New Gas Gridwatch Tool
February 17, 2020
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
We have a new toy to play with!
Just like its electricity big brother, this tool monitors usage of natural gas in the UK.
It offers a stark reminder of just how much we rely on gas during winter months. Even with mild weather this month, non-power demand for gas peaks at over 100 GW each day (the blue bar is power). In other words, double peak demand for power.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
For once, not guilty…. Not even bottled. Nearest gas about 10km away.
Oil ? Of course not.
Local plans for hydro came to nothing..
Wind ? Planners asked a key question . Can it be seen ?
Will they reconsider ?
Paul, isn’t it time that we “Deniers” organised into a group to counter XR? Lord Monckton, Prof Patrick Moore and Lord Lawson and many others are there on Youtube but don’t seem to get any exposure elsewhere.
Chris Booker gave Paul lot’s of exposure and he is now quite often quoted in MSM comments sections.
Mr Booker is greatly missed.
Tony Heller is also on youtube.
David, I agree wholeheartedly. What we need is a leader; someone forceful; magnetic; a great orator. They are very few and far between. Someone with the qualities (although not the political views) of Sir Oswald Mosley would have been great. Nigel Farage could be a candidate… But we need to do something – and soon.
It would be worthwhile pointing this out to those in government – except it would be a waste of time as none of them would understand the implications and why we should get on with fracking and build more CCGTs.
Paul
Does anybody know a site like Gridwatch that puts together all UK energy usage, ie daily electricity production and how it’s generated, gas, calor gas, oil, biomass, petrol and diesel in an easily understood table/graph.
It would be useful to show how much more electricity we are going to need to replace all the other fuels, and what progress we are making to ‘zero’.
I suggest it’s shown daily in all newspapers, TV and online to show the enormity of the task, particularly to politicians who don’t seem to have a clue about anything. I doubt half of them know the difference between million and billion.
£1,200,000,000 for an American computer (probably) to let us know when it’s going to rain!
And a fraction of that for flood defences.
Pathetic.
In 2016 a parliamentary committee concluded that , if every house was insulated up to the highest standard , then it would take another 200 GW of generated electricity to heat them .[ Which costs about 4 times the cost of gas or oil heating ]
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Terry/My%20Documents/Downloads/Parliamentary_Advisory_Group_on_CCS_-_Final_report%20(1).PDF
Long paper , but about page 65.
So that would be another 50 Hinckley C power stations , [ £ 1000 Billion ] plus about the same again to upgrade the grid . And that does not include all of the extra power that would be needed if more cars go electric
Which was why the whole idea was dropped then .So coming up with this idea again is just insanity .
Looks like the link did not work . But it should still be findable on the web .
http://www.ccsassociation.org/news-and-events/reports-and-publications/parliamentary-advisory-group-on-ccs-report/
OK try this link then download report
I did once propose to Claire Perry (O’Neil now), of all people, that, in the same way that it is law that petrol stations have to have large signs on their forecourts which indicate to the motorist the price to pay for each litre of fuel. solar farms should also have large displays (visible to the passing public) which would indicate (say) the current power being generated, the total for the day/period so far and for each and any measurement, also as a percentage of the farm’s nameplate. Needless to say, she scoffed at the idea.
I figure that if this publicity was ever made flesh the backlash from the paying public would be enormous.
Well all this is really interesting and yet I have not heard how electrikery will make up the electrical grid deficit of some 30 GW ( on a good day), gas of 100 GW and also of petrol and oil of some 47 billion litres at say 9kW/litre per year. Today is really sparking with wind providing some 12.5 GW. I don’t know much, but that seems a decent gulf to bridge, but our betters must have a plan how to do it. Answers on a postcard………..
No need to worry: some pop singer, actress or Oxbridge PPE or English Lit. graduate will come up with the answer!
moonbeams and wishful thinking = extended blackouts and I predict it as it is been thus wrought
With a Desmond! (2.2)
now Monday 1500hrs Gas for power stations is 18.89 GW, Electricity produce 7.74GW giving 41% efficiency. Thats as good as it gets with generation and transmission losses.
