Britain will need to boost its generation of electricity by about a quarter, Scottish Power has estimated.
The energy firm said electric cars and a shift to electric heating could send demand for power soaring.
Its chief executive also said there would have to be a major investment in the wiring necessary to handle rapid charging of car batteries.
Is the net demand for energy really spiking, or is it merely shifting from one source to another?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Scottish Power Says UK Will Need to Boost Capacity
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 24 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:17PM (16 children)
The question in the summary is specious because it changes terms. The article quote itself says "SHIFT to electric heating", presumably from burning either fossil fuels or wood/peat/etc. at the home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:24PM (13 children)
Electric heating is unbelievably wasteful of resources.
All you need is HEAT, not a carefully controlled source of electric power that WAS OBTAINED FROM HEAT at a very high loss factor as an inescapable part of the process!
Unless the UK is going to heat using heat pumps... very efficient technology, but also only usable in a mild climate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:07PM (7 children)
Not quite - what you want is easily turn-on-and-offable heat which is easy to deliver, and which has no toxic byproducts.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:23PM (6 children)
Electric resistance heating is not the only way to do this, and you know it.
There is natural gas and steam heat as well. Natural gas will heat your house better than any competing technology, but it's not the only way to go.
Heat pumps are great if it never gets very cold.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:35PM (5 children)
Heat pumps have consequences as well.
Imagine an entire urban area heated by heat pumps, ground source, air source, water source.
No sooner would the systems be installed area wide than the heat source would be depleted to such a degree you would have to re-install a different, better solution, a deeper loop of tubing, or using more water, or what ever.
Oil was once thought to be inexhaustible.
Coal was thought to be inexhaustible.
Lets not make that mistake again.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
Your reply sounds like a joke.
For the record, I meant the common heat pump that uses ambient outside air: basically, an air conditioner you can run in reverse.
The heat source for the outside air is the sun. That makes it inexhaustible. Furthermore, you are only *moving* the heat from outside the house to inside the house. The heat isn't being "used up." It will, as a matter of fact, very slowly leak back outside over time. Plus the *new* heat being created by the heat pump compressor will be vented outside. There is no permanent loss of outside heat, just a temporary moving of it to inside your house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:41PM
I'll only add that a heat pump depends on a well-insulated house so that once the heat is moved inside it stays there a long time.
At least in residential settings, I have never heard of heat pumps wringing the outside air clean of heat.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:39PM
Ground source heat pumps are able to handle temperature extremes better, because the carrying solution coming out of the ground is always 55F. In the winter you spend a little energy to boost that to 72F, in the summer you blow air across the coils and there's your cooling. A lot of GSHP systems also tie in the water heater to handle that as well.
The real limiting factor is what kind of soil your house/building is sitting on. If you're on a solid slab of rock, with not enough top soil to get down the requisite 6 feet where that 55F is, then you're out of luck. Drilling into solid rock to drop enough coil to heat/cool your house will never pay for itself. If you have at least 6ft then you can at least use a trench formation to lay your coil out horizontally.
It's worth checking that out. If you have the subsoil to do it you'll save yourself tens of thousands of dollars (here in the Northeast oil heat for a normal 1-family home can run $5K/yr) in heating costs and cooling costs, plus the heat pump will run forever.
Air source heat pumps you're talking about are limited. Water source ones have problems with fouling, though close-loop ones are OK; the city of Toronto in fact uses one of those to pull up frigid water from Lake Ontario to cool buildings downtown in the summer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:02PM (1 child)
I'm sorry? I honestly don't even know where to begin here. If you manage to "deplete" the ability of your source to dispense or absorb the necessary amount of heat energy to be useful, you have ROYALLY screwed up your initial engineering calculations. If you do it right, it doesn't matter whether you're the only one within ten miles or if you're in the middle of a city where every building uses the same technology.
... First of all... heat pumps transfer heat in either direction. In the winter they are used for heating, in the summer they are used for cooling. Whether air, water, or ground, the overall heat balance comes from either the sun or the heat of the Earth's molten core which maintains the average temperature of the crust around 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit. We aren't capable of depleting either of those things within the next billion years no matter how hard we try. A properly installed and sized ground-loop heat interchange system will literally work "forever" (as far as our civilization is concerned), pumping heat into the ground during the summer and pumping it out during the winter. Even if we put a 100-story skyscraper on every square inch of land on our planet, each with a huge heat sink reaching hundreds of feet down, we could never turn the Earth into either a ball of ice or a molten rock by "depleting" the heat balance of the planet. That just isn't how this works. It's more like a battery that gets charged during one season and discharged during the opposing season. It's an endless cycle of heat transfer in both directions.
