I recon there are many micro hydro sites that could be put into use. Think of all the mills that used water power in the past. There is a mill race in Belper, Derbyshire, where I live, that has been adapted to produce electricity. I doubt it will amount to much in the scheme of things but every little helps. Shouldn't HMG instruct the water companies and the Environment Agency to identify all viable sites for hydro, and pumped storage, and start work now on the building the infrastructure to exploit this resource? We aren't waiting for technology to advance here are we?

There has to be some mileage in Tidal and wave energy, so what are we waiting for? Where are the billions going into R&D? It pains me to see the wasteful manner in which governments fritter the people's money away (Iraq, the Olympics, new Tridents subs, welfare for the bone idle etc) and yet when it comes to energy they put off doing anything meaningful and throw a few crumbs in grants etc to be seen to be doing something.

Energy, how we reduce our consumption and secure our supplies, without causing climate change or going to war over oil supplies, should be the the number one priority of this and every government. All the best brains should be working on this with whatever resoures they need. I don't see any urgency at the moment, they just want to leave it to the next lot. I'm sick of hearing about the public services which are a money pit, always have been and always will be. Time to focus on something important Gordon. Peak Oil is staring us in the face and the Great Powers are squaring up for a fight over the last drops. Nothing is more serious that this so why is nothing serious being done?

I tend to agree tony, electricity load is a constantly changing (with some predictable peaks and troughs) as much as generation , so with just make the control centres work a little smarter.

I don't think it would be to hard for wind turbines to just free wheel if you have an over supply?

Tony & Jeff: engineers are not fools and grid operators know full well that billions are at stake in optimising grid management. Windfarm supply is a quasi-random statistical series and consumer demand is composed of seasonal, daily, climatic, and random components. When you super-impose these, the overlap is virtually 100% when windfarms form say 1% of annual demand, but progressively falls as the windfarms proliferate and the % rises. If the wind ain't blowing, there is no contributuion. When the wind blows, whether there is an excess windfarm output depends on the number of turbines and size of consumer demand. As turbine numbers rise, the probability of excess (curtailment) rises, so the more turbines you operate, the lower the average utilised output per turbine. Depending on national characteristics, if you set out to build an infinite number of turbines you find that diminishing returns sets in very quickly, and before long the latest turbine simply generates unwanted electricity. It is thought that the theoretical maximum proportion of electricity which could be provided by an infinite number of turbines may be about 40%, but this would involve enormous curtailment (unwanted power), so the practical limit is 5 to 10% - but only then at large economic cost arising from plant duplication and penal costs of stand-by generators.

Chris: I agree with much of your comment re HMG waste. Unfortunately, micro hydro is expensive and a pinprick. There is a great deal in Scotland, vastly more in Canada, NZ, Austria, Scandinavia, S Africa, Brazil etc. Inevitably, densely populated parts of the globe tend to be far from mountains, so as in England hydro sites are virtually non-existent.

Tidal schemes are not great generators: low and varying heads for short periods of time. You need at least the Thames falling over a 100ft cliff - but as soon as engineers propose sites all the ecofreaks protest about habitat loss etc.

Sea currents and wave power may prove viable but thats a long term hope.

Sorry to have to say this, but it's nuclear or freeze pdq. We need to view nuclear like fossil fuels: a temporary godsend to fuel civilisation whilst we come up with something better. With say a UN controlled nuclear global power scheme, we could have nuclear plants supplanting all fossil power plants within 25 years.

Once oil runs out we will need to generate hydrogen of charge up fuel cells with electricity This could be done with wind so long as we have the capacity.

I dont like waste and nuclear waste is the worst kind but the idea of wasting wind generated electricity is not going to happen.

I cant agree with your analysis of wind either fun sorry.

I am in favour of nuclear power (no shares either), as I am in favour of renewables, in fact I'm for anything that improves our energy security, cuts production of greenhouse gases and makes it less likely me and my lad will be conscripted to fight energy wars over the next couple of decades...

But what do you make of the uranium supply situation Funcrusher? Biff has made the point a number of times that we barely have the production to fuel the existing reactors never mind any new ones. What makes you so sure we can find new uranium resources to fuel new nuclear build? To me, this question is just as key to the future of nuclear power as the question of variability of wind power is to that technology and it is the question that supporters of nuclear power never want to talk about in the same way that the supporters of wind power gloss over the variability issue.