So our leaders are going to replace our 90% efficient gas boilers using low cost gas with expensive inefficient electricity. All because of the belief that CO2 is a pollutant and causes warming. MADNESS.
ALSO
My electric supply has 100 Amp fuse ,so in theory I can get 24kW out of it. (with diversity factor, its really a lot less across all users, probably less than 10kW) it costs me 13 .0 pence/kWh (AVRO). My gas boiler is 30kW, I have a gas cooker with 4 rings in total 11kW, I can run them all at the same time total 41kW it costs me 4.0 pence/kWh. The gas comes through a simple pipe, no switches/fuses/circuit breakers.
Words fail me……did you see the program on XR last night, they came across s amatuer, police could have done better, the courts were totally useless, letting most of them off. The guy who glued himself to the plane is up in March, the penalty for terrorist acts at an airport is 20 years…i guess he will get a conditional discharge as he his blind.
Geoff, I saw some of the XR doco last night. Yes, some of it showed them to be amateurs, but I was most concerned that quite a bit of it showed them to be highly organised and tech-savvy to a great extent. They also had a lot of legal advice – whether good or bad I know not. The most worrying part of it was seeing adult – very mature adults – claiming that they were with XR because they were so worried for their children/grand-children, believing the world was coming to an end for them – unless ‘we do something’. They seemed not to realise that the ‘something’ was a cure worse than the so-called disease – and much more likely to ‘kill’ the patient.
Dave
Energy Vault has the answer. 400ft towers with six 35 ton bricks that take excess wind and solar power (is there any) to provide 2000 houses with enough electricity for 24 hours using gravity. The Times 17/02/20.
Company has secured $110 million from SoftBank.
Don’t you wish you’d thought of it!!
There have been plenty of variations on this theme that have been trying to secure subsidies. Some use mine shafts (intrinsically a better idea) instead of towers. The most ambitious design calls for a huge cylinder of rock several hundred metres in diameter. They are all fraught with real engineering problems and terrible economics. Here’s the mine analogue of Energy Vault – Gravitricity – given the proper once over:
https://euanmearns.com/short-term-energy-storage-with-gravitricity-iron-versus-ion/
You will note that the real purpose of the design is to provide fast acting grid stabilisation, not serious bulk energy storage. It competes with grid batteries in the same market. Here’s the company website:
https://www.gravitricity.com/
You will note they are now somewhat behind schedule.
The other thing to keep watch on so far as gas is concerned is the state of the storage. The various types of storage are covered in different charts and spreadsheets accessible here:
http://mip-prod-web.azurewebsites.net/PrevailingView
The important ones are LNG in tanks at Grain and Milford Haven (Dragon and South Hook), and the “medium term storage”. There is also a smaller element as spare linepack, created by pressurising the distribution pipes to a higher level. Linepack is important to ensure that customers get extra delivery when demand increases.
Linepack stores about 2-days average consumption. Infinitely more than our electricity grid is capable of storing 😉
I guess that this whole topic as expounded by Notalotof………has reached the stage when a meeting is necessary to collate the various sources of information and make our case coherent.
I have read enough of the contributions led by Paul H for us to be confident about being able to ‘make a case’.
Such a meeting should confirm the moving average performance of each power source against its claimed designed capacity to establish the facts on efficiency. It would address the issue of fragile generation when there was insufficient wind and at night.
The meeting would confirm the compensation payments for refusing to take outputs into the grid. It would look at the cost of making irregular outputs phase into the grid. Lastly it would look at predicted useful life of each source and the premium or additional costs imposed by the Government to fund the frail generators or whatever we might call them.
As Paul has pointed out overpriced power erodes the competitiveness of industry.
We have read all the facts that have been reported and can be updated . They need to be assembled in one place. Nothing should be done to feed anything to the serious or the sensationalist press until the paper is complete. Similarly for the politicians.
At the end of the short cool spell with some snow in Feb / March 2018, the UK had approx four days of gas reserve left
o/t but
and it’s the cost …
UK offshore wind decommissioning costs already at £4bn
https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/decom/212865/uk-offshore-wind-decommissioning-costs-already-at-4bn-2/