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birdie1971 | 01:12 Wed 21st Oct 2015 | News
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I wonder how many other people on this website (and in the wider UK) know just how precarious our current energy situation with regards to electricity generation?

A recent article in Private Eye may surprise many. I would include the link but it will most likely cease working soon and so I shall reproduce the short article in the first post.
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Worked in the office of a large jute manufacturing firm in 1973. We worked daylight hours and as I was a shorthand/typist I could carry on as usual.
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paddywak - "... we've had solar panels for about a year,they've reduced our electric bill by half plus we've just received a check for £455.48 for six months feed in.Works for us but I have my doubts on a National scale."


Good for you that you've made some money off this scam. Most of us have been and continue to be, fleeced.

I'm sure you're aware, the only reason you're getting a return on your solar panel investment is due to massive government subsidies. Solar power on its own, is a loss leader. The current technology cannot possibly generate electrical power at anything like the cost of current gas, coal and oil prices. Hence, it is heavily subsidised by government, making it seem, on paper at least, to be quite economical.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Solar is economically unviable without government subsidies. Even on a small scale, solar is uneconomic. The cost of the materials with which to make the panel vastly exceeds the value of the energy produced from it over its working life. All this is academic of course when one realises that solar panels only produce electrical energy when the sun is shining.

At night, solar panels produce nothing whatsoever.

I had an astonishing conversation just the other day with a college of mine. He's a chartered civil engineer. We were speaking about the diminishing energy margins. He said, "Maybe it's time I got solar.". I enquired as to why he thought that the possibility of nationwide blackouts could be avoided by him installing solar panels on his roof. His answer was telling. He said (and I'm not exaggerating):

"Well, I can use the energy stored up by the solar panels during the day to power my house at night".


This is a man well versed in physics and hard engineering (ie. engineering that, if it fails, lands you in court). He's been highly educated. And yet his knowledge of power generation and its limitations are like a foreign language.

He genuinely believed that a battery exists that could be charged by the solar panels on his roof during the day, that could then provide the necessary energy to his entire house once the sun had set. When I questioned him on this it was as though I was talking to a child. He seems incredulous that this technology doesn't exist.

His ignorance is the result of the disinformation that constantly emanates from our main news outlets. How many more well educated people have been duped into thinking that solar (or wind) is the answer?
@tambo

Try this postcode-based calculator
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/solar-energy-calculator

It helps you assess your house's orientation, with respect to facing south, via Google Earth satellite imagery. You tell it the roof slope angle and what dimensions of panels you think will fit.

I specified 16 square metres on a steep (60deg?) roof, facing almost due south and got a power rating of 2kW, leaving a payback period of 11 years, or worse.

Now that might be because the installation costs are not correspondingly smaller for installations that small. A bigger installation would cost more in absolute terms (more panels) but, by generating more power, reimbursing the installation (labour) costs that much faster.

I am limited by roof area so I am waiting for power output per square metre to double, relative to the price, if and when the technology advances.



@birdie

The gridwatch website has extra information nuggets concealed within it which only those computer users in the habit of using cursor-hover (in this case over the guages) on webpages will ever notice.

Regarding solar, it says the UK's capacity is not metered - not even the industrial-scale farms (!!!) and that their output is only revealed by a midday dip in the main demand reading.

Some of our wind power (esp. privately run turbines) is unmetered and displayed as dip in demand, in a similar manner.

This bit about "midday" is revealing. A solar farm near me has fixed panels. In California, they have ones which can swivel and track the sun across the sky. That's how far behind we are. But, turning a low-output pasture into a subsidy siphon makes economic sense so who cares if it only feeds the grid for an hour or two, either side of noon?

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Hypognosis -

"... That's how far behind we are. But, turning a low-output pasture into a subsidy siphon makes economic sense so who cares if it only feeds the grid for an hour or two, either side of noon?..."

Forgive my ignorance, but what is, "a subsidy siphon"? You're going to have to help me out there. What does that actually mean?
@birdie

Your acquaintance could do no worse than google the phrase
"solar panel storage batteries"

...but they may need to don the peril-sensitive sunglasses before they glance at the prices (eg 4kW for upwards of £6K).

Panels would be ideal for charging the nation's growing fleet of electric vehicles while workers have their lunch but would employers provide that as a perk out of generosity (what??) or would they be tapping the gubmint for lucrative incentives?

Actually, that is part of the idea of subsidy - big buildings, owned by employers, feeding the grid in the middle of the day and feeding the public charging points.

The amount of carbon fuels saved during the day can then be used at night. I will continue to regard electric vehicles as mere emissions shifters until total carbon consumption actually drops to lower than any given prior year.



@birdie

Perhaps I shouldn't reach for such emotive terminology in order to get my point across.