The nuclear waste issue is not a concern to me because we already have the problem of what to do with the waste from our existing nuclear program. Ultimately, new nuclear build will just mean digging a slightly bigger hole in the ground to burial it all in. Each reactor only produces 1 cubic metre of vitrified high level waste per year, if you reprocess, which is about as big as the desk I'm sat in front of.

I still can't believe the lack of action to address the energy issue. It looks like conventional oil production has already peaked. The brown stuff is going to hit the fan within only a few years. Once higher oil prices start to bite (and I mean much higher), can someone explain to me how the world economy will continue to grow? Surely we will go into a depression with less and less energy available each year. It will be a depression without end and we will not have the resources to make the infrastructure investments to cope with declining supplies of hydrocarbons. We are squandering our last chance to get ahead of the oil depletion curve in an orgy of global consumption and racking up debts we can't hope to repay in the process. We should be doing everything possible right now to develop and implement alternatives to oil and gas without resorting to coal burning (unless the CO2 is captured) and putting an energy rationing system like TEQs in place right now.

The variability of green electrical power, could be buffered by existing power stations, having auxillary hydrogen burners. As the power contribution of the green sources start to over volt the grid, the power stations absorb this by electrolysing water to produce hydrogen, which they do on a small scale now anyway for cooling the generators. When things have calmed down. The hydrogen could then be burnt, resulting in a lower coal/oil consumption. The only extra expenditure would be for increased storage of hydrogen and its generation and the burners and a meagre sum for the control kit.
Can I claim my 10% of the £10,000,000 saved now? :-)
Frank

I wonder whether some people contributing to this thread have not yet got round to reading the CAT report on Zero Carbon Britain, downloadable from here:
http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/

The nuclear enthusiasts will doubtless be heartend by today's news of progress in Finland
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aFh1ySJ.lYQc
Only 25% over budget and 50% over time (so far).

Posted By: chuckeyby electrolysing water to produce hydrogen, which they do on a small scale now anyway for cooling the generators

That's incredible - it's done already - not just future fantasy! But how does that cool the generators?

Chris: the uranium supply caused me some hesitation in the past, so I took the opportunity of putting this to a senior nuclear scientist I knew well from schooldays. Academically outstanding and a very practical chap with an incredibly 'green' lifestyle: cycles thousands of milies on a tandem with his wife every year on hols.!

I was not surprised by his response. Firstly, exploration responds to demand /price, and of course there has been no incentive for some decades to look for more uranium. Geologists have algorithms which enable them to forecast the likely undiscovered mineral deposits on the basis of the current state of exploration and discovery. The search for uranium is in its infancy, equivalent to the search for oil a hundred years ago, and current projections imply vast undiscovered quantities.

Secondly, 'Fast Breeder' technology ( pioneered by the Uk and also adopted in Japan), though more expensive, makes the uranium which is available 60 times as productive.

Thirdly, there are large quantities of extremely enriched uranium and plutonium which can be recovered from dismantling nuclear weapons.

Overall, shortage of uranium is not on the horizon for say a couple of centuries. The chances are we shall simply move on to something better by then anyway, just as we have moved from wood to coal to oil as fuels without actually exhausting supplies.
resources.

There is I think more info on this site:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.htm

If there is a reasonable chance of there being a fair bit of uranium still undiscovered, and that seems reasonable to me given that we haven't really been looking for it for a 20 years, I think we should build a new generation of reactors. I know that isn't a popular view but I think it is a realistic one. Higher uranium prices have sparked a massive effort to find new supplies. An investment conference I went to in April was awash with uranium exploration companies looking for funding. Some of them will find new reserves.

If we are going to get emissions down by 90% by 2050 we are going to have to use a lot less energy full stop. Demand reduction is key. However, I doubt we will use any less electricity because we will have to electrify the transport system and provide more heating and cooking with electricity as oil and gas dwindle. To provide all the electricity we need with renewables seems unrealistic to me. If we can do a third with nuclear, a third with renewable and a third with fossil fuels, capturing the carbon, that seems more realistic and achievable to me. We should push forward on all three fronts without further delay.

I don't see why the nuclear and renewables lobbies have to be at odds all the time. I think the "Green" lobby carry a lot of "baggage" from the CND movement which is not helpful. For instance, I was disappointed to hear that a group of protesters from the climate change camp at Heathrow, which I supported, went on to picket a nuclear power station, a facilty which is helpful in the battle against climate change. Neither do I think having Bernard Ingham sneering about renewables on Question Time is helpful either. The aim here is to secure our energy supplies without causing runaway climate warming. We should see both as alternatives to fossil fuels that can make a contribution to this most important of causes.

