This week has brought us to a situation we had long been concerned about which is a lack of wind. This matters because we depend so much on it for electricity generation these days. Indeed there is even a German word for this situation which is dunkelflaute. We can start with my home country the UK because it went literally from feast to famine and did so in short order. From Javier Blas on Monday.
Over the last 40 hours, the UK wind power industry has swung from producing 16.4 GW to generating 0.4 GW The drop in electricity production is equal to, give or take, switching off 14 nuclear power stations. That’s the reason why UK power markets are tight today.
This posed quite a challenge for obvious reasons and of course had been made worse by the rush to close coal power stations with Alok Sharma pretty much partying as one was destroyed. Also the mention of nuclear makes me wonder if we could have at least managed another winter from this.
The nuclear power station that has generated more electricity than any other has been switched off.Hinkley Point B in Somerset has been making power since 1976 and currently contributes about 3% of the UK’s total power needs. ( BBC in August)
Actually even keeping it running a bit longer shows the failure here which is the reality that we have let our nuclear capacity wither on the vine in a display of gross mismanagement. As I type this we are producing only 4.12 GW from nuclear power and as Hinkley C seemingly gets ever mote delayed (2027 is the latest) there is no hope for some time yet.
The stretched situation meant that the recent more favourable price structure got blown up at least temporarily.
No wind again today. Day-ahead electricity prices for the evening peak are hitting £1200/MWh, perhaps 25 times where they would be if the country wasn’t run by insane people. ( @Dissentient )
Any sustained period like that and we would be bankrupt. Also it seemed to make some lose their minds. From Caroline Lucas of the Greem party.
This Tory Govt has had an absurd mental block over onshore wind for a decade. It’s cheap, hugely popular, can strengthen our energy security & help tackle #climateemergency. Pitting onshore against offshore is nonsensical & dangerous – we need both.
When the wind is not blowing we can plant as many windmills as we like but it does not help. I think that the issue here is that our establishment has got obsessed with wind a bit like they have with Europe and have not looked beyond it. They somehow believed that a Dunkerflaute could be wished away. Even Javier Blas is at it a bit below.
Intermittency is a well known downside of renewable energy. Per se, it isn’t bad (as critics claim), but needs to be understood and addressed. Storage can help (currently, only via pumped hydro as everything else is too small). But demand response as critical.
The truth is that the intermittency issue has been ignored and our ability to cope with it is very minor. Also per se it is bad unless we can do something about it. Frankly demand response sounds rather chilling and not a little dystopian.
Also even pointing that out got this response from Dave Jones of Ember Climate
Thanks Javier.. will you post a wind tweet one day without negative subtext, you always sounds so cynical;) For example, you could mention that wind provided 33% of all the UK’s electricity last week?
Actually he had mentioned wind had been strong but we are back to the issue that just because it was good last week it is somehow okay this when it is not.
Interconnectors and the UK as an exporter
One actual improvement in the situation has been the spread of interconnectors whoch allow countries to balance their grids by taking from those with a surplus. This has benefited the UK in two ways. Firstly in times of need we have been able to draw on this as for example we importing 3 GW as I type this and on Monday night at the peak we were importing around 6 GW. But the overall situation over the past year is that we have been a net exporter with iamkate recording it averaging 0.5 GW.
A gain here is that we do get a sort of ersatz storage as the a.1.4 GW interconnector with Norway effectively comes from their hydropower. The risk is that Europe hits trouble at once and everywhere has a cold still day.
France
France has been the country that has seen the most swing in situation and more recently a rally. It appeared that its nuclear fleet would have in in food shape both in relative and outright terms. But then it turned out that Edf had problems with maintenance and that the fleet was suffering from ageing,
The utility, which is in the process of being fully nationalised, is racing against time to ensure its nuclear fleet can run at full capacity for the depths of winter. It has already seen its electricity output this year drop to a 30-year low due to a record number of outages. ( Reuters)
According to Reuters it lacks the skilled staff.
French power giant EDF (EDF.PA) is looking to recruit a new generation of welders, pipe-fitters and boiler makers to fix its ageing nuclear reactors……..The problem is that in France such skilled workers are in short supply. So much so that EDF, which has a reputation for delays and cost overruns in building nuclear plants, has had to fly in around 100 of them from the United States and Canada, it said this month.
Perhaps I should write a piece on that as everywhere we look we seem to have skill shortgages! That is another modern day reality which does echo some ominous science-fiction writing as at the moment it looks to be a fact.
Forecasts for French nuclear power keep being reduced and 2022 so far has been much worse than previous years. But this week France has jelped keep both its and our lights on via this. From Javier Blas on Monday
France is leaning hard on gas- and coal-fired plants, running currently at >10 GW (one of the highest daily generations days for gas-and-coal over the last 5 years) to offset weak nuclear generation.
Germany
This is the case of the biggest example of what in the financial world would be called a miss selling scandal. The promised wind of energiewende backed by gas from Russia has turned into this. From last night
Germany is burning a lot of coal (~45% of all electricity generation) as wind stops blowing. It’s electricity carbon intensity jumped to a crazy 745 grams (CO2 gr per KWh) this evening — higher than in South Africa and India ( Javier Blas)
It gets even more extraordinary when you note this.
Last year, Germany paid South Africa $800 million to stop using coal. Since then, German imports of South African coal increased eight-fold. ( @ShellenbergerMD )
Also I thought we were supposed to be unhappy about Qatar?
QatarEnergy and ConocoPhillips have signed two sales and purchase agreements to export liquefied natural gas to Germany for at least 15 years starting 2026 – the first such supply deal to Europe from Qatar’s North Field expansion project.
The agreement will provide Germany with two million tonnes of LNG annually, arriving from Ras Laffan in Qatar to Germany’s northern LNG terminal at Brunsbuettel, QatarEnergy’s chief executive said. ( Al Jazeera )
So the future for Germany is coal and LNG whenever the wind does not blow?
Comment
This is perhaps the greatest example of incompetence we have seen but it hides in a something of a smokescreen because it is the establishment which is guilty. A wind farm or a solar one have their uses just not the one they have been sold as providing. Last week the UK pretty much lived up to the soubriquet of the “Saudi Arabia of Wind” but this week we have a drought. The issue is the ability to store power which we only have in a limited way and the interconnector with Norway is a sort of implicit version. The media does not help with articles like this.
But what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine blah blah bl – oh right, we now have industrial-scale batteries:
That is from David Shukman of the BBC and it would last for maybe 20 seconds although actually it is for balancing wind power so not for that at all which he ignores. I also note there is no mention of the cost.
Along the way we have willfully let nuclear power wither on the vine and closed coal power stations. Of course we are now re-opening the latter as fast as we can. But will we see ever more deindustrialisation as it moves to cheaper sources of power?