I'm amazed by the NIMBYism for the middle of the desert. Yes it's not completely devoid of life and impact, but as far as places for generating solar power go, it's about as good as you're gonna get.
It's not NIMBYism because it's not my backyard. It's an attempt at environmentalism and cost-benefit calculations. It might turn out to be net positive, but you can't know that unless you consider the negatives first.
That's a stretch. We're literally talking about arid almost-wasteland. A few sq miles is a small portion, yet will provide clean power. The cost benefit is abundantly clear.
IMO as a planet we should try to move beyond that sort of colonialism. Yes the UK is a richer country, but that doesn't make their ecosystem inherently more valuable.
But like, it is someone else's country. They just may not like the look of it and that would be the end of the story, maybe move on to ocean based solar+current hybrid power generators?
Morroco is the one pushing for it, in this case. It's not like the nation state in question is being forced into it. They see it as a major opportunity to export energy, a famously lucrative enterprise for countries.
I didn't dispute that, i just said the value of it is not the only consideration, you still need to test it out before deciding, regardless of who pushed for it.
Given the benefits involved, the chance of it being net negative are basically nil. It's not worth delaying. Probably not even worth the money and time to investigate.
It might not be worth the delay to investigate, but it is certainly worth the time and money. If it is an easy win in one case, how do you identify the hard wins?
Perhaps more importantly, you learn the biggest hurdles so that you can address them. For instance, the UK doesn't want its power to be at risk from political instability (more than it is already). That risk can be addressed in part by working with the local population: perhaps you allow for co-located grazing so you're not displacing herders. Perhaps encourage joint projects that also provide local power so that Moroccans benefit from the project (beyond just the ones in power).
What about security? It seems a bit concerning if 8% of UK's power can be knocked out in a single attack. How would you address that?
You keep existing fossil fuel generation facilities available. They will only be used at most a few days a year--or in situations like this where 8% of UK's power is knocked out in a single attack.
Its this kind of stuff that makes me think all the global warming hysteria must be overblown. If it were really as dire as environmentalists would have you believe, they wouldnt be fighting this kind of stuff (or nuclear).
The only real accomplishment the global warming people have achieved is to make energy much more expensive and energy supplies much more unstable (e.g. california, europe)
Most environmentalists surely have good intentions, but they (like most people) are not experts on climate science and those that are have conflicted interests. For academics, you can only get one answer or you are cast out and shunned as a big oil lackey. For activist groups like greenpeace etc they only raise money by being alarmist. And then some are simply motivated by the desire to hurt western economies.
With every political problem: environment, racism, failing schools, terrorists, climate change, etc. the people in power need the problem more than they need the solution.
There are very real concerns but a whole lot of people talking about them have pretty shallow knowledge and just sort of jump on anything that sounds right. This is a problem with many issues that attract activists.
Lousy activists shouldn’t invalidate the issues that inspired them.
Because it's not actually about saving the environment, but about slowing down or stopping human and technological progress, because human progress is basically evil.
This is the fundamental driving emotion behind the environmental movement, and it's why almost any real environmentalist is against a technological solution to it. No nuclear, no wind farms (destroy landscape), no solar farms in africa.
The problem is humanity. It's a virus. It needs to be killed. There are too many people on the planet, we can't feed them, children are the worst thing for the environment, I'm sure you've heard all these things.
Meanwhile, 50% of 8bn people on earth will be overweight by 2030.
Well, duh. I don't think anyone thinks "sun strong -> good for solar" is bad reasoning. What is bad reasoning is ending your analysis there.
What's the cost-benefit of installing heavy transmissions infrastructure for the desert? The shore? The sea and ocean? Everyone and everything who live there? How vulnerable is that infrastructure to natural and artificial disasters, and what costs do we bear to build resilience to those outcomes?
Aren't surrounding communities also in need of strong consistent power? Why not move the power less distance (far less materials, less power losses) and serve a different population?
The classic thought-terminating cliche of if we covered X% of the Sahara we could power the whole globe obviously ignores the act of moving that energy from one place to another, which is a huge endeavor, to say the least.
Your argument is basically of the flavor "why is California still in a drought while the Mississippi river rages?"
I presume the existence of this project demonstrates that the cost/benefit analysis was done and the result balanced towards “benefit”. The most recent nuclear power plant built in England produces 3200MW and costs nearly $40bn so far. This cable will carry 10,500MW and costs $22bn. The latter number doesn’t includes the solar generation, but build costs for utility-scale PV are running less than $1/watt so 10,500MW of name-plate capacity would cost only another $11bn. Even at much lower capacity factors you’re still looking at less than half the cost per MW than nuclear.
Whose analysis, incorporating whose costs and whose benefits? Why are you assuming that the logic is reasonable and not asking these questions? What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption?
Who's we? This sounds like another one of those silly "why do x when we could imagine doing something completely different" type of arguments for nothing and posited for no reason.
"Don't build skyscrapers, build townhouses!" "Don't have checkstops, people die in car accidents anyway, instead we need to think about road safety" "Why build a huge energy project when small towns won't directly benefit in the next 5 years"
You would assume that the considerations have been made because it's basically a massive engineering project, it hasn't been posted to hacker news for the purpose of gathering theoretical conjecture in step 1 of the planning process, and that's how massive engineering projects tend to work, along with other political effects that aren't necessarily logical reasoning experiments to begin with.
Financially I assume the analysis was done by the people committing $22bn. Presumably the investment in the region will both spur local development (jobs and infrastructure) as well as other forms of development. The thing about solar is that people tend to overbuild it, since you need to ensure that there’s sufficient capacity even when it’s cloudy or the sun is low in the sky, so power near the generation sources should be relatively inexpensive when the sun is shining (and if more is needed, scaling existing solar plants will be much cheaper than building new infrastructure.) And then of course there’s the very real benefit that decarbonizing Europe will have on the undeveloped world, which is going to bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.
It strikes me that developing a more renewable grid that decarbonizes energy in both Europe and Africa is one option. There's no reason the electricity can only go from Africa to the UK. It might well flow in reverse on windy nights.
The other is that rich and middle class people in the developed world build their own little microgrids that can easily withstand primary grid outages with all the economic inefficiency that entails. Batteries are relatively scarce still and are far more equitably deployed to the grid writ large than only certain households.
But of course perfect is the enemy of good which is why people are arguing about this online.
> What kinds of benefits would we see in the near future if we invested in providing power to places that could use it for development and not merely consumption
Sounds like you are asking "don't spend 22 billion on infrastructure for yourself, donate 22 billion to build infra for someone else"
Not so simply, no. But if we can pivot to a philosophy of lifting up the lowest among us, rather than exploiting their resources to extract value from them, that would be a positive step for humanity.
If the surrounding communities are in need of power, they’re likely to get it cheaper as a result of the UK building there.
Hopefully they require a split of the power as part of the building conditions.
If the desert supplied energy to the whole continent, it would free up other resources (eg gas) to power other countries. It’s a little different to your river analogy.
they would be better off finding a use for the power in Africa. It like they have to pipe it in from so far just to... have it worthwhile. smh terribly thought.
It’s actually probably the opposite because of that - people in Africa now might have this as an accessible option simply because the UK went through all of the trouble to stand up the infrastructure. Even if the resources from the project itself don’t get reused all of the knowledge and derisking gained from demonstrating the concept has some intangible value
I am uneducated in this particular field but my understanding is that salt water is extremely corrosive. Having reliable energy is not just about installation, but also about maintenance and continued operation. The latter is a challenge in a corrosive salt water environment.
