We've had several power outages in our area recently, most of them JUST long enough that the food in our fridge was deemed unsafe and we had to toss some of it out.
This sort of thing really makes me think about the large scale deployment of rooftop solar and batteries. If we had a battery system in our house, we could have used it to intermittently cool the fridge/freezer and potentially save the food and avoid the waste. It seems to make more sense to have everyone have their own power generation capabilities than for all of us to rely solely on a broad network stretched thin.
I know very little about this subject, but the primary reason we haven't done it is that there aren't many subsidies around where we are. In addition, I often wonder about the future proofing on these systems. Our old house had coax run to every room because they just assumed you would be using cable tv instead of wireless streaming.
The last time I can recall any long electricity cuts was during the 3 day week in the early 1970s... Which perhaps explains some of the reasons why coal power (or at least the people who produced the coal) were seen as a political threat:
That does not mean that day long power outages are impossible. Especially not locally.
For example, storm Arwen in 2022 left lots of communities without power for many days https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/storm-arwen-report . Admittedly not because of power generation, but because of transmission lines being cut by falling trees.
"In our area recently" — at least state the country!
You are commenting as if your experience is relevant to this news from Britain, but weasel out of even the roughest location. Your phrasing and choice of words is generally American.
Guilty as charged! American, unfortunately located in the southeast.
To be clear, this wasn't intended as a comment against or argument against the UK's accomplishment. I am EXTREMELY glad to hear they're moving away from coal.
It depends on how much you want to run. Just keeping the fridge working and powering an internet router and a tv would go a long way and wouldn’t take much.
Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.
It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.
This. Seeing a lot of great stories of EVs being very useful in the aftermath of hurricane Helen in US. The Ioniq 5 can power a house for 5 days for example. And is more cost effective (since you also use it as a car) than installing batteries at home.
(Disclaimer not all EVs support V2L)
Where? I'm in the UK. One of my network switches has 595 days of uptime so I haven't had power issues in at least that long, but it seems like more than 3 years since the last disruption when something blew at the substation round the corner and was fixed within minutes.
Then there is Drax a vast coal plant now burning wood chips cut from foreign forests, dried and shipped across the ocean in bunker oil fueled cargo ships. That counts as renewables. 7% of our electricity today, more than solar. I am actually very optimistic about the future in ten years of so. I think we oversell the present a bit though.
I'm not a fan of Drax (is anyone?), but I guess the alternative is worse, at least for now. In the short term, the marginal alternative is LNG, also shipped in oil-fueled cargo ships. So as we continue to build out wind and solar and reduce the amount of natural gas we burn, it's probably good to keep Drax on biomass. But it shouldn't be a long term solution.
Could it be quantified how much UK is using coal power of other countries?
Since industry is moved outside, the products we consume use power of producer country, mostly China. Is there a correlation in reduction of local coal power and amount of energy intensive products imported?
It's much easier to just look at the global consumption of coal. Peak coal usage was in 2022 (a brief spike caused by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine). With the exception of China and India, coal usage has declined pretty much everywhere. And in many western countries, like the UK and US it is being phased out rapidly; mostly for economical reasons. It's just no longer cost competitive.
China is still building coal plants but their usage seems to have peaked as well or be close to that as they have aggressively accelerated deployment of wind and solar there and are of course responsible for producing most of the growth of that. Also, there's a sense of urgency there because coal related pollution was making their cities unlivable. This is similar to what happened in the UK mid last century. Also, they are pursuing some aggressive short term goals to reduce dependence on coal.
On the flip side is really fair for a nation to claim their emissions aren't their responsibility because it was due to the production of exported goods? Would we accept that line from Germany if they decided to keep a coal plant open. "Oh, that's not our CO2, it's all going to make cars for China. It's their CO2". A little ubsurd when Germany gets rich off the sale. All the profit, none of the responsbility. If china wants to make our stuff I only think it's fair that they are responsible for the pollution caused by the production.
If anything else this narrative "exported CO2" muddies the water and makes it harder to hold nations to account. A basic "emissions in your borders are your responsibility to handle and reduce" is easy to understand, hard to game, and avoids this all devolving into CO2 accounting tricks.
That is a good point. Europe has since the 1970s actually cleaned up the continent pretty well by kicking out a lot of polluting industry.
(The latest target of environmentalists in the Netherlands was data centers. They used too much power, water whatever. So they went to the deserts of Spain. Epic win).
What's interesting about 140 years is that there's probably quite a few people who are ~70 and their grandparents have seen the first coal power plant start up. It isn't really that long ago.
The actual electricity production and consumption of the UK is declining [0]
The UK is also rapidly deploying renewables, and adding more and more interconnection to mainland Europe.
So as the capacity goes up the consumption goes down (for now). It's completely fair to decommission all coal plants.
I assume the energy consumption will go up at some point, as there's only so much you can save with energy efficiency, an delocalisation, and as we shift primary energy usage onto electricity (what's currently being imported in the form of gas and petrol).
