PowerSwitch

July 2024

I predict that within the next twenty years we’ll all be desperate to find a way to deal with acres of unrecylable derelict solar farms and rusting and dangerous wind turbines.

Actually let’s go for 10 years on that. I probably won’t last the 20.

Or we’ll have given up with the whole non renewable renewables malarkey.

Let’s see if I’m right.

Could be right but I expect the UK might also get overrun by climate 'refugees' many of whom seem to come from the oil producing Middle East. Funny that.

The EROEI of wind and solar is also not so great so maybe there will be ever fewer of them being built in the future the UK population might be huddling around campfires and living in caves.

Don't forget that renewables will need things like synchronous condensers and extra inertia devices and storage to enable a stable grid as Australia is finding. Interestingly Australia is having a debate whether in introduce nuclear power.

And of course not many solar panels and wind turbines are made in the UK and so the UK will have to borrow more money to buy them. And some people still wonder why the latest generation are so much poorer than their parents and gransdparents.

Renewables and nuclear are not a good partnership - at least not nuclear as it's being built here in the UK. It can't laod-follow: it's either "on" or "off", in quanta of hundreds of MWatts.

Our last coal-fired gen got shut down for good today and everybody's saying what a landmark etc. Well it is, psychologically-speaking, but Carbon-wise it's less of an achievement. Gas, if you factor in the inevitable methane leaks, can be as bad as coal, and both have the merit that you can fire them up at peak-times only and thus bypass a lot of the variability problem of Renewables, plus deal with the Inertia question.

One intersting development is that they're building battery storage 'stations' on the sites of old generators - sites which already have useful things like a grid connection and a set of concrete foundations that you can put the buildings on.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2024 ... -batteries

Presumably, it won't take much retrofitting to return Drax to coal? Is the use of biomass a convenient way to hide a few GW of coal power station in plain sight?

Why should solar farms be "unrecylable" ? The great majority of of the modules should last for decades, the odd early failure is easy to replace with either a new one, or a module recycled from elsewhere in the farm. E.g. after 5% failures, reconfigure the 95% of sound modules into say 114 series strings, rather than the 120 series strings originally installed.
If the whole solar farm is redundant, for example because there is no longer a grid system to receive the power, then the modules are easy to sell off or scavenge for small scale private use. That leaves only the lightweight angle iron frames, useful for building huts, sheds, and animal shelters.

Non functioning solar modules if physically intact are useful roofing material. Broken modules can be broken up and dumped on the nearest rocky beach, wave action will soon reduce them to that well known beach pollutant called sand.