Serious answer? Yes. Brooms and mounting panels a foot off the ground works fine. Heat reduces efficiently but by a very, very small amount. Not long ago there was a company posted to HN which puts panels basically flat on the ground, and has a little robot run up and down sweeping them off in Texas.
Much simpler and cheaper and less error prone than a floating array of panels exposed to salt water and waves.
Heat reduces power of PV Panels by up to 10%. Looking at a random spec sheet it's -0.35%/C so from 45C to 75C the difference is roughly 10%. I would not call it "very very small". Also increase in temperature reduces the lifetime of the panels.
That said I too think that taking that hit will never be offset by all the faff of dealing with ocean water, waves etc.
Moreover the big installations in Morocco have not been PV but concentrated mirrors in which case any increase in heat is improvement and brooms are more important.
Brooms cause abrasions, especially when they are moving sand along glass or composite plastics. Non lubricated wipers are fine (but not ideal) for dirt / dust, but not at all comparable for sand.
Yeah, and as far as I am aware, they are all kept clean with water. I'm not aware of a single installation that isn't hooked up to water facilities, let alone plonked down in the middle of a desert.
I'm really not sure why you think washing them with water is vital to make a solar installation worthwhile. Panels have been getting / are dirt cheap, efficiencies have been going up, and that trend will continue for a long time. If $ cost to wash is more than $ increase from cleaner panels, we won't wash them.
Would panels be even efficient for such a project though? I think concentrated solar is better in this case, as it generates power at night, more stable during weather changes, and not subject to heating issues.
There was an article a while back about placing solar panels on California aqueducts. This wasn’t really worth the cost in the analysis, until you considered preventing water loss from evaporation and saving on canal cleaning. I expect solar power from the ocean would lose money, if floating it on land is barely profitable.
Floating windmills sounds like a fun concept. I never heard of it but in theory, with cables securing it to the bottom and weights to keep it upright, I could see it work.
Scotland was big, at one point, on using sea-power. Their idea was more about using the rising/falling/tidal energy to generate electricity via motion:
That makes no sense, that's like saying the costs of oil are rooted in Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Russia etc. and all the benefits go to other countries. Those countries have immensely benefited from selling oil to the world. How is solar power different?
As opposed to what alternative? Would we rather Iran/Russia/etc be poorer or redistribute the wealth to other countries as if oil isn't a geographic right? Punish oil nationalization or pro-nationalize but be more like Venezuela where everyone gets even poorer despite a boom in oil prices?
I don't see who this is an 'inverse problem' without a realistic alternative.
Africa gets a lot of jobs they would otherwise never get. How is exporting your labor something bad? Countries try hard to get more exports, but once an African country does so, it's bad all of the sudden.
Depends on how that labor is valued. Just because a project creates jobs with export value in country doesn’t mean that project is a net benefit for the people of that country. A project like a waste reprocessing facility might create exportable labor for the country that hosts it, while simultaneously harming the health or people who work in the facility and those who live around it. Does it generally make for a just system if rich countries are allowed place facilities they don’t want in poor ones?
I think the answer depends on how well labor in those countries is rewarded for working at such facilities. So I certainly hope countries that are considering hosting those projects drive a hard bargain on price, starting by acknowledging that what they are giving up is real. The land use is a real concern, yes even in the desert.
This is not a waste processing plant though. Even waste processing can be lucrative, Sweden buys trash to burn from neighboring countries. How can people say with a straight face that land use in the Sahara is a concern is beyond me. I guess global warming really is over-hyped, if we got to worry about land use in Sahara.
It’s geopolitically a terrible idea. Didn’t anyone learn any lessons from COVID about globalization? Or the Russia-Ukraine War? Even among countries that are close allies (EU) energy politics are a huge problem and countries that import energy always get the short end of the stick when there is a conflict of interest with the exporting country.
How is Russia-Ukraine war relates to that? Is it even a war (neither Russia nor Ukraine declared a war officially)?
USA works for many years on destroying German industry. Starting from not allowing to build gas pipelines from Russia to Germany and eventually destroying them (I don't think that even brainwashed western population believes in that bullshit theory that 5 guys on a yacht destroyed Nord Stream). To the Volkswagen emissions scandal and plundering Deutsche Bank.
Russia always wanted to be a friend with Germany because that would be highly beneficial to both parties. USA always looked for a way to make that never happen and to destroy German industry.
USA succeeded, Germany has a bleak future ahead. But that is only tangentially related to energy import/export.
> Is it even a war
Even Russian state-sponsored media/propaganda calls it a war these days. Denying the "Special Military Operation", as Putin wants it called, its approriate label of "war" only acts to support Russian propaganda and lies. Call it a war, because that's what it is. The 380th day of war of Putin's 3-day spec^Wwar.
> [USA] eventually destroying [Nord Stream]
Who the actor for the destruction of Nord Stream was is still unknown, there have been multiple different stories about it now, all of them with some plausible and inplausible parts about them.
> Russia always wanted to be a friend with Germany
Russia doesn't want to be friends with anyone. They (Putin and his mistresses) only strive to become a political, military and geographical superpower again using the same tactics other tyrants like Kim Jong-un are using.
It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy.
If they could just be self-sufficient with a load of nuclear power plants then they would have less political leverage problems
The UK in particular has a vast abundance of wind power off it's coasts. It makes more sense to double down with 22bn investment in wind!
These solar projects are good to start as they could empower more african nations with cheaper electricty. We just need more electricity everywhere if were going to drop the reliance on oil.
From what I understand, the UK actually has private companies ready and more than willing to build wind farms with their own money. The government is just inexplicably being slow at handing out the permits.
The market for wind in the UK is unusually profitable due to a quirk of the UK electricity market.
Specifically, the power price across the UK is the same everywhere. However, there isn't infinite transmission capacity. So, if you generate power in one place, but the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it, but you still get paid, and you get paid compensation on top.
You know what's better than producing power... being paid to produce power, paid extra compensation, and then not need to actually have those wind turbines spinning (so much reduced maintenance too!).
The government is delaying lots of permits till they can figure out how to change these perverse incentives... Needless to say, the wind industry isn't happy about the fact they might no longer get paid such large amounts, so they're demanding the old scheme be kept in place for existing producers for 25+ years, and having the new pricing rules only apply to new builds...
UK need to divide the country into cost regions based on the bottlenecks and it will work like international power connections. The political problem is making Scotland its own separate region.
Have a look at the regions in for example Sweden which face similar bottlenecks in transmission capacity from north to south.
There are lots of wind businesses dependent on the old market rules. There are lots of multi-decade power delivery agreements using the old single-price market as a benchmark. If you change the rules, you have to give everyone compensation, or run the risk of being seen as a 'bad place to invest'.
Copying the Australian power market with it's >$20k mWh price swings, negative energy prices and brown outs on hot days is not something anyone sane should do.
Australia and California are the poster children of why renewables are terrible for an electricity grid once they get past 10% of generation.
(Most of) Australia's problem is that the government stuck its head in the sand for a decade and pretended that renewables weren't happening. Consequently minimal groundwork was done by preparing the grid with suitable transmission and storage. Now it's being overtaken by the inevitable: renewables displacing coal/gas because they are cheaper to build and run. There will be a period of pain whilst the missing groundwork is done but it will get there.
I say "most of" as South Australia is showing how it can be done, with over 70% of its energy coming from renewables whilst not being blessed with hydro [1].