But hopefully by this point the continued growth of production means will cover the increase
I had understood that one of the reasons for the reduction in consumption was related to having one of the highest priced electricity in the world. With more being deployed it should bring prices down too to allow increased consumption. Hopefully.
It really does make things uneconomic here, and painful for the poorer folks in society.
The graph in the article makes clear that isn't really true. Around half of coal use was replaced by natural gas in the 1990s, as you say. That's still a win - same energy, but half the CO2 emmisions. But since 2010 or so, the remainder of coal use was largely replaced by renewables.
Now we just need to get rid of the remaining natural gas use. For electricity production, the trend here is pretty good. Natural gas won't disappear anytime soon, but there will be longer and longer periods where none is burned. But for home heating, I don't think gas will be phased out as fast as really needs to be done.
At least it’s still lower on average than renewables at the moment [1]. I’m not sure what the current state of Nuclear Reactor construction is like, but hopefully we get some come online soon.
That one looks only at carbon emissions, which is not the main issue with Natural gas. The problem is that since it's a gas it leaks and natural gas in the atmosphere is a very very potent greenhouse gas.Though ofcourse over time in will break down to simple co2
Readit News
This sort of thing really makes me think about the large scale deployment of rooftop solar and batteries. If we had a battery system in our house, we could have used it to intermittently cool the fridge/freezer and potentially save the food and avoid the waste. It seems to make more sense to have everyone have their own power generation capabilities than for all of us to rely solely on a broad network stretched thin.
I know very little about this subject, but the primary reason we haven't done it is that there aren't many subsidies around where we are. In addition, I often wonder about the future proofing on these systems. Our old house had coax run to every room because they just assumed you would be using cable tv instead of wireless streaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
NB I wasn't very old at the time and rather enjoyed the experience!
We have our problems, but electrical grid reliability is definitely not one of them.
For example, storm Arwen in 2022 left lots of communities without power for many days https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/storm-arwen-report . Admittedly not because of power generation, but because of transmission lines being cut by falling trees.
You are commenting as if your experience is relevant to this news from Britain, but weasel out of even the roughest location. Your phrasing and choice of words is generally American.
To be clear, this wasn't intended as a comment against or argument against the UK's accomplishment. I am EXTREMELY glad to hear they're moving away from coal.
They need to e.g. provide the proper frequency on their own and entirely/physically decouple from the grid etc.
They are available but just rooftop solar and a battery is not enough.
It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.
I think you mean - they just assumed you would be connecting to the antenna on the roof to get the 4 glorious full colour channels.
https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/the-largest-emit...
So lower than solar now (which has been growing).
LNG ships are usually fueled by natural gas evaporated from its liquefied payload, which is much cleaner than burning diesel.
Since industry is moved outside, the products we consume use power of producer country, mostly China. Is there a correlation in reduction of local coal power and amount of energy intensive products imported?
It's much easier to just look at the global consumption of coal. Peak coal usage was in 2022 (a brief spike caused by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine). With the exception of China and India, coal usage has declined pretty much everywhere. And in many western countries, like the UK and US it is being phased out rapidly; mostly for economical reasons. It's just no longer cost competitive.
China is still building coal plants but their usage seems to have peaked as well or be close to that as they have aggressively accelerated deployment of wind and solar there and are of course responsible for producing most of the growth of that. Also, there's a sense of urgency there because coal related pollution was making their cities unlivable. This is similar to what happened in the UK mid last century. Also, they are pursuing some aggressive short term goals to reduce dependence on coal.
If anything else this narrative "exported CO2" muddies the water and makes it harder to hold nations to account. A basic "emissions in your borders are your responsibility to handle and reduce" is easy to understand, hard to game, and avoids this all devolving into CO2 accounting tricks.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom#consum...
But both are still trending down.
(The latest target of environmentalists in the Netherlands was data centers. They used too much power, water whatever. So they went to the deserts of Spain. Epic win).
Deleted Comment
So as the capacity goes up the consumption goes down (for now). It's completely fair to decommission all coal plants.
I assume the energy consumption will go up at some point, as there's only so much you can save with energy efficiency, an delocalisation, and as we shift primary energy usage onto electricity (what's currently being imported in the form of gas and petrol).
But hopefully by this point the continued growth of production means will cover the increase
0: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&countr...
It really does make things uneconomic here, and painful for the poorer folks in society.
It's no longer needed for contingency.
Or just build more wind and over provision
Now we just need to get rid of the remaining natural gas use. For electricity production, the trend here is pretty good. Natural gas won't disappear anytime soon, but there will be longer and longer periods where none is burned. But for home heating, I don't think gas will be phased out as fast as really needs to be done.
Electricity not power just to be pedantic. Most power is still from directly burning gas and oil.
[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix-uk
https://group.met.com/en/mind-the-fyouture/mindthefyouture/n...