[Johnny Brown]

It needs both. Ultimately the population is composed only of individuals, the other entities are legal fictions, controlled by individuals. Change must come from them, because it can’t come from anywhere else.

Carlos, there was a massive (I.e. bigger) El Niño in 2015-6. Less than a decade ago. It didn’t put us out of ‘ordinary’ bounds. There has also been a big volcanic eruption, and some changes in shipping emissions. Hopefully they’ve all added up for a freak year. Or we’re entering a powerful feedback loop, the feared tipping point. Another 12 months and we’ll know.

[JamieG]

If anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about:



We're currently about 4 sigma above the average over the last 40 years.

Although comparing climate and weather is always risky, I doubt it is a coincidence that the last 18 months are the wettest England has ever experienced.

Well that’s a terrifying graph!

[gme]

Genuine question for those who know.

Is onshore wind not a quick and easy fix to electricity production that is also pretty temporary. If we come up with a better way in the future they can be just removed and the land put back to how it was with very little long term damage.

Or is this not true.

I don't mind them and wont ever sign a petition against them, can see the big Middle moor ones from my house.   I can live with a bit of visual pollution for the greater good, if the top  of stanage was proved to be the best site for them i wouldnt object.

[Fultonius]

Genuine question for those who know.

Is onshore wind not a quick and easy fix to electricity production that is also pretty temporary. If we come up with a better way in the future they can be just removed and the land put back to how it was with very little long term damage.

Or is this not true.

100%. The only lasting negative visual impacts are the roads, which can take many years to blend in again, oh, and siting them on deep peat - that should just be banned really!  (it's becoming economically unviable anyway as it's such a pain the hoop to build on anyway.

Foundations, buildings, cables, buildings etc. all pretty easily removable and land reinstated. I'm working on various life extension and decommissioning projects at present.

It's nigh on impossible to get planning consent in England, and now the government has gone and put a surcharge on remote sites to pay for the infrastructure (fine) but also to encourage, via pricing signals, more development in the areas where....nimby's block them.

Offshore is clearly easier to digest, but it's most expensive, more dangerous, and quite a bit less carbon-saving (all those ships for survey, install, O&M).

We considering rooftop solar, but instead are looking to get in on the next round with Ripple - there you buy a chunk of the solar/wind farm and get fixed bills forever - without having to faff around with panels, maintenance, installs etc. (we're a block of 3 flats, so it would be complex).

[Johnny Brown]

Im no expert but broadly speaking yes, I’d agree. The main thing for me is they are proven technology that can be implemented now.

However some of the uplands targeted are among the small percentage of the country that hasn’t been developed before. Some of that is ecologically valuable, can’t simply be restored and I think it’s reasonable to think carefully before whacking them anywhere.

With so much of the country in private ownership, you’re also at the whims of individuals rather than being able to take a broader overview of where might be best. Planning obviously gives some control, but is purely reactive when a proactive approach would be better.

[Fultonius]

Additional thought. What do you think the grandchildren and great grandchildren will be more appreciative of - a nice view, or a functioning renewable energy system and hopefully a functioning ecological system,

If all is well, and the planet doesn't tip into disaster - they can always remove them and reinstate the land. They can then appreciate the nice view.


Pete - your mine analogy is a bit false - you can't reinstate an open pit mine.



And yes, JB, places of true ecological value should be protected.


Oh, and onshore they are can be up to 200m tip height, 250m+ offshore. Commonly 149.9m tip height onshore as it saves a load of hassle with radar etc. as far as I remember (I don't work in development) 

[stone]

Offshore is clearly easier to digest, but it's most expensive, more dangerous, and quite a bit less carbon-saving (all those ships for survey, install, O&M).

You're the windpower expert so I'm keen to learn.

To me, almost anything that displaces fossil fuels and eventually leads to more carbon being left in the ground seems a good thing so I'm in support of this Calderdale windfarm.

Looking more long term, my impression was that as we get ever higher penetration of renewables into the generation mix it will become ever more important to have generation that keeps working on the least windy days. Floating wind farms in exceptionally windy parts of the sea look to be great for that.https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

I'm totally in agreement with Pete's point about the need for mines. The proposed lithium mine in Serbia (for instance) really needs to go ahead IMO.

About the metallurgical coal mine in Cumbria that SpiderMonkey mentioned -don't we need to be investing in using hydrogen etc for reducing iron ore rather than in carrying on with high emitting steel production methods? I know steel is needed now (not least for windfarms etc) but we have to transition steel making technology ASAP too.

