Fred Starr's edited nuclear letter
From Energy-Experts
Wind power and renewables can perfectly well meet the UK's baseload and Peak demand for power. Malcolm Grimston and his seven colleagues (Letters,Guardian Jan 7th 2008) are misleading about the operation of Electricity grids and power stations when they claim that it can't by raising the (in this case) spurious issue of base load: "For base load power - the irreducible minimum electricity use, which runs to more than 20,000MW in the UK - intermittent sources of power, including most of the renewables, are ineffective." They then go on to imply that, accordingly, base load power must and can only come from continuously running (i.e. base load) stations such as coal or nuclear. Serious study suggests that both their premise and conclusions are incorrect. During inevitable low wind periods - i.e. week long ANTI_ cyclones, the National Grid would do what it did this Christmas when half the nuclear power stations in this country were out of action - and still are, -they would simply start up existing coal or gas stations (already built and paid for or their necessary future replacements), which are held in readiness for this very purpose to back up nuclear or other large power station loss.
Other techniques, all used already to a greater or lesser extent in this country and around the world, routinely deal with the sudden loss of power stations, or with TV programme load surges (FA Cups, Royal Weddings etc). The lights do not go out. Standard every day methods used by National Grid include: automatic shedding of non urgent loads (steel works, cold stores), energy storage (immersion heaters and night store heaters), use of tariffs and smart meters to influence consumer consumption patterns, ripple control of customers loads by the utility, inter-country and inter-continental connection of power grids. There is also the ability to call up of vast numbers of small diesel generators, already owned for private local emergency use (hospital, water works and cold stores. All of these all these methods can be developed to deal with the fluctuations in power which are a feature of electricity from the wind or solar power sources generation.
But it should be remembered that whereas owing to the progress of the weather, the change in wind or solar output is gradual. This is in contrast to the nuclear power. The largest potential cause of sudden power loss in Great Britain would result from one unit of Sizewell B nuclear power station, going off-line, resulting in a step change of 1.3 GW, compared to a maximum demand of 60 GW. In the summertime this could lead to drop of about 7% in the power coming onto the systems, possibly leading to widespread blackouts.
Although wind power in the short and medium term will require coal gas generation to help meet the demand when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, it is not generally realised that nuclear power plants also require the availability of fossil fuel power generation. This is because most types of nuclear plant find it very difficult to start up and shut down, so as to meet the variation in the day to night demand for electricity. Hence all nuclear plants run at virtually maximum output day and night, and rely on some other source of power to meet the peak daytime and even loads.
In the UK because of the shortage of hydro (water power) capacity this power has got to come from coal and gas stations. Whereas, given enough wind power (around 150GW) it would be possible to dispense with fossil fuel power plants, nuclear locks us into a situation in which we have to continue to rely on gas and coal fired plants. In addition because these types of plants would only be operating for a few hours a day, it would be virtually impossible to capture the CO2 from such systems.
But some cynics would also pose the question, as to whether the UK Government has an ulterior motive in maintaining its nuclear capacity. Could this have anything to do with the proposed continuation of Trident and Britain’s wish to retain some semblance of having its own independent deterrent
