While the UK may be using less non-renewables, they are paying more in total every year for fossil fuels.
Articles like this one (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-f...) shows a rather dark trend.
Some key quotes: From 2020 to 2021 they (fossil fuels) received an extra £1bn support from the government compared with 2020, a 10.7% increase
In 2021, support for fossil fuel extraction rose by 20% to nearly £2bn.
Using fossil fuels as reserve energy is only getting more and more expensive.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200423005264/en/8mi...
China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.
There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.
It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.
But the cost is huge. Even the Chinese central government is pragmatic enough to admit that they have a huge unsustainable problem; e.g. https://time.com/6258519/china-lithium-mining-environmental-...
> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.
You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.
> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.
At this point somebody usually argues that you can only do that in Australia and the geography for pumped storage is super rare (I call it the "theres a shortage of up" fallacy), and I have to cite the same study proving that it's actually not.
Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".
edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.
In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!
I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.
The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.
If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour
$5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage
The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.
Utter rubbish.
So if enough solar gets built that the electricity price falls to near zero every day, batteries are now cheaper than natural gas?
That's a very impactful change that I honestly didn't see coming.
The other 2 months a year sure, you've got either grid power or an off grid oil/gas generator.
> And are there that numbers of batteries available
Not yet — but there are enough people investing in each stage of mining, processing, and making battery factories, that this is probably not going to be an issue.
> Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.
Technically, I think, yes; but that's just where we are today rather than a fundamental property of world geography.
That fossil fuel generation is centralised so easier to mitigate and not where the usage is happening (ie in our towns and cities).
Plus we already built all that storage for gas and oil, might as well use it as part of the transition.
Does this include transmission losses? I think they average 10% for UK electricity.
Quote: Every year, the United Kingdom loses a share of generated electricity through transmission. In 2021, transmission losses amounted to around 25 terawatt-hours, or approximately nine percent of the electricity supplied in the UK that year. Transmission losses stood above 30 terawatt-hours in the early 2000's.
Heat pumps don't qualify for EU Renewable heat incentives if they get less than 2.5 SFP (COP averaged over the year's seasons).
They are building them, but in the sea which could be interesting with an annoyed Russia.
Wind farms were built at sea, on the surface because of nimbyism on land, but being ever cynical I think the real reason was to push the cost and difficulty up giving oil companies more time.
Later, during Liz Truss's short and disasterous tenure, just as solar panels were getting very cheap, even very low quality farm land was reclassified as a strategic asset for food to be grown on and no solar.
In what was possibly a distraction wind was now to be allowed on land (of course it's much less convenient to put up a wind turbine than to get some very cheap solar panels and that's before all the nimby groups, some of which get dark money funding).
Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first.
As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by people's gas bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/14/wood-bur...
I’m guessing that if all the open fires were instead “low particulate” stoves, then it wouldn’t be a concern compared to PM2.5 generation from vehicles.
I don’t see a perfect here until we all have heat pumps driven by nuclear.
Exhaust particulate per mile has plummeted over the past couple of decades! By comparison, EPA stoves put out a couple grams of particulate per hour.
But, it seems like it's not apples to apples, because brake dust is metal dust, whereas wood smoke tends to be mostly organic compounds. Maybe the body is better at dealing with organic wood smoke compounds? We've certainly been heavily exposed over many generations.
Unfortunately, it seems like middle-class Brits are completely obsessed with log fires, judging by British home renovation shows.
Tree starts as a seed. Grows up and sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon. Tree is re-planted, grows up, sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon.
If everything in the world right now was wood powered, we would not have a global warming problem. We would have massive tree farms sequestering the same amount of carbon we are releasing. (We might have a soot and particle problem, but that's another story).
The problem with oil and coal, is we have no way to make more. We burn oil and release carbon.. how are we making more oil and pumping back underground to sequester that carbon?
But I don't feel bad when I burn firewood pulled from a local forest. As that burning is not adding carbon to the world overall.
Simply burning gas to generate heat is basically 100% efficient, if you convert it to electricity first you'd need a COP of at least 1.7 to recover the energy lost while generating the electricity.
Either way you should take into account you lose about 40% of that by simply converting the fuel to electricity, which is kind of the opposite of what happens when moving from combustion engines to electromechanical engines.