I also agree with the need for rapid build out of nuclear. Our failure on that is a travesty. It is so shameful considering how France and Sweden were able to build zero-carbon electricity grids 40years ago and only took 15years or so to do so.

Above all, I concur with everyone who has been saying how we all need to be consuming less crap. I'd be all for setting mandates on stuff such as fuel efficiency etc. There are a lot of private jet flights in the UK -shouldn't be happening IMO. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/uk-is-worst-private-jet-polluter-in-europe-study-finds

[Dingdong]

Carlos, there was a massive (I.e. bigger) El Niño in 2015-6. Less than a decade ago. It didn’t put us out of ‘ordinary’ bounds. There has also been a big volcanic eruption, and some changes in shipping emissions. Hopefully they’ve all added up for a freak year. Or we’re entering a powerful feedback loop, the feared tipping point. Another 12 months and we’ll know.

Makes sense and yeah the feedback loop is terrifying, once that permafrost is gone the leaking of methane is pretty much guaranteed we are so fucked. Truly terrifying… let’s hope it’s a blip like you say 

[SA Chris]

Given the numbers going in offshore, do we really need onshore ones too? From my window I can see the 114 already in place for Seagreen on the horizon. https://www.sserenewables.com/offshore-wind/operational-wind-farms/seagreen/ with Berwick Bank and Marr Bank soon following.

Or is demand just going to hike as more people switch? Sad thing is it doesn't matter much what we do in the UK, there is a big island across the way full of people who don't even believe in climate change, and it looks like they may just be reloading to shoot themselves in the other foot. MADA.

[stone]

My view is that we all have to go all in at avoiding climate change. That is our only hope. We may fail because people elsewhere continue to emit lots, but if we don't try then we certainly fail. In the UK we have plenty of the World's worst emitters (the private jet, super yacht massive). Just normal UK people like me are up there on a global scale of who is emitting the most. As a nation, we are making a political decision to not address this. If we were to turn that around, it could inspire the rest of the world.

[ferret]

Just a dope on a rope but have spent 18 years in the energy sector, so I get a slightly different view than than average and have the same personal interest as any of you. I’ve worked coal, oil and gas and wind for extended periods of time.
Wind has its issues, the turbines fault out regularly (usually software, which is often a quick fix but mechanically too), they don’t produce a lot of power per unit and obviously are really variable in production. Generally the number of turbines required is double the max power production for the contracted power supply. E.g. if 100 turbines at max production generate the agreed upon power you will have to build 200 to allow for inconsistent production.
The positives of wind is that it can be expanded quickly, cheaply (relatively speaking) and incrementally. This is pretty important due to availability of funding and the disconnect between/differing interests of for profit corporations and governments.
A wind turbine costs between approx 2 and 10 million, which while a lot of money is relatively small compared to something like hydro or tidal (which would run into the billions). This allows renewable energy to slowly expand at the rate of available funding be it private or public.
The negative side of this is it allows the for profit entities to just expand incrementally just enough to keep in line with changing regulations. I’m in the US so (like with many things) a couple of steps behind Europe but I’m sure the underlying pattern is the same.
For profit entities are not dynamic or interested in the greater good as much as keeping shareholders happy. They knock up another wind farm while band aiding their existing non renewable facilities together waiting to see which direction energy production will take. Most existing infrastructure is well past its obsolescence date, upgraded only in the emission scrubbing to comply with regulation. This is one reason why countries such as China have far better fossil fuel technology. The big disconnect being that a lot of energy production research is heavily dependent on public money and not always in conjunction with the corporations that would ultimately have to implement it on a for profit basis.

As far as the bigger renewable picture goes there are quite a few options Hydro, Geothermal, Tidal, Wave, Wind, Solar. Most of these have variable production (and to a lesser degree huge upfront costs). This leads to a whole other problem, The Energy Grid. In order to allow for variable production (especially with the potential for increased demand from EVs) the Grid needs to contain an element of energy storage. This is again a huge upfront cost (how and who pays it?) and the current technology (and R+D funding) is behind where we need it to be to transition on mass to 100% renewables.

Obviously power production is one large piece of the puzzle along with transit. I’m yet to be convinced that EVs are scalable to even all of the passenger car market (aforementioned mining expansion, charging infrastructure, increased demands on the Grid) let alone air, shipping, freight, agricultural and plant.
The transit industry for me shares the same issues with the interests of corporations and the people/governments not being aligned. Solid state batteries will hopefully have a big impact but I’m not sure EVs are anything but a short term solution. Meanwhile who is working on the long term solution?

