Heating suggestions?

[AMc]

Why, I ask myself, is the Government tempting me to install gadgetry that will feed-in electricity to the grid at (if I understand the equation correctly - which I probably don't!) a unit price far higher than it will earn commercially. If a substantial portion of the population took advantage of the scheme, the cost to the Government would surely be enormous, wouldn't it? Much more than just subsidising the cost of building a new generation of nuclear power plants?

Feed in tariffs (FiT) aren't paid for by the government, they're paid for by the energy suppliers who in turn charge their customers the premium. The energy suppliers have an obligation to source a (tiny) proportion of their output from renewable sources. The FiT is very generous and it's carries a guarantee that you'll be paid over the odds for years but it won't be available in a couple of years time so it's not an open ended commitment.

The government has made legally binding commitments to reduction of CO2 emissions, in part to stem the increases in developing economies which may be about to tip our planet into catastrophic failure. I'm not going to debate the truth of the argument other than a scientific consensus exists that increasing our CO2 output as a species is a very bad thing to do and we must act 30 years ago, sorry now.

By forcing the energy suppliers to pay above market rate for 0% CO2 production on small scale installations the government is encouraging the development of a network of supply and installation for this type of product and to encourage those who can to install the equipment. By shortening the pay back period for the installations they are stimulating a market which is meeting part of the UK's commitments in a way that can't be met by large scale developments.
Unfortunately like any other grant it's now encouraging an industry of subsidy farming rather than addressing the real issues - that we need as a country to invest in and accept the compromises of large scale renewable production.

I consider Solar PV to be currently environmentally unfriendly due to the energy use in manufacture. I would love to be shown wrong on this but as yet I know of no Solar PV manufacturing plant that uses their own product to power their plant which says a lot. As technology improves, this will change but I don't believe we are there yet.

Solar PV is a very well proven technology - there are panels in Japan that have been generating electricity for decades - the inverters wear out but the panels more than pay for their embodied energy in the first few years. The problem is that they simply aren't that efficient converting around 5% of their received solar radiation as usable electrical energy. As I said earlier the problem is capacity - to produce the amounts needed to power an industrial scale manufacturing plant would need fields and fields of panels and the capacity of the factory would depend on the amount of sun.

The spot price of electricity has always been a minefield - Economy7 is only cheap because the power plants that can't be quickly turned off and on produce power through the night when industrial demand is lowest. The solution to that was to encourage the widespread use of domestic storage heaters in new developments which saddled people with terrible heating systems.
At one point if the spot price of electricity dropped it wasn't worth starting a wind turbine even on a windy day (you have to power the turbine to get the blades moving) because the cost of starting it wouldn't be paid back by the value of the energy generated. So you saw the ridiculous situation of wind turbines standing stationary despite a strong wind.

As petrol prices continue to climb the motor industry is making at least token efforts at plugin hybrid and electrical vehicles. If collectively we invest in smart grid technology then it should be possible to use their batteries to buffer the peaks and troughs of renewable & non renewable energy production.

The elephant in the room is that replacing the massive capacities of coal and gas fired power stations with renewable sources is going to take investment that makes FiT look like small change. It's also going to take an enormous compromise on the environmental impact of projects like the Severn tidal project.

 

[Penners]

More frequently than you might expect (typically in the middle of the night when the wind is high and the demand is low) the price of electricity goes negative. This means that wind farms pay to put electricity onto the grid and (large) users get paid to use that electricity.

It all seems to me like an argument for more pumped storage schemes like Dinorwig. I was involved with the supply of construction plant to that scheme, when it was being built. Going inside the hollowed-out mountain was quite an experience.

http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm

But the premise of the scheme is purely economic rather than scientific. Use night-time electricity - which is cheap and abundant - to pump the water uphill. During the day, allow the water to flow downhill, generating high-cost electricity.

The laws of perpetual motion obviously decree that you actually use more electricity than you generate. So it's just cost benefit equation.

 

[Penners]

It's also going to take an enormous compromise on the environmental impact of projects like the Severn tidal project.

And a Government that has the guts to fly in the face of vocal public protest in pushing through the construction of such projects.

The problem is that, to the average politician, getting re-elected in 3/4/5 years time is a lot more important than saving the planet.

 

[robgil]

And the easy solution would be for them to wear their underpants on the outside over their trousers, this would enable them to then save the planet and they would definitely get my vote.