Okay, with a field-sized solar farm one has to assume the tariff paid to the owner has to be high enough to incentivise the gamble on investing a huge lump sum in the first place. It is difficult to imagine this being anything other than higher than the price paid for generation using carbon fuels.

I thought you, yourself, said that it is the taxpayer who is making up the difference between market rate and feed-in tariff rate?

Anyway, that's what I meant by 'siphon'.
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Hypognosis - "...[Solar] Panels would be ideal for charging the nation's growing fleet of electric vehicles..."

Wow. I had you pegged as smarter than that. As the Americans say, "Do the math".
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Hypognosis - "...The amount of carbon fuels saved during the day can then be used at night..."

I'm sorry, but LOL! Not three letters I type lightly.

Please try to explain this, err ... comment.
Easy, if we took away the solar sector completely then we'd be burning carbon to fuel these electric cars during the day *and* meeting regular needs, at night. Greater carbon emissions overall, without the aid of solar.

By emissions shifters I meant that electric vehicles do away with particulates and nitrous oxides in city centres but the carbon footprint is shifted to the power station, elsewhere. They are not saving the planet until solar/wind or other 'clean' power has brought about serious reduction in use of carbon fuels.
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Hypognosis - "... if we took away the solar sector completely then we'd be burning carbon to fuel these electric cars during the day *and* meeting regular needs, at night. Greater carbon emissions overall, without the aid of solar..."

That's not quite correct. A great many other people share your belief about this but both you and they are wrong. Allow me to explain by first asking a question:

Are you aware that you simply cannot turn off a fossil fuelled power station when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining?

Fossil fuelled power stations continue to consume fossil fuels even when the energy they produce is essentially being dumped. It's absurd. They are deliberately dumping (through heat exhaustion) energy that could be used to produce electricity in favour of identical energy produced by wind turbines and solar. As a result, the net saving of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is zero.

It cannot be said loud enough nor often enough. For every wind turbine and solar panel there must be an equivalent amount of fossil fuelled power permanently on-line to kick in at a moments notice when the wind stops blowing the sun stops shining. Wind turbines and solar panels do not prevent carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. In fact, they are net carbon dioxide emitters themselves as their creation, installation and maintenance all involve massive amounts of fossil fuels.


Hypognosis - "... electric vehicles do away with particulates and nitrous oxides.."

In their immediate vicinity, I agree that they do. But that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about pollution. We're talking about energy production and carbon dioxide. Not particulates. And carbon dioxide is not a pollutant - no matter how many times it is described as such by the BBC and other news outlets.


Hypognosis - "... They are not saving the planet until solar/wind or other 'clean' power has brought about serious reduction in use of carbon fuels."

You think that wind turbines and solar are "clean"? Not so. See my comment above.

Why do you think that atmospheric carbon dioxide at greater concentrations than exist today are a bad thing? I assume you are aware that we currently live in an age where atmospheric CO2 is around 400 parts per million [ppm] and that there have been a great many times in the past when atmospheric CO2 has been much higher - as much as ten times higher - than current levels and yet the average global temperature has been much lower than today? I also assume you are aware that CO2 helps plants to grow? Some farmers (notably tomatoes growers who grow on an industrial scale) pump CO2 into their growing environments and as a result produce a significantly higher yield than they would otherwise? Crops 'love' CO2.

I further assume that you are aware of the limited and negative logarithmic absorption rate (ie. saturation) of atmospheric CO2? Initially, at low levels, CO2 helps to trap heat into the atmosphere but as the amount of CO2 increase, this ability diminishes exponentially. We could double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 800 ppm and the average global temperature would be essentially unaffected.

http://goo.gl/cOAoz


Maybe you think that higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations result in more inclement or severe weather? If so, not one of the big global insurers shares your view. In fact, natural disasters due to weather are at an all time low. It's also been 10 years since a category 3 hurricane has hit the USA - a record in this field.

http://goo.gl/duSvjT


I understand why you think that CO2 is a problem. I really do. The mainstream media love a disaster. Unfortunately, Global Warming, or Climate Change as it is now known is slowly proving to be a dead duck. Not one of the catastrophic predictions has materialised and not one of them seems likely to in either the short or long term.
@birdie1971

Okay, if 400ppm CO2 is the saturation point, for heat absorption, how does Venus get so hot?

I admit it even has clouds, reflecting visible wavelengths away into space, which complicates the picture, since it is the re-radiation of visible wavelengths, absorbed by the ground, at longer wavelengths (CO2's absorption favourites, among them) which is at the heart of greenhouse effect.

If, as theorised, CO2 traps radiated heat from the ground then, equally, it must be blotting out some of the inbound infra red. Any IR which does leak through would be re-radiated at even longer wavelengths and escape into space because CO2 might be fully transparent to those. Pending cloud cover, of course.

