage? You still massively reduce your electricity bill. There is incidentally at least one company on the market already doing this. FIT free (and cheap)

But what about "approvals" "Part P" etc. Well, as I understand it, most of the modern small grid ties are G83 approved and are advertised as "Plug and Play" They literally plug in like an appliance, but they actually drive electricity into your ring main not suck it out. Setting up a couple of solar panels to supplement your electricity supply could not be simpler. You reduce you electricity bills and so don't personally end up paying other peoples FITs, and you system is massively cheaper than an "approved" installer one. As you can appreciate this gets more and more worthwhile the higher electricity prices go.

But here is the sting in the tail.

The current Grid ties almost universally have what is known a MPPT (Maximum power point tracking) front end that is tailored to extract the most energy possible from solar panels.

So what happens when someone comes up with a cheap grid tie that instead of interfacing to solar PV, interfaces to a small generators? Or even more likely when some clever wag designs an interface to fake up an MPPT output  from a petrol generator?

We end up with people backing off the mains with polluting small generators simply because electricity has become so expensive due to the ridiculous ROC and FIT subsidies.

But surely mains electricity is cheaper than equivalent petrol or diesel? Today? Only just. But if you use LPG or Tesco's best sunflower oil, probably not even today.

Remember you do not need to power your maximum requirement you just reduce it, so a small cheap generator is all that is needed.

If electricity prices continue to rise, people will find ways to beat the system and solar PV will only be a small part of it.  We will end up with distributed pollution rather than distributed "renewables".

But worse, the people still paying for the ROCs and the FITs will be the poorest and most vulnerable who don't have the wherewithal to beat the system.