["HVDC transmission between UK and France in 1986"]

Please can you send me some papers,articles and CD’s on avalaible
Please help me, Please help me.

Thank you very much
With Best Reqards
Thanks

My ordinary mail is:

Ali N. Hamoodi
P.O.Box 11144
University post office
Mosul
Iraq

George et al,

Apologies for going “off reservation”!

As to Iceland, there is no reason for any external investment to increase energy costs there at all. In my mind, I assume that foreign (ie UK) investors make the capital and infrastructural investment and link the output directly to the interconnector. It would not even have to be “plumbed into” the Icelandic grid. There would have to be some sort of annual ground rent for the site, an annual O&M contract for the facilities to be run by Icelandic nationals, and an amortised decomissioning fund set up. I assume the Icelanders would also want to be paid something for their energy, possibly through some sort of tax……. though how much that would be would have to be determined by project economics…
Nigel

[Claverton-Group] Interconnector – intercontinental? Norway UK / UK Iceland link?
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:38:38 +0000

Dear all, as Dave will tell you I am notoriously scrupulous about sticking to the point…

A very quick aside. A ‘bad bank’ is political suicide for any party, since it is then the government foreclosing on mortgages etc. and there is a financially liquid majority asking probing questions about why individuals who took risks are then getting parachuted. If it happens, make preparations to emigrate, although goodness only knows where to. Methinks HMG are trying to find ways around this at present. Oh, and a fair amount of my savings are (or should I say were?) invested in RBS…

I suggest I get in touch with some people in Iceland and find out how they would go about the generating side – say http://www.res.is/is – but can I assume that this wouldn’t push up energy costs in Iceland since it would effectively be a one-way link from otherwise stranded assets?

Regards, George

Subject: RE: RyeE: [Claverton-Group] Interconnector – intercontinental? Norway UK / UK Iceland link?

I have frequently commented that the only country in the world that does more than pay lip-service to free-market capitalism is the UK. Even here, through necessity, that is now changing as the government seeks to nationalise banks, bail-out the car industry, encourage the money lenders to lend and the “consumer” (since that is what we “people” are now known as) to consume more… all in the pursuit of the endless growth paradigm that relies on ever increasing consumption of a limited resource base. I am far from the only person to think the country would have been far better off putting those hundreds of billions of bail-out pounds into creating nationalised industries building wind turbines, power interconnectors, domestic solar thermal applications, etc, etc. I would like to see a state-funded investment in the use of phase change technology to capture waste heat from power stations and deliver it it offices, schools, hsopitals and homes. I would like lots of things, but do not think many, if any, of them are likely to happen.A Council of Wise Men and Women would likely do a better job of central planning than a bunch of elected politicians, but no doubt performance standard benchmarking and Key Performance Indicator requirements would likely get in the way of the job at hand. After all, the Council would have to be accountable to someone and that would be the public, THROUGH ITS DEMOCRACTICALLY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES! In any case, as we have seen here at Claverton, it is hard to get a bunch a (very) wise men and women to agree on almost anything and that is largely, in my opinion, because we are largely pushing our own agendas, opinions, businesses, etc. Because we are “wise”, we all think our own solutions are the ebst solutions – as a largely non-partisan spectator it’s enough to make me want to scream. If we can’t agree a specific agenda amongst ourselves, what chance of convincing the government, the general public, etc. I understand entirely where you are coming from, Dave, in your advocacy of a crash programme for investment in sustainable and renewable technologies and the surrounding infrastructure, and for what it’s worth I agree in principle with the idea. However the devil is in the details: 1. Where are we going to get the £35 billion a year without (further) bankrupting the economy and driving sterling to ever lower values, thereby inhiniting our ability to source the natural resources needed to build the infrastructure?2. What, exactly, are we going to do with that money? As I said, there is not even agreement on that at Claverton….. As an aside, has anyone considered why the car industry (800,000 direct jobs) gets £2.3 billion in bailouts, whereas the financial services industry gets more than 100 times that but does not support 80 million jobs? It’s about the multiplier effect. The government needs to support the banks for two reasons. Firstly, by re-capitalising them it hopes to re-inject liquidity in the credit markets. Secondly, bankers earn more than carworkers and therefore have a greater amount of disposable income to spend thus sustaining the economy. However, the banks have not come clean on the extent of the losses in their loan portfolio and the government has not even begun to do enough due diligence before throwing hundreds of millions at them. I think that the majority of these institutions are de facto bankrupt, so why not just nationalise the lot of them, wipe out the shareholders, sweep all the loans into one “bad bank”, and issue new shares in the banks owned by the public. That way the public bares the longer term risk of the credit book, but gains from the upside of owning the nationalised banking industry which can start afresh with a healthy balance sheet. The banks could then finance the sort of projects we are talking about. The problem is who supervises the banks to stop them simply going back to the same idiotic excess that got us into the mess in the first place? A Council of Wise Men & Women… whoops, back to square one!