@birdie1971

Why are wattsupwiththat only concerned with USA hurricanes? Don't 6000 dead Philippinos count?

No-one can be that parochial, surely?

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Hypognosis-

Just because Venus is called the "Earth's twin" does not mean that they are alike. They are approximately the same size. That's where the similarity ends. The Earth is around 93 million miles away from the sun and Venus is about 67 million. Therefore, each planet receives very different levels of solar radiation. This has a marked effect on the chemical compositions of their atmospheres and their subsequent surface temperatures.

It is often said that Venus' atmosphere is demonstrable of a "runaway greenhouse" effect. What isn't often stated is that Venus' atmosphere is entirely dissimilar to Earth's. The atmosphere of Venus is - CO2: 96.5%, Nitrogen: 3.5%. The atmosphere of Earth is - Nitrogen: 78%, Oxygen: 21%, Argon: 1%. Carbon Dioxide doesn't even warrant it's own percentage figure at this resolution and even if it did, there's no way of differentiating between naturally occurring CO2 (ie. that emitted by ocean algae, decaying organic vegetation and volcanic eruptions) and that released "artificially" into the atmosphere by the burning of naturally occurring carbon.

In short, the idea that the current atmospheric composition of Venus can be likened to a theoretical future composition of the Earth's atmosphere is absurd and borders on scaremongering. The fact is that Venus and Earth, while the same size, are chemically speaking, chalk and cheese. Atmospherically speaking, Earth cannot become Venus and vica vera since their chemical compositions are so utterly dissimilar.
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Hypognosis - "Why are wattsupwiththat only concerned with USA hurricanes? Don't 6000 dead Philippinos count? No-one can be that parochial, surely?"

You're spectacularly missing the point.

The message from certain people that support the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming (or climate change as it is now know) [CAGW] are saying that "extreme" weather events will *increase* as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Unfortunately for these doom-sayers, extreme weather events that precipitate a humanitarian crisis are either static or on the decline. But don't take my word for it - all the world's major insurers are saying the same.

That weather related disasters still occur is not in question. They are occurring and they will continue to occur and they will inevitably result in the tragic loss of life. However, not a single one of these weather events can be linked to atmospheric CO2 that has been anthropologically introduced into the atmosphere by the burning of naturally occurring fossil fuels.
Climatologists fiddle while Rome burns.
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VE - "Climatologists": those who study multi-decadal climate by using unverifiable and unverified computer models and deduce that the world will be a specific degree warmer or cooler than today even though the error bars of such a measurement exceed the very prediction being made.
An excellent thread to make people aware of how precarious the power industry in the UK is; the social collapse of no power would be fairly instant, whereas the social collapse of no oil might take longer.

Ignoring CO₂ caused ocean acidification may be as shortsighted as unjustified optimism

http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/Carbon-Dioxide-in-the-Ocean-and-Atmosphere.html

http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acidification
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sevenOP - "... Ignoring CO₂ caused ocean acidification may be as shortsighted as unjustified optimism."

Oh please... What an absolute crock of the proverbial. Ocean "acidification"?!?

The alkalinity of the world's oceans varies. Yes, that's right - alkalinity. The values vary somewhere between 8.8 and 8.4 on the pH scale. All of the world's oceans are alkaline.

The idea that the average pH of the oceans is turning "acidic" is scaremongering writ large. It's a completely dishonest and phoney use of language that gives the uninformed public the idea that the seas are becoming acidic. They aren't. Not even close.

As I hope you are aware, pH 7 is neutral - neither acidic nor alkaline. If (and it's a big "if" as no real-world evidence for this phenomena has been found - it's all models and small scale lab experiments) the pH value of the world's oceans is slightly decreasing, it is entirely dishonest to call it "acidification". The only honest term would be, "decreasing alkalinity". But that wouldn't sell newspapers or make the news.

The fact that newspapers and the mainstream media embrace a pejorative and misleading term such as "acidification" without question is a sad reflection on the state of reporting in this and other countries. The fact that other people repeat this Machiavellian term without any clue as to what it actually means shows that they also have a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic science of simple chemistry and of language.
Whether it is called dealkalisation or neutralisation of the ocean's water, it still needs an acidic substance to bring about a decrease in alkalinity.

birdie1971: -"If (and it's a big "if" as no real-world evidence for this phenomena has been found - it's all models and small scale lab experiments) the pH value of the world's oceans is slightly decreasing,"

- the first graph of the second link of my previous post shows the decrease in alkalinity off Hawaii and states below it "So far, ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 since the industrial revolution..." and this is from samples taken throughout the world, not "all models and small scale lab experiments."

http://oceanacidification.noaa.gov/AreasofFocus/OceanAcidificationMonitoring.aspx

http://www.goa-on.org/

http://www.interacademies.net/10878/13951.aspx

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