Is shale gas a good thing?

[eighthobstruction]

Just bumping this up the bored ....for those Northerners who needed to be in bed early to get to pit early morning....

....Of course his Lordship might have been refering to all the pub carparks that are now empty due to closures....

[jean]

Even if he'd been right about large and uninhabited and desolate areas in the North East, he's failed to notice that most of the shale gas is in the North West.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Unfortunately Mike Fallon (http://www.thegwpf.org/energy-minist...s-exploration/) has said otherwise, so Rupert and Jocasta will just have to stay in while they frack their lovely countryside. Perhaps they can use their time to learn the use of the apostrophe. And god's country can rest in peace and quiet.

[eighthobstruction]

Did you see this.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23475584

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Or this:

http://www.thegwpf.org/uk-government-subsidise-coal-power-plants-wind-farms/

elsewhere the EU says we can subsidise nukes, so before long we'll be subsidizing everything.

[Stanfordian]

When insurers put up our annual property insurance premiums owing to damage or potential damage caused by fracking, and they will, who will be paying for the extra cost. It won’t be the local councillors, pro-fracking experts or MPs will it, it will be the ordinary householder or business holder.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Taxation is about pooling resources and helping one another, often through subudies.

I've just returned from a few days in the North East (County Durham) and can vouch for the complete inaccuracy of his lordship's silly comments about the countryside. Many parts pf the county are quite stunning.

But I ask leave to repeat myself by suggesting that all nuclear waste should be buried in London, all London buildings should be topped with a wind turbine and fracking should be confined to the south-east.

[teamsaint]

headline on BBC Radio 5Live this morning.

CEO of Fracking company says "Fracking is safe".


I didn't make this up,it was the BBC news top headline.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Taxation at least aims to be progressive. If everyone is subsidising everything in energy supply (balmy, but seems to be where we're going) it is regressive. Paul can afford his windmill/solar panels, Peter can't.

The present EMR implies a spend of £110b on new generation and transmission plant by 2020 to cut our emissions by 20 %. That's £655/per household per annum, and has nothing to do with actual generation of any energy, which will on top of this. This is bound to cause significant energy poverty in the UK. PWC has modelled a switch to gas that would save the same in emissions and cut the bill by £70b (there'd be no significant new transmission costs for a start) but this is not being adopted.

I'm sure the insurance companies will be delighted to add fracking damage to our insurance. It's a safer bet than any other risk - money for old rope. And it'll be a lot less than £655/per annum.

[ahinton]

Taxation at least aims to be progressive. If everyone is subsidising everything in energy supply (balmy, but seems to be where we're going) it is regressive. Paul can afford his windmill/solar panels, Peter can't.

The present EMR implies a spend of £110b on new generation and transmission plant by 2020 to cut our emissions by 20 %. That's £655/per household per annum, and has nothing to do with actual generation of any energy, which will on top of this. This is bound to cause significant energy poverty in the UK. PWC has modelled a switch to gas that would save the same in emissions and cut the bill by £70b (there'd be no significant new transmission costs for a start) but this is not being adopted.

I'm sure the insurance companies will be delighted to add fracking damage to our insurance. It's a safer bet than any other risk - money for old rope. And it'll be a lot less than £655/per annum.

You've put forward your Peter and Paul argument before but, even if there is truth in it in the way that you are seeking to persuade us, are you suggesting that there should be means-testing for subsidies so that Paul who is able to afford to fund his own installations can't get any whereas Peter who is not can get all the subsidy that's available? Who pays for the administration that's always the bugbear of any means-testing? Peter, after all, would be far less able than Paul to fund his energy bills and so could be argued to be in greater need of subsidy than Paul for that reason alone.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

You claim not to understand that solar and windmills are regressive subsidies. Perhaps this Forbes article will persuade you:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonjohnson/2011/03/31/are-solar-power-incentives-a-nasty-regressive-tax-on-the-poormisinformed/

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jan/13/green-deal

(from the latter: "Two years ago, I warned that the feed-in tariff, a tax on energy bills which pays for people to produce their own low-carbon electricity, would be deeply regressive. To install solar electricity, for example, you would need your own roof plus £10,000 or more in cash. If you were lucky enough to possess both these assets, you would be making, at other people's expense, one of the most lucrative of all possible investments. It would give you a state-guaranteed return of 5-8%, fixed for 25 years, which was both index-linked (making a nominal return of 7-10%) and tax free.") His calculation's wrong, but then this is the Guardian)

Otherwise, you're doing nearly as good a job as Barrett in putting an argument into someone else's mouth and then attempting to destroy it.

