[Scottish Scientist]

Using these results, I have written a web-page script on-line calculator -

Wind, storage and back-up system designer (my Scottish Scientist Wordpress blog post for documentation and discussion)

Wind, storage and back-up system designer (the actual calculator web-page which has to be hosted separately because it uses javascript which Wordpress, the blog host, don't allow).

Now renamed as the “Wind, solar, storage and back-up system designer” to mark solar’s debut.
http://scottish.scienceontheweb.net/Wind%20power%20storage%20back-up%20calculator.htm
I’ve re-programed my (formerly wind-only) grid systems designer to include solar power and I’ve added a few other useful features too.
If readers have any questions, problems etc arising with the new version then please reply to this comment.

[alancalverd]

Looking forward to reading your latest, SS. I think there is some psychic connection: I haven't thought much about energy storage since your last posting 18 months ago but it all came to mind this week during a trip to Bute and hearing about a hydrogen fuel-cell bus trial. Eminently practicable without flooding the Highlands. More anon!

[Scottish Scientist]

BBC: Lightning strike 'partly to blame' for power cut
A lightning strike and the sudden loss of two large electricity generators caused nearly a million people to lose power in England and Wales earlier this month, an interim report has found.

The National Grid outage affected homes, businesses and transport, and while power was restored quite quickly, disruption continued into the next day.

Regulator Ofgem has opened an investigation into National Grid and other companies involved.

National Grid: Interim Report into the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection (LFDD) following Generator Trips and Frequency Excursion on 9 Aug 2019

The National Grid’s interim report includes a high-resolution frequency vs time graph, part of which I have extracted and annotated.



The National Grid was in breach of its licence obligations (to keep grid frequency above 49.5 Hz) within 5 seconds of the first events which precipitated this power cut crisis.

This proves that the National Grid has totally inadequate automated frequency response services.

The Times did their own version of this graph.

Nice. 

Remedial Action
Operationally, the National Grid should contract for generators (while not actually generating at full load or at all) to run in spinning reserve for frequency response service and to add “inertia” or rotational kinetic energy to the synchronous generators system which is drained by any supply-demand power deficit, moderating the rate of frequency slowing.

The National Grid should contract for a margin of excess demand-side response capacity too.

Those cheap and cheerful measures could be done very quickly and would keep the lights on securely while considering the best investment decisions to suit the transition to renewable energy, most likely supplementing the UK’s 2.9GW of pumped storage hydroelectricity short term operating and fast reserve with fast-response electrical energy storage, be that from super-capacitors / ultra-capacitors and / or batteries to supply a short burst of fast-reserve power of no more than about 2.9GW – to sustain the supply power and maintain frequency while the UK’s pumped storage hydroelectric schemes are reaching full power output from their highest state of readiness, ideally spinning reserve.

Battery vs Ultracapacitor


The National Grid reports it has 472MW of batteries already so investing in another 2.4GW of super-capacitors should complement the UK’s 2.9GW of pumped storage hydroelectricity nicely to create a high specification renewable energy reserve power supply that could power up instantly and last for hours if necessary, even in the event of a power shortage crisis that was twice as bad as the one just suffered.

Here are some reference links which explain the two quite distinct concepts of –

(1) spinning reserve power, the capacity of a spinning generator held in reserve to increase its power generation massively on command which does not require any change in the rate at which the generator spins,
Wikipedia – Operating Reserve
Energy Storage Association – Spinning Reserve

(2) the inertial response of synchronous generators, a property of rotational kinetic energy changes which is associated with grid power imbalances that is intrinsic to the changes in the rotation rate of those generators with grid frequency
Wikipedia – Inertial Response
Inertia in Electricity Systems

Many generator types can offer either or both of those useful functions to protect against power stations trips which threaten frequency drops and power cuts.

Whilst both coal and nuclear power stations excel at providing inertia (when they are generating at constant load) they are not the quickest and best at increasing their power output on command from spinning reserve.