Subject: RyeE: [Claverton-Group] Interconnector – intercontinental? Norway UK / UK Iceland link?
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:19:31 +0700

Wise words Nigel, but doesn’t that point up the stupidity of relying on markets to finance a long term energy infrastructure?

Surely it is the case that this is definitely one area in which a council of wise mean (see Interlock Research – http://www.claverton-energy.com/energy-experts-online/interlock-research )
– largely technical people with a few economists thrown in, should in some way come up with a long term strategic plan – for implementation over the next 30 years – in that context we can ignore all the gyrations of the capital markets, which as we now know are largely driven by irrational mood swings in traders hormones levels feeding into their perceptions (testosterone on the up, and cortisol on the down – See BBC Evan Davis’ look at markets and traders on BBC2 yesterday).

What we need to do is to swap 30 or even 60 years of reduced import bills (my estimate ?35 Billion per year 60 years x ?35 billion buys you a lot of cables, insulation and wind turbines) for investment now in technology – and it definitely returns cash.

This is how we funded WW2 – 60 year loans from the USA which we only paid back a few years back – life wasn’t that bad after the war after all.

We didn’t have any cash at all back then – but we funded the defeat of Nazism – it’s a much smaller deal to fund some assets which actually have a positive return, than $ the $7 trillion spent on non productive assets in world war 2.

If you don’t want to do it by manipulating the money system – printing money – then the alternative is for us all to starve in the cold and dark – or to force the now hopefully unemployed bankers – at gunpoint if necessary ( particularly those who have been paying themselves massive bonuses for gambling and losing our money) , to take their shirts off and built the wind turbines or cables themselves.

Dave

On Behalf Of Nigel WakefieldSent: 29 January 2009 22:57T
Re: [Claverton-Group] Interconnector – intercontinental? Norway UK / UK Iceland link?

Please do not take my “costings” as gospel, as they are hopelessly out of date. The NorNed link between Norway and Holland is a more recent build and likely a better indicator of cost.

As to the cost of interconnection versus the cost of new nuclear, you are right that the interconnector would be cheaper. However, we would also have to factor in the capital necessary to develop the energy resources in Iceland, whether that be geothermal, hydro or wind. The hydro and wind resources are substantial, but have limits in their utility. Wind, as we know is intermittent, and therefore could not offer optimal usage of the cable. The same is true of hydro which would only offer output in the summer when the snow and ice melts….

>From a hydro storage point of view, Iceland does not offer a great deal as far as I am aware. I think most of the potential is run of river. Alan Drake at The Oil Drum is pretty clued up on this, perhaps we should ask him for some detail….

An Iceland / UK interconnector economic case would look best with baseload geothermal power. I did some cursory research on this a few months back, enough to establish that there are at least a couple of GW of relatively easily tapped resource, with a total available of some 6 GW or more. Easy, that is, from an engineering point of view, rather than an environmental one. Having said that, I suspect Iceland would be happy to take whatever investment it can get given its current economic state. From that point of view, now would be a great time to strike a deal, while they are relatively desperate…. unfortunately we are also relatively desperate here in the UK and the capital required is not insignificant.
The situation is ironic but entirely logical. The global recession has crushed commodity prices particularly in base metals and energy. Now would be a great time to lock in project economics by securing the (commodity) components necessary for such infrastructure works. However, the capital (and, dare I say it, debt) required to fund such projects is simply not available from the “financial” sector. Oil companies certainly have the necessary capital but are, in my opinion, more likely to spend it on M&A to secure oil and gas reserves while prices are relatively cheap. Energy utilities also havae the financial wherewithal to finance such schemes, but seem to be more focused on “clean coal” or new nuclear.

Lastly, experience shows that the lead times for such projects is rarely less than 2 or 3 years, and there is not sufficient liquidity in the various markets (power, copper, etc) to enact the various financial hedges required to secure the necessary funding. In any case, such funding would be probably be looked upon as “securitisation” which must be one of the dirtiest words in the financial lexicon at the moment. Securitisation does of course come in many shapes and sizes, but sadly has now become synonymous with sub-prime mortgage packages. Everything is tarred with the same brush, and hence, to mix my metaphors, the baby will likely get chucked out with the bathwater.

Subject: RE: [Claverton-Group] Interconnector – intercontinental? Norway UK / UK Iceland link?
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:11:38 +0000

Dave – I thought pretty much the same on size until I looked into it, Mercator projections can really mess with perception! In long-term theory, why not both? CGIUK links and a Barents link would provide 24 time zone connection around the northern hemisphere…

Nigel – thanks. An Iceland link would be advantageous since they have a potentially massive surplus that is effectively stranded, meaning that export should not affect their domestic situation? There is some talk of a subsea HVDC link from the Peterhead area south to Northumberland, so Dounreay may be possible?

Overall we’d be looking at costs of perhaps £500million to £1billion for perhaps 1GW-2GW input – considerably less than a nuke?

Regards, George