Windfarm Britain means (very) expensive electricity

From The Register:

A recent industry study into the UK energy sector of 2030 - which according to government plans will use a hugely increased amount of wind power - suggests that massive electricity price rises will be required, and some form of additional government action in order to avoid power cuts. This could have a negative impact on plans for electrification of transport and domestic energy use.

The study is called Impact of Intermittency, and was carried out by consulting group Pöyry for various industry players such as the National Grid and Centrica at a cost of more than £1m. Pöyry modelled the likely effects on the UK electricity market of a large windpower base of the sort needed to meet government carbon targets - assuming no major change in the amount of nuclear power available.

There's a summary of the report for the public available here in pdf - probably quite detailed enough for most of us at 30 pages. It says that there's no particular problem for the National Grid as such - the actual electricity transmission network - with large amounts of wind in the 40+ gigawatt capacity range. But the introduction of so many wind turbines will spell disastrous problems for operators of "thermal" plant - that is fossil fuelled, and conceivably nuclear too.

According to James Cox, one of the report's authors: "Our worry at the outset of the study that the very dynamics of variable wind output would challenge the system operators, has moved to concern that the economic environment for thermal plant will be highly challenging.”

Massive unpredictable variations in the amount of energy coming from the wind would combine with the much more regular changes in demand and in possible tidal power projects to produce an energy market described in the study as "volatile". If there were enough thermal plants in existence to cope with rare (but nonetheless certain to occur) events such as nationwide calms during winter evenings, some of these plants would almost never be in use. They'd sometimes go years without running for more than a few hours.

In order for energy companies to build those thermal plants, necessary to avoid power cuts, they'd need to be sure that they could charge enormous, outrageous prices during the brief periods when they were actually in operation. According to the report's authors:

In our opinion, it is likely that the sort of price 'spikes' needed to reward the risks for such plant will stretch the market design to its utmost... Equally a market with spiky and volatile prices is one where the risk of operation is greatly increased: it is unlikely to send clear economic signals to new investors.

In other words, nobody would want to build and maintain a power station with no reliable idea how much it would get used from one year to the next (the report reveals that the UK's annual wind output could be expected to vary by no less than 13 per cent). A certainty of enormous rewards when the kit was finally needed would be required in investors' minds - but there could be no such certainty. The spot electricity price would need to soar to such levels as to introduce even more risk, in the form of government intervention to protect energy distributors from going bust and consumers suffering from vicious price surges.

As things stand, then, it will be more or less impossible to get the necessary contingency plants built - nobody would provide the capital for them. Thus, when the inevitable early-evening winter calms hit in the 2030s, the required amount of thermal backup power stations will simply not be there. Up to a certain point the National Grid can "manage demand" without causing power cuts by fiddling with the supply voltage, so delivering less power to users without cutting any of them off, but it has been known to crash right through this safety net even with the comparatively manageable power stations of today.

So we're talking power cuts on a fairly routine basis, if nothing else changes and the planned levels of wind farms appear.

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Jet Fuel From Seawater Is Possible, but......

Air contains about .04 percent carbon dioxide, but ocean water holds about 140 times that much -- and using electricity to split the water molecules and then combining them with hydrogen creates a hydrocarbon fuel ... and it works. For now, the problem is that it doesn't work especially well. Navy chemists have gone so far as to process seawater into "unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons," according to NewScientist, "that with further refining could be made into a kerosene-based jet fuel." If they power the reaction with a clean energy source the military could correctly claim to be flying mostly "carbon neutral." At this stage, the process is still producing an undesired byproduct -- 30 percent methane. It also takes substantially more energy to create the fuel than the fuel itself can yield. Navy chemist Heather Willauer is leading the project and believes the efficiency of the process needs to be significantly improved, which may be achieved by applying a new catalyst to the process.

Early attempts using a cobalt-based catalyst yielded methane, almost exclusively, along with some liquid fuel compounds and waxes. Switching to an iron catalyst shifted the balance to 30/70. But, again, the complex chain of reactions requires a significant amount of energy and every step added to the process is likely to add complications and cost.

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• US Navy Developing Jet Fuel from Seawater (neatorama.com)
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• Jets fuelled by seawater? The US Navy thinks it's possible (guardian.co.uk)