Yes, and it had enough backup to run the grid for 5 minutes, at the low low price of $200m. Now you'd only need another $50,000,000 to have enough storage to run it overnight.
Those price swings are reflecting the economic reality of a product which there is very limited capacity to store and for which both demand and supply can vary rapidly. In practice energy consumers and generators are both limited in their exposure to them through financial instruments like CFDs.
"brown outs on hot days" is straight up propaganda.
And at least having different pricing regions means that it's not investing in building useless generation where there isn't the demand or transmission capacity to move it to where it's required!
"Nationalize"? No, they suspended the market-based dispatch mechanism, in accordance with the rules to which the market participants had agreed, and used centrally directed dispatch for a couple of weeks.
The market failure which required this extraordinary action was primarily the interaction of a particular cap price with two problems, both fossil-fuel related: the large increases in price of natural gas and coal due to the Ukraine war, and coal supply problems at several generators due to widespread east coast flooding resulting under the influence of La Niña . Most Australian gas and black coal is exported, so the domestic market is exposed to the internationally traded price. The gas prince increase in particular was so severe that the short-run marginal cost of gas electricity generators was above the administered price cap value. The widespread flooding also, somewhat ironically, constrained the output of some hydro generators as well, because there was no capacity downstream for more water release.
Certainly there are strong market design lessons from this, but they're around price caps and bidding behaviour. They're unrelated to the regional or nodal pricing concept which this thread was about (and there isn't really a renewable energy angle on this either).
Still don't know what brownouts you're referring to, and I follow the NEM pretty closely.
Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".
The last major power outages to do with the grid were a couple of years ago here in Queensland when a large coal unit (Callide C unit 4) literally blew up, instantly taking a a bit over 800 MW of generation off the grid. Took like three hours to get large parts of the state back on. A year or so before that there was some minor load shedding in Victoria when two coal plants were down for unexpected maintenance over a heat wave (and I think another one or two tripped out in the heat) - and actually solar and wind from other states helped minimise that. Then there was the big one, where massive storms in South Australia took out transmission lines and a bunch of generators (including some wind farms) tripped off. Of course, despite being caused by the storm destroying transmission lines, the right wing did blame the wind farms for it...
> Sorry, were you in Australia? We haven't had load shedding from a LOR (Lack Of Reserve) event almost ever, and we don't commonly get browouts. That's just lies and FUD. That article is actually just "sometimes the grid operator has to ask aluminium smelters to reduce their demand a bit".
I was a quant for one of the top 3 largest electricity retailers in Australia. A wonderful market where you take everyone's money as long as you call it green. It was shocking to see the liberal government tell the truth about renewables while labor and the greens are lying/in denial about them.
Bullshit. The Australian example best demonstrates that selling off production and networks to private companies, whilst trying to create an artificial market that constrains a monopoly chokehold on a product with inelastic demand is very difficult to pull off.
It seems absurd to me that spending $10B on a transmission cable from Africa to the UK is more sensible than spending that amount to make a much shorter cable to southern Europe and increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way (including within the UK). That takes a lot more cross-governmental cooperation, of course.
> Increasing capacity at bottlenecks along the way
This would presumably amount to building a slightly shorter but nevertheless very long cable on/under land. And I think it's much easier to just drop a cable under the sea than it is to dig and bury it under the ground or build pylons to carry it above the ground.
Not necessarily. The shortest maritime path crosses at least one country maritime economic exclusive area, that will have to agree on that, without reaping any meaningful benefit.
Plugging by land is easier to negotiate, maintain and finance, as the connection can also be used by those countries.
I'd guess the reason this isnt being done that way is both because the UK left the EU and the whole Gibraltar debacle.
I may be wrong on this, but the whole thing just looks like UK being UK - trying to solve their problems while ignoring the rest of the world exists.
I think building new subsea power transmission is cheaper per mile than building over land.
If you need to upgrade most of the links along the way, then building the longest possible cable at sea makes sense.
There might also be plans to tap off this cable to feed into portugal, spain, france and ireland along the way - that allows the cable to also take the role of some of the local transmission grid
> the power network cannot transport it, you get told not to bother producing it
I know I just don't understand the details but I'm always kinda confused about how hard it seems to be to dump excess power off the grid. Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?
But, due to the lack of transmission, and the 'single price' scheme, this power isn't cheap. It's expensive, but there is too much of it in one region only.
> Is it just really hard to build something that can use enough power even when it doesn't need to do any useful work?
It's just easier to not produce it. The issue with building up the grid is investment, but there is little marginal cost to turn off an existing plant.
That makes sense. You'd think they'd have prioritised this and have it done by now though. Both the new payment system and extra transmission capacity.
They've (the right wing government) underfunded the government so much there aren't sufficient staff to run the beaucracy. The recent (failed) rocket launch from the UK was massively delayed because of slow government processes
The UK has built a huge amount of offshore wind generation - in fact it had the most in the world until quite recently, and is currently second only to China. This just isn't a complete solution because wind is intermittent, and in particular it tends to drop off to nearly nothing during the coldest parts of winter when energy demand is at its highest. All of the solutions to this are about as speculative and questionable as this proposal.
It depends. Hopefully they source say 150% of requirements and not max them out so that losing 8% takes you yo 142%
and not a single led gets dimmed. Redundancy. But I also read how it is hard to stop / start generating power on demand so it might be costly to have so much redundancy.
You just don’t scale nuclear power up and down. You run at full capacity all of the time outside of maintenance shutdowns.
If you shut down or reduce power at all, you essentially have to wait two days to turn back on.
There’s a decay chain of isotopes that only stick around a couple of days which are normally burned off by neutrons when the reactor is running which build up when you turn the reactor off. They eat up neutrons making the rector much harder to control until they decay naturally. In order to restart the reactor you essentially have to double the output for a while and slowly very carefully reduce it at just the right rate… and if you make mistakes the reactor melts down.
This xenon poisoning was part of the Chernobyl disaster where operator actions and mistakes causing it and then their responses and mechanical failures led to the meltdown.
Rectors are just not designed to do this because it’s too risky and complicated to be worth it. So when you stop the reactor it just stays stopped for a couple of days. Similar for any throttling down which I understand is done carefully in some circumstances but absolutely not continually to respond to demand.
We have perfectly good reactor designs that can go down to half power or even lower without problems, and that's plenty of scaling. And they can scale in real time too. The biggest issue is that it increases the average cost per watt, which is not that big of an issue.
The capex is so high and fuel cost so low it just also doesn’t make economic sense to ever turn down your reactor. Or you have to be overproducing to the extent that there is a significant negative price for electricity for quite a while before the cost makes sense.
"French utility EDF began making its nuclear plants more “maneuverable” in the 1980s, and today it says a 1,300-MW reactor can increase or decrease its output by 900 MW within about 30 minutes."
> The capex is so high and fuel cost so low it just also doesn’t make economic sense to ever turn down your reactor. Or you have to be overproducing to the extent that there is a significant negative price for electricity for quite a while before the cost makes sense.
Sure, the price of power has to temporarily go negative to be worth it in a market-based system. I don't know about "significant" though. That's not a problem for grid stability, it just means your cost/benefit calculation gets more complicated.
While an undersea cable requires continuous operation and the agreement from a single country where it starts. If they suddenly decide for whatever reason to turn it off (say they're short of electricity) then the supply is immediately stopped.
