Thanks for acknowledging where you made a mistake; too few people do that!
I'll concentrate on the interesting points.
A wind farm can be commissioned in a matter of months, far quicker than any nuclear or gas power plant, but it can generate comparable power to one in good conditions.
Nonsense, unless you are using "commissioned" in a non-standard way that you haven't bothered to specify (cf "wind ex storage").
Cherry picking (e.g. "in good conditions") is a bad debating technique, suitable only for politicians and salesmen.
It is true that getting a conventional nuke operating is slower than a wind farm. The SMR approach is yet to be tested.
I think SMR will turn out to be a pipe dream, but let's see if it happens. It has my support, just like fusion, we need to approach the problem with all options. But we should spend the most effort on things that currently work and can be demonstrated to work. How many commercial SMR plants are there, compared to windfarms full of 20MW turbines?
Essentially there are more operational SMRs than most people would like. They are,of course, self-propelled and surrounded by coolant.
Repurposing such reactors is one reason to believe their technical characteristics are well understood. Whether the political and commercial aspects work is TBD.
Fusion does have a potential problem: if it works and if is too cheap and if energy consumption continues to increase at the historic 2.9%/year, then in 450 years the oceans will boil (ref: the "Thermodynamic Limits" in
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ )
Those are variations on a theme, and nothing fundamental.
100GW with storage is larger than we would require. Without storage we would want something around, say, 1000GW to avoid outages
No. 1TW would be far too much with current projected demands. I don't think you're appreciating what storage does to resolve the intermittency issue.
I was presuming the storage problem
isn't solved. Solving it has to be a high priority, and (as I said) solving it will lead to the richness of Croesus
No, the UK doesn't. It has 25GW peak capacity, which is very different. In the last year
- On 2nd August it had own to 0GW (zero) output.
- 1.7% of the time it had <1% of the peak output (i.e. <250MW).
Please do your research before making statements such as those below.
Do you think that I don't appreciate wind sometimes goes to zero watts? The whole point of storage on such a scale is to make wind power viable (and solar in countries which have good insolation.)
The whole point about overbuilding the amount of wind power is that you store the excess by converting it into hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel, and then use that fuel when there's no wind. You combine that with demand management, so encouraging usage of energy when it's more readily available, and conservation when it isn't - e.g. EV chargers that run more on excess wind.
If you don't understand how that can work I don't really know what to say.
Oh, I completely understand
that. What I, and others, don't understand is how to do that
economically and
in the UK.
After that is solved on the scale of seasons and grids, wind/solar/tidal/etc it becomes practical to remove fossil fuel power stations.
But hopefully Russia's actions show that is increasingly necessary to maintain energy independence which wind power and storage enables. Anyway, I said we'd need more storage, this is not the hard part. There are lots of depleted gas fields, and there will be more come the end of North Sea gas and oil. I'm sure we can figure that bit out. The difficult bit is the syngas stuff, that is the new infrastructure that needs to be built en-masse.
"I'm sure we can figure that out" is not sufficient.
Well, the good news is I'm not in charge of grid and power engineering for the UK, so you don't need to rely on me "figuring it out". There are people working in this area that know way more than both of us working this stuff out, and I am summarising research, papers and thought patterns here.
There have been people working on that for many
decades. My father, when he was at the Central Electricity Research Labs, wrote a paper summarising the options. That was
40 years ago !
Hence my wanting to "kick the tyres" before believing that any particular technology is
practical.
In terms of storage, the UK has comparatively little in use right now. About 9 days' gas (see above) whereas NL has around 130 days.
That sounds about right.
One viewpoint is that the UK has been "banking" imported gas in various European storage facilities. Let's hope we can "withdraw our deposits" when there is a "run on the banks".
If we use depleted gas fields, we should be able to achieve capacities similar to Europe.
...
We certainly have no shortage of fields that could be developed for this purpose.
...
There are also inland fields, or converted coal gas mines, available.
Maybe. I don't know which locations are practical and economic.
I'm skeptical about storing gas in coal mines; overall capacity and leakage into buildings are two obvious issues..
It's not yet clear whether natural gas or hydrogen will win here. Natural gas is easier to use, as existing gas boilers, power plants, and industrial processes can use it, and it is easier to store and transport than hydrogen. However, it has greater losses. Current research suggests about 70% conversion efficiency could be achieved with an optimised CH4 conversion system; hydrogen may be able to achieve 80%. The conversion loss is one reason that you need to overbuild the wind power and the storage capacity, because your storage will be less efficient than using the energy directly. The really cool thing about Sabatier is it uses CO2 from the atmosphere, so processes that trap CO2, like fertiliser production via CH4 (a huge amount going into the soil carbon cycle) it is negative for carbon emissions. And even if you burn it in conventional boilers etc., it is effectively carbon neutral if fugitive emissions are kept low enough.
I'm skeptical about non-commercial uses of hydrogen. Apart from its low energy density, the small molecule size exacerbates leakage, and over time it embrittles metals.
I wonder if the planned test sites will be monitored long enough, or whether success will be declared before the problems have had time to become apparent.
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