European Energy Independence

I simply don't trust the Telegraph's optimism:

The power will reach Britain through a pair of HVDC cables (high-voltage direct current) developed by XLCC in Glasgow using British-made steel – probably made in Teesside – and laid by specially designed ships that will make the UK the world leader in undersea cable technology.


My policy is to stop reading whenever I encounter
make the UK the world leader
as it is invariably a sign that someone is begging off the taxpayer.


Of far more relevance to me is:

https://xlinks.co/who-we-are/
 
@innonimatu
This whole project has nothing to do with Brexit or about being anti-EU. In that spoiler, it talks, for example, about a second hub going into Benelux.
And at its peak it would only be the equivalent of two nuclear plants, providing less than 10% of our needs.

@EnglishEdward
Well we already are 'world leaders' in undersea cabling, apparently. :)

I thought this was purely a private enterprise, but of course the govt has to be involved, such as to decide what happens if they force price caps (as they are doing at the moment, ofc).

It appears there is a possibility of a similar link between Australia and Singapore – only it is even longer:-

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...r-project-clears-another-hurdle?sref=QV0pAzKC
 
EU rushes out $300 billion roadmap to ditch Russian energy

The European Union’s executive arm moved Wednesday to jump-start plans for the 27-nation bloc to abandon Russian energy amid the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, proposing a nearly 300 billion-euro ($315 billion) package that includes more efficient use of fuels and faster rollout of renewable power.
The European Commission’s investment initiative is meant to help the 27 EU countries start weaning themselves off Russian fossil fuels this year. The goal is to deprive Russia, the EU’s main supplier of oil, natural gas and coal, of tens of billions in revenue and strengthen EU climate policies.

An EU ban on coal from Russia is due to start in August, and the bloc has pledged to try to reduce demand for Russian gas by two-thirds by year’s end. Meanwhile, a proposed EU oil embargo has hit a roadblock from Hungary and other landlocked countries that worry about the cost of switching to alternative sources.

In a bid to swing Hungary behind the oil phaseout, the REPowerEU package expects oil investment funding of around 2 billion euros for member nations highly dependent on Russian oil.

Energy savings and renewables form the cornerstones of the package, which would be funded mainly by an economic stimulus program put in place to help member countries overcome the slump triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
The European Commission said the price tag for abandoning Russian fossil fuels completely by a 2027 target date is 210 billion euros. Its package includes 56 billion euros for energy efficiency and 86 billion euros for renewables.
Von der Leyen cited a total funding pot of 72 billion euros in grants and 225 billion euros for loans.

It put forward a specific plan on solar energy, seeking to double photovoltaic capacity by 2025 and pushing for a phased-in obligation to install solar panels on new buildings.

The European Commission’s recommendations on short-term national actions to cut demand for Russian energy coincide with deliberations underway in the bloc since last year on setting more ambitious EU energy-efficiency and renewable targets for 2030.
Those targets, being negotiated by the European Parliament and national governments, are part of the bloc’s commitments to a 55% cut in greenhouse gases by decade’s end, compared with 1990 emissions, and to climate neutrality by 2050.
Von der Leyen urged the European Parliament and national governments to deepen the commission’s July proposal for an energy efficiency target of 9% and renewable energy goal of 40% by 2030. She said those objectives should be 13% and 45%, respectively.
While Vietnam shows how to start but really really not how to finish

Solar and wind farms forced to limit operations due to infrastructure limitations following the renewables boom.

For up to 12 days every month, Tran Nhu Anh Kiet, a supermarket manager in Vietnam’s Ninh Thuan province, is forced to turn off his solar panels during the most lucrative peak sunshine hours.
“I’m losing on average 40 percent of output,” Kiet told Al Jazeera, referring to the solar panels he installed on the roof of his store so he could sell power to the national grid.

Across southern Vietnam and the Central Highlands, authorities are asking small-scale energy producers like Kiet and industrial solar farms alike to limit their operations due to infrastructure limitations.
After an unprecedented boom in renewable energy investment in recent years, the transmission lines that connect solar and wind projects to the national grid lack the capacity to deal with spikes in supply.
Policymakers have not been able to keep up either, leaving regulatory gaps that prevent some investors from monetising the power they harness.

“A [transmission] line takes three years to build, and a wind farm one year to build,” Minh Ha Duong, a clean energy expert, told Al Jazeera. “So lines need to be planned years in advance. This was not possible since in 2018 nobody knew for certain where they would be needed.”​
 
The North Sea Summit: Historic declaration can provide 230 million European households with green electricity

https://via.ritzau.dk/pressemeddelelse/the-north-sea-summit-historic-declaration-can-provide-230-million-european-households-with-green-electricity?publisherId=9426318&releaseId=13651496

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left the EU in a new geopolitical situation and the need for sustainable solutions and more renewable energy is more urgent than ever. At the North Sea Summit in Esbjerg, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and the Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo co-signed a joint declaration with the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen that sets an ambitious target to quadruple the four countries’ total offshore wind capacity by 2030 and increase the total offshore wind capacity to at least 150 GW by 2050."
 
The North Sea Summit: Historic declaration can provide 230 million European households with green electricity
Sorry to be nit picky, but this is not really true is it? It may in 2050 provide the amount of electricity that 230 million households use today, but the idea is to move most heating and personal transport to electric by 2050, so each household will use much more electricity.
 
Replacing combustion does take an absurd amount of electricity.
 