I don't accept it Nigel, but I think there is fair chance, given the amount of exploration that is going on, that there will be an increase over the next decade in economically recoverable uranium reserves. There will also be efforts to use Thorium and develop economic fast breeder reactors. I think there will be enough fuel to make a new generation of reactors viable, but certainly not enough to provide for all the world's energy needs.

There is no silver bullet in energy. We have to make the best of what we have and exploit all resources we can, while at the same time reducing consumption so that developing counties can have their fair share of the energy pie. It makes more sense to me the use the nuclear fuel in countries that have good track records with safety etc and therefore leave more of the fossil fuel for others.

Imagine a scenario where we set our faces against nuclear completely leaving ourselves increasingly at the mercy of the Russians and in 10 years time, the current exploration efforts yield substantial new finds of uranium. We will have shut our nuclear industry down and lost all the expertise that we currently have. Better in my view to keep our options open and maintain some diversity in our energy supplies.

Chris

I personally dont have a problem with nuclear if it were a short term requirement.
My problem stems from the belief that if we were to go down that route it would give out all the wrong messages.
We would it appears have a unlimited source of carbon neutral energy and we dont have to change, that would suite most of the human population even it is err as Biff says wrong.

We need first and foremost to kick our addiction to cheap energy and then find the most effective balance of sustainable energy production.

funcrusher is a wishful thinker happy to believe the self interested pap put out by the nuclear industry to convince us that they should keep their jobs and they can solve our energy needs on their own.

Chris, your reasoning is excellent. You will have gathered that there are participants who wish to blow raspberries instead of advancing reasoned debate.

What makes engineers diffrent from just about every other profession I have encountered is that they know there must be at least 3 solutions to every problem, that they must find them, and they must work in the real world we have. . Every other profession: doctors, lawyers, accountants etc live in a world of extensive failures or make-believe, most of which are never investigated, and where outcomes/performance are often subjective. Society does not accept engineering failures, and thus engineers must create successful solutions.

In short, engineers have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as they would like it to be. They must, for example, consider the abuse of equipment by idiots as well avoiding irrational assumptions and wishful thinking. They also know that nothing is a panacea; no perfect solution, just the best possible compromise between such aspects as efficiency, reliability, cost, safety etc.

The very phrase 'renewable energy' is a contradiction of the Laws of Thermodynamics and indicative of the unreal world peddled by politicians and braying idiots. Yes, hydro is fantastic when you get it, wind can make a small contribution, tidal and wave might in 50 years time offer a practical contribution. But no matter what green measures are deployed on the consumption side, a vast tidal wave of humanity in the developing world is claiming what we have long enjoyed: hospitals, universities, industries, leisure, lifting of the crushing burden of manual labour - not to mention water, warmth, sanitation and a modicum of air conditioning. All these require vast inputs of power, and far in excess of anything experienced so far and vastly greater and more quickly than potential hydro or other green solutions could ever provide.

All technologies are ultimately supplanted, and no doubt nuclear will be too. In the meantime the choice is either world nuclear power, perhaps under UN supervision, or a vast smog.

Finally, nuclear offers a much greater chance of energy independence for all nations, and the avoidance of current and future wars about gas and oil supplies.

Posted By: fostertomUse the wind electricity to electrolyse hydrogen from water, then burn that in turbines (or CHP plants) when the wind drops

Anyone know what %age of hydrogen produced has to burnt in order to provide energy to compress the rest before storage? And when the compressed hydrogen is burnt, what happens to the energy of compression - would it be recovered as useful heat in a simple boiler, or could it only be recovered through expansion in a turbine or IC engine?

Posted By: fostertom

Posted By: chuckeyby electrolysing water to produce hydrogen, which they do on a small scale now anyway for cooling the generators

That's incredible - it's done already - not just future fantasy! But how does that cool the generators?

Any answer to that, chuckey?
What %age of full-load fuel does a gas turbine burn when running as stand-by, full-speed, no-load, ready to provide instant electricity when the wind drops, at the flick of a switch/simultaneous opening of the gas tap?
What's the calorific value of compressed hydrogen, compared with natural gas, as burnt in a turbine? Are hydrogen-burning turbines designed different from gas-burning ones?

I don't see that. The total national load of car batts being charged at numerous sites at any given time would follow a smooth curve, couldn't be cut in and out instantaneously to compensate for fluctuations in renewables generation. Whereas hydrogen electrolysis, like pumped storage, at a few sites could be cut in and out instantaneously, under central direction.