So in terms of spinning reserve, we can expect excellent performance from certain hydroelectric turbines such as those at Dinorwig, which when synchronised and spinning-in-air offer an emergency load pick-up rate from standby of 0MW to 1,320 MW in 12 seconds – impressive!

However it seems on the day of this power cut, the National Grid shamefully neglected to contract and to deploy Dinorwig instantly in an automated frequency response role.

The National Grid has not admitted to that crime of omission explicitly but only in so many terms, admitted to having only 1,000MW of automated reserve power back up, 472MW of which was batteries.

We can also deduce the same from the Gridwatch data –

Date stamps – GMT – frequency – pumped
8/9/2019 15:55:37 – 48.889 Hz — 293 MW
8/9/2019 16:05:35 – 50.1819 Hz — 958 MW

– which shows that the UK’s pumped storage hydroelectricity generation was 293MW at the time of the power cut and did not ramp up to 958MW until about 10 minutes after the power cut – 10 minutes too late to avert the power cut!

The UK’s about 20GW total of Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) both contribute a lot of inertia to the grid – in proportion to those CCGTs which are actually online and in synchronous rotation – and the UK’s CCGTs also are capable of outstanding performance as spinning reserve, due to their ability to ramp up power quickly from partial load to full load. This is always true for the CCGT’s gas turbines but is not always the case for the CCGT’s steam turbines especially not when the CCGT is operating in stand-by at zero or very low load when there would not typically be enough heat nor steam pressure to quickly ramp up the steam turbine’s power output.

One more word on the decommissioning of coal-fired power stations. It would be possible in theory to re-purpose the turbine units of those decommissioned coal-fired power stations so as to keep their useful inertia for the grid without burning any coal or boiling up any steam. This could be done by starting the turbines and spinning them up to synchronous rotation using electrical power.

Regrettably, the UK’s reckless rush to demolish coal-fired power stations has never considered the potential advantages to maintaining grid resilience which could be had by suitable re-purposing of these power station plants. The accountants who know little about power generation have simply rushed in to strip assets so as to sell off the land and placed our electricity power supply in great danger.

To serve our electricity needs on dark windless nights in the middle of winter at least expense, we ought to convert coal-fired power stations to burn bio-mass fuel as has been wisely done at Drax in England, but was recklessly not done at Longannet in Scotland which is now being demolished, which will require in future new-build biomass power stations in Scotland.

It would be just to seek compensation for the public purse from those who ordered and allowed Longannet levelled to the ground – an unforgivable and gratuitous act of industrial vandalism. 

In the context of the transition to renewable energy, please note -

• that the power-cut which the UK suffered recently was not because of the intermittent nature of wind power, nor because of the transition to renewable energy, so this power cut should not be conflated and confused with the issue of storage requirements for transition to 100% renewable energy, which is a different issue and a different requirement to the energy storage requirements of coping with such power station trips
• that the energy storage capacity requirement for managing the grid’s future intermittent renewable generation will be larger than batteries can provide for at an affordable cost,
• that pumped storage hydroelectricity is a better, most cost-effective technology for  large capacity energy storage for most national grids, albeit supplemented with batteries and / or super-capacitors / ultra-capacitors for the best frequency-response performance.

Re-nationalising the National Grid?
In May 2019, the BBC reported that the Labour Party unveiled plans to take the National Grid into public ownership.
After this power cut, the Guardian asked “Does this strengthen the case for nationalising the National Grid?“.

Maybe it does because the suspicion must be that the privatised National Grid has hived off its grid management to a separate “Electricity System Operator” company limiting its liability with respect to OFGEM fines, with a shoddy frequency response service, risking power cuts in order to profiteer with predictable consequences for grid reliability.

My view – re-nationalise the National Grid with extreme prejudice. 

Adapted from my blog post - Remedying UK Power Cuts and Re-nationalising the Grid

[Bored chemist]

Well, I didn't expect to find myself agreeing ...
Yes, the problem here is that the Grid was being run for profit, rather than its real purpose of maintaining  the supply.

