CoffeePhilE According to some reports (assuming they’re right) we came VERY close to blackouts in that really hot spell a week or so back, never mind winter. I guess one difference is that fans, and especiaaly air-con, require electriciy while most heating uses gas.
The logic is inescapable and it will be worse on still, overcast winters days. So one wonders why the UKs headlong virtue signalling rush to net zero when it will make absolutely no difference to climate change. Why are we building lots of windmills and solar (often funded by the fossil fuel industry). Perhaps because it guarantees the use of fossil fuels?
Why are we fed the rubbish of grid scale storage by scientists (funded by god knows who), when the worlds largest battery will run our national grid for about 4 minutes at 3 am????
The most confusing to me as someone still keen on science….why are we not building more nuclear and less Windmills/Solar? When there is a glut of wind/solar power…those Nuclear reactors are not turned down, nuclear doesn’t work that way….the Xenon burn off problem. Those reactors keep running at the same power level around 90 to 100%, all the steam that’s generated, simply bypasses the turbines. This allows people to ooh and ahh that all our electricity needs were met by wind power. The reality is actually we have 6.5GW of power being generated by Nuclear, when you read 100% of our power came from renewables….what that really means is we have about 3,000 more wind turbines than we actually need….because those reactors cannot be “turned off, or even turned down efficiently”
https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12/technical_and_economic_aspects_of_load_following_with_nuclear_power_plants.pdf
Buried in page 28 are some salient facts about Iodine 235 decay into Xenon….especially the bit that effectively states as a reactors fuel gets burned up, it’s capability to burn up Xenon reduces and then significantly affects manoeuvrability.
What is left unsaid, is that reactors then have to be refuelled more often. This means less fuel burnup, much less efficiency and more downtime. The other thing that is unsaid is just how much more expensive it is to build and operate a reactor with 50% manoeuvrability (when just refuelled or new, it decreases as fuel is used up).
When these theoretical. new reactors are built in abundance, then we will only have 1500 more windmills than we need and reactors that cost 2x as much to operate.
I had a great deal of interest in Nuclear power over the last 40 years…..in fact one of my university papers was based on safety aspects of low dosage radiation for people working in the industry.