Sorry to be nit picky, but this is not really true is it? It may in 2050 provide the amount of electricity that 230 million households use today, but the idea is to move most heating and personal transport to electric by 2050, so each household will use much more electricity.
I think you forget the effects of new technology and developments in energy efficiency; as an example: Denmark had an annual energy use per capita at around 4,000kg of oil equivalent from 1970-1995 in average. It has since dropped to 2,800kg of oil equivalent per capita today, a drop of close to 30%. That becomes even more significant when you consider, that Denmarks GDP has almost doubled since 1995. So, productivity has doubled, while the energy consumed to drive that rise in productivity has dropped.

Just consider that the EU wide mandated switch to LED bulbs instead of the old incandescent bulbs, means that all my LEDs at home use 90% less electricity now, compared to before. That's just light bulbs... My current LED 55" flat screen, uses less than half of what my old 40" LCD flat screen used. Technology gets better.
 
This is heat. Heat was waste in both those applications. Heat is the point of heat.
 
This is heat. Heat was waste in both those applications. Heat is the point of heat.
... and that is a perfect example of increasing energy efficiency (by eliminating energy waste in the form of heat), is it not? ;)
 
Heating can get more efficient with heat pumps, but if all the fossil fuels in the below graph are changed to electricity that is a big increase to be taken by efficency.

 
Yup yup.
 
Sorry to be nit picky, but this is not really true is it? It may in 2050 provide the amount of electricity that 230 million households use today, but the idea is to move most heating and personal transport to electric by 2050, so each household will use much more electricity.

By usual energy metrics like IEA data, the transport sector is its own thing and residential transport is part of that, not household energy use.

But also "number of households" isn't a real thing and is just used by politician and media types for converting announcements because most normies don't understand petajoules. By 2050 the size of a household will presumably be different and their energy use patterns different too.
 
Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

One of the proposals to solve the energy crisis with nukes is to build loads of small ones. Eg. Rolls Royce is pushing the UK gov to fund them. Surprisingly enough they are much worse even than the big ones.

The study, published this week, found that not only did those particular SMR approaches generate five times the spent nuclear fuel (SNF), 30 times the long-lived equivalent waste, and 35 times the low and intermediate-level waste (LILW), their waste is also more reactive, therefore more dangerous and consequently harder to dispose of.

Paper Writeup
 
Why would this be surprising? How much they are worse?

It was never a secret why nuclear reactors were scaled up for civilian use. The small ones are comparatively ruinously expensive to maintain, per unit of power produced. Only some militaries can afford them. Scaling up was the only way to make nuclear power even appear competitive with alternatives.
The other way was hiding decommissioning costs. A big part of the expense is this waste. It too, as other costs, scales down power power produced as the reactors are scaled up.

But thanks for pointing this out here. It's worth saying as governments cyclically get corrupted by conman into financing these ruinous schemes.
 
Why not put the solar panels on the hydroelectric reservoirs?

Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed.

Solar panels need to be deployed over vast areas worldwide to decarbonize electricity. By 2050, the United States might need up to 61,000 square kilometres of solar panels — an area larger than the Netherlands. Land-scarce nations such as Japan and South Korea might have to devote 5% of their land to solar farms.

The question of where to put these panels isn’t trivial. There is fierce competition for land that is also needed for food production and biodiversity conservation. One emerging solution is to deploy floating solar panels (‘floatovoltaics’) on reservoirs.

Solar power is space-intensive, requiring at least 20 times more area than conventional fossil-fuel plants to produce one gigawatt (GW) of electricity. Several environments have been proposed as locations for extensive installations, each with pros and cons.
I am amazed it is only 20 times the area.

 
That article seems to really over-egg the area question, photovoltaics and wind turbines for the most part aren't an exclusionary land usage and even to the extent that they are... there's really quite a lot of planet out there.
 
Just consider that the EU wide mandated switch to LED bulbs instead of the old incandescent bulbs, means that all my LEDs at home use 90% less electricity now, compared to before. That's just light bulbs...

Yes, but the energy savings are not necessarily always what they may superficially appear to be.

For instance in the UK, people have their lights on more in winter (long days) than in
summer (short days), and in winter the waste heat from incandescent bulbs was useful heat.
So if they switched to LEDs and then put the electric fire on on occasions when because, in the
absence of incandescent light bulb waste heat, they felt too cold, there is little energy saving.
Of course the LEDs are better in summer and in warm countries and for outside lighting.

When I looked at the economics regarding my own house, a few years back, with respect
to solar water heating, solar photovoltaics, internal/external cladding etc etc, it all came
down to high capital cost for a small saving. In the end I concluded that it was more economic
to invest in community wind power schemes and use the dividends from that to pay higher bills.
 
I highly doubt a few bulbs were providing enough waste heat to warm a room when switched on at 5pm rather than 10pm.
 
Why not put the solar panels on the hydroelectric reservoirs?

Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed.

Solar panels need to be deployed over vast areas worldwide to decarbonize electricity. By 2050, the United States might need up to 61,000 square kilometres of solar panels — an area larger than the Netherlands. Land-scarce nations such as Japan and South Korea might have to devote 5% of their land to solar farms.

The question of where to put these panels isn’t trivial. There is fierce competition for land that is also needed for food production and biodiversity conservation. One emerging solution is to deploy floating solar panels (‘floatovoltaics’) on reservoirs.

Solar power is space-intensive, requiring at least 20 times more area than conventional fossil-fuel plants to produce one gigawatt (GW) of electricity. Several environments have been proposed as locations for extensive installations, each with pros and cons.
I am amazed it is only 20 times the area.



I am a little bit bemused by this. Do they not circulate the size of coal mines, storage, transport infrastructure etc? Huge areas are a wasteland due to oil extraction.. I think they seem to gloss over this part of the "footprint".
 
Top Bottom