This thread is based on the difficulty (some say impossibility) of ensuring that when losses of generators occur (due to weather) we can switch other ones (possibly in other countries) in to replace them.

That is difficult, but it shouldn't be impossible.

What surprises me is that the grid's automatic systems didn't provide enough reserve.
The grid negotiates with  very large power users and offers a reduced tariff to those who are prepared to accept automatic short term power cuts.
If you are a supermarket chain running a huge refrigerated warehouse a 15 minute power cut isn't going to affect you at all- you just need a bit of emergency lighting. Steel processing furnaces can also tolerate short power cuts- their large thermal mass tides them over.

In exchange for a reduced electricity price you accept a relay that continuously monitors the mains frequency and, if it drops below some set point (commonly 49.5 Hz), the relay cuts the power to your refrigeration plant.

Systems like that should automatically balance the load with the supply.

If they didn't work it's because they were not properly implemented.
And the obvious reason is that the Grid's profits suffer if it offers discounts to customers.

[alancalverd]

Two irrational responses to a minor cockup!

First: The statutory minimum frequency is surely no more than an indication of load vs capacity. Time was that we had two clocks in a power distribution center, one linked to Greenwich via telephone line (yes, I'm going back over 60 years!) and one driven by a mains synchronous motor. The requirement was to keep the latter within 5 minutes of the former, so any short-term drop below 50 Hz could be made up overnight and load shedding was a response to a real disaster (of which we had plenty in the 1950s). One minute below 49Hz was not an emergency if there was sufficient capacity on standby.

Seond: The real problem on 9 August was the fragility of the consumer systems. Apparently some trains could not be restarted by the drivers, but needed an engineer to locate the train and drive out to reset the electronics. How is this an advance on steam and diesel? An idiot would think that if the power is switched off for 10 minutes, all the trains should start running again with a 10 minute delay, not 7 hours. But the world is run by computers, not idiots!

Last week's ITV show "Fighter Pilot"  had a new recruit about to take his first flight in an F35. Called his instructor - "user name and password rejected". After a couple of goes, the instructor said "try switching everything off and start again", then asked the cameraman to leave as the next trick (apparently, calling a ground engineer) was top secret. Funny in a flying school, kiss of death on a carrier flight deck.

My personal record was waiting 4 hours at £100 per hour whilst folk ran around a medical school trying to find the password to switch on the x-ray machine, beating by 1 hour the dentist whose brother had installed the computer the day before, and promptly flew back to India with the password securely tucked in his briefcase.

Whatever happened to keys? Who is going to steal a train (or a dental x-ray) and how far will he get against unscheduled points?

Anyway, I agree with all you say and I'm all in favour of renationalising as much of the electricity supply industry as economically possible. But it is incumbent on end users to note that (1) a centralised supply is prone to occasional failure and (2) a machine that cannot be started by its driver is a liability, not an asset.

[Bored chemist]

Who is going to steal a train (or a dental x-ray) and how far will he get against unscheduled points?

There was a rumour at the time that this
http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/eventsummary.php?eventID=9018
was caused by kids who had broken into the train with a view to joyriding.

The train got as far as a major road junction.

On a related note, did you know that all JCBs have the same key?

[Scottish Scientist]

Well, I didn't expect to find myself agreeing ...
Yes, the problem here is that the Grid was being run for profit, rather than its real purpose of maintaining  the supply.

Agreed.

This thread is based on the difficulty (some say impossibility) of ensuring that when losses of generators occur (due to weather) we can switch other ones (possibly in other countries) in to replace them.

That is difficult, but it shouldn't be impossible.

Again agreed.

It was inevitable that when one of the power stations which tripped was a wind farm that the fossil-fuel- and nuclear- lobbies against wind and solar power would try to "blame wind", conflating the non-wind causes of this power-cut with the intermittent power supplied by renewable energy farms and that anti-wind propaganda could easily have been swallowed whole by an unsuspecting polity had someone not published to explain the facts of the matter.

