The Anonymous Widower

Coal Sales Could Lose Tens Of Millions For Consumers

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.

These two paragraphs outline the story.

A huge stockpile of coal bought for emergency use in power stations this winter is due to be resold at a loss of tens of millions of pounds to consumers.

National Grid funded the procurement of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal as part of a deal to keep open five coal-fired units this winter. The estimated £368 million cost of the “winter contingency contracts”, which includes an undisclosed sum for the coal purchases, is being recouped via energy bills.

Note.

1. None of the coal has been burned, as the weather was warmer than expected,
2. It is now sitting in various places around the country.
3. It will probably sell at a loss and there will be transport costs.

I will look at the mathematics of disposal.

Burning Fossil Fuels

On the Internet, I have found these figures.

• If you burn a kilogram of natural gas you create 15.5 KWh of electricity and 2.75 kilograms of carbon dioxide.
• If you burn a kilogram of coal you create 2.46 KWh of electricity and 2.38 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

This means that natural gas and coal create 0.18 and 0.97 kilograms of carbon dioxide respectively for every KWh generated.

I believe these figures say, that if we have to use a fossil fuel, gas will be much better than coal for climate change reasons.

The Size Of The Problem

We are talking about 130,000 tonnes of coal for EDF and 400,000 for Drax. Uniper’s figure is not stated. Let’s say they make the coal pile up to 600,000 tonnes.

Burning this pile will generate 1,476,000 KWh or 1.476 GWh of electricity and create 1428,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Effect On Total UK Carbon Dioxide Emissions

According to government figures on the Internet in 2021 we emitted 107.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Burning all that coal in a year, would add less than 1.5 % to our carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps we should burn it strategically over a number of years, when there are energy supply problems, as it is after all a crude form of energy storage.

What Would I Do With The Savings?

The money saved on the transport and making loss-making sales could be spent on other ways to save carbon emissions, like converting surplus wind energy into hydrogen and blending it with the gas.

I discussed the mathematics of hydrogen blending in UK – Hydrogen To Be Added To Britain’s Gas Supply By 2025.

If we put 2 % hydrogen in our natural gas, this would save nearly 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in a year. This figure is much bigger than the 1428,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, that would be created by burning all the coal.

At a level of 2 %, most appliances, boilers and industrial processes would work without change. But a good service would help.

February 21, 2023 - Posted by AnonW | Energy, Energy Storage, Hydrogen | Coal, Coal-fired Power Stations, Decarbonisation, Drax, EDF, Hydrogen Blend, National Grid, Natural Gas, Uniper