For what it's worth, on subsidies in the ESI. The present subsidies have done much to destabilise the market. An example of this is that EdF is arguing for a nuclear baseload price of £150/MWh, comparable with subsidised wind. In days of yore, nuclear used to chug along 24/7/365 at £20/MWh. As a comparison, the typical UK electricity spot market price is around £50/MWh (5p/kWh). Coal is perhaps to have a subsidy to start/stop in order to load follow wind, but this is a role they used to have (together with pumped storage) covered by simple market arangements (reserve and response). New plant is not being built partly because each investor seeks clarity of the future subsidy regime. Given that other EU countries are scrapping subsidies because they can't afford them (Greece, Spain, Portugal) I'd hope that eventually the UK might also scrap all energy subsidies as well/

[zoomy]

Depends what you mean by, is it a good thing. It is not very labour intensive so may have limited impact on jobs,it will not lower energy prices because of the way the european energy market is constructed against the consumer and in the interest of the producers - Which means that it will mean massive profits for rhese companies when the whole thing really gets moving. So invest now !

[Dave2002]

Or this:

http://www.thegwpf.org/uk-government-subsidise-coal-power-plants-wind-farms/

elsewhere the EU says we can subsidise nukes, so before long we'll be subsidizing everything.

Is it not the case that coal fired power stations are not as easy to turn on quickly as gas powered ones? Surely it'd be better to use gas power stations for rapid top up over base load - or have I got this wrong?

Indeed, although I am broadly speaking against the wanton waste of fossil fuels, if they must be used, and it seems they must in many situations, then isn't gas always the better option than coal - unless of course you are a politician and see coal as a cheap and plentiful and available resource. I have noted before that generating electricity from gas is more efficient than doing the same from coal, and it doesn't seem to me that the response time of the turbines is a significant adverse factor for the use of gas over coal.

[Dave2002]

re msg 146

Yes, many "green" subsidies are regressive, at least in the medium term. Doing the calculations for PV FiTs does indeed suggest a significant shift of wealth towards the better off over a period of 10-15 years. OTOH, in the short term, home owners installing PV systems with a high rate of FiT will still have had a significant outlay, with a break even point somewhere around 10 years. Interestingly, the capital costs have reduced significantly now that the FiT rates have come down.

There are also problems with "green" industries. Solar water heating is feasible in the UK, at least in the south of England, and can reduce the use of gas or other fossil fuels significantly. However, with typical installations costing £5000 or more, the payback period is again rather large compared with simply burning the gas to provide heating when wanted - even in the winter. One suspects that the installers and system manufacturers are getting the lion's share of the benefits.

Disregarding the capital costs though, I have a few friends who have solar heating. One family say that their total gas bill during the summer this year has been under £5 - I'm not sure what they use for cooking - but showers and baths and washing up water are included in that figure. Another friend has a solar heated swimming pool which he has had for many years, and I think he must also have some part of his system doing hot water. He told me that years ago the gas company wanted to investigate him as his bills were very low. I got the impression that they were not over pleased at his very low consumption, for which they might have been able to charge.

A ludicrous feature of modern life is also that much equipment (e.g washing machines, washing up machines) is designed to only work on cold water fill, so even if a cheap supply of hot water is available, the equipment still has to take a feed from cold water mains.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Is it not the case that coal fired power stations are not as easy to turn on quickly as gas powered ones? Surely it'd be better to use gas power stations for rapid top up over base load - or have I got this wrong?

Indeed, although I am broadly speaking against the wanton waste of fossil fuels, if they must be used, and it seems they must in many situations, then isn't gas always the better option than coal - unless of course you are a politician and see coal as a cheap and plentiful and available resource. I have noted before that generating electricity from gas is more efficient than doing the same from coal, and it doesn't seem to me that the response time of the turbines is a significant adverse factor for the use of gas over coal.

#148 I've little experience of CCGTs. (I assume that's what we're talking about).

There are two ways of varying generation load: totally switching the generator off or on (as is common in two-shifting) or part loading and varying the output to peg the grid frequency close to 50 %. For the latter you can even use old PWR plants - it's what the French are doing with their PWR fleet and it's why their load factor has dropped to 70 %. You can do it with coal and gas stations. In the case of coal stations the only impact is reduced generation efficiency and thus increased emissions. In the case of CCGTs the load swinging again drops efficiency but the GT also suffers both a reduced time between maintenance and a decreased plant life. Two shifting has been done for years on coal plants; it decreases efficiency even further. I'm not aware of it being done to CCGTs. The CCGTs operators try to sell their production such that whatever load following they have to do is kept to a minimum. They avoid setting low values of droop on governors so as to minimise load following.

Yes CCGTs are getting to be very efficient. The pity is that extensive research in the late 80s on burning coal in fluidised beds what chopped short by our dash for gas. There was every indication that efficiencies above 50 % might have been possible.