Can someone help me count on my fingers and toes please?

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I was just trying to work out... Supposing in a fit of madness/inspiration, the UK government decided here and now that all our summer daytime electricity consumption was going to be met from solar PV procured/installed by them.  Forget baseload/nuclear/etc.  We turn on gas generation at night or whatever... Just hang in with me on this fantasy for a moment...  (Please forget the usual effect of government on big projects for a moment, also!)

Now, for a ~40GW daytime/worktime load that would mean 40GWp of solar panels (assuming sunny summer days for the moment: it has been known to happen!).

Let us assume roughly that the UK govt could get a decent discount ("Hello, yes, we'd like to buy absolutely every solar cell and inverter you have please, today...") amounting to an install price of say £2/$4 per Wp...  That would come to £80bn.  The annual UK govt budget is ~£500bn/$1tn according to the CIA Factbook (and that sounds about right to me), so could probably done if there was a really pressing need, maybe instead of protecting oilfields...

But what about land area required...  Ignoring shading (eg mountains, adjacent tilted panels, etc!) I think that even the best panels in mass production require about 6m^2 per kWp, so that would be ~2.4E8 m^2 or 2.4E2 square km, or about 0.1% of the UK land area (I had calculated 100% to start with, by having 1Wp per 6m^2 rather than 1kWp, phew!).

Does that sound right?  ~16% of annual budget and 0.1% of land area to meet all daytime needs from PV on a good sunny day?

Rgds

Damon

[gotwind2]

Hi Damon.

If your figures are correct (I think they are) that looks very impressive, at a guess, 1/3 rd of the peak power from solar might be more realistic over a U.K summer season.

Not sure how that would effect your calculations - all guess work on my part..

Still well under the annual budget I suspect.

Ben.

[DamonHD]

Oh yes, there's all sorts of problems, I know.  I think that ordering several hundred billion panels all at once might ... ahem ... cause a teensy-weensy glitch in the world market for example.

But suppose we had (say) 30GW+ nuclear baseload (that does roughly cover minimum use ~4am), eg see http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/2423 and another 40GW+ of solar, and decent tidal and wind, that probably could meet all UK power consumption just about during the summer, at nominally zero carbon, especially if we had time-of-day "smart" metering to very strongly encourage people and businesses to move their usage into the daytime when the sun is out and/or the tide is running and the wind is blowing.

You keep some decent (and efficient) natural gas plant that can be cranked up and down very fast to cope with short-term mismatches in supply and demand, but charge a huge premium for their power as a carbin tax.

And then in the winter maybe we could burn recently 'stored' solar energy, eg from managed woodland and other biofuels.  Again, nominally zero carbon, with backup from gas which is the least-bad (least-carbon-intense) fossil fuel source.

I think that it's actually plausible if it was thought to be the right thing to do, for whatever reasons (global warming, avoiding funding dodgy oil producing nations such as Norway^W^W^W B^> )

Incidentally, some of the nuclear baseload can be done away with and replaced with RE as baseload if we do any or all of a number of things, eg better/bigger interconnectors to other countries with different load/sun/wind profiles to us, storage improvements such as (distributed redox flow batteries or melted-salt heat stores, etc, etc...  (We only have a seedy 2GW of interconnector from the UK to France right now, with another one being built to the Netherlands.  Others have been proposed.)

Rgds

Damon

[fungus]

"You keep some decent (and efficient) natural gas plant that can be cranked up and down very fast to cope with short-term mismatches in supply and demand, but charge a huge premium for their power as a carbin tax."

Pumped storage hydro suits this better IMHO ..

[DamonHD]

Simply not enough of it, AFAIK.

All the obvious UK places for pumped storage are already in use, and its clearly not the case that we can coast on them now without base load generation.

And (as has come up here a few times recently) heaving water uphill stores astonishingly little energy...

Rgds

Damon

[fungus]

Well just an example (I've visited this place) , Ben Cruachan has pumped storage in it , (this is all IIRC) 1000ft of head and the power part is drilled 1km inside the mountain .. they can supply 450MW of power for 9 hours ..

