Coming shortage of UK generating capacity?

[adam2]

Monday January 8 looks as though supplies might be a bit tight.

It is the start of the first full week after the holidays.
Mondays tend to have a slightly higher maximum demand than other days
It is forecast to be very cold, both during the day and over the preceding night
Not much wind is forecast.

I doubt that the lights will go out, unless some exceptional event occurs, but the margin looks rather tight.

[adam2]

Looks as though tonight's evening peak will be fine. Demand is high as would be expected, but there is plenty of wind, contrary to my expectations, nuke output has also picked up.

[BritDownUnder]

In Australia a very hot day supposedly got the grid very close to full capacity.

http://anero.id/energy/2018/january/6

Luckily it was a weekend and less industrial use meant demand was lower than otherwise may have been.

https://www.4bc.com.au/households-expec ... ity-bills/

Interestingly Australia's peak was about 30GW which for about 22 million people (the 2 million in Western Australia have a separate grid) is quite a lot more than the UK's 50GW demand shared by 60 million people. Could be less domestic gas usage and more industrial electrical usage in smelters I suppose.

[kenneal - lagger]

Air con probably.

[BritDownUnder]

Air con probably.

Yes I think you are right. The power companies are beginning to dread when rooftop solar production falls off in the last hour of daylight on a hot day. Queensland gives you a discount on your bill if you agree to have your aircon shut off at peak grid demand.

We got an aircon split system unit replaced last week. The old one used 3.5kW on max and the new one uses about half of that while feeling colder. The newer version is also an inverter type meaning almost a 0 to 100% adjustable range in energy consumption is possible. The old one would always consume more than 2kW even on the smiley face eco setting.

The real killers seem to the whole house aircon units. They can consume as much as 10kW. Quite a lot of Australians keep their house at 22degC all year round as well. I am satisfied with a range of 18 to 28degC.

[kenneal - lagger]

Ours ranges from 14 to 28 C although the 14 is in parts where we don't sit. The areas where we sit we keep at a minimum of 17 when we're sitting in them and the max of 28 is during a heat wave when the thermal mass of the house, shutting everything during the day and night time cooling work together to keep us cool.

Different temperature conditions though. If I was designing a house in Australia I would probably be looking at courtyard development with fountains, wind catching towers and basement rooms as in Saharan architecture although, again, it would depend on the local conditions.

[adam2]

Looks very tight tonight.
CCGT at 26 which may be a record
OCGT running as early as 17-00, before the peak.
Very little wind, under 1
Nuclear at 7.7
Importing 2 from France.
Demand 48 and rising.

It will be interesting if a nuke trips or the French interconnector breaks.

All figures in GW indicated on the gridwatch site, other sources may vary.

[woodburner]

No worries, there’s 8GW from coal, or is that Canaian/Portugese/ANOther old growth forest wood pellets? Should be worse tomorrow onwards, much lower temperatures, and even less wind.

[adam2]

The 8GW from coal does not include biomass which is listed separately.
Biomass has regularly been at about 2GW, but at present is only about 0.7GW.

[adam2]

The supply situation was very tight indeed last night, we muddled through, but I suspect that the reserve was minimal or non existant during the peak.
Any significant failure could have resulted in power cuts.

Under all ordinary circumstances the national grid have available sufficient reserve capacity to allow for the largest reasonably foreseeable loss of generation. I think that last night that this would have been the loss of half the French interconnector.

By far the biggest source of electricity was CCGT which I suspect was flat out at 26
Very little wind, and of course no solar for the high peak, there was a very little solar, about 0.1 for the beginning of the peak.
The limited OCGT capacity may all have been running.

That only left pumped storage and hydro from which a little more could have been obtained, but only short term before running out of water !

Tonight looks similar, except that I think we have lost a nuke since last night.

[BritDownUnder]

I found some information on UK generating plants that were operational in May 2017. It was on this website

Rough numbers of generation in GW are as below...

Biomass 2
CCGT 30
Coal 13
Liquid/OCGT 3
Nuclear 9
Pumped storage 2
Solar 2
Wind On 8
Wind Off 5
Other inc hydro 2

Totals to 76GW (actually 80GW on the spreadsheet)

On a cold windless night you will have

Biomass 2
CCGT 30
Coal 13
Liquid/OCGT 3
Nuclear 9
Pumped storage 2
Other inc hydro 2

Down to 61GW

As Adam says CCGT seems to peak at about 26GW, nuclear on a good day is 8GW and on a bad day is 7GW. Coal seems to never go above 8GW. So you are down to...

Biomass 2
CCGT 26
Coal 8
Liquid/OCGT 3
Nuclear 7
Pumped storage 2
Other inc hydro 2

i.e. 50GW which is what the demand was at 6pm yesterday. It looks like the interconnectors were maxed at 3GW which meant that the OCGT was not needed.

Looks like the evening peak around 6pm lasts for 2 hours and it about 5GW more than the majority of the day. I would guess that a 50GW peak is holdable assuming the Europeans are on board and no major trips.
To me it looks like early evening will be the danger point. How the demand may be mitigated before blackouts happen is a matter for discussion.

As you can see from the gridwatch website wind will be calm for several days before getting up to speed again for as long as ten days in a row. Solar from grid connected utility scale power plants and from many hidden rooftop arrays is of no use in the evening but once or twice a week in winter makes a useful dint in the CCGT trend around midday thereby saving natural gas for another day.

My question would be is how easily achieved would that 10GWh per day be for a typical evening peak around 6pm on a cold windless evening. Would pumped storage or home or utility scale batteries be the best?

Note to Adam. Feel free to break this one away from the thread and we can embark on a discussion on how this situation may be resolved in the future as I am happy to digress.

[kenneal - lagger]

....... but the link is too long to post here.

You can post long links by using the URL button above the message box.

If you highlight a word, while you are typing out your post, in a sentence, say "here" in the sentence above, and then click on the URL button the word here will be surrounded by (URL) and (/URL) (but in square brackets). If you now put an = sign between the L and the ] in the first bracket thus - L=] - and paste your URL after the = sign and hit the submit button the "here" will be highlighted and if you click on it it will take you to the URL location but the long URL will not show in your post.

I usually hit the preview button first and check that the link works.

"but the link is too long to post here"

I will edit your post above, BDU, so that the gov URL doesn't show but a word is highlighted. If you edit your post you will be able to see how it worked in your post.

[BritDownUnder]

It's a spreadsheet. Very interesting too. Link below for you to tidy up.

Who would have known that there was a 14MW power plant near a place in North Lincolnshire that burns "Meat and Bone Meal" as its fuel, in other words rendered slaughtered cows with suspected BSE!!!

link here

[fuzzy]

If I URL paste:

link here

it downloads to my PC

Of course you probably have to go searching to find where these things end up saving..

Interesting stuff, as you said BDU. Note the 75 GW 'total'

[kenneal - lagger]

It's a spreadsheet. Very interesting too. Link below for you to tidy up.
DUKES_5.11.xls

I knocked it back to ww w.google.com...... and it worked OK.

Who would have known that there was a 14MW power plant near a place in North Lincolnshire that burns "Meat and Bone Meal" as its fuel, in other words rendered slaughtered cows with suspected BSE!!!

BSE has gone completely as far as I'm aware. There is some testing done on older animals going into the food chain but there haven't been any instances reported in the press for a decade, at least, as far as I'm aware. It is probably just burning condemned animals and specified offal (spinal cords, etc).