You could use a CANDU PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor) if supply chain safety is that important to you, but don't want an enrichment industry. CANDU reactors can use natural Uranium.
You can stock it though, in case foreign countries cut supply short you're not suddendly out of power but instead have time to plan a negotiation or attempt to source it from elsewhere.
If the issue is just geopolitical independence, it's easy to stockpile uranium reserves. I believe France has several years worth of uranium stockpiled, so even if relations soured with all of our providers, which are pretty diverse, we would have a few years to react.
An unfortunate part of human cognition is we're pretty bad at assessing small but widespread and constant risks/damages so the impact of pollution pales in comparison to the mental impact of singular events like the various nuclear disasters or near misses we've had between TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, et al. So they receive outsized push back compared to their actual reduced risk. (Also to be fair when a nuclear disaster does happen it renders an area unusable for a lot longer so the events tend to stick in people's memories)
Building them is also unfortunately a many decades long endeavor so we need shorter timeline solutions to bend the curve of climate change. I think a lot of environmentalists have also been burned by long term projects that sit in planning and approval hell for years to decades then get cancelled or funding redirected when a new administration decides to try to make their mark on a project. A similar thing has hampered NASAs Moon and Mars programs where options are pursued and cancelled constantly. SLS is not the first plan for a Moon return NASA has worked on for years it's just the first one that managed to spread the pork around enough to avoid cancellation.
Some people don't like nuclear power plants and somehow that's more important to them than national/energy security.
UK (and France) already have the bomb; going renewable here rather than nuclear has nothing to do with proliferation. I don't see how (for the UK) it's anything except people's feelings are hurt by nuclear power plants.
For the rest of Europe maybe it's about proliferation. And maybe economies of scale make tagging along cheaper than local nuclear for Britain.
The UK is currently developing 12GW of nuclear power plants, and it is not exactly going great.
Hinkley Point C was originally quoted for £16 billion in 2012, which rose to £20.3 billion when construction started in 2017. It has been under construction for 6 years, they are 3 years behind schedule, and the cost is up to £32.7 billion.
Sizewell C is allowed to start construction and was scheduled to do so in 2021, but they haven't been able to finance it. Moorside was cancelled because Toshiba pulled out of the project, and Hitachi pulled out of the Wylfa B and Moorside plants leading to them getting shelved.
Not to mention that they are very controversial from an economic perspective. Hinkley Point C has a strike price of £92.5/MWh, while recent offshore wind projects have a strike price of £39.65/MWh.
In practice this means the consumer will end up paying to turn off wind turbine in order to run nuclear. It just doesn't make economic sense.
A haphazard continent-wide transition from Russian gas, and all we get is nuclear prices for power? So to get it straight, you are proposing that we always should have an energy crisis in Europe?
Your chart shows residential prices for the total us average ~$140/MWh, not $250/MWh.
Plus, this is the total cost including transmission and distribution, which is roughly half the retail cost. Generation costs average less than $70/MWh, including expensive peaking power in the average.
You want to compare the £150/MWh to generation costs of the alternatives in the UK, which are a fraction of £150.
On- and off-shore wind plus storage is going to be a lot cheaper than nuclear, as well this massive transmission line. Hell, at £150/MWh, I bet that solar+storage is cheaper in the dreary parts of the UK.
Maybe Rolls Royce will figure out cheap SMR nuclear, but that won't deploy until late 2030s, I would guess, if it does work.
We are fortunate to have good carbon free alternatives to nuclear, after decades of hard work by renewable technologists. It's real tech.
The UK has been valiantly trying to build new nuclear, but it's hard to find anybody that can do it, and it's unbelievably expensive if it even does get built.
I think that there was a narrow window in time where labor costs were low enough for nuclear to make sense, but in more advanced economies, highly labor intensive energy sources, as required by nuclear construction, are no longer viable. Advanced manufacturing capabilities have eclipsed construction technology.
On the money. Nuclear is too expensive and fragile, especially in this political environment. Also much more susceptible to sabotage in the event of a war, which is becoming a more relevant reality.
> It always seems odd to me that countries are willing to go across international boundaries for such a vital part of the economy.
Versus going across international borders for most other aspects of their economy? if the UK stopped international trade it would completely collapse anyway.
I fully agree with nuclear fusion power plants, but there is so much free solar power that is currently being “wasted”.
Nuclear fusion reactors are many decades away and hopefully that’s when our global power problems will be (hopefully) solved :-)
I wouldn't say the lesson was expensive for France, we've enjoyed cheap energy for decades due to this buildup.
The conclusion of this study isn't that France made a costly mistake, it is that it is extremely delusional to forecast ever-increasing efficiency gains when deploying a new technology.
I wouldn't be surprised if the very same lesson was learned by countries planning to go full-renewable.
That's an often repeated falsehood. While there are costs shouldered by the public [1][2], they are similar to what any industry gets. In the following, I compare 2013 costs with the 400TWh produced in 2013:
* Research costs, which are partly funded by private companies and partly funded by the state. These projects currently don't focus on the current infrastructure but on potential new projects. Same as any domain, before a new industry can exist, there's research to be done. With about 784M€ [2] in 2013, that's just under 2€ per MWh. Spending was always within that order of magnitude ever since 1957.
* The surveilance authority is publicly funded, just like any regulatory body. In 2013, it cost about 217M€ [2] which is about 0.5€ per MWh.
So, as you can see, the money spent by the state on nuclear energy in 2013 barely registers compared to the power produced by nuclear plants the same year.
EDF is essentially the state nuclear energy, which has been talks of being renationalized.
> A price cap on energy for French consumers hit EDF profits hard but so did the enforced closure of many of its of nuclear power stations for repairs.
> The losses are the third biggest in French corporate history and the worst for more than 20 years.
Dude, you're talking about taxes, I tell you what ends up on my tax bill.
Now you're telling me that EDF is essentially the state. Sure, but that's pretty much like my own company is essentially me. There are still two separate bank accounts, and clear rules and proper accounting about what goes from one account to the other. That's why I can tell precisely what is on my tax bill and what is on my utilities bill.
My point was that the "EDF is subsidized, a large part of your energy bill is paid by your tax bill" claim is wrong.
Now if you want my opinion about our current (and past) government and how they mismanage EDF and ruin the legacy they received, I can go on for hours. That's unrelated to nuclear, though.
This planned link is very long distance, but UK is still part of a European power grid: it's normal for power lines to cross national (or State) borders.
Impossible in capitalism or with modern politics, but I planning for failure makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't mind having a power grid support 2x capacity.
Same for food, medicine, and general-purpose manufacturing (e.g. machine shops), for that matter.
We might end up seeing peaker plants. We might see companies taking advantage of the price difference to cheaply run energy-intensive industry like aluminium smelting. We might see companies trying to take advantage of the price difference by building storage batteries. We might even end up incentivizing consumers to shift their usage patterns by providing cheaper electricity during low-demand periods.
- "Most controversially, the two other sites mentioned by Bouaida — Mahbes and Lemsid — are in the neighboring disputed territory of Western Sahara, which Morocco has claimed as its own for almost half a century, in defiance of the UN, which does not recognize the claim and lists Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory."
Absolute madness to lead the article with lessons learned from Russian energy dependence, and segue into "let's put our eggs into this civil war basket-case". Never mind the moral arguments of investing in power plants on illegally annexed territory with no sovereign government. As a practical matter: what happens when conflicts break out again, and the keys to your high-value industrial economy are in some third-world warzone?