[DamonHD]

Yes, which is amazing, but even minimum UK demand is more than 50x that.  And nights are not often shorter than 9hrs in the UK.

It's definitely a GoodThing(TM), but I just think that we can't do enough of it.

Still, that doesn't make it less realistic than my 240 billion solar panel scheme!  B^>

Rgds

Damon

[thirteen]

Has the UK government going to help everyone get better appliances say stove, frig, heaters. Maybe light bulbs to help cut the power usage. To me it may work for the city's but not in the farms or rurel areas. They could have the gov do that or them. It looks good on paper but will see.

[richhagen]

If RE is to replace base line power stations, it will have to be coupled with large storage systems.  About 372.6 Twh in electricity was produced in the UK in 2005.  That would be about a thousand twenty one Gigawatt hours per day.  Assuming the unattainable 100 percent efficiency for the moment, if you wanted to store that amount and could manage 1000 feet of head, then you would only need to move 325 billion gallons of water to power the UK each day on average.  Thats just under one and a third cubic miles of water provided my calculations are correct.  

I've got a lake with about 1100 cubic miles of water within three miles of my house, too bad there is no mountain range nearby.  Rich  

[DamonHD]

Interesting numbers: I'll have to use a few more fingers and toes.

Anyhow, we can build a mountain round your lake AND a long transmission cable then...  What wire gauge would that be?  B^>

Actually, there's a couple of towns here that we could flood and that no one would miss much.  The only question is whether we let the people out once we've built the wall and before we put the water in...

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

The EU (and our own Energy Saving Trust in the UK) has a scheme like the US Energy Start program(me) to rate the best appliances and actually forbid manufacturing very inefficient ones.

Over time, appliances are getting more and more efficient without getting more expensive.

A new, larger fridge/freezer for my family is going to take less than half the power of my current one, for example.

Also, there are schemes to get very efficient new appliances into poor homes for the price of a secondhand appliance.  Saves energy for people who really need to save the money (and removes the incentive to sell the shiny new box on immediately I suspect).

Rgds

Damon

[Gary D]

 If you want to fantisize, you may want to add in a bit of generation capasity for e- cars needing recharged. They, or plug in hybreds will soon add quite a bit of demand to  the grids of many Countries... Some are due to go into production in/ for the U.S. this year I think...

 Living in an Electric Co-Op. area here, I've had a bonnett/cut off on my hot water since they offered them(15 or so years). Power company sends a signal to cut power off to it as needed. The Co-Op now claims to be able to shed 17% of peak demand in an instant even tho it's totally voluntary (only a fraction of people have them installed). It doesn't drop total demand, just shifts it to a more cost effective time.

 Since the U.K windfarms are/will be generating almost constantly(at varying levels), less solar will be needed than your figures (no need to figure 100% solar)....  :-)

[DamonHD]

Indeed, I already attempted to have one discussion with the National Grid on this:

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-distributed-grid-support-from-microgeneration.html

and yes, the wind will be blowing somewhere in the UK the whole time...

Rgds

Damon

[finnsawyer]

But what would be the cost in power (KWH) to build all these solar cells versus the power they would provide over the lifetime of the cells?  They will wear out, probably all at once.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Depending on type/construction less than 20% of the energy captured is negated by the embodied energy of manufacture, AFAIK, and for some constructions such as CIGS and CdTe the embodied energy is reported to be much less than that.

I kinda doubt that they'd all die at once in the absence of EMP, and I imagine that a steady rolling replacement scheme would go into force after 10--20 years (or the first teenage catapult attack)!

