Really?

Last night the thunderstorms hit out here in our little patch of the wider west. Here in northwestern Europe (and most other places on the planet apart from permanent deserts) this is par for the course. We get a warm spell for a couple of weeks, and as the humidity builds, it culminates in thunderstorms. This is perfectly natural and predictable and nothing to get concerned about. Unless you forgot to get the delicate items in.

We had our portable gazebo and other items of garden furniture in store, like my hammock, two days ago. Our farming neighbours have already done their hay cuts and stacked their big circular bales in hay barns ready for Winter. Our own meadows won’t be cut until the next warm spell in July as part of our rush control regimen. I’ve already managed to reduce the rushes on our land by almost half, and intend to keep up with our organic only approach, if only because I’m too cheap to buy commercial weed killer.

Highly entertained by the news of it being too hot for solar panels during the recent UK warm spell. This whole rush toward ‘renewables’ has wasted so much taxpayer dollar it’s been painful to watch. I’ve long said that solar and wind are a waste of time and money, because outside of a given set of operating conditions, they become not ‘renewables’ but ‘unreliables’. A far better choice would be SMR‘s for baseload and covering the intermittent demand with LNG powered turbines. Maybe pipe sewage directly into massive digesters and harvest the biogas at the sewage plant for later re-use would add another string to the Energy bow. Add in a 100% scalability factor (Build 200% capacity with planning for additional expansion) and we’d be golden.

By way of illustration, in my youth, I worked on several power station sites as they were refitted from coal to LNG. These outdated sites had and still have all the infrastructure to fit said sites with a Small Modular Reactor, like one of those which power Nuclear Submarines and ships. One of these would provide solid baseload for a large urban area, instead of an ugly forest of wind turbines, like we have in Sligo and Galway, or thousands of hectares of solar panels, blighting huge areas of natural beauty and destroying wildlife and habitat. Without the solid reliability of nuclear or LNG generated power.

Here’s my sums; a small modular reactor (SMR) rated at 300MW can run at high efficiency, putting out about 300MW on a 25 acre site. Once there’s a small barrier of mixed deciduous and conifer trees planted around it, you’d never know it was there. Same for a fracking site, only with a less than 5 acre footprint. And trees.

By contrast, a 160.5 metre plus tall 3MW rated wind turbine runs at a maximum 23% of rated capacity in ideal circumstances on just under 78 acres / 31.36 Hectare per turbine. So that’s 690KW (occasionally) off an area big enough to build 900MW capacity of predictable SMR baseload. And with Nuclear, LNG or biogas, you get to plant trees around the site. Something you can’t do around wind turbines and big solar arrays. Refuel every ten years. Reprocess waste. Less pollution. Fuel bills lowered, capacity expanded. Job done.

Feel free to correct me in the comments if I am not close. I like my version. And the extra trees it would bring. Never mind the CO2.

Now how come so many ‘experts’ can’t do simple stuff like that? Our Victorian forebears used to over-engineer and allow for extra capacity, why can’t we?