[stone]

Ferret, my Dunning–Kruger style solution to intermittency would be to have loads of predominantly offshore wind (eg 150GW nameplate capacity for the UK), together with about 30GW of traditional normal nuclear (eg boiling water reactors as in https://euanmearns.com/the-hitachi-advanced-boiling-water-reactor/ ) and a massive liquid-air-energy-storage system in tandem with the nuclear. The waste heat from the nuclear would be used to boil off the liquid air to provide the required power boost whenever it wasn't windy enough. When there was excess wind, the excess energy would be stored as liquified air (as in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2013.08.077 ).

I'm puzzled as to why such a setup doesn't seem part of any public conversation I've come across. I'd love to have someone who knew about such things point out where I'm deluded from an engineering perspective. Obviously such an idea (like all sane electricity proposals) is only suited to a 1970s style regulated monopoly utility economic model. But it seems to me that the required political battle to get the required economic arrangements is contingent  on having a compelling engineering model at the end of it.

[petejh]

Vaclav Smil is essential reading to understand this issue. Buy his 'how the world really works', read pages 189 - 204, feel sad, and move on with a greater understanding of the reality of what needs to be done versus what can be done, compared to the total bullshit regularly heard and reported. All you need to know about how absurd it is to think along lines of 'it's essential that we build onshore windfarms in the UK in the effort halt global warming' is there. In climbing training terms - it's like someone who climbs 6a sport, with a goal to climb 9c, thinking that buying a squeezy ball to work their fingers will make a meaningful contribution to the gainz required.


* I love renewable power btw.

[ferret]

There are theoretical solutions to the energy storage problem (splitting and recombining water being one of them).
Having a balanced portfolio of renewables that provide different energy variances instead of just banging up wind turbines would also reduce the storage needs.
Geo (where possible), hydro, wave all have the ability to produce electricity constantly all be it with a variable output.
I’m sadly with Pete in not being hopeful that governments globally (with differing priorities) can work with or enforce capitalist entities to produce a large scale solution in any meaningful timeframe

[spidermonkey09]

Vaclav Smil is essential reading to understand this issue. Buy his 'how the world really works', read pages 189 - 204, feel sad, and move on with a greater understanding of the reality of what needs to be done versus what can be done, compared to the total bullshit regularly heard and reported. All you need to know about how absurd it is to think along lines of 'it's essential that we build onshore windfarms in the UK in the effort halt global warming' is there. In climbing training terms - it's like someone who climbs 6a sport, with a goal to climb 9c, thinking that buying a squeezy ball to work their fingers will make a meaningful contribution to the gainz required.


* I love renewable power btw.

Which chapter Pete? ebook page numbers are all over the place.

[petejh]

Chapter 6, 'Understanding the Environment'.


I'll post pics of the relevant pages here, I think it's important enough to understand the issue and the numbers to do a bit of freeloading. The rest of the book is amazing and worth buying.

[stone]

There are theoretical solutions to the energy storage problem (splitting and recombining water being one of them).
Having a balanced portfolio of renewables that provide different energy variances instead of just banging up wind turbines would also reduce the storage needs.
Geo (where possible), hydro, wave all have the ability to produce electricity constantly all be it with a variable output.
I’m sadly with Pete in not being hopeful that governments globally (with differing priorities) can work with or enforce capitalist entities to produce a large scale solution in any meaningful timeframe

I have done a fair bit of (ignorant amateur) tire-kicking of such ideas. My impression was the investment cost for water hydrolysis of the required scale was way worse than for air liquefaction storage.

For the UK there are hard geographical constraints for other types of renewables (see https://www.withouthotair.com/ ).

Tidal has the catastrophic issue of the bimonthly neap-tide spring-tide cycle.

[spidermonkey09]

Chapter 6, 'Understanding the Environment'.


I'll post pics of the relevant pages here, I think it's important enough to understand the issue and the numbers to do a bit of freeloading. The rest of the book is amazing and worth buying.

Just scanned it. good read. If you are reasonably adept at internet scouring it can be found online with little fuss.

That broadly chimes with my understanding of the issue as well (especially having come back from India a few months ago!). I guess the practical takehome is that if we accept that the solutions are likely to be costly, inefficient and unlikely to produce rapid results, we have two choices; do nothing because its pointless or try some things anyway. Obviously these things have to cohere with domestic/local priorities as well as big picture stuff. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see it being pointless to move towards EVs or a broadly renewable energy sector in the short to medium term, even if China/India/other outside factors make such changes relatively meaningless in the medium term. I think it would actually make more logical sense to object to an onshore windfarm on the grounds of 'its totally pointless cause of wider geopolitics' than on the grounds that NIMBY groups tend to rely on; namely, wildlife and spoiling the view.

