Regarding backup, aside from the near impossibility of ever being able to afford the cost of grid size backup, and even then, only for a few hours, this is so succinctly put:
"the billions to be spent on storage will not generate a single extra MWh of electricity. Indeed, after taking account of losses during charging and discharging, the batteries will consume energy. Adding extra expenditure to the system without increasing output can only increase system costs and thus push up our bills even further."
Another great analysis David - There are no low energy, rich nations and there is no nation in which the masses will be rich on renewables and that’s the whole globalist net zero aim
See the charts I posted. It's not really that significant - Landfill gas and EfW incineration. Actually, I was surprised by how big it is. But it's hard to see it becoming a mainstream large scale source of power.
Great analysis David. Couple Q's that need resolving in my little brain. Is the AR6 strike price of £70/MWh solar in 2024 prices the actual cash the generator receives Or is it the difference between strike and wholesale reference? The 100 or so proposed solar farms in AR6 seems suspicious. My solar LCoE for solar comes out at £41/MWh over 20 years
The £70/MWh is the total revenue. If the reference price is below £70, then they receive a top up. If reference price is above £70, they have to pay back the difference. Note also that the more solar we bring on the grid, the lower the reference price is likely to fall during the mid part of sunny days.
I’m not an economist, nor am I financially that literate, since I’m a recovering academic formerly specialising in history, but my take on this is two fold:
Energy and data centres both require very few actual flesh-and-blood people to run them, what with computing technology and now AI promising an ever jobless future. Manufacturing was the last people-intensive sector on that first chart, especially if you think of the kind of very specialist manufacturing (like some engineering and aerospace stuff that appears to be the last bastion of British skilled labour), and that is a fraction of the 8% investment. So the overall picture seems to be less and less jobs for actual workers.
With an absence of workers, and of people in general, there is less need for energy consumption at the domestic level (heating homes etc). If the future is intended to be less peopled, then there is little need to upgrade the electricity grid. What energy we once consumed for our homes, mobility and leisure can then happily be diverted to feed the data centres. Maybe my imagination is running a little rampant today, but I fear a future scenario of a green and pleasant land, green because nearly devoid of people and pleasant for the few remaining, where we have achieved net zero by in effect becoming serfs to the servers.
How many of these will ever get to FID remains to be seen even many of the energy projects from previous rounds of CfDs and Capacity Mkt bungs have yet to put a spade in the ground.
If Labour are serious about this growth strategy they would confront head on all the hoops that any developers has to jump through to just get approval.
At nominal capacity we can see that we are a long way short of a pipeline for the offshore wind and solar targets MIliband dreams of. Many of the projects are a long way from being constructed.
I made a rough and ready conversion to real world capacity factors, and suddenly the huge pipeline of storage (mainly batteries) looks rather less significant: even so, the 8% I used is on the high side. Solar is cut down to size, and the dominance of offshore wind becomes a lot clearer. The futility of many of the technologies is also nicely illustrated: toys for boys in some university engineering departments in most cases. The Flywheels are at JET Culham, and used to inject 400MW from a 6MWh store for a few seconds when they fire up a fusion experiment: they have been there since the 1980s.
Got a piece on the REPD in a coupleofweeks. There's loads of projects that get planning permission and then don't get built. And quite a lot that land CfD contracts and get cancelled.
I think the next quarterly update will come out on 15th November. The current version, dated July, was published 15th August, with an update on October 1 giving more detail of some solar projects. It will be interesting to make a comparison to see the Miliband effect...
Thank you David! I always value contributions that give us the facts and spare the rest of us the agony of paying attention to what governments tell us, then digging through the rubble for any surviving truth.
According to my calculation, the capital cost alone for the Greenvolt project, assuming a ten year life in the marine environment, is similar to my current retail overnight rate with Octopus, so the direction of travel for bills is clear.
Do you know if these capital costs include grid connection, or is this, plus end of life, maintenance and energy storage cost, further cause for joy as we receive our bills?
