Interesting Links for 17-10-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The Labour Party is splintering because of Starmer's cold response to Palestinian suffering

(tags:Palestine Israel labour )

2. Electricity grids are the weak link in clean energy transitions

(tags:electricity infrastructure )

3. The UK's Shambolic COVID Winter Vaccine Programme Alarms Experts

(tags:UK vaccination Pandemic OhForFucksSake incompetence )

4. Scotland's biggest offshore wind farm is now fully operational, and can power 2/3 of Scottish households

(tags:scotland renewables electricity windpower )

Comments

[dewline]

2. Sprucing up the grid infrastructure is an issue in the US and Canada as well, if memory serves me.

3. Public health is not something we dare play "nickel-and-dime" games with. Such practices always end up biting us at some point. Especially with a Pandemic still in progress.

4. Good!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, grids which were fine for getting power from large power plants to nearby places are not going to support getting power from massively distributed locations to, well, everywhere else.

[danieldwilliam]

If I'm reading the article on grids correctly quite a lot of the cost is for building new grid capacity in places that don't already have lots of it - Sub Saharan Africa, India and so on. Which perhaps doesn't change the scale of the work needed but might allow it to be run in parallel more.

[andrewducker]

True. And hopefully bring some work/money to areas that don't have a lot of it.

[danieldwilliam]

Some I think, I don't know a lot about the grid supply chain. There's a bunch of work physically assembling the wires and towers and what not but I think most of the cost is in things like sub-stations, transformers and switching yards and so on. What I don't know is how specialist the manufacturing facilities for those are. I know there have been bottlenecks in the supply chain in the past in Europe, which implies that the production facilities are hard to expand. What I don't know is how easy it would be to set up a production facility in , say Kenya. Do you need the generations deep technical skilled engineering labour of Germany to run these things or can you do it competently with some folks who have less experience?

[andrewducker]

Clearly I'm not an international supply-chain and manufacturing expert, but I'd expect that you'd start off with a bunch of experts who brought in locals to help, and over time you could ramp up local expertise and need less of the overseas experts.

But that's all going to be complicated by background education levels and availability of skilled workers.

[danieldwilliam]

That's the pattern but whether it takes you 5 years or 50 to build up the required knowledge base I don't know. I'd be inclined to be cautious about how quickly one could set up a manufacturing facility for grid hardware because the quality requirements are probably high and the defects latent and expensive to fix.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I don't think it would be fast. I think you're talking decades to be majority-local, and generations to entirely migrate.

[bens_dad]

I don't know about Scotland, but England has been blocking onshore wind power for a while and has now opened it up again.
Lots of local renewables will/would mean that we will have lots of islands which don't import much power most of the time, but from time to time will need to import considerable amounts of power. That demands large "inter-island" connections that are only lightly used; not a great investment opportunity :-(

For many (5-10) years I have been seeing adverts in New Scientist from IBM about "digitizing" the grid to cope with these new energy flows, so some people have been working on this for some time :-)

[andrewducker]

Not just islands - Scotland has way more access to wind power than England does, and there are very few power grid connections that run North/South in a useful way.

Clearly we are going to need a lot more storage. But I agree that importing power will also be important - as will exporting it. Over-building, and shipping the excess elsewhere will cut down on how often we need to import too.

[bens_dad]

I didn't mean geographical islands but areas which have good internal connectivity and production and consumption are approximately balanced; say a town, a hamlet/village with a windmill, or perhaps a single well designed building with lots of solar panels and appropriate storage.

If that model win out there is less need for a big fat interconnect until something unusual happens so will anyone have paid for the interconnect ?

--

I do remember a time (1980s?) when there were just four power lines linking the production in the north with the consumption in the south. I wonder how the planned North Sea electricity grid will make a difference ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link suggests that the Norway-England link has been used to power part of Norway when the UK is over-producing, allowing them to save hydro-electricity for another time - negative prices come in to play here. If the Norwegians have pump-storage capacity too, could that mean the UK
using the fjords as a battery ?