Latest Consumer prices index: fuel components, monthly figures

Latest figures from UK gov. Show consumer prices index fuel components up to October 2018

There is a 20% price hike in 2016/17 - is this due to green taxes or profiteering?

The UK Storm of 28th October and the National Grid

The storm of 2013-10-28 managed to isolate a UK nuclear station from the National Grid leading to headlines such as:

Dungeness nuclear power station shuts down following hurricane-strength winds

St Jude’s UK storm forces the Dungeness B reactor in Kent to shut down for up to a week

The isolation from the grid means that essential systems controlling the reactor only have diesel generator backup and so for safety the reactor is shut down.

 

Just How is the loss of 1GW handled by the grid - the two plots that follow use data generated every 5 minutes (the dotted curves use the scale on the right of the plots all vertical scales are in MW):

 

 

 

Note that the bulk of the transient is compensated by pumped storage during the 1st 5 minutes (actually responds within 12 seconds) Hydro and coal and gas (CCGT) are also ramped up and pumped storage is reduced.  However at this time in the morning demand is rapidly increasing and coal and gas output cannot provide further rapid increase an so pumped supply is again increased,

 



 The plot shows data at 5 minute intervals so the immediacy of the Pumped storage is not visible.

 

 

It is also worth noting that the rarely used OCGT (inefficient gas) is brought online in case it is needed (only 50MW is utilised - past OCGT has provided up to 400MW).

 

So this aging reactor of approximately 1GW switching off is handled adequately by the system. In particular the instant response pumped storage.

 

The proposed Nuclear plant at Hinkley Point C will use 2 * 1.6GW reactors Losing one of these will equire spinning reserve (as provided by pumped storage and spinning turbines of other thermal stations)

 

Pumped storage:

 Each of Dinorwig's six generating units can produce 288MW of electricity, offering a combined station output of 1728MW.

Ffestiniog's four 90MW units have a combined generating capacity of 360MW.

 

I.e. a total of around 2GW. This will handle one of Hinkley's reactors but not both.

 

30 year average UK

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/averages/ukmapavge.html

Interestingly the days of thunder have reduced over the 2 periods.

Air frost days UK

From a Post deleted on WUWT (why!?)**

a plot of airforost days in the uk from a few stations:




**[snip - nice try "thefordprefect" - you are no longer welcome here when you do shape shifting, pick a name preferably your real one, and stick with it, otherwise bugger off]

How much warming

From post on WUWT:

What is evident from my plot is that the period from 1985 to present does not (yet !!) conform to the general linear trend. Adding a trend line to 1985 to present gives a warming of 4.4degC/century (got it right this time I think)


The current trend in CET is negative so there is a possibility that in a decade or so there will be a return to the .3C/100year average. But can we wait to find out?

Looking at satellite data:


data: http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
the channel CHLT (no longer reported – too much of an incline??!!) gives a temp increase of 11C/century.
It would be interesting to know why this channel was dropped.

UK spaghetti temperatures

A spaghetti plot of uk temperatures. Data from met office:


An average of those stations