I just visited Morocco. And I asked the tour driver about Western Sahara being a different country. He immediately said it is not a different country but Morocco.
Morocco ended up in the web of French and Spanish Colonialism. It lost some land during independence, some of which ended up in formerly French Algeria after the French left up. Western Sahara was one of those territories where the King of Morocco had 350k people march into the land and tell the colonialists of the Sahara whose land it really was.
It is just bonkers that the UN does not recognize Western Sahara that Morocco has exercised sovereignty over for so long as part of Morocco. It just feeds into the idea that the UN is nothing more than a central conglomerated vasal of colonialist rule.
It’s insane how these articles somehow conjure up some kind of nonsensical bad for environment arguments. Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment. It reduces the ground temperatures and lets more plants and animals survive. It might also slow down further desertification.
I see where you're coming from, and I agree that the arguments highlighted in the article are rather unconvincing, but messing up with ecosystems ALWAYS triggers unintended consequences. Some might be good, others terrible.
I wouldn't be as definitive about the "good" in it as you make it sound.
It’s a bandaid solution for the UK to maintain growth sans environmental consequences.
Maybe that’s okay if North Africans own the means of production and transmission giving them the ability to turn those consequences into opportunities elsewhere.
Insulation cut my mother's home energy costs by 60% this winter. And her home wasn't as poorly insulated as UK homes seems to be according to what I read (and in general, it was a bit above the average French home).
Granted, heating is around 15% of the total equivalent Co2 we use, but reducing that by 60% would prevent 8 to 9% of produced energy to be used. Also would cut costs for a lot of the poorest.
If insulating UK cost around the same price (or even more, because the windfall will be in UK taxpayer pockets), I think it should be done first.
UK home owner here. House is sticks and bricks, built 1920ish but heavily modernised. Insulated to modern building regs, including extra steels and structure to account for snow loading on the roof. When it snows here (very infrequent) our house is the only one that it sticks to. Also acoustically insulated between floors. Ground floor (first floor elsewhere) - we hung safety barrier netting between the joists and ran 125mm of loft insulation between the joists to insulate from below but still allows some air movement and avoid condensation.
Underfloor heating ... electrical underfloor heating - across the entire house. Now our theory was that if we got our 'leccy from renewables, we were pretty "green". We do have gas but that is only used for cooking (hobs only - not the oven) and hot water.
When say our kitchen floor decides to switch on, that's 4KW. Each room has its own circuit and we switch off the unused ones. After a power cut the blasted things revert to defaults and switch themselves back on, I have to cut them off at the consumer unit to be sure. I am three years into experimenting with Zwave zone controllers but they cost a fair bit and I need to be absolutely sure about safety before I deploy all 10 zones. I'll probably install a separate cut off switch per zone with a few temperature probes as well as the controllers with their own sensors but that is a while off for now. Home Assistant with Node-Red runs this lot and more. Safe power control does need some care ...
Electricity here is roughly three times more expensive and rising than it was before a bunch of homicidal Russians decided to fuck up their neighbours. My bills are quite heavy and it doesn't help that I run quite a lot of IT stuff here! I'm very lucky that I can afford all this but not everyone can.
I don't think that UK housing, in general, is any worse than the rest of Europe with respect to insulation. I lived in West Germany for some time back in the day and I studied Civil Engineering so I think I have a fair handle on the issues involved. We have just as many horrors in our housing stock as everyone else.
Interesting, I'm in a house of a similar age/construction but not very well insulated apart from the loft. Have you written up any more information at all; costs too? Assuming you have a cavity wall, did you insulate that?
I'm a bit wary about filling the external wall with polystyrene balls or whatever. I need to determine whether there are enough brick ties installed and that they are working. Brick ties are basically bits of heavy wire that should be laid in the mortar that hold the two rows of bricks together.
The idea of filling the cavities of a fairly old brick built building with some form of insulation is sound but does need care. In the UK (and elsewhere too) we generally go for "sticks and bricks" construction. The external "box" is often a double skin of brickwork. My house is roughly six meters by 12 meters (20' x 40') in plan. Each storey is about 2.5m high - that's why you see wood in 2.4m lengths (allow for bits above and below).
So let's look at the structural components: Take a wall 12m long x 5m high. The wall is constructed of two skins of brickwork. Brickwork is very good in compression but not so good in response to a lateral force. If wind is allowed to whistle inside our brickwork it will basically raise the pressure inside the gap between the two skins of brick. If you pump something into the gap that will also exert a lateral force. To stop your walls collapsing outwards, you should have brick ties installed and they should be in reasonable condition and the mortar should be gripping them effectively.
You can go for external or internal insulation instead. External means cladding of some sort and internal means you will lose some internal floor space.
The biggest gain of all is insulating the loft - heat rises. You should aim for a good 250mm of "wooley" or equivalent.
In general I'd suggest looking for draughts and plugging them. Do be careful that ventilation is still maintained.
Yes, insulate as well. But a person living in a single glazed warehouse conversion with no insulation but next to a tube stop and a food shop will use quite a bit less energy overall than a person who lives in a passive house but has to drive 10miles to work. Restoring walkable town centres and discouraging car use in towns and cities that worked fine before cars would save more energy and would be quicker and less disruptive than trying to insulate every old victorian house. Insulating old houses is technically hard to do right and different houses need different solutions. If it’s done badly it will cause health problems from black mould and structural problems from condensation causing timber joists and rafters to rot where they pass through the insulation into the masonry walls.
Sure I agree liveable city neighbourhoods are also a good goal, one the UK gets right a lot of the time (certainly more so than the US for example).
Re bad insulation, don’t do that then, a gov scheme with regulated contractors could ensure that but it is much better to use less energy heating old leaky homes.
To be fair, all industry is "messing with ecosystems", and in particular the energy industry is doing so with far more per-kWh impact, and globally. This is very much like the "birds vs. windmills" arguments. Yes, it's important to recognize externalities to any decision and have a plan for mitigation where needed. But at this scale, "look-here-is-a-problem" tunnel vision just creates paralysis.
I disagree, because I think the scale is relative to the size and complexity of the ecosystem you're touching, not the size of your influence. They're unpredictable and unexpected, and that's why we tend to refer to them as unknown unknowns.
But like you said, they're not necessarily catastrophic or cataclysmic.
Back to the context, I just don't think someone can say for sure that changing the very nature of a thousand square miles piece of land in the middle of some of the least studied terrain types will be great and won't have any bad consequences.
I didn't say that the scale wasn't relative to the size or complexity. I'm saying that any amount of change in an ecosystem isn't necessarily "bad".
Contextually, I can see why you're a skeptic of this amount of land changing having an undeniable "good" influence, but the size could absolutely not be a factor at all.
I'll use your words but change the last part to illustrate better what I'm saying: "I just don't think someone can say for sure that changing the very nature of a thousand square miles piece of land in the middle of some of the least studied terrain types will be good because...It sounds right and I'll choose that answer even though I don't actually know."
Also saying "changing the very nature of" is quite dramatic.
This is valid, but have to use some sort of heuristic or things will continue to get worse as we struggle to assign probabilities to the manifold possibilities.
It ignores the fact that climate change is disproportionally going to affect Africa and that doing nothing does not mean the status quo remains for nomadic tribes.
It means more desertification, less grazing area and greater poverty.
Sources please. AFIK there is no conclusive data out there backing the idea Africa will just turn into MORE desert from climate change.
I'd also like you to provide data showing green energy initiatives will reverse this trend anytime in the near future.