Rgds

Damon

[richhagen]

There are a few places in the U.S. that have sufficient differences in elevation and sufficient water supplies that such a scheme would seem possible.  It would take huge capital investment in the storage schemes to build one of significant capacity, and probably more importantly, the overall cost of the power would be higher when you consider the RE generation and storage than the costs paid now for equivalent power from other sources.  In fact, what pumped hydro storage has been built here has generally been coupled to fossil fuel power stations as a load leveling/peak demand measure.  Building such a system for RE would only make sense currently in terms of energy security and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  I suspect the same factors apply in the U.K. as well, but you guys seem to be having a more vigorous debate on future energy supplies and emissions over there at the moment.  I would like to see a smaller scale version built here at least on a trial basis.  I would think the costs would be competitive over the long term with any other RE coupled storage schemes currently available.  Rich  

[DamonHD]

There's also an argument for doing this to clean the air of the other flue gases and effluent (such as ash) from fossil fuel sources, and to avoid continuing to disturb untouched ground to get at those fuels, I think.  It will be in the eye of the beholder to some extent whether a huge artificial lake is better/worse than drilling in Alaska or open-cast coal mines.

Rgds

Damon

[finnsawyer]

And how much energy would it take at the end of the solar cell's life to dispose of it without adversely affecting the environment?  This is something that is usually ignored.

[DamonHD]

AFAIK that has effectively been factored in to the 20%.  The material is relatively inert and/or easy to recycle, eg glass, Al frames.  And newer cells are using less and less material, so it looks like the position is going to improve.

Rgds

Damon

[mbeland]

This whole story seems a bit megalomaniac to me because up front, one should consider the efforts that could be put into saving energy rather than producing energy. The same  advice given to newbies on this list about where to start in their RE projects should be given to governments. To paraphrase the signature of one of the board members " a joule saved is a joule made". I don't have a clue of the approximate amount of energy that could be saved in that manner and how it would change your calculations but it is certainly worth considering. Escaping forward is not always the best solution.

MartinB

[elvin1949]

Martin

 This was a what if thing, A mind exercise thing

if you will.

 You are right. But that was one part of the equation that was ignored.The whole thing was based on today's reality,I.E.how it is now.

 Interesting reading.

later

Elvin

[finnsawyer]

Here's Finnsawyer's solution:

1.  Build more nuclear power plants.
   
2.  Electrify all the railroads.
   
3.  Sell all the long haul trucks to China.
   
   

Yeah, I know number three doesn't help for the short term, but the trucks will wear out fairly quickly and we improve our balance of trade in the short term.  I apologize now for the potential highjack this comment can cause.

[DamonHD]

Megalomaniac, moi?

Mwhha ha ha hahahahahaha!

B^>

Rgds

Damon

PS. But yes, this just is a thought exercise.  South Africa has managed to trim ~10% electricity demand almost overnight (well, over the course of a couple of months) in the face of their capacity crisis, and I'm sure that the UK could do the same if it had to.  But even energy saving is not without some expense, eg the turnover of housing stock is expensive so should we prematurely pull down and rebuild every energy-inefficent building (ie several million) or should we stuff them with insulation and plop solar PV/thermal on the roof?  It's not immediately obvious to me which is better in the short and longer terms in terms of cost, energy, actual distruption and benefit, etc...

[ghurd]

It looks to me like building insulation over there is WAY below what we do here.

Just blowing them full of recycled ground up newspaper would knock off a big chunk of the power th UK required.  And that's cheap to do.

G-

[DamonHD]

Presumably someone has thought about the fire hazard from that form of blown insulation?  Is the paper treated in some way to reduce flammability?  Some of our tabloids are practically self-combusting!

Rgds

Damon

[ghurd]

It's treated for fire... and taste.  I geuss that's to keep out rodents, but it sure tases nasty.

G-

[DamonHD]

So, we would need about 2,000+ of these?

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/powering_20000.php

Actually, that doesn't seem so bad: one each next to reasonable size towns for example, which would therefore also have a reasonable grid connection...

Rgds

Damon

[elvin1949]

Ghurd

 It is treated with Boric-acid.

later

Elvin

[mbeland]

I didn't mean to suggest that you were megalomaniac. Sorry if it was taken that way.

