Reply to post: Re: Political deals...but if they do

Re: Political deals...but if they do

And you seem to fail to understand the purpose of the NSN. The NSN isn't there for the UK to suck down hydro. It's a two-way system. The UK has a lot of potential variable renewable resources, especially in wind and tidal, while Norway has a lot of dispatchable hydro.

You're right that the link could work both ways, you're wrong in believing that it will ever be economic to link different assets in these two countries in the hope that excess generation in one will match excess demand in the other. All of these renewable resources are very poor at the critical winter peaks - hydro will be only part full having been depleted over the summer (or in a dry autumn will be largely empty), on the coldest days wind output is negligible (c6% load factor on the 100 coldest days), and solar in winter (in the UK) will produce at best 20% of its summer output, and potentially low single digit percentages if it is cloudy.

Hydro as a power source is largely a "use once a year" resource unless you're talking about the barely useable power in run of river systems. Hydro's volumetric power density is appalling, its capital costs are very high. Sure, if you're a communist dictatorship willing to evict a few hundred thousand peasants to build a Three Gorges dam - is that you?

The whole misbegotten interconnector idea is a fig leaf for DECC (and UK politicians) failure to grasp the nettle of UK energy needs. In the words of the late Sir David Mackay, the government's former chief scientific advisor, powering the UK with renewables is an appalling delusion. Now, with all due respect I think I'll go with Sir David. The answer has always been CCGT if you want low cost reliable power, or nuclear (excluding Areva's half baked EPR) if you're obsessed with carbon emissions. In the UK we've not spent something of the order of £120bn (cash) on crappy renewables. And still we have frequent days when they produce low single digit percentages of our power demand, particularly when power demand is high.