Africa is an already impoverished nation, how does greater grazing area help them? Are they going to use it for large amounts of livestock they can sell/slaughter? Is that making them less impoverished right now?
What will make Africa less poor is a lot of infrastructure, likely built off the back of fossil fuels. You know.. they same way all western nations industrialized and got to the point they could sit around worrying about whether they were hurting the environment instead of worrying about whether they have enough dung to burn so they can keep warm.
I have no idea what you're on about. Africa isn't an impoverished nation, nor is it a wealthy nation.
The nations in Africa have a GDP per capita ranging from about $1k (way less than Haiti and Afghanistan) to nearly $40k (similar to Croatia and Greece)
The IPCC fact sheet on Africa [1] confirms the core point of the GP: Africa has been and will continue to be disproportionately affected by climate change.
The African _continent_ would be best served by every possible acceleration of green energy initiatives that would hold climate change below 2 degrees (an increasingly unlikely goal).
There has been continuous hypocrisy in the West over climate change. But burning fossil fuels to do ??? development would pull Africa deeper into the trap it's already in; a trap of wealthy country's making.
> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment.
This is categorically false. Solar panels actually increase the ambient temperature in the area [0]. Directly under a panel will be cooler, but those areas are 1. Heavily disturbed, with most the native plants an animals destroyed on installation and 2. Small compared to the total affected area.
Solar fields take up a large amount of space and installing a new one involves damaging a lot of native landscape.
Despite the drawbacks I think that solar is usually quite a bit better on net than the energy it's replacing, but we should still be clear about the costs and drawbacks.
In this case the ecosystem in question has even less in the way of native plants and animals (to my understanding) than the semi-arid American Southwest landscapes usually examined in research papers on the topic. But yes the general point holds that a cost-benefit analysis is worthwhile, though here it likely is quite net-good.
I happen to spend a lot of time in desert areas that have seen a lot of solar development in recent years and the places I am familiar with are anything but desolate; generally they are teeming with native flora and fauna. Unfortunately solar development has been harmful to these regions.
That said, developing solar has significant benefits to other regions. Mining and burning more coal or other legacy power source does even greater damage to different areas so I get it, solar isn't something we should block reflexively. But there are still costs and tradeoffs to consider, and plenty of room to improve as we transition off of fossil fuels.
It’s different, but hard to say if it’s better or worse globally. Dust from the Sahara plays a major role in cloud formation and transporting nutrients to the Amazon basin.
I doubt it would be significant for the Amazon in the short term, but it could mean less frequent but larger tropical storms in the mid Atlantic which then pound the east coast. Perhaps it’s a net good globally and just bad for America and the Caribbean, I don’t actually know.
However, these plans don’t actually involve that much land so the net effect is probably minimal compared to the gain from reducing natural gas useage.
Hasn't North Africa only been a desert for a few thousand years? It's not exactly some perfectly balanced ecosystem that has existed for a million years or something. Really, it turning to a desert was an ecosystem collapse... Second, Africa is HUGE. The amount of land they would be using for this must be minuscule compared to the area of this ecosystem. Third, not all ecosystems are equal.. The biodiversity of some areas is so much higher than others, it's not comparable. An acre of rain forest must be worth more than an acre of desert.
Just because an area has gone through climate change in the past is not an argument that current climate change, which is happening at an accelerated rate, is acceptable. It is that rate of change that makes our current risk so high.
Having said that, I agree that the impact of putting solar panels in this are is likely much less and more local than the impact of burning the fossil fuels that they solar would offset.
My point is that this one in particular is pretty new, and was previously completely different (wet and green). I doubt there has even been enough time for much balance to have been achieved. Also some quick googling claims that the amazon rain forest has existed for millions of years (between 10-55 MILLION years), seems pretty well established to me...
Wrong again; you would also notice that it's completely different 8 million years ago.
It's not difficult to distinguish between a population that migrated one hundred years ago and the source population it was drawn from. 8 million years is... longer than that.
No, it's called a continuous ecosystem because it remains very similar. Selective pressure would be very similar, unlike the rare case of certain populations changing significantly when facing a very different situation.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pine tree from 100,000 years ago to one today, let alone 100. Or a rabbit, snake, bee, fish, or bird.
> You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pine tree from 100,000 years ago to one today
Perhaps. Certainly if you put me in front of the two trees I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. But that's a different question than whether I can tell the difference. If you put me in front of a pine and a fir I couldn't tell you which was which, but it wouldn't be at all difficult to tell the difference.
It might also be relevant that the last time I had any significant contact with any conifer was quite a few years ago.
> it's called a continuous ecosystem because it remains very similar. Selective pressure would be very similar
This is a myth. Specifically, it's the myth of the "living fossil". It's a popular concept, but not a scientific one.
The majority of people can't tell the difference between a coral snake and a king snake. That's not evidence that coral snakes are similar to king snakes.
> unlike the rare case of certain populations changing significantly when facing a very different situation
Not relevant. It also isn't difficult to tell the difference between two populations that were divided by a barrier 100 years ago. Things drift.
> Perhaps. Certainly if you put me in front of the two trees I wouldn't be able to tell you which was which. But that's a different question than whether I can tell the difference. If you put me in front of a pine and a fir I couldn't tell you which was which, but it wouldn't be at all difficult to tell the difference.
No, I mean you couldn't tell the difference, other than it being a different tree. If you had a bunch of trees from 100,000 years ago and a bunch from today, you would not be able to sort them.
> It might also be relevant that the last time I had any significant contact with any conifer was quite a few years ago.
Pick almost any life form. Grass, bird, fish, snake.
> This is a myth. Specifically, it's the myth of the "living fossil". It's a popular concept, but not a scientific one.
It's not that myth at all, and has nothing to do with it.
> Not relevant. It also isn't difficult to tell the difference between two populations that were divided by a barrier 100 years ago. Things drift.
The point is that there was no barrier. Most things don't drift very fast at all. Most species in an old ecosystem could have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.
There are species that have existed for millions of years, you do accept that at least?
> Most things don't drift very fast at all. Most species in an old ecosystem could have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.
No, that is the myth of the living fossil. It baffles me how you can deny this. What you are describing is an ecosystem composed entirely of living fossils. Living fossils don't exist.
It is not in fact possible for a species to have evolved more than a million years ago and had little change since then.
> I mean you couldn't tell the difference, other than it being a different tree. If you had a bunch of trees from 100,000 years ago and a bunch from today, you would not be able to sort them.
This might or might not be true, but it's pretty likely. If you give me a year to do the job, though, I'll be able to sort them.
> Putting solar panels in the desert is good for the environment
Instead of altering unique grassland and desert ecosystems, and displacing nomadic tribes, the better option for 'the environment' and its peoples would be to build nuclear power plants.
You're not wrong, and I'm as pro-nuclear as it gets (would love to see moonshot-scale projects to fully nuclearize as much of the globe as possible), but... we can have both.
If large scale solar deployments in the sunniest, most hostile parts of the planet are available sooner than our nuclear dreams could come true, then I say hurrah.
It seems like you missed the point of my comment, and maybe didn’t read the article very closely. Whether one leans towards conservation of culture and ecology or not, it’s fair to say that reducing land use is important for said conservation. Even if you don’t hold such concerns, that doesn’t change the validity of the argument.
nuclearize the moon! Tether it with a giant space cable, made of sustainable materials of course. then watch all the pro mooninite folks come out of the woodwork and defend the hunting grounds of the moon master and his inalienable(pun intended) rights to all things moon.
