It maybe has something to do with the giant Hinkley Point C nuclear power project nearby? An investment of £25billion.
The UK government has long had an energy policy that prioritises large scale nuclear power plants in coastal locations.
These things are a money pit into which the government pours money. While wind farms fit nicely with off-shore Oil and Gas industries, tidal power does not. Tidal power remains unproven and requires a large scale project to prove the concept. Funding for that has never been forthcoming central government.
Just now the UK government has committed to investing in another large nuclear power plant at Sizewell C. That will cost many billions.
The financing of these projects is interesting. The UK government prefers foreign investors like China. They get the French state owned EDF company to build it. The preference is for really big, long term deals.
For some reason they don’t do small, efficient reactors. It always has to be some big beast of a project that takes a decade or more to build. With huge cost over runs and generates power at high cost.
Nuclear power is a bit like big military defence projects that require an open check book and a great leap of faith that they will deliver long term security.
They would rather invest in grand projects rather than something simple like paying for homes to be insulated, thereby reducing energy demand.
There are powerful vested interests that benefit from large projects underwritten by governments. Nuclear power is seen as a national security issue and remains protected from normal commercial considerations.
There is also the issue of Putin reminding all (I will never miss here that a lot of what is being criticized is taking place thanks to what Putin is doing) how big nuclear power can be used as a weapon and a hostage too, I do think that many in Germany are not amused by what Putin is doing with the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
One of the main problems with tidal schemes is the effect that such large-scale projects would have on the local ecosystems. In many cases, the ideal sites are already conservation areas.
seems the fastest is by far pv-solar … I live in S-America, and once solar plants get beyond the “paper-war”, the physical construction is about 6 months from greenfield to hooking up and producing (obv. assuming that downstream everything is set) …
here: 1.1MW solar added per day, expanding an existing system with a new process:
one of the reasons for PV-solar being so fast is that you hardly need any civil construction and it is quite easily scalable
so knowing that solar is not the answer to all questions, but it got “quickly deployed” on its pro-side
Not a problem with coastal nuclear power stations, they are extensions to existing sites and so much of the environmental damage has already been done. The grid is already in place.
In these environmentally sensitive times it is easy to make a case against tidal power because there is no data because there are no existing large scale projects to measure. Not difficult to find opinion that sows uncertainty and doubt and exploit a tendency towards precaution. Anything new and innovative has an uphill struggle to gain credibility.
Nuclear power is a known quantity. It is, however, extremely expensive and it takes decades to build. They are going to look very poor value for money. Offshore Wind farms are being built at a fast pace, fabrication is centralised and the energy they generate is cheap and they are located many miles offshore, out if sight. They just need a grid that can move the power to where it is consumed. This is something that stymies grid development in the US, which has huge on-shore wind farm potential, which is a lot cheaper to install than off-shore. But there are an awful lot of land owners and lawyers that can hold up development of a grid to get the power to where it is needed.
I would be a lot more optimistic about nuclear if the modular reactor became the norm rather than these huge monolithic grand projects. The UK has wasted many billions and oversold nuclear power for many decades. It is a bad habit.
The UK will have a new Prime Minister on monday and hopefully we will learn how they are going to deal with the energy and cost of living crusis that Putin had created.
Slightly different language: renewable capacity is cheap, but the levelized avoided cost of electricity isn’t always greater than the levelized cost of renewable energy. Non-dispatchable sources can be made dispatchable or pseudo-dispatchable with storage and demand response, respectively, which is expensive. Although I disagree that it isn’t getting cheaper.
Strengthening the interconnectors within Germany and with neighbouring countries has been a massive topic since the late 2000s (The general consensus between federal government and nuclear industry about no new construction and the decommissioning schedule was reached at in the year 2000 and legislated in detail in 2002 - Fukushima in 2011 merely led to speeding up the schedule).
A number of 380 kV AC trunks have been completed, a lot more are scheduled to enter service in 2023-2035. The first major HVDC link to enter service was NordLink from Norway to Germany in 2021
Unfortunately interconnector construction in Germany has been subject to a lot of delay by nimbyism - perhaps the present crisis can cut through some of that.
A major policy development in Germany since spring has been to speed up conversion of home heating to heat pumps - they are electrically driven but crucially are a dispatchable load as German houses have a lot of heat capacity; turning the heat pump off for a few hours is barely noticeable in modern construction with underfloor heating.
In other news, the “maintenance” of the NordStream pipline that was due to end 3 September has been extended. Most of the German public now expects that that’s it and Russia will stop delivery for good. It is to be expected that storage and economies will get us through the winter. A number of energy-intensive industries will have to close down and put their workers on Kurzarbeit
I have a problem with building supergrids with HVDC connections: loss of redundancy. Evolved systems like we have now have numerous points of redundancy: Grids are separate so that one failure doesn’t take down everyone, a mix of gas heat, gas vehicles and electricity means that a failure of one energy source to deliver doesn’t shut down everything. If electricity fails, emergency services still run, cars can still move, heat still flows.
If we have a national HVDC grid, I fear that political forces will also drive that grid to the brink of failure through NIMBYism and attempts to offload the need to generate power onto others. We’ve seen that happen again and again: Necessary improvements for reliabiity are deferred for political reasons, grids are run way closer to capacity than they should be to prevent having to build new generation, etc.
And if the HVDC grid goes down it takes the entire continent down.
