It was the wrong decision. I'd have made the same one they did.
It's the wrong decision made for the right reason with the available evidence at the time.
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Energy Bills
- Thread starter Grays_1890
- Start date
It's the wrong decision made for the right reason with the available evidence at the time.
That would be great if we could, all I know is that's not possible here. Maybe it's the scale of the project but SSE want nothing to do with our excess.
SpurMeUp
Jimmy Cantrell
Setup some free evening and weekend EV charging spots.
SpurMeUp
Jimmy Cantrell
The issue is how slowly governments have been reacting. Russia invaded Ukraine over half a year ago. Weaning ourselves off gas and fossil fuels is a longer-term object anyway. Being proactive buying up solar and putting in place a project to install over the nation, would have paid dividends. But it looks like nothing was done at all. Asleep at the wheel?
Again, doing it is no issue, liability is.
metalgear
Nayim
Battery longevity has been patchy at best so it is good to see that manufacturers are conservative about performance promises.
I believe that the industry is still learning about how the batteries behave differently compared to petrol engines in adverse conditions especially extreme temperatures.
They are highly flammable too and while it isn't a problem now but imagine when the majority of cars are evs and a places with high density of EVs be one a super fire hazard. I think new fire safety devices at scale too.
Personally I think battery tech breakthroughs will come soon, however in the longer term hydrogen fuel will be the standard... Safe energy generation on demand as opposed to distributed and stored.
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Is highly flammable a problem when the alternative is petrol?
ricky2tricky4city
Tom Huddlestone
You're thinking to 'real-time'. My suggestion related to the inefficiency of pumping water up hill, I've married that with you're issue of burning off electricity that no-one needs. I'm not thinking of your or any other specific location.
Just identifying dots that could be joined.
ricky2tricky4city
Tom Huddlestone
They couldn't possibly put a large chunk of taxpayers money into something that would be eternally useful. What a ridiculous idea.
metalgear
Nayim
It burns differently. But when it does it can get pretty violent, hotter and needs more water to put out.
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I certainly think that could work. There must be something better than that for storage on a large scale though.
ricky2tricky4city
Tom Huddlestone
I think it's a multi faceted problem/solution.
It's the joined up thinking/approach we need, which is a worry with the political 'brains' involved and a non-nationlised sector to get buy-in from.
In this particular case, it cuts down on storing excess as you're using it to pump water uphill to a reservoir (which is effectively storage).
There are many new battery techs that will be safer, cheaper and more suited to large scale storage in the future. Different battery tech characteristics lend themselves better depending on how they are going to be used. Sodium, liquid metal, Sand, graphene...all under development.
Edit: I also think if people/businessess did feed into the grid or storage it should be '1 in 1 out' ...you use 1kw you're back to zero usage if you feed 1kw back in. None of this different rates for feed in and usage.
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The problem with looking at what will be available in the future too hard is that it leaves us in the predicament we're in now.
5-10 years is a long time for my business to carry £0.5m extra utility costs per year - it wipes out our profits completely. It's also a long time for households to carry £2.5k annual bills (or whatever it is now).
As much as we need to get away from our reliance on gas, we should have reduced its supply in line with the power we were generating elsewhere, not shutting it off in the hope that something else will just turn up and replace it.
SpurMeUp
Jimmy Cantrell
Agree. Although hydrogen is possibly even more combustible. Storing hydrogen safely is one of the key issues to overcome. A big tank of hydrogen exploding would be like a massive bomb?
Bedfordspurs
Martin Peters
The grid can take feed inI've never once heard of anything like that. If you want to post some articles how the UK grid can't take feed in electricity I'll read them. Even if that was the case the solution is to fix the grid to handle it. It works everywhere else. And as I mentioned you'll use almost all the electricity you create anyway. You are tilting at windmills here.
And of course solar panels alleviate costs. Why else would you be putting them on your factory? A reasonably small 2kw system would get you about half your domestic electricity in ideal conditions. And again a 2kw battery adds say an additional 1k or so to the cost of an installation. It is not a massive amount.
If you want to argue that the current cost of a solar pv system is still beyond a lot of households then yes I would agree. This is where the government should come in. Batteries and panels are well on the learning curve and the prices has been dropping rapidly for years, but if you can't afford a 5k energy bill I assume you won't be able to afford a 5k pv installation either. Lower-income families should be helped with the upfront cost rather than throwing a few hundred quid at them every now and then which goes back to the energy companies anyway.
I was involved in a project to do just that about 15 years ago, when head of procurement at Tesco
We ran our generators on test but fed the electricity back to the grid
They use something called a ROCOF relay, rate of change of frequency … I remember the name and acronym so well
The programme was called Flexitricity
Bedfordspurs
Martin Peters
Our issue with energy costs in the UK isn’t wholesale costs, that’s just spin
It’s that our prices are off setting every other countries utilities as we don’t own any
Even our wind turbines are mainly owned by Danish companies
We are a laughing stock in Europe for the sell offs we have done
EDF - France
EON and RWE - German
Equinor - Norway
Orsted - danish
SSE - Swiss
it’s a shambles
It’s that our prices are off setting every other countries utilities as we don’t own any
Even our wind turbines are mainly owned by Danish companies
We are a laughing stock in Europe for the sell offs we have done
EDF - France
EON and RWE - German
Equinor - Norway
Orsted - danish
SSE - Swiss
it’s a shambles
Bedfordspurs
Martin Peters
I know a few guys that invested in tidal about 10 years ago. A Dutch system to be trialled in the Severn…. I do think it ever happened
metalgear
Nayim
Well that's what I worry about too, but from my casual reading:
- hydrogen by itself is not combustible
- to combust it needs to be ignited in a mixture of oxygen in sufficient volumes
- hydrogen is so light that if you free it it would disperse too quickly to be dangerous if not contained
- fuel cells work by mixing tiny amounts of hydrogen and oxygen so they are safe
So it won't spontaneously combust like Li ion batteries, but in the case of an accident, or creative user errors, I suppose anything can happen.
Korea and Japan are investing heavily in hydrogen and innovations to improve extraction and safety are still happening albeit under the radar, not hyped up by the Western press. This article explains better :
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans...ld-revolutionize-the-energy-market-1162360769
The issue with hydrogen as a fuel is generation and storage, to generate a lot of it and then get it compact enough for transportation.
Interestingly, tesla does not own much battery tech or innovation: they get their batteries from Panasonic (Japan) and LG (Korea) , who curiously are still not rushing out electric cars as enthusiastically as we know they can.
Also there are huge issues with sourcing cobalt and lithium, so new tech sodium batteries is inevitable. In which case, hydrogen fuel cells is ahead in large scale research and practical application.
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Rorschach
Sonny Walters
Do you mean you dont think it happened?
I have seen a bunch of successful tidal projects but they are very much prototypes and not scalable to any degree. I'm sure something somewhere might get a bit of traction but considering the low cost of other renewables it will not grab much of the market. Tidal has missed the boat.
Bedfordspurs
Martin Peters
Yeah Don’t
Typo
It was with a sixth company and they needed depth but not too many boats