SteamyTea

Not quite. You have to take the thermal conductivity into account as well. And the thermally exposed areas where potential differences are. A tonne of concrete will store the same amount of energy as an identical tonne of concrete, but if one is a sphere and another spread over 50m2, they perform very differently.

@Omnibuswoman Anytime.

Yes, and it is why there are, sometimes, no solutions. Though you can put a time element into the mix, which you, in effect, be enthalpy. But as you are working within limits, and tight limits as well, it is probably close enough.

WC uses partial differential equations (PDE). These show a possible solution to a position on a complex curve. In heat equations, complex curves can be though of as rugby ball. If you place a rugby ball on a table, and assume it rests level, then you can easily measure the heights along the length from the table. This will give you a curve. Now imagine that for every 5mm you move, either left or right, towards the pointy end of the ball, that you measure the circumference. This will reduce as you move left or right. So you can see that you have two variables. Positions on the X and Y axis. Now imagine that you throw in a third dimension, Z, and you can see that you could recreate the shape of the rugby ball. This can be written as a PDE with the form: δ2u/δx2 + δ2u/δy2 + δ2u/δz2 = 0 All that is really showing is that if you know two positions you can deduce the third i.e. Flow dT, OAT. This is because of the Laws of Energy Conservation. Easy really.

You could have bought a different home.

Out of interest, who decided to change the specification, and for what reasons.

This is often a problem. My manager obsesses over a price difference of a penny per butter portion, missing the big savings of 40p on a sausage. Had the financial director down the other day (I work for a multinational) and she is pretty shrewd (as a financial director should be). She pointed out that if we replaced the gas hob with an induction one, we would reduce energy usage and overheating in the kitchen. I got 'looks' from my work mates as I had been saying this for years. Not one of them had used an induction hob ever, and still think they are infrared hobs because they have ceramic tops. I have been saying for a long time, to most people that ask me about reducing energy/CO2 changing car will probably be the biggest change.

I am not sure how much 'oil' that actually uses. Very little I suspect. About half can be turned into a liquid fuel, a fifth into low sulfur bunker fuel, a bit it bitumen and other polymers, some comes out as gasses, which are feed stock for other polymers. Eventually you get nothing but tar, which is used in ashfelt, but that tar is easier to get from Trinidadian pitch fields (lived there as well). Many polymers can be made from vegetation feed stocks, cellulose was made that way, as are some polyurethanes. Oil is just crushed and heated plant matter after all.

I lived on an island that processed Venezuelian crude. It was a smelly place.

“One day, Canada will take over the world. Then you’ll all be sorry.”

Or in derived SI units, 6,154.49 MWh. I use about 25 MWh/year in my car.

This week's comic has been running a series on 'best ideas'. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2511326-new-scientists-guide-to-the-21-best-ideas-of-the-21st-century/ The electrification of everything: Best ideas of the century Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable power is crucial. The opening of Tesla's first "gigafactory", which used economies of scale to electrify our transport and energy systems, marked a turning point in this endeavour By Chris Stokel-Walker 19 January 2026 Stephan Walter Batteries and the harnessing of solar energy have been around in one form or another for centuries, but only in 2016 did these technologies, arguably, become world-changing. This was when Elon Musk, before his controversial political career began, opened the first “gigafactory” in Nevada, producing advanced battery technology, electric motors and solar cells on a massive scale – giga meaning 1 billion, or “giant”. You could fairly describe the amount of renewable energy – in the form of solar, wind and hydropower – available to extract on Earth as gigantic too. In just a few days, the sun delivers more energy to our planet than is in all the reserves of fossil fuels we have ever discovered. Reliably harnessing that power is another matter. Even though the photovoltaic effect, where light energy produces electrical current, was discovered in 1839 by Edmond Becquerel, and the first practical solar panels were made in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 2010s that technology had advanced enough for solar electricity to become competitive with fossil fuels. Parallel to this, the invention of lithium-ion batteries in the 1980s provided somewhere to store this energy. The gigafactory certainly helped advance these solar cell and battery technologies too. Yet its impact was less down to any specific invention and more in how it brought all the parts of electric car production under one roof. This supply-chain integration reflects what Henry Ford did a century earlier – just populating the planet with Teslas instead of fossil fuel-powered Model Ts. “It gave us dispatchable solar thanks to batteries, and it gave us electric vehicles,” says Dave Jones at Ember, an energy think tank in the UK. The economies of scale unleashed by the gigafactory had knock-on effects beyond electric cars, too. “That battery unlocks all kinds of new things: the phone, the computer and the ability to have relatively low-cost, high amounts of energy you carry around,” says Sara Hastings-Simon at the University of Calgary in Canada. In fact, in recent years, the cost of these technologies has plummeted so much that many experts say electrification of our energy systems is inevitable. In California and Australia, solar energy is so plentiful that grid operators give it to people for free. Commensurate with that, batteries are getting closer to storing energy as densely as fossil fuels do, so we can start to build solar airplanes, ships and long-haul trucks – and completely detach our transport and energy systems from their centuries-long dependence on fossil fuels.

A good review of the world's energy is here. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics.html I know it is published by an oil company, but it is about as good as one will get. For a more UK based one. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/digest-of-uk-energy-statistics-dukes One of my favourites. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption Worth a look here. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025 Best to avoid this one though, was good, not now. https://www.energy.gov/

Now I would have thought that would increase the icing as the air is cooled more. That is counteracted by the greater area though. The true metric is dT/kg.s or in English, how much is each kilogram of air cooled in a second as is passes though. Throw