Drax power station? A little on the nose, isn’t it?
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Unfortunately, the Greens are now bleating about the pylons needed to bring renewables ashore - and helping forge yet another NIMBY alliance with the Tories who are still opposed to power that doesn’t involve burning our ancestors. Putting the grid underground and offshore will make renewable power utterly unaffordable.
They are also still against ramping up new nuclear as a low carbon base load to help manage troughs and peaks in solar and wind power. Our AGR fleet is aging rapidly and they still deliver a useful, reliable chunk of power. Unlike PWRs, they can’t receive much more of a life extension as their graphite cores are cracking which poses problems down the road.
Oh for a spot of French pragmatism in this country.
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One of the great government scandals of our time - Private Eye has been in the case for years (see also infected blood scandal, Horizon…) and somehow it never seems to get to the top of the news agenda.
Drax has received more than £7bn in ‘green’ subsidies since 2012, and right now it is requesting further subsidies until 2030. The government is staying very quiet on the topic.
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We also have Skynet and COBRA, so why not?
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This is another one of those frustrating cases where Private Eve manage to be right and clueless at the same time. “Old Sparky” is correct about the Drax scandal and has been going on about it for years, but is also incredibly negative about planned renewable power schemes, while also being down on pylon NIMBYs. He just seems to be grumpy about every possible plan and isn’t really for any particular solution, which is fine if you want to rile people up and sell magazines, but ironically isn’t great at “Keeping the lights on”.
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It isn’t. What it is doing is driving miles and miles of huge pylons across the country to get power from offshore to where it is to be consumed. It’s too expensive to put the cables underground. In between is offshore cables to come ashore where it is needed, but that’s still more expensive than pylons. Though apparently it is only a small handful of years before that would cost much the same as pylons. It is going to be a continuing huge political row for a while to come.
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Bright sunlight heats up the panels, which reduces their efficiency. That said, it can’t be denied that Britain’s latitude means its daylight hours vary from about 8 to 16 a day, depending on the exact location and the time of year.
Wind power is much less inherently variable when you have wind farms spread out over an area the size of the UK and surrounding seas. The problem is grid connections.
The UK is also very well suited for tidal power schemes, which are very reliable. So they have been refused by the previous Conservative government.
Clearly there should be a storage capacity based on various kinds of potential energy storage. I think too that domestic batteries have a part to play alongside microgeneration.
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The tides are very reliable, but tidal power is… not so successful. Unless you are willing to dam off an entire tidal inlet and deal with all the environmental consequences that has, all other tidal power technologies have proven to be very difficult to keep operational against the sheer power of the UK’s tidal flows and coastal weather. There have been trials running off of Orkney for around a decade, and the tech has always had problems with scaling up. It’s such a shame, because the predictability of the tides and their staggered progression around the coastline make tidal power really appealing if it can be done correctly, but we’re just not there yet.
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A couple of you have beaten me to it - the obvious windbag:
The “more cheese than France but weaker lettuce” windbag:
The “How do trousers work again?” windbag:
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What are they winding?
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I think solar is just so high, as its easier to build, thanks to the torys, and no on land wind, farmers have a much easier time of putting solar in their fields and homes all go solar as thats what is easy, and for the wind the uk gets industrial wind is a better bet, being at the end of the jet stream the uk is quite literality a wind power house, we could be like 75% wind, if it was windy all the time.
But I love a windy day as i am with octopus agle, so while its way more expensive for me use power between 4p, and 7pm over night last night there was time when it was so windy they where paying me to use power, so a grate time to run the pyrolitc ovens self clean, or delay start dishwasher.
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… giant rubber bands, for energy storage 𖣘
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Doesn’t this source get clogged with milkshakes?
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Only when thrown correctly.
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Now that’s wind power!
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