You can generate electricity with a gas power plant at 50%, use that to operate heat pumps, and you will warm your house more than directly burning the gas.
Or put another way, in a gas dominated grid, switching from gas heating to heat pumps saves carbon gas emissions.
while that is true, it is only a stepping stone towards generating electricity renewably (let's say wind or solar).
The consumer ultimately decides the method (via market forces), and they are the easiest to convert first. If the demand for gas heating drops because of electrification, gas demand would fall (but the cost of extraction remains the same/similar), and therefore, makes electricity cheaper and cheaper.
The losses from current electricity conversion from gas at the plant is merely a short term loss for a better long term 'future', and i would consider it a cost of electrification.
> Similarly, in Finland, tests of air-to-air heat pump systems from various manufacturers resulted in COPs of 3 at -10C and 2 at -20C.
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-the-energy-crisis...
The main issue is that homes were designed to trap and keep heat in, rather than true insulation, which means that as summers get warmer, our homes turn into ovens, with no way to cool them down properly. Case in point last summer with UK temps hitting 40C and above for a few weeks.
Government are trying to kill off the old gas boilers though, with heat pumps being pushed very heavily, not sure if they're enforcing it yet or not though. Apparently they're also looking at switching out natural gas for a hydrogen mix, but that means having to rework a lot of the piping/valves as hydrogen needs much higher standards than currently applied.
1. It is unlikely that hydrogen will be pushed heavily by the UK gov because of the expensive pipe rework. The reason they're pushing hard for heat pumps is because of the Glasgow Climate Pact; they're on the hook to reduce carbon emissions or pay heavy fines. To that extent, subsidising heat pumps becomes financially less unviable for them than doing nothing.
2. Regarding the heat in summer; the houses insulate well but don't do much to prevent heat coming in from the windows during summer. There are some pretty useful half-fixes; mvhrs+insulation, or recessed windows/overhangs/sunshades massively aid this. For those who rent that's not much help though :(
The average minimum temperature in the winter months in London is 3c above freezing.
https://www.mylondon.news/weather/london-weather-coldest-nig...
But - other comments have noted, some backup generation capability that use less green resources should be acceptable for such rare contingencies.
Probably a good half of our homes have fireplaces and chimneys.
It's not cost effective for everyone to have a wood burner but if only a small percentage used them on the cold days we'd be fine.
People obsess a bit about pollution, as a response to rare events it's fine.
Storage is another one. As is multiplicity of energy inputs.
I still have no idea why nobody uses heat reservoirs for shower hot water, like they do in the Mediterranean. (it's not a sun coverage problem, because contrary to popular anecdotes, the UK actually gets quite decent sun coverage a lot of the time)
That was obviously short term stupidity at the time, but has only become more so with hindsight.
In general, a lot of comparisons with other countries that get published in the British press are like this - they ignore important differences between the UK and those countries or problems and costs associated with what they're doing because the goal is to make it seem like there were easy options that the UK missed out on because our government is evil, not to actually help people understand the world.
Though of course, sometimes there are easy options that the UK missed out on because they are inept and apathetic, which would vindicate some of those comparisons to some extent.
That's 18 years ago. Not exactly recent.
Now I am indeed curious what the minimum amount of sunlight required is. I'm sure the angle of the sun is just as important as the duration, on top of weather and seasons and temperatures.
Plus you have to account for the energy used to grow, harvest, season & transport the wood, even before you throw 20-40% of it away when you actually burn the damn stuff!
It's far more efficient to burn that fuel to move existing energy from one place (outside) to another (inside)... you can turn 1J of fuel into 4J of heating if you're lucky!
Considering this is false as many commenters have mentioned, do you feel any obligation to edit or delete your comment?
But a typical electric heater is probably not going to match the efficiency of a natural gas heater. It matters how much energy is lost in generation and transmission versus extraction and transmission though.
Also I don’t care for your comment. I think if we met in real life, we would not be friends.
The technical terms are "primary energy" (the amount of energy you put in as fuel) and "final energy" the actual useful stuff you want done.
Cars moving to EV will reduce the need for "primary energy" by about 4x if the useful final energy remains flat. Similar for heat pumps for home heating.