By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
I have shown this graph before. It is an estimation of half hourly demand for natural gas for heating, as compared with total electricity demand, and was included in a report by the Parliamentary Advisory Group on Carbon Capture and Storage in 2016.
I was wondering what it would look like during the recent spell of cold weather. The chart below is from the National Grid, and gives daily data in million cubic meters:
http://mip-prod-web.azurewebsites.net/PrevailingView
It would deem that demand for gas actually spiked much higher than the Imperial College reconstruction showed, which itself was based on the cold winters in 2010. Moreover, the NG daily figures would themselves underestimate peak half hourly demand.
This poses enough problems for gas supply, but could cripple the electricity system, if domestic heating and other users of gas were to be electrified. We could easily be looking at a situation where demand for electricity could peak at ten times the current peak.
The Parliamentary Advisory Group’s Report concluded:
They were, in a polite way, basically saying that electrification of heat on any large scale was a non starter. Given what we have learnt in the last few weeks, the message is even starker. If the country had been relying solely on electricity this winter, the grid would probably have melted, figuratively if not literally!
Oxburgh’s Report went on to recommend a large scale switchover to hydrogen networks, if decarbonisation targets were to be achieved:
I have looked at this “solution” before, and as we know it would be a horrifyingly expensive system, both to set up in the first place and to run.
But steam reforming does not even solve the problem of CO2, as Oxburgh goes on to acknowledge:
Although small amounts of CO2 might be usable, the default position is that it would still all have to be piped away for storage.
It seems we are no nearer solving the problem of how we heat our homes and at the same time meet decarbonisation targets.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 21, 2018 at 02:57PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 