Germany needs a bailout

@brickster69

I wouldn't put anything past the current rabble on office.

@fly_agaric

The UK is in this strange position of having lots of LNG import capacity but ever since Rough closed basically nowhere to store it. Apparently the undersea pipelines are exporting at full pelt.

Rough is supposed to be open the winter, if it does or not is another matter. Currently they have leased storage in Holland for the winter and exporting loads to Europe at the moment.

Only problem i can see is if Norway totally stopped supply for some reason, but by doing that the two Norwegian gas fields would have to shut down because the pipeline from them only goes to the UK. Norway has ample supply of gas but the pipelines they have don't have a lot more capacity to do a whole lot more immediately. At the moment a lot of it is being sent to the UK and then they are shipping it elsewhere through it's system for them.

If the Eu started playing games and tried to force Norway to stop selling gas to the UK which they can't then no doubt Ireland would probably veto it for obvious reasons.

Inflation and general lack of confidence starting to hit retailers as sales drop by the biggest margin in 42 years.

Invest in a few million hamsters running 24 hours on those spinning wheels and a few cables running off them. Saying that Russia is probably the biggest exporter of hamsters so they have probably been sanctioned by now.

I have a stanley superstar range all ran off turf heats radiator has oven and hot plate for cooking. Great job

Electric prices hit a new all time high in Germany in the middle of Summer. Up 1000% on the last decades average price.

I don't believe Eirgrid, ESBN, SSE, BGE or the CRU actually measure this. Which is why it's highly disengenuous where we have seen loud cheers in the past about how X% of our electricity was generated entirely from renewables on a given day, completely ignoring the fact that this didn't mean we had the same X% of our dispatchable gas load powered off.

Most of our plants are combined cycle because typically they've been used as baseload plants, always on and always run at relatively high levels of load.

The other type of plant is a plain old open cycle, the gas is used to drive the turbine which then drives the generator. The gas turbine exhaust vents straight into the open atmosphere. However over half of the energy in the gas consumed is lost as heat blown straight out the chimney so typically only 30-40% of the energy in the gas ends up as usable electricity.

Combined cycle plants recover some of the heat from this exhaust to generate steam which then drives a steam turbine to generate additional power thus further increasing the overall efficiency. Typically 60-70% of the gas used is converted into electricity.

The problem we face with renewables is they're "lumpy" - in wind's case, it could be eerily calm now ahead of a storm force wind arriving in a few hours time but then grid demand drops quite significantly overnight causing a massive excess of energy on the grid. Even when it is windy, the wind is rarely steady, particularly in storms when it tends to be extremely gusty and the amount and intensity of wind varies widely from second to second. Similarly, with solar, the output of panels can vary significantly if the sun is constantly being covered and uncovered by passing cloud cover.

Eirgrid have to try and align the ability of wind to very suddenly generate huge quantities of electricity to demand, by trying to manipulate existing power plants that were designed to be always on.

If you turn a combined cycle power plant on and off frequently throughout the day, it operates at low efficiency until the steam side has warmed up and has started generating electricity and maximising output. Then when you turn it off, you rapidly lose steam pressure so the steam side stops generating but a significant amount of heat still remains within the boilers that ends up cooling naturally, thus wasting more energy. Worst of all, the steam side was never designed to be frequently heated and cooled so by doing that you also put them under a significant amount of stress which starts to cause longer term reliability and efficiency issues.

While an open cycle is much more geared towards being able to be turned on and off rapidly and frequently, the efficiency is much lower overall.

Both types of gas plants also have to be ramped up, you can't spin it up to speed and then dump full output on it immediately, you have to allow it spin up and gradually place electrical load on. Thus you're burning gas for several minutes before it is fully loaded and similarly when you go to take it offline, you can't just press OFF, you have to deramp it and then shut it down meaning further losses.

It cant be that bad. Our Politicians are on holidays. Cant be an emergency situation.

How often does a tanker deliver gas to Ireland?

Can gas be stored in tankers in short term?

Gas Is delivered via the Moffat pipelines that are connected to the UK grid and then on to north county dublin and into our grid.

We don’t get tankers of gas as we have no LNG terminal.

We have no CNG tanks (compressed natural gas) either.

Thank you for the comprehensive reply. It does look like an interesting area of research. I'm surprised there isn't a "gas equivalent" calculation done. Obviously if you generate say X amount of energy from wind it won't replace X amount from from gas due to the intermittent nature of wind and inefficiencies of powering up and down gas generators. There will be some percentage loss which I would expect would increase as the proportion of energy from renewables increases. The problem is without such a calculation, arguments get both heated and a hand-wavy.

I'm not sure we'd be seeing any great consumer benefits this winter as a result of renewables. Of course there's the environmental factor, but I'm focusing on the consumer for now.

Whether our production through renewables was 10% or 100%, that electricity would be priced at (or above!!) international market rates, not necessarily at the cost of generation. If the price of energy in Europe goes sky-high, wouldn't the same happen to the price here?

Look at Corib gas. We didn't suddenly get cheap gas bills just because the gas was extracted off our coast. The price we paid was based on international market prices regardless.

I don't think we'll have blackouts this year. I could be wrong, but I think it's more likely we'll see demand-shaping through pricing. I.e. high prices regardless of where/how the electricity is being generated. Even if we were on 100% renewables, I think it'd be the same end result for the consumer. I'm open to correction on that though.

They should follow the example of the thrifty Swabian Housewife.