Unpicking that deliberate conflation and confusion so as to defend the reputation of wind and solar power and to show how it is indeed possible to guarantee no power-cuts with a well-designed and well-managed 100% renewable energy system is therefore on-topic in this thread.

What surprises me is that the grid's automatic systems didn't provide enough reserve.

The National Grid had only 1,000MW of automatic back-up power available and as far as I can tell from the National Grid's report (see the somewhat cryptic and terse information in tables 3 and 4 on pages 15 and 18), that 1,000MW included both frequency response "dynamic response" power reserves from batteries and frequency response "static response" demand-side cut-offs.

The grid negotiates with  very large power users and offers a reduced tariff to those who are prepared to accept automatic short term power cuts.
If you are a supermarket chain running a huge refrigerated warehouse a 15 minute power cut isn't going to affect you at all- you just need a bit of emergency lighting. Steel processing furnaces can also tolerate short power cuts- their large thermal mass tides them over.

In exchange for a reduced electricity price you accept a relay that continuously monitors the mains frequency and, if it drops below some set point (commonly 49.5 Hz), the relay cuts the power to your refrigeration plant.

Systems like that should automatically balance the load with the supply.

If they didn't work it's because they were not properly implemented.

Of that sort of demand-side cut-off measure, they only seem to have had

• 198MW triggered at 49.7Hz and delivered within 30 seconds (why take so long to operate a relay, or was it something more sluggish than a relay involved? The report is not transparent about such questions.)
• 230MW triggered at 49.6Hz and delivered within 1 second (that's quick enough but why only 230MW?)

Systems like that should automatically balance the load with the supply.

If they didn't work it's because they were not properly implemented.

Agreed.

By 16:53:31, 1 minute after the events which precipitated this crisis, there was "a total of 1,691MW of cumulative infeed loss" which was more than the 1,090MW of all "frequency response is being delivered at this point attempting to restore the frequency to operational limits".
See table 1 on page 11.

1 minute in, the grid was still suffering a 600MW power deficit and so frequency continued to drop, provoking the automated power cuts to unsuspecting customers.

[Scottish Scientist]

One minute below 49Hz was not an emergency if there was sufficient capacity on standby.

According to Wikipedia - National Grid Reserve Service

If Frequency Response and spinning reserve fails to control grid frequency and it falls too far, then the fans feeding combustion air into power station boilers begin to deliver at inadequate draft/pressure since they are synchronous, and the output of all power-stations in the grid, goes into irreversible decline. To prevent this, frequency sensitive relays on entire substations trip out, disconnecting entire customer areas on a pre-determined schedule.

So it really depends on how far the frequency falls during that "One minute below 49Hz". If the frequency falls too far then the grid is in peril because the power stations are only contracted to operate for 20 seconds under 47.5Hz - and not at all below 47Hz. See table 5 on page 19 of the National Grid's report.

[Bored chemist]

fans feeding combustion air into power station boilers begin to deliver at inadequate draft/pressure since they are synchronous

Well, that's a piss poor design, isn't it?

Ironically, it seems that coal powered stations are less robust than wind power.
It's fairly stupid that the driver can't restart a train after a power failure.
It's even more stupid that a power station can't even cope with a brown out.

[jeffreyH]

It should be a requirement of every new house build that solar panels are installed. This should also be required for new commercial builds.

Retrofitting all buildings should be a priority. Why is this so hard?

[alancalverd]

FGS! I haven't used a synchronous fan or a 50Hz transformer for anything more important than stirring my office air and venting the toilets in the last 20 years. All the industrial chillers and aircon systems I have installed in clinics have had inverters, as have all the computer systems, so that they can work from out-of-spec mains or shut down recoverably from a crudely phased UPS. Back in the day, power stations had banks of lead-acid batteries to keep the lights and telephones working, with enough reserve to restart  the boilers (if they had run out of oily rags and matches).

We also tested hospital diesel generators every week. But "we" were public sector employees, now replaced by offsite contractors to PFI companies that have gone into liquidation.