As a thought exercise, just trying to be a little be megalomaniac myself!!,  I suggest that if you simply double the price of electricity overnight. You will get an almost immediate decrease in the consumption of let's say approximately 10-20 percent. In most cases in industrialized countries, this would be without much loss incomfort, just plain conscientiousness of the value of things. That's a start! To verify that, it would be fun to check the per capita consumption in Europe vs USA or Canada (I would guess there would be approx a ratio of 1:2 in price) removing the heating load. We would most probably get a 10-20% consumption. Would that cause a recession? Maybe. Just take the taxes from increased electricity prices and put them to incentives for saving energy and RE.

The next step is probably insulation. As another member pointed out, recycled newspaper or otherwise called cellulose loose fill is pretty cheap and would change a great deal the consumption for heating and air conditioning. I have no clue of the % reduction achievable but 10% is not hard to imagine. Maybe more.

Lighting: there is a growing trend in replacing the incandescent lights to CFL. I wonder where is the proportion of CFLs to indandescents in UK or here in Canada. In My house, which is probably typical or a little bit in advance of the average, we are approximately half way through changing to CFL as incandescents burn out. If I replace a 100w with a 25w CFL, it means 75% reduction in lighting consumption. Considering I have already changed half of the incandescents, changing the remaining would cut my consumption by 40% from the actual. This could be done (and will be) at no cost in a couple of years.

Insulating dhw tanks and piping 10%
Recovering heat from sewage water 10%


The list could go on. I don't have all the facts. But the same means of saving energy at the individual scale seem to be upscalable for a whole country at little cost, maybe just a little bit of job creation! The overall energy potentially saved is hard to imagine. My guess is that it is virtually endless. Of course not totally endless, and once the first % points are gotten, the additional ones will be harder and cost more but there is still a lot to be done.

Martin

[ghurd]

"I have no clue of the % reduction achievable but 10% is not hard to imagine. Maybe more."

Mine went down over 60%.  Like from $220 to $80 on the gas bill in the cold months.

About $20 of that is the water heater, or that is about what the summer gas bill runs, and only the water heater is on.  Never tried to figure out what are fees and what is gas.

Furnace blower runs a lot less, saving grid power.

Only run the A/C about 10~15 days a year now.  That saves a lot of grid power.  And we are far more likely to run the A/C now that it costs less.

Cost less than $2,000 total.  A company did the walls from outside (removed and reinstalled the siding), and made the attic slightly more than dusty.  Then I did the attic to more suitable depths.  And 2 areas of the attic still need more.

G-

[DamonHD]

But I have got the "mwhahaha" laugh right, yes?  B^>

My guess is that most people could save up to 50% of their electricity consumption if they really tried hard (ie possibly replacing some very old computers/fridges/etc with newer ones and spending some real money on insulation, timers, etc) and 25% if they simply did the money-saving CFL-and-off-at-the-wall routine.  In neither case making themselves significantly less comfortable.

I wrote to my local policitos recently suggesting compulsory time-of-day metering for anyone (eg any household or business) using over 500kWh/month (my family is on less than half that) which would encourage people to move loads away from peak (more-carbon-intense-generation and grid-straining) times and hopefully simply economise in general.  The peak-time rate could easily be 2x or 3x or even 5x the mean to reflect more closely the underlying wholesale pricing and transmission capacity costs.

Rgds

Damon

[mbeland]

"But I have got the "mwhahaha" laugh right, yes?  B^>"

I guess you got it right! Did my writing show that I am French speaking or what? Just curious...

Your  idea about compulsory time of day metering is very good. If applied this would be more easily accepted that simply doubling the rate of electricity which could be perceived as rough on the poorest households.

I wonder how your suggestion was received. I have a feeling that governments often perceive  electricity companies (especially when publicly owned) like if they should grow because it brings more taxes. This slows progress toward more re and energy savings.

I wonder if you could post the letter you wrote. This could give people on the board an idea of the arguments to give and maybe other people could try the same in their areas.

Thanks,

Martin

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I got a couple of reasonable responses already (from my MEPs, ie EU MPs):

http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html#TOD500

Rgds

Damon