I see a big pie chart for new energy investment that's 100% solar & wind scams and their needed storage & transmission scams and CCS scams. Nothing for nuclear the only economical low carbon source. And you keep hearing claims that nuclear is back on the table. Seeing is believing. So far I'm not seeing much.
They only want it to supply their 100's of GWs of A.I. data centers 24/7, reliably and economically. Now why would that be? Most of the A.I. is just hype, they're not really very good at real human skills. But I can imagine they would be excellent as mindless managers of an extraordinary complex management system based on CBDCs, Social Credit scores, 24/7 citizen monitoring, carbon footprints, 15min ghettos and compulsory military service for endless wars. You won't even have courts or a justice system, the A.I. will impose fines, restrictions or worse without recourse. A dystopian nightmare awaits us.
And, other than the energy investments with inbuilt subsidies, one has to wonder how many of these projects will actually reach fruition. At this stage, they are all, at best, at the LOI stage, so not yet legally binding.
Take an example - Blackstone. Blackstone is in the business of renting properties at the highest rents the market will take. So, with Labour's proposed rent controls, is it likely that Blackstone will wish to go ahead in the UK? And if they don't go ahead in the UK, why would they build a data center there when the UK already has the highest energy prices in the world and those prices are going a lot higher.
Data centers use enormous amounts of energy and can be located essentially anywhere. SO the logical place to build them is in the lowest cost energy location, obviously taking other factors also into consideration Political stability etc).
It would be interesting to revisit these investment projects annually to see just how many were actually completed.
Regarding backup, aside from the near impossibility of ever being able to afford the cost of grid size backup, and even then, only for a few hours, this is so succinctly put:
"the billions to be spent on storage will not generate a single extra MWh of electricity. Indeed, after taking account of losses during charging and discharging, the batteries will consume energy. Adding extra expenditure to the system without increasing output can only increase system costs and thus push up our bills even further."
Another great analysis David - There are no low energy, rich nations and there is no nation in which the masses will be rich on renewables and that’s the whole globalist net zero aim
Waste-to-energy is the answer…….
……it utilises and unending supply of fuel, and vitiates against landfill.
Extremely environmentally friendly.
Each large town could have its own generating plant……thereby cancelling the need for huge investment in cable infrastructure from coast and country.
Our leaders are blackguards.
See the charts I posted. It's not really that significant - Landfill gas and EfW incineration. Actually, I was surprised by how big it is. But it's hard to see it becoming a mainstream large scale source of power.
We already do waste to energy. There might be potential for more, but it will be only a small fraction of our total electricity generation.
Right, it's not too efficient because of low energy density of the material.
Great analysis David. Couple Q's that need resolving in my little brain. Is the AR6 strike price of £70/MWh solar in 2024 prices the actual cash the generator receives Or is it the difference between strike and wholesale reference? The 100 or so proposed solar farms in AR6 seems suspicious. My solar LCoE for solar comes out at £41/MWh over 20 years
The £70/MWh is the total revenue. If the reference price is below £70, then they receive a top up. If reference price is above £70, they have to pay back the difference. Note also that the more solar we bring on the grid, the lower the reference price is likely to fall during the mid part of sunny days.
Very disapointing but not surprising
I’m not an economist, nor am I financially that literate, since I’m a recovering academic formerly specialising in history, but my take on this is two fold:
Energy and data centres both require very few actual flesh-and-blood people to run them, what with computing technology and now AI promising an ever jobless future. Manufacturing was the last people-intensive sector on that first chart, especially if you think of the kind of very specialist manufacturing (like some engineering and aerospace stuff that appears to be the last bastion of British skilled labour), and that is a fraction of the 8% investment. So the overall picture seems to be less and less jobs for actual workers.