Chernobyl was over 30 years ago, as was the US ice storm brownout. Does nobody ever learn?

[evan_au]

A few years ago, there was a major power outage in South Australia, triggered by major storms that knocked down transmission lines carrying electricity from distant coal generators.
- Some storms were predicted, so starting up a more local coal-fired station to run as spinning reserve would have been a very expensive but (in retrospect) wise precaution. 

One of the findings of the enquiry was that wind-farms had circuit-breaker settings that reflected the traditional behavior of coal-fired power stations more than wind-farm capability.
- In seeing repeated frequency drops, the wind-farms were cut off, when the wind was still blowing.

These wind farms did not have enough capacity to save the South Australian grid, but they would have continued generating until later in the failure, rather than contributing to the onset of the failure.

As a result of this, Tesla has built a battery inverter installation in South Australia to stabilise the grid, and introduced a new category of grid support which operates in under 100ms, instead of the traditional load scheduling that operates on >15 minute timescales.

I guess as we transition to new forms of generation & power reserves, we need to consider which parts of the traditional grid design are still relevant, and which need to be updated.

[alancalverd]

1 minute in, the grid was still suffering a 600MW power deficit and so frequency continued to drop, provoking the automated power cuts to unsuspecting customers.

Dinorwig

can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt (2,317,000 hp) and has a storage capacity of around 9.1-gigawatt-hour.

National grid, or just a bit of vanity engineering, not for public use? And is this a valid model for hydro storage on a larger scale? IIRC there had been plenty of rain, so the tanks must have been full. 

[Scottish Scientist]

so starting up a more local coal-fired station to run as spinning reserve would have been a very expensive but (in retrospect) wise precaution.

Gas turbines can ramp up their power faster than coal-fired power stations so gas is a better choice for spinning reserve than coal, unless coal is all you have.

South Australia doesn't yet have much in the way of hydroelectric power so that wasn't an ideal option for them.

As a result of this, Tesla has built a battery inverter installation in South Australia to stabilise the grid, and introduced a new category of grid support which operates in under 100ms, instead of the traditional load scheduling that operates on >15 minute timescales.

Batteries are fast admittedly but super-capacitors / ultra-capacitors are equally fast and more powerful for the same money, though store less energy and don't generate for so long.

So for the same money -

• batteries give you less power but for a longer time, the minutes you need to start up a total smaller generator capacity from a dead stop.
• super-capacitors / ultra-capacitors give you more power for a shorter time, the seconds you need to ramp up the power of a total larger generator capacity from spinning reserve.

Since the UK has lots (about 20GW) of gas turbines and a decent amount (about 2GW) of pumped storage hydroelectricity which can operate in spinning reserve and power up in seconds then we will get more frequency response Watts for our pounds if we buy super-capacitors / ultra-capacitors to support our plentiful existing spinning reserve capacity.

Some of the hydroelectricity capacity the UK has has not yet been upgraded to operate in spinning-in-air for a (super-capacitor / ultra-capacitor supported) fast-start up and so the batteries which the UK already has - 472MW - can best be deployed to support a fast-start frequency-response in support of those more sluggish-start hydroelectric generators.

Rather than buy more batteries, I'd rather upgrade more hydroelectric capacity to operate in spinning-in-air reserve.

So let not the UK ape South Australia and be convinced by Tesla's snake-oil battery salesmen to invite little rocket man Elon Musk to jet-set in as "the savour" of the UK National Grid for the transition to 100% renewable energy. 

It's bad enough that the National Grid already has "a battery venture with Tesla". If I were the suspicious sort, I'd suspect that National Grid manufactured this power cut to justify higher bills or a government grant to pay for a Tesla "biggest ever" battery contract. 

"Biggest ever batteries" as a one-size-fits-all solution for renewable energy grids? That don't impress me much!

Since we have got onto the subject of "Australia", I must mention my enthusiastic support for Snowy 2.0. 

Tasmania is also good for pumped hydro. South Australia is short of fresh-water but sea-water schemes are possible there.