[remus]

Tidal has the catastrophic issue of the bimonthly neap-tide spring-tide cycle.

Getting a bit off topic, but why is this catastrophic? Naively, I'd assume that a constant power output is the ideal but output that is predictable with confidence over long-ish time spans is also pretty good i.e. you turn down the arc furnaces when it's a neap tide then turn em back up again on a spring.

[ferret]

Stone, I was referring to wave as opposed to tidal. I don’t follow too close but there has been gains in development here recently from varying designs/sources. Not sure how scalable it is in practically but you are harnessing say 1% of the energy of every wave, so near constant output if small per unit. Would be interesting if it could share some infrastructure with offshore wind.

[stone]

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see it being pointless to move towards EVs or a broadly renewable energy sector in the short to medium term, even if China/India/other outside factors make such changes relatively meaningless in the medium term. I think it would actually make more logical sense to object to an onshore windfarm on the grounds of 'its totally pointless cause of wider geopolitics' than on the grounds that NIMBY groups tend to rely on; namely, wildlife and spoiling the view.

I'm struggling to get a sense of which direction you are arguing.

For myself, it seems very difficult to sympathise with the view that what we do is immaterial because of "India&China".

It is somewhat arbitrary where you draw a catchment to then describe a subset of the 8B people we have on Earth. You could say a district China needn't do anything because its emissions are immaterial in comparison to "the western world" or whatever.

Like I said, we as the UK public have political power over many of the most egregious excessive emitters in the world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/uk-is-worst-private-jet-polluter-in-europe-study-finds

If, in the UK we were to demonstrate that we could implement a prosperous zero-carbon economy, then people in India and China (and elsewhere) would take note and might endeavour to emulate that.

[petejh]

I think it would actually make more logical sense to object to an onshore windfarm on the grounds of 'its totally pointless cause of wider geopolitics' than on the grounds that NIMBY groups tend to rely on; namely, wildlife and spoiling the view.

Yeah agree. When I said I'd object to an onshore windfarm going up on the hills opposite me because of the aesthetics, I internally know it's a totally meaningless contribution to solving the issue (and actually I think this sort of scheme risks being a setback not a step forward - in the sense it distracts people to thinking we're doing something useful on a meaningful scale towards making reductions). But I tend not to express that bit because .. you know people.., oh and the aesthetics are shitty in wild areas so that's easy!

[abarro81]

I’m in the US so (like with many things) [...]
For profit entities are not dynamic or interested in the greater good as much as keeping shareholders happy. They knock up another wind farm while band aiding their existing non renewable facilities together waiting to see which direction energy production will take. .

A lot of developers in the US are not the same companies that own the fossil generators (although some are) - those would generally love to smash out more projects but grid interconnection is a big (and growing) issue as you say.

Pete - of course onshore wind isn't essential, but it is likely to be important in the context of delivering a decarbonised grid at anywhere close to the lowest cost. As an example, the power and economics team at our parent company does some modelling on this - the grid they think is optimised for the lowest cost in Europe as we move away from fossil fuels has a bewildering amount of wind in it. But maybe people will be prepared to pay to put it offshore, or pay more for a higher % of solar (needing more storage)? There was an interesting paper in nature where they adjusted LCOEs with a non-financial fudge to produce a model that could predict the past few years of installations (how much wind vs solar vs gas etc), and that predicted a huge amount more solar and less wind than is likely to be the lowest cost solution, so to some extent we're on that trajectory already.

[stone]

Stone, I was referring to wave as opposed to tidal. I don’t follow too close but there has been gains in development here recently from varying designs/sources. Not sure how scalable it is in practically but you are harnessing say 1% of the energy of every wave, so near constant output if small per unit. Would be interesting if it could share some infrastructure with offshore wind.

This is great about the geographic max possible for wave power https://www.withouthotair.com/c12/page_73.shtml

[spidermonkey09]

I'm struggling to get a sense of which direction you are arguing.

I think the UK should invest heavily in renewables because I think its the right thing to do. I'm aware its not a magic bullet and that there are wider structural issues that would quite possibly make it pointless, but I don't personally like the idea of not doing anything and as Smil says in his book, forecasts are fairly limited in their usefulness because we can't predict how the world will change. I also fucking hate nimbyism and if anything am more likely to want to build something where there are strong local objections as a form of punishment  I just see it as, not always but all too frequently, a fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical point of view which heavily rely on sophistry and generally amounts to older generations pulling the ladder up behind them.