Introducing EcoTrack
Project monitoring is often haphazard and time-consuming. Furthermore, results from monitoring do not always lead to improvement and learning. Now EcoTrack makes project results transparent and easy to use.
EcoTrack is a new monitoring system for sustainable energy and household energy projects. It is highly reliable, networked, and results-based. Eco, a private company based in the UK, has developed EcoTrack to systematize the monitoring process, provide timely data, and enhance reporting to funders and other project stakeholders. EcoTrack allows users to track the progress of activities, outputs, outcomes and objectives against performance indicators. It therefore improves the quality of both monitoring and management.
"UK Energy Risks – Uncertain but not Unimaginable" – Global Energy Advisory
On the 23rd of February it was reported that one of the large six utility companies in the UK lost £172.5mn, in just three months, by trading a gas position. This loss could have been against a background of relatively low gas price volatility; presumably this “increase in wholesale cost” will now be passed on to end consumers? Who trades and who pays? Who invests and who pays?
The new Energy & Climate Change Committee is today taking oral evidence from the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Rt Hon Edward Miliband MP, in the House of Commons in London. The independent Global Energy Advisory White Paper entitled: Investment Failure, Fails Customers, was circulated to the Committee earlier this week.
The paper discusses the potential risks to UK energy security which are well known within the Industry. It also asks pertinent questions regarding the costs and consequences of the energy investment/trading decisions being taken at the current time.
This discussion will be continued at the Global Energy/Advisory Super Derivatives Seminar in London on March 5th – see below for full details.
Read MoreLittle known (or conveniently forgotten) reason for 1926 miners strike recalled – Dr Fred Starr
If no one has anything better, here is a slightly incomplete table for coal production. This has been compiled from various sources over the past few years.
Peak was 1913 when we were exporting 100 million tons at a price of around £1 per ton. This might be equivalent to £50 per ton today (or higher?).
UK coal exports began to get uncompetitive after WWI, and was one of the main reasons for the 1926 General Strike, when the coal owners wanted to reduce wages.
Coal output was insufficient in WWII (and afterwards) and was one reason for sending one in every ten
conscripted men down the mines
UK coal reserves are now given as somewhere between 400-800 million tonnes. Not the billions that everyone supposes.
If the UK energy system was totally dependent on coal, as it used to be, these would last 2-4 years.
Read More"would it be practical to store syngas as a method of allowing IGCC-CCS plants to respond to the overnight fall in demand?" Fred Starr responds
Claverton Hydrogen Storage on IGCC Sites
Dear Neil
You asked if it would be practical to store syngas as a method of allowing IGCC-CCS plants to respond to the overnight fall in demand
The prospects of the on-site storage of syngas, to enable an IGCC to vary its output seem limited. The gas that would have to be stored would have to be hydrogen. Otherwise, the processes by which the carbon in the syngas is removed would have continuously vary their throughput. Only the gasifier and air separation unit ( for supply of oxygen) would run at a constant output
Unfortunately, a very large amount of gas is produced when gasifying
Read More(IGCC) Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle for Carbon Capture & Storage
Abstract
This paper endeavours to give an objective account of the background to gasification based processes for power generation with carbon capture. Such processes are a development of IGCC plant designs in which coal or heavy fuel oil is first gasified and to produce a fuel gas for a CCGT unit. Although the IGCC concept does lend itself, very well, to high levels of carbon capture, and could lead the way to the hydrogen economy, it does create some important technical challenges. In particular, it restricts the type of gasifier that can be used to the high temperature entrained flow type. Furthermore, because the fuel gas that is produced in an IGCC consists of over 90% hydrogen, this will reduce the efficiency of the plant. Given that the hydrogen economy is some decades away, a more reasonable gasification-type option would be to produce natural gas from coal. This substitute natural gas could be used as a fuel gas in standard gas turbines (with no efficiency penalty) and can be used to supplement the UK and EU fast declining reserves of natural gas. The main drawback is that only about half as much carbon would be captured as in the IGCC “clean coal” systems currently being envisaged.
Read MoreChris Hodrien's CCS / Carbon Capture and Storage prediction comes true in US
Chis Hodrien told us all at the October Claverton conference at Wessex Water Bath. that gasification-CCS was poised to become reality! It is interesting that the States are all legislating in favour of gasification IGCC (having recognised its many advantages for new-build), the very opposite of the British Gov’ts post-combustion CCS bias. They also recognise […]
Read MoreMechanical power station master clocks.
Power stations used to have two of these pendulum master clocks (one duty, one standby). A series of mercury switches were used to send 30 second interval pulses to various measurement and control equipment. For example typically there would be two rooms (duty / standby) filled with various meters and the pules instructed the meters […]
Read MoreNew Study Puts The Generation Costs For Power From New Nuclear Plants Triple Current U.S. Electricity Rates
A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates.
see: http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants/ rel=no follow
Current CSP costs (still substantially less than nuclear):
Vinod Khosla gives current CSP at 16 cents kWh (and note PV far higher at 22.4 cents kW/hr – see slide 124 onwards at http://www.slideshare.net/guest76ed37/khosla92507 rel=no follow
Also, good summary of costs can be found here: puts current CSP at 13 – 17 cents kWh: http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/04/concentrating-on-important-things-solar.html/ rel=no follow
Makes CSP look very attractive indeed at 11 cents per kWh by 2011 (cf Ausra & Bright Source CSP plants signed up with PG&E in South West America) – compatible with gas prices, and estimated to reduce to 4-6 cents per kWhr by 2020. Nuclear costs unlikely to reduce, but instead are on an upward trajectory.
Nuclear energy can only make small impact by 2050 according to New Scientist report
Reporting on a communique from the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, published on 16 October New Scientist reports that nuclear power output could be quadrupled by 2050 rising to 1400 gigawatts from present 370 GW and supply roughly 12.5% of total world power use. This high projection assumes that renewables and CCS don’t […]
Read MoreBlackouts could hit Britain by 2015, says National Grid chief
Reported in The Daily Telegraph by Jon Swaine 22 Dec 2008, Steve Holliday, National Grid chief executive, said that Britain faces a severe shortage in power generation due to crumbling coal and nuclear plants being taken out of service and that the Government needs to cause the investment of Pounds 100 billion in new power plant.
This is the legacy of the deluded economic “thinking” of the Thatcher era which instituted the not widely admired market for electricity which was supposed to use market signals of supply and demand to cause an optimal delivery of the cheapest sources of power.
Read More