Imagine a world with a national grid stressed to the breaking point, with electric cars replacing gas cars and electric heat replacing natural gas. Then you get the winter storm of the century, and the national grid goes down. All traffic stops, deliveries of food and water stop, home heating stops… No one can evacuate from hard hit areas because there is no electricity for the vehicles.
All evolved complex systems feature antifragility. Human-engineered systems often seek maximum efficiency at the expense of redundancy and fragility.
A nation-spaning HVDC grid also gives an enemy a single point of failure to target.
on the bright side - this will fast-track any so urgently needed transition out of russian energy and also be a huge boost for renewables and e-transport solutions …
Russia painted themselves into a corner, once europe gets past this winter (fingers crossed its a warm one) - then russia and their energy are as relevant as last week’s newspaper
again, speeding up an urgently needed transition …
“The capacity-weighted average age of U.S. natural gas power plants is 22 years, which is less than hydro (64 years), coal (39), and nuclear (36).” [From 2017–the ages for coal, nuclear and hydro will probably be 5 years older now]
So basically there is a very slow turnover of generating equipment. Similarly it takes years to build new facilities to handle the import of LNG, new gas pipelines. So it is completely unrealistic to expect massive change in only one year.
Maybe on shore LNG installations take longer, but Germany has now hired its fifth floating LNG terminal.
The UK invested in LNG terminal capacity and this is being used to land LNG from tankers gassify it and pump gas across the English channel via existing gas pipelines into the European network.
Whether all the numbers add up is an interesting question.
Each country will be assessing its dependency on Russian natural gas and planning for a worst case scenario.
Some have pipelines to other suppliers, LNG terminal capacity, storage capacity and measures reduce consumption and getting other fossil fuel power stations operational……The Baltic states and Poland saw this coming.
When there is a national emergency, a state can pull a lot of levers.
Sad to say, the most exposed country is Ukraine itself.
Bear in mind that Russia will be cutting off its money supply dramatically. No gas. No money.
That will start to eat into the reserves it is using to prop up its economy.
On the other hand world gas prices have quadrupled and that is causing a sudden inflationary financial crisis in economies all over the world.
Putin is not going to win any friends. Russia has gone from a consistent Oil and Gas supplier that honours its long term contracts to an unreliable supplier controlled by an unpredictable maverick, in just six months.
Pretty easy to destroy trade relationships, far harder to build them for future prosperity. A lesson we would be wise to re-learn in the UK.
How much division is this gong to cause in the EU if things get really rough? Are the countries that prepared better going to give their precious gas to countries that didn’t? Are we going to see massive wealth transfers to countriies to allow them to buy gas at exhorbitant rates? Are the people in various countries going to rise up if they feel they are getting a worse deal than other countries?
I am sure Putin is hoping there will be division in Europe. There is the question of Orban in Hungary who hopes to still get cheap Russian gas by being Putins friend in the EU. He is an oddball.
But for the ex-Soviet EU members, there is a shared fear of Russian occupation. Germany and the rest will help each other and have all the mechanisms to make that happen, that is what the EU is for.
Whether there is enough pipeline infrastructure to move gas around or enough LNG terminal capacity….we will see when the winter months arrive.
I think it will be a case dealing with a quadrupling of gas costs rather than a shortage of supply. The poor will suffer and it is up to each government to support the most vulnerable. That will be a test of responsible political leadership in the face of an existential outside threat. Like the pandemic, some countries will handle it better than others.
I suspect Putin will try some new tactics. In the past he has stirred up unrest in the Baltic states amongst Russian speakers.
FWIW - I am a Spaniard living in the Netherlands. Regarding natural gas, Spain gets its gas from North Africa, and connecting pipelines to France (and through it to the rest of the EU) exist. The Russian gas was cheaper and that is one of the reasons why it was prioritized by Germany et al.
Also, the Netherlands happens to have the biggest natural gas field in the whole of Europe, in Groningen. Exploited since 1959, It was scheduled to be closed in 2023 (even though there is still A LOT of gas there), among other things, due to concerns about instability in the terrain, and also because Russian gas was cheaper.
Now, the Dutch government has said that “until the geopolitical situation changes” the remaining wells will be kept open and they are looking at reopening others that were already closed.
My feeling: this winter there may be discomfort, but it won’t be a catastrophe, not by far. Incidentally, the target for natural gas storage was for the EU to have its natural gas tanks 80% full by November 1st. That target was achieved in early September.
Add to that the sprint to install alternative energy sources and get alternate providers… the final result will be discomfort in the short term, stabilization in the mid term, economic blow to Russia in the long term because sure as hell I don’t see the EU buying Russian gas and oil in the quantities it did before.
The NordStream pipelines (1 and 2) have been damaged in the morning and early evening of 26 September (according to seismograph data) in three separate places, in Danish and Swedish waters, shown on the map to this article (German language) by the NDR public broadcaster:
There is hardly any doubt that this is deliberate sabotage by a state actor.
Both pipelines did not carry any gas flow (NordStream 1 has been shut off by Russia under the transparent pretense of maintenance not being possible due to sanctions; NordStream 2 has been denied its operating license by Germany). That means blowing up these two pipelines is pretty pointless in itself for any state party. Russia, in particular, has lost its carrot to dangle at Germany.
My speculation is that this may be a proof of concept operation.