No matter how much solar energy we use, we will never "deplete" the sun until it burns itself out billions of years from now. And as long as the Earth turns on its axis and has an atmosphere that gets heated on only one side by the sun, we will have wind available for wind energy production. We could theoretically reach a point where adding new wind turbines would be pointless after reducing the total atmospheric kinetic energy to an equilibrium point, but that will take millions of huge wind turbines installed all over the world. We could power our entire civilization from wind energy several times over before we could reach that equilibrium point.
You are comparing these things which in any rational sense are non-depletable during the time period when life will be capable of existing on this planet, with a fuel source that with the most conservative usage possible will simply cease to exist within a thousand years, and won't be replaced for hundreds of millions of years. Even if we somehow managed to reach those theoretical equilibrium points with these other forms of energy, they would still be producing energy for us for as long as we have the raw materials available to keep replacing the related hardware that makes them work. They'll never just "stop" the way fossil fuels soon will.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:45PM
If only RedBear would read all the posts at 0 or higher, he wouldn't answer questions that have already been fully answered.
It's a problem with this site. No, I will not log in because I value my privacy. I am not interested in Facebook style tracking of my posts by other users.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:53PM (4 children)
And heat pumps are powered by.....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:00PM (3 children)
Please read my above post where I explain how a heat pump works.
Yes, it takes electricity to run the compressor (plus fans, but the majority is used by the compressor), but the heat pump electricity is used only to move OUTSIDE HEAT into your house.
This uses little electricity compared to the other option which is inexplicably popular in some countries of ELECTRIC RESISTANCE HEATING which is basically running a big toaster inside your house and blowing that hot air around.
Heat pumps use electricity to help *move existing heat*, while so-called "electric heat" (electric resistance heating) *generates* 100% of the heat from electricity.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)
Duh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
What a waste of forum space your posts are--just filler.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @11:21PM
And you assumed that all electric heating is resistive.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:59PM
Of course, I'm not pretending there's a noble motive behind what he's saying - he wants to be in control of an even bigger slice of the UK wind farm industry than he already is, and presumably wants to get the goverment to subsidise, i.e. the taxpayer to partly pay for, the equipment whose output will then be sold back to the taxpayers. I'm completely convinced he doesn't want any other company fulfilling this projected demand.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:02PM
The vast majority of homes in the UK use mains gas for heating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:48PM (1 child)
I bet it's a dinosaur figuring out now is the last time they will manage to build another 40 years mega facility before solar and wind take over...
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @11:22PM
Wait, is the dinosaur the fuel or the energy company?
(Score: 3, Informative) by tomtomtom on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:34PM (2 children)
The problem is not increasing demand per se (demand is increasing but not especially rapidly), but shrinking spare supply capacity, which is down to mismanagement on the part of government.
Basically, the UK has been failing to replace old generation capacity quickly enough as it's been shut down at end of life or for other reasons (e.g. old coal-fired plants phased out under the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive). This is because over the past 10 years, renewables became such a large part of the market that the way it was supposed to function was no longer working properly. The way the market is designed is that every half hour electricity is sold at the marginal bid made by generators to meet the anticipated demand. The problem is, renewables generally put in a bid at, or close to, "zero pence/kWh" because their short-run marginal cost is very close to zero, and they want to be guaranteed they will be dispatched if the wind is blowing/sun is shining/etc. They rely on other forms of generation to be price-setters and take whatever they can get.
This effect has kept the wholesale price of electricity on average down to a point at which there is very little probability that the long-run marginal cost for any new entrant not in receipt of a subsidy (ie nuclear or renewables) will not be loss-making. So new renewable capacity continues to be built to the extent the long-run marginal cost is covered by subsidies but nothing else is really being built beyond that. As the old gas/coal/etc plants reached end of life the capacity in the system (especially the spare capacity in the system) has slowly been coming down. At the same time, the capital cost of building a new coal/gas/etc generation plant has increased faster than inflation for a number of reasons (rising commodity prices, rising wages, shrinking market leading to a less competitive playing field etc). The government knew this was coming for a long time but instead of dealing with it head on, they messed about for years chasing ever more renewables and new build nuclear (and arguably even doing that wrongly - by going for very very large nuclear plants as they thoughts that would mean fewer arguments over where to put them, but as a consequence making them far more expensive to build per MW of capacity and far more like to be delayed in construction).