Desertification destroys formerly fertile ecosystems. People die. The few extra-adapted species and the few people that remain are not an argument for protecting deserts.
> Deserts and nomadism are romantic in literature and movies only
The inhabitants of the land defend their way of life, which is more an existential concern for their culture, not so much romanticism. From TFA:
> Salime says “8,000 villagers lost their access to collective pastures,” as well as sources of water, firewood, and traditional herbal medicines. There was “widespread disappointment” at the community benefits from the project, concluded Boris Schinke at Germanwatch, a Bonn-based nonprofit watchdog on environment and development issues.
> One is near Chbika, a small coastal resort close to the city of Tan-Tan, where the submarine cables from the U.K. will reach land. This is not empty desert. The area is inhabited by Regeibat and Tekna nomads who traditionally range across wide areas of the Sahara seeking pastures for their sheep and camels.
> Atman Aoui, president of the Moroccan Association for Mediation, an NGO, sees large renewable projects such as the Noor solar park as part of a wider attempt to take control of desert regions that have previously been the domain of tribal groups.
As for deserts, they aren't all lifeless places. They have ecosystems and endemic species of there own. Once again, from TFA:
> Tunisia is developing two schemes – the TuNur and Elmed projects — that aim to send power to Malta and Italy from solar complexes near the oasis town of Rjim Maatoug in southwest Tunisia. The area to be annexed is rich in salt-tolerant desert shrubs such as traganum and ephedra and is close to the largest salt pan in the Sahara, the Chott el Jerid.
Of course, whether you (or anyone else in particular) cares or not is a matter of subjectivity. But from a conservation stand-point (ecologically and culturally) these don't seem like good outcomes.
> The inhabitants of the land defend their way of life
There always are people who defend their existing way of life, regardless of anything. Even slavers defended their way of life. There being people sticking to their nomadic way of life of scarcity and hardship in the desert does not justify having millions of people regularly die on the other end of the desertification caused by that desert.
> millions of people regularly die on the other end of the desertification caused by that desert
This is speculation, not argument. Regardless, also in the article you’ll find how solar farms are cordoned off areas, razed clear of vegetation, and impassable by anyone, while using up water reserves used by inhabitants. Even by some consequentialist end-justify-the-means argument, the ends don’t look good for the people living off that land. Once again, you might not care about that, but that’s not my point
edit: I know that this is some political compass meme, but i know way too many real-life people who are into green everything, but are afraid of nuclear.
It's a little unfair categorization of why people are averse to nuclear energy. It really doesn't help that both government controlled and commercial operations have traded-off costs for safety leading to high-profile incidents. Nuclear energy has robust and passive fail-safes, like MSR designs, but it has a branding issue, and that's thanks to misincentives for cost-cutting on critical systems. New nuclear has to provide better assurances to the public, and how it does that, I'm not so sure.
Nuclear power plants are great, but you need to maintain an energy mix that doesn't make you dependent on a single source.
Consider the French nuclear infrastructure; by Sept 22, 32 of 56 reactors were off for maintenance or technical problems. Several reactors were affected by a welding issue that created cracks and made them inoperable.
There's also the small matter of fuel. France sources most of its uranium from Niger. You can bet nobody is getting French standards of pay, healthcare, holiday, or pensions in those mines.
This argument applies to pretty much all sources of energy. Resources needed to build solar panels also don't come from France. And good luck to build those without relying on fossil fuel.
Regarding nuclear, the next generation of power plants could operate with uranium-238 which is very abundant.
Changing the natural state of the desert environment is good for the environment? the desert is full of plants and animals that are adapted to it already.
By definition, energy = transformation of the environment. The more energy we use, the more we transform our environment. Which most like isn't good for the environment, and eventually for us since we depend on this environment too.
One of the pictures in the article shows one of those giant mirror arrays. They have one in the Eastern CA desert near Vegas. They reflect all the energy in a big circle into a single point, which when you look at it is at like, a near-sun-level of brilliance, where it (presumably) boils lots of water to run turbines or whatever.
Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.
> Perhaps they're going to use those instead of all the rare earth complexity that is photovoltaics.
Photovoltaics (aka Solar panels) do not use a lot of rare earth materials.
From one of the links below:
> Unlike the wind power and EV sectors, the solar PV industry isn’t reliant on rare earth materials. Instead, solar cells use a range of minor metals including silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium.
15 years ago it looked like solar thermal might be the way to go. But it turns out that, once people started manufacturing a lot of solar PV panels, they got really good at it. Solar PV costs dropped 90% in a decade.
At this point, in most cases, it would probably be foolish to build a non-PV solar power plant.
There are similar plans to power Singapore with Australian solar. And Norway is exporting hydro to Europe via underseas cables. And the UK and Norway are planning to exchange wind and hydro both ways. Connections by cable are a game changer. Easy to understand and proven technology.
It's an often overlooked factor in renewable energy. Yes intermittency seasonality is a thing. But it's a local effect that you can compensate for by connecting to other intermittent sources of energy. They won't all fail at the same time on average. And if you interconnect enough different sources, the system as a whole gets more predictable and resilient. It's not all going to fail at the same time everywhere.
It's not even seasonality - it's just weather. It's extremely rare to find a place that gets no wind and no sun and has nowhere within say 1000km that doesn't have a different weather pattern.
Mountains and water bodies are things that affect weather, and generally population centers are separated by them.
Unfortunately not true, at least for wind energy in europe. It tends to fall (or blow) all over europe at the same time.
And, even worse, the wind tends to stop blowing in winter when it is extremely cold (highest demand days) and there is virtually no solar. It's becoming a serious problem in Northern Europe.
you can't go by averages, lulls happen generally during winter, and freezing for 2 weeks means there is little consolation to know that the month still had an above average production.
> Which is why you have geographic redundancy into other weather patterns.
Exactly...and one of them is Morocco. The UK is already connected to France for nuclear power, Norway for hydro, it makes sense to connect to Africa for sun power.
According to NYTimes [1] Die Zeit [2] and Financial Times, a rogue billionaire with a yacht and a team of 6 people can blow up natural gas pipelines that were hardened under concrete.
So how on Earth do you expect to secure such a massive length of cable?
There’s a 0% chance the Nordstream pipelines were disabled by a few scuba divers in a sailboat.
I sail a 45’ boat. It would not be in any way possible to deploy 500kg of explosives over 100s of kilometers to a depth of 80m from my boat, even if I was given ample time to retrofit with specialized equipment to support the operation. And this fable claims they merely chartered a vessel!
Exactly. I was being sarcastic. Yet this is what passes as intelligence these days. After Sy Hersh's exposé on what happened to those pipelines [1], they had to come up with an alternative theory and that's the best they could do. This wouldn't pass the second reading of a B-movie plot.
My point was that undersea cables and undersea pipes are now a "fair game" and in the future we will see these kinds of infrastructures suffer all kinds of incidents. It's lunacy to go forward in today's geopolitical climate with massive projects that have an attack surface that's thousand miles long.
They do need more capacity to/from EU, but it's not a bad idea to add extra path diversity to increase reliability of the system. A direct undersea HVDC cable is going to have far less conversion losses than converting to AC, going through Spain, and then another HVDC conversion to hop over to the UK... Even more so given most of the current and proposed cables are via France.
So if an adversary can cut off 8% of your energy just by blowing up the pipeline at any of its more vulnerable spots, what prevents them? Should we call this the Full Employment for the Royal Navy Act?