With an absence of workers, and of people in general, there is less need for energy consumption at the domestic level (heating homes etc). If the future is intended to be less peopled, then there is little need to upgrade the electricity grid. What energy we once consumed for our homes, mobility and leisure can then happily be diverted to feed the data centres. Maybe my imagination is running a little rampant today, but I fear a future scenario of a green and pleasant land, green because nearly devoid of people and pleasant for the few remaining, where we have achieved net zero by in effect becoming serfs to the servers.
How many of these will ever get to FID remains to be seen even many of the energy projects from previous rounds of CfDs and Capacity Mkt bungs have yet to put a spade in the ground.
If Labour are serious about this growth strategy they would confront head on all the hoops that any developers has to jump through to just get approval.
Nice question. I looked at the government Renewable Energy Planning Databasse - REPD to prepare these charts:
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Renewables-Project-Status-Nom-Capacity-1729458825.0085.png
At nominal capacity we can see that we are a long way short of a pipeline for the offshore wind and solar targets MIliband dreams of. Many of the projects are a long way from being constructed.
I made a rough and ready conversion to real world capacity factors, and suddenly the huge pipeline of storage (mainly batteries) looks rather less significant: even so, the 8% I used is on the high side. Solar is cut down to size, and the dominance of offshore wind becomes a lot clearer. The futility of many of the technologies is also nicely illustrated: toys for boys in some university engineering departments in most cases. The Flywheels are at JET Culham, and used to inject 400MW from a 6MWh store for a few seconds when they fire up a fusion experiment: they have been there since the 1980s.
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Renewables-Project-Status-CF-adjusted-1729462743.1475.png
Got a piece on the REPD in a coupleofweeks. There's loads of projects that get planning permission and then don't get built. And quite a lot that land CfD contracts and get cancelled.
I think the next quarterly update will come out on 15th November. The current version, dated July, was published 15th August, with an update on October 1 giving more detail of some solar projects. It will be interesting to make a comparison to see the Miliband effect...
Thank you David! I always value contributions that give us the facts and spare the rest of us the agony of paying attention to what governments tell us, then digging through the rubble for any surviving truth.
According to my calculation, the capital cost alone for the Greenvolt project, assuming a ten year life in the marine environment, is similar to my current retail overnight rate with Octopus, so the direction of travel for bills is clear.
Do you know if these capital costs include grid connection, or is this, plus end of life, maintenance and energy storage cost, further cause for joy as we receive our bills?
It's not clear exactly what the capex figure is supposed to cover
I see a big pie chart for new energy investment that's 100% solar & wind scams and their needed storage & transmission scams and CCS scams. Nothing for nuclear the only economical low carbon source. And you keep hearing claims that nuclear is back on the table. Seeing is believing. So far I'm not seeing much.
Nuclear is back on the table in many locations across the world. It's the UK that is dragging ger feet.
The globalists don’t want the cheap, reliable electricity for the masses that nuclear would provide
They only want it to supply their 100's of GWs of A.I. data centers 24/7, reliably and economically. Now why would that be? Most of the A.I. is just hype, they're not really very good at real human skills. But I can imagine they would be excellent as mindless managers of an extraordinary complex management system based on CBDCs, Social Credit scores, 24/7 citizen monitoring, carbon footprints, 15min ghettos and compulsory military service for endless wars. You won't even have courts or a justice system, the A.I. will impose fines, restrictions or worse without recourse. A dystopian nightmare awaits us.
And, other than the energy investments with inbuilt subsidies, one has to wonder how many of these projects will actually reach fruition. At this stage, they are all, at best, at the LOI stage, so not yet legally binding.
Take an example - Blackstone. Blackstone is in the business of renting properties at the highest rents the market will take. So, with Labour's proposed rent controls, is it likely that Blackstone will wish to go ahead in the UK? And if they don't go ahead in the UK, why would they build a data center there when the UK already has the highest energy prices in the world and those prices are going a lot higher.
Data centers use enormous amounts of energy and can be located essentially anywhere. SO the logical place to build them is in the lowest cost energy location, obviously taking other factors also into consideration Political stability etc).
It would be interesting to revisit these investment projects annually to see just how many were actually completed.