The Scale of Energy

sense-making public policy energy

I've been exploring fossil fuel industry as an essential, and large, part of the UK's current energy mix for the National Energy Explorer sim / serious game.

I was looking at the initial fields that were developed in the UK Continental Shelf and saw the Ninian field. It's sitting just south west of the Brent field which is now depleted after producing 3.5 billion barrels of oil.

Screenshot of the Ninian field from North Sea Transition Authority

The Ninian field is still producing from a 600,000 tonne oil rig...

The giant Ninian oil rig under construction and an artistic rendering of what if would look like once completed

...that was towed out to sea and put on the sea floor...

The giant Ninian oil rig under tow out into the north sea

Renewables


Along with exploring the scale of the fossil fuel industry I've also been crunching the numbers on renewables in the UK.

It's been surprising. From Thoughts for Symbiosky on Wikisim and Collective Sense-Making:

  1. loads of data is out there. Many experts must be pulling the same data and running into the same problems of cleaning it, contextualising it. Can we do better at sharing cleaned & contextualised data? Are there existing platforms that could be better leveraged for this like GitHub or Kaggle or something else? Or do we need to build something new?
  1. these experts must be building models, sometimes their conclusions / outputs are public but those models themselves very rarely are made public. So the models are never validated by others, errors fixed, models improved and extended. Lots of waste and opportunity there. Can we build anything to help with that?
  1. there's value across the whole fractal knowledge tree. As in if you're trying to answer some high level system question like how much solar is there installed in the UK? You will naturally stumble over other interesting data, anecdotes and questions. For example you might find out that the largest solar farm in the UK in 2020 was "only" 0.7 km2 - located just outside Andover. 5 years later in 2025 the largest solar farm now covers 6 km2 in Kent, and that there's 6 times more area of planned solar farms in the pipeline than we currently have installed.
0.7 km2 solar farm near Andover, operational 2020

6 km2 solar farm near Kent, operational 2025

Notes

ยน This post was drafted in May. When I showed it to a friend they remarked:

It is really impressive. The energy industry is full of crazy feats. Its mad to think what people go through for this substance oil, gas and electricity we take for granted - and then madder to think how that applies to so many things.