Batteries can't match pumped hydro for endurance so please resist the temptation to waste precious UK investment resources on "biggest ever batteries". 

[Scottish Scientist]

Dinorwig can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt (2,317,000 hp) and has a storage capacity of around 9.1-gigawatt-hour.
National grid, or just a bit of vanity engineering, not for public use? And is this a valid model for hydro storage on a larger scale? IIRC there had been plenty of rain, so the tanks must have been full.

Dinorwig could indeed have saved the day, had it been contracted to be on stand-by for frequency response in seconds instead of as it was used, on stand-by for short term operating reserve response in minutes.

As can be seen at a glance from the Gridwatch graphs, the National Grid has been misusing the UK's pumped storage hydroelectricity capacity for routine generation at times of peak load, to save the cost of gas for the same, or the cost of investing in building more pumped storage hydroelectricity capacity.



So they've misused Dinorwig to increase National Grid operating profitability at the expense of disarming the UK's most powerful emergency power supply.

The privatised National Grid has profiteered on the orders of its chief executive Mr John Pettigrew so that he can get his increased salary and bonuses and the customers can suffer the risk of power cuts, that's why. Profit before public service. What else in Tory-boy UK?

So in terms of spinning reserve, we can expect excellent performance from certain hydroelectric turbines such as those at Dinorwig, which when synchronised and spinning-in-air offer an emergency load pick-up rate from standby of 0MW to 1,320 MW in 12 seconds – impressive!

However it seems on the day of this power cut, the National Grid shamefully neglected to contract and to deploy Dinorwig instantly in an automated frequency response role.

The National Grid has not admitted to that crime of omission explicitly but only in so many terms, admitted to having only 1,000MW of automated reserve power back up, 472MW of which was batteries.

We can also deduce the same from the Gridwatch data –

Date stamps – GMT – frequency – pumped
8/9/2019 15:55:37 – 48.889 Hz — 293 MW
8/9/2019 16:05:35 – 50.1819 Hz — 958 MW

– which shows that the UK’s pumped storage hydroelectricity generation was 293MW at the time of the power cut and did not ramp up to 958MW until about 10 minutes after the power cut – 10 minutes too late to avert the power cut!

[Bored chemist]

IIRC there had been plenty of rain, so the tanks must have been full. 

The point of Dinorwig, is that it doesn't really depend on rain.

Gas turbines can ramp up their power faster than coal-fired power stations so gas is a better choice for spinning reserve than coal,

It's  a long time ago, but I went to an open day at Fiddlers Ferry once
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlers_Ferry_power_station

They had a gas turbine of sorts.
It was an aircraft jet engine coupled to a MW or so generator.
That gave them enough power to "cold start" the station without the grid- I guess a lot of that power drove the fans.

The jet engine itself had a diesel engine to run it up to speed from "cold".
That diesel was fitted with an electric starter  driven from batteries but, in principle, you could  crank the whole 2GW coal station from a standing start.

By hand.

[Scottish Scientist]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlers_Ferry_power_station

BBC - "Fiddler's Ferry: SSE to close its last coal-fired power plant"

Fiddler's Ferry near Warrington will close on 31 March 2020

Energy firm SSE has announced it is closing its last coal-fired station - the Fiddler's Ferry site near Warrington, Cheshire.

The company said the plant, which employs 158 people, will close on 31 March 2020 and it was beginning a consultation with trade unions.

SSE said the station's losses were "unsustainable".

Trade union Unite, which has 110 members at the site, said it was "grim news" for the workers.

Last month, the UK had its first week without using electricity from burning coal since the 1880s.

Stephen Wheeler, managing director of Thermal Energy at SSE, said the proposed closure of its final coal-fired station was "not a decision we are taking lightly".

He added: "Financially, Fiddler's Ferry is loss-making and our projections show that it will continue to be so."

The company said it hoped to redeploy some employees elsewhere in the group with others remaining to decommission the site.