Now the government has belatedly realised it needs to deal with this and its solution to this has been to implement a "capacity" market operating alongside the traditional market where generators who are able to guarantee dispatch at short notice are paid to be available even if they never actually generate anything. The theory is that this should put certain technologies (e.g. Open Cycle Gas Turbines) back into a position where a new investment has a reasonable chance to be profitable and thus spur people to build these plants. But it may well be too late so demand management measures will become more visible first (some large industrial customers are given a lower cost of electricity per kWh in return for being happy to have their supply interrupted at short notice). Long-term "smart grids" are supposed to broaden demand management measures to smaller customers but it's unclear how realistic it is to expect this to work (it amounts to the national grid being allowed to turn down people's thermostats and stop charging their electric cars in periods of high demand - neither of these will be popular with consumers).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:50PM (1 child)
The missing thing in your analysis is energy storage. (Which is not surprising, since its also missing in the energy market).
Do you need peaking generation capability if you can store 3 or 4 days of energy? Currently we can't even story enough to compensate for a cloudy calm day.
Your excoriation of the government for doing nothing fails to take into account the tax breaks and subsidies they have been providing for decades. This IS proactive, foresightful, and wildly successful - to the point where (by your own analysis) it has driven the price of the next unit of energy to near zero.
Maybe this public investment should be re-directed to the most needed component in the system: Storage.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:45PM
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that a capacity market is a bad way to solve the problem. Indeed to your point, energy storage is one of the beneficiaries of the capacity market and it should spur new investment there. There are limited sites suitable for pumped hydro in the UK and batteries are really in their infancy - but I believe (haven't checked) that they qualify for the same types of subsidy scheme as solar etc - i.e. they are segmented by how early-stage the technology is viewed to be and then within each group competed for best price for a given fixed amount of production/nameplate capacity. Storage even has a further advantage in that it can price lower per MWh because it also gets a boost from capacity sales. I personally don't think it needs more of an incentive than that. Having said that, I don't think it's obvious that peaking plant is less environmentally friendly than battery storage - as utilisation is by definition expected to be low across the years/decades, the lifetime cost will be dominated by upfront costs both in financial and environmental terms - and "simple" OCGTs may well have a lower environmental cost than high efficiency batteries which involve materials which are pretty difficult to source, process, manage during lifetime and eventually dispose of. The other piece not often talked about are interconnectors but you start to interact with other countries energy policies and markets, security of supply concerns, etc as well there so they will probably always be small given the consequent political difficulties.
My point really was more that government (Ofgem and the civil servants in the various government departments - I actually don't really blame politicians for this as it wouldn't have been a difficult political decision given the level of technicality would almost guarantee it stayed off the headlines) took far too long to get here. Once the decision was made to aim for such a high proportion of renewables so quickly and the incentives and subsidies were put in place to get there, this was a logical and highly foreseeable consequence. It's not like the problem came out of nowhere for government - a large number of people have been saying this for a long time (I heard people advocating for a capacity market in the UK more than 10 years ago). I really don't know why they missed the boat so badly - the only real answer I can come up with is that it raises consumer prices but so did the green subsidies - if it had been part of a package then I doubt there would have been any additional complaining over the price impact.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)
Is this really the question?
The story is about Electrical Generation needing to be increased.
As we switch to electric cars, that energy we USED TO consume as gasoline will need to be replaced by electricity.
Soon-ish we aren't going to have the gasoline, so the question of shifting sources is moot. Its a forced shift. Not a whim or a fad. We won't be putting that gas to other uses.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:56PM
One interesting statistic is that energy (as opposed to electricity) usage per capita is now going down in most developed economies. Newer housing and offices need far less energy to heat due to better insulation, only partially offset by growing need and desire for air conditioning. Household appliances are getting more energy efficient which more than offsets the greater number of them people tend to have. And perhaps most importantly, heavy industry is also continuing to move offshore. This is offset by growth in population and faster growth in the number of households. The overlaying factors for electricity are then changes to energy sources households use for heat and cooking (driven in the UK at least partly by some volume housebuilders cutting costs by not installing mains gas), and the big unknown - electric cars. They are such a small proportion of the total fleet today that they just aren't relevant to national energy consumption and noone really knows how much of the market they will eventually control - on the one hand you have governments setting soundbite targets like "no more ICEs by 2040", but on the other hand adoption has been slow to date and nothing has really happened to change that.