Re: Nuclear back on


John Beardmore wrote:

Not sure that it need be so elaborate to be honest.

To start with, I'd be pleased to generate only when heat is required,
and to have BG buy any excess for a flat rate and aggregate any ROCs
they can.

Heat in the home is very storable over a 24 hour period, so you can
also generate heat when electricity is requested by the grid.

My hypothetical algorithm will want to know if the grid is going to
want electricity at say, 6pm. If so, it'l wait. If not, it might
conclude that it's better to heat at 4pm, as the house is now 1C colder
than its human occupiers want. Alternatively, if there is still spare
heat in the system, it might wait till later when the grid does want
electricity.

And it also needs to know my preferences. At what mark up am I prepared
to sell. What temperature dip in my house am I prepared to tolerate.
And my house characteristics: How much heat storage capacity do I have,
and how much heat does my house loose, how much energy is lost in grid
transmission.


In summer, you only sell electricty when the electricity comapany
needs to buy. In cold climates where air con doesn't dominate, this
model works really well.

If they ever need to buy, I suspect something will have gone badly
wrong.

Its the value of capacity versus energy. If gas costs 3p, then my
summer electricity marginal cost is 7-10p. Spot prices in summer will
occasionally exceed this. If millions of households are connected with
intelligent boiler / generators, then the spot price will never exceed
this amount, even if every wind turbine in the country is on strike.



Future scenario:
1/3 nuclear

Seems a bit on the high side.

1GW reactor on each existing site, > 1/3.

Not what I would choose.

Might be what his Toniness chooses.


1/3 renewable

Seems a bit on the low side.

Add in a Severn Barrage, and hope for wave power.

And tide stream and domestic renewables.


1/3 local generation (which provides all the spare capacity needed to
support variations in the renewables, and in winter is a by product of
heating)

I was rather hoping that a lot of the local generation would be
renewable too.

Gas is a lot more convenient.

But not remotely sustainable unless it's hydrogen.

Unless there's a breakthrough in converting solar heat to hydrogen,
forget hydrogen. If the process involves making hydrogen from
electricity, then it will always be better to move the electricity.


I'd go for gas for domestic generation,
and biomass for municipal or farm generation. So a chunk of the 1/3
could be renewable.

Got to be more in the long term.

You'd have a situation where in summer where generation is nuclear and
renewable, with gas only used to meet spikes in demand, or troughs in
renewables. Local boiler generators would have massive capacity (10
million X 5 KW = 50 GW), but would only supply a few percent our needs.
And this would be linked to water heating.

In Winter, households are prepared to sell electricity at the price of
gas plus say, 20%. So gas becomes a bigger source, but its effective
generation efficiency is close to 100%. Unless you can find a
replacement for gas for home heating, this is an opportunity.



And you wouldn't want to generating with a classic CHP plant, never mind
a Whispergen unless you needed the heat. It's just not viable, and less
efficient than centralised power generation.

In summer, I'd buy electricity. In winter, I'd make my own. But if the
distributor really needs it, because Sizewell is being refuelled, and
the Thames Array has no Wind, then I'll sell it to the distributor.

In dire emergency...

As above, a few percent

Alex

.

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