A statement said it would be offering enhanced voluntary redundancy terms to avoid compulsory redundancies.

Regarded as a landmark in Merseyside, the station - which has two groups of four cooling towers - opened in 1973.

It was formerly operated by the Central Electricity Generating Board until privatisation, with SSE taking it over in 2005.

The government plans to phase out the UK's last coal-fired plants by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.

So there is still 7 months for the UK to save Fiddler's Ferry to serve in future as a renewable-energy dispatchable back-up biomass-burning power station at times of low wind and solar power generation, which will be needed for the lowest-cost transition to 100% renewable energy.

Even when Fiddler's Ferry is at a low state of readiness, its furnace extinguished and its boilers cold, its turbine - generators could be spun up to synchronous rotation using electrical power and thereby add inertia to the grid to buy time in the event of a power station trip to help to avert a disruptive power-cut.

The danger is imminent and it is real. This is what the psychotic accountants have done to Longannet coal-fired power station in Scotland.

Longannet before -


Longannet now -


It'll be too late to save Fiddler's Ferry if we allow them to do there what they did at Longannet, OK?

The time to act is now.

The company which has condemned FIddler's Ferry is SSE plc (formerly Scottish and Southern Energy plc) which is an energy company headquartered in Perth, Scotland.

The UK energy sector and I believe many aspects of company law is a reserved matter - governed by the Westminster Parliament and UK Prime Minister and government.

SSE is in no way accountable to the Scottish Parliament for this decision or for most of its decisions.

With the devolution settlement as it is, even if the Scots wanted to save Fiddler's Ferry we couldn't. This is not on us Scots, OK? This is on the whole UK.

It is my duty, as a Scot with an interest to see power security and good management of the UK energy sector to disown this reckless decision of a nominally "Scottish" company SSE. 

That's nothing to do with "saving coal", OK? To hell with coal. We need to save the plant for biomass burning and inertia.

The same applies to other UK coal-fired power stations though some like Aberthaw have not been converted to burning biomass. Nevertheless it will be cheaper and quicker to convert from coal to biomass than to demolish a coal-fired power station and build a new biomass power station.

Guardian - German utilities firm RWE to close its last UK coal plant in 2020

Decision will leave only four remaining coal plants powering British homes

The German utility giant RWE will close its last UK coal plant after the coming winter, leaving only four remaining coal plants powering British homes.

RWE will close the Aberthaw B power station in south Wales at the end of March 2020...

The Thatcherite "market" has got the bit between its teeth and it is running amok with the UK's electricity generating sector.

" This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated.   ”
—  Assessment by the ICI in 1948

Even from beyond the grave, Thatcher is still managing to wreck this country's infrastructure. She and her Tory-boys are the ruin of us.

Demolishing coal-fired power stations delays the transition to 100% renewable energy
Why? Simply because without those power stations converted to burn renewable-energy biomass as back-up power the cost and the time taken for the transition to 100% renewable energy will be multiple times greater.

Meanwhile, burning fossil-fuel natural gas as back-up power may keep the lights on but it will bind the UK into a fossil-fuelled future for many more years. So we absolutely need biomass burning for the transition.

Tree-huggers may foolishly rejoice that fewer trees will be felled if there are fewer biomass-burning power stations to burn them in? Don't celebrate too soon - massive wild-fires will eventually consume most of the trees that tree-huggers want to hug and those trees will go up in smoke sooner or later.

I am sorry but the harsh reality is that tree-hugging, massive wild-fires and burning fossil-fuel natural gas is not helping, but hindering the transition.

[alancalverd]

The point of Dinorwig, is that it doesn't really depend on rain.

I know that. I was just eliminating one feeble excuse!

[alancalverd]

And then the demolition of Didcot cooling towers blacked out a significant area with flying debris hitting a transmission line. Worse still, it has removed the only visual reference point I can recognise when flying to work in Southampton!

[Bored chemist]

Maybe it's just me; I thought the tragedy of the demolition at Didcot was the 4 dead people.