Depleted? Why this negative outlook? Germany filled all storage last winter, and are still at ~70%. The next winter will be easier as we adapt to the new reality.
If Germany can reduce its gas usage, it will certainly help the situation. I hear that BASF is exploring moves of operations to locations with better access to cheaper gas such as China. Some energy use could switch to coal and other sources. I do not have enough visibility to predict actual outcomes.
Ah yes, the Europeans stealing the African's photons. I wont say much as there are already so many comments. This proposed cable and the solar farms that would drive it are not going to be owned by the British government. They are not some extractive colonial endeavour. The African governments should tax the generation, re-invest the tax revenue, and build-out their local infrastructure. I'm aware of the resource curse. As I think Bob Geldof said once "the only thing Africa really needs is a better class of African leader".
I wonder when are we starting to lay cables across longitude so you get solar power when it's night time. Thinking this out loud now - lower night time loads get covered by wind and other renewables.
Overall I like this project. It's a win-win for both the UK and Morocco.
The only problem is the security of the cable. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the blowup of the Nordstream pipelines, you can't take this security for granted. I think it would make more sense to ship liquefied hydrogen rather than send the electricity via cables.
Singapore is building a similar project, a large solar array in Australia connected by undersea cable[0].
I think it makes a lot more sense for a city state like Singapore, with very limited space to build their own power infrastructure.
But for a country like the UK, just the energy security risk alone seems dangerous, especially after what we have seen with the Russian gas pipelines.
These cables can easily be attacked, any country with a semi-competent navy could probably pull it off covertly, which would make attribution difficult.
Although I guess the US could have been a little more covert about their efforts[1].
Assuming the economic projections are accurate, the amount of good the energy would do, not least of which from the reduced CO2 emissions and reduced poverty, absolutely dwarfs the environmental damage caused by the placement of solar panels in the relatively small area of sparsely populated desert ecosystems that would be required.
This absurdly short-sighted environmental obstructionism reminds me of how it ended up being the Green parties, and environmental groups like Greenpeace, that were the biggest impediment to the expansion of nuclear power - which is far and away the most promising substitute for fossil fuels - over the last four decades, and consequently and farcically, it was the environmental movement that ended up becoming perhaps the single biggest contributor to CO2 emissions since 1970.
The goal is to provide 10% of the country's energy, so I don't think it's that risky.
In the vast majority of cases, win/win deals create stability because neither party has any interest in the deal stopping.
If you think Russia is a counter-example, consider that Europe chose to ignore every single red flag and every American intelligence report for about a decade.
The (strong?) electromagnetic fields from these cables must have some impact on marine systems, and I bet we don't well understand what that impact will be.
Years or decades later we may trace some significant change in marine systems back to this source, and then we may decide that the cost was much greater than the benefit. We have a habit of making decisions for short term gain and intentionally downplaying the potential risks...
Even short term, I wouldn't be surprised if Portugal felt the impact within one decade, as they are very dependent on fishing along their coast.
The dumb part is running the cable 2300mi from Morocco to UK. It would make a lot more sense to run the cable across Straits of Gibraltar. Could even run it to territory of UK. And then spend the rest of the money improving transmission lines across Europe. Power and money are fungible.
Or use the money to run multiple lines to Europe. Solar in Sahara for Europe makes a lot of sense. The article mentions a couple of projects.
It would probably actually be a good idea to do both (since the UK also has some other proposed HVDC links to Europe). That creates redundancy, having different paths, as well as opening the generation up to a wider market.
It's actually not a bad idea to run a long HVDC through the ocean - they're very low-loss and it's frankly easier than running transmission over land given all the property rights etc. you need.
On land there are huge issues with people not wanting power lines in their backyard. It has stopped a lot of German new green energy projects. If you take the ocean route, there is no more NIMBYsm, and especially not across 2 different countries.
They are going to have to accept new power lines. Improved grid is big part of green energy.
For example, solar in Spain going to cities and north will be important. Same with wind from UK at night. The advantage of connecting Morocco to Spain and Spain to UK is get lots more flexibility and efficiency in distributing power.
>Noor spreads across some 12 square miles of desert and requires more than 2,000 acre-feet of scarce desert water each year.
That's the smaller existing project, where is all the water for this project going to come from? You put a big batch of mirrors and or solar panels in the desert, you have to clean them periodically.
I would never have thought an undersea cable from the UK to North Africa to be realistic as the voltage is limited, meaning one needs to use more copper for the same efficiency. But since the price tag is already out, I am eager to see how this plays out.
Perhaps instead of energy storage, we will see an intercontinental electric grid.
The fact that the UK is resorting to this instead of massively ramping up tidal power is crazy. We're one of the most tidally active areas of the world, and yet we only get 2% of our power from tidal, with seemingly no appetite to increase it.
Dumb question: Why can't we do this with reactors and repurposed oil rigs out in the middle of the ocean? If it sinks or melts down yeah that sucks, but water is exceptionally good at shielding radiation so just chuck it over a trench and call it a day?
Dumb answer: salt water is very very corrosive. You don't want to build something expensive and relatively toxic for the environment in the middle of salt water. And then there's the problem of nasty weather which is quite frequent in the middle of the sea.
> The cost of the proposed 10,500-megawatt Xlinks project is expected to be $22 billion, half for the solar and wind energy farms and half for the cables.
I thought the UK had too much wind energy as is, why would they be importing more?
It is all about correlation between sources. The wind power where it connects to is more weakly correlated to UK's existing wind compared to for example Danish.
Leaving aside the bizarre arguments in the article, it blows my mind that we are doing this but onshore wind has been dumped on for a decade and there's no subsidy for rooftop solar.
The UK is rather far north, and an infamously cloudy place. For comparison, London has a bit over half the average sunlight as Rabat (the capital of Morocco, the country mentioned in the article).
The UK is quite northerly. It is at about the same latitude as Alberta, Canada. Morocco and the Western Sahara are at the same latitude as Florida.
In the UK you have a yearly irradiation of about 1000 kWh / m2. In Morocco it is closer to 2450 kWh / m2. This means that the same panels produce over twice as much power. Once you are planning utility-scale solar, it becomes a bit of a no-brainer.
Besides, the vast majority of solar is already located in large arrays due to economies of scale. 50.000 local arrays isn't even an option for utilities. And even if you were to build 50.000 local arrays, each of those arrays would have to be 210 kW - that's close to 600 panels per array!
> if you were to build 50.000 local arrays, each of those arrays would have to be 210 kW - that's close to 600 panels per array
Why is that a problem?
I also don't see why just because your power output is half, why it is a "no brainer" to boost the voltage way up, run 2,300 miles of underwater cable, reduce the voltage again and then distribute it to the exact same places the local arrays would put it.
Am I being crazy thinking depending on 8% of your electricity with cables that can be damaged by sabotage and are from a politically useable region is not very wise?
Photovoltaic cells generally last for about 30 years, so about $10/person/year. The tradeoff is that the alternative is fossil fuels that release gigatons of CO2 every year.
Jeez I suppose it makes sense from a "one world" perspective but as soon as you start thinking about continents, the "optics" are terrible... plundering Africa yet again for European gain!
This is really sad for an university publication got written by freelance journalist with clearly biased views on issues beyond his shallow understanding
According to the article, it is 2300 miles long, that is approximately 3700km. Losses for HVDC power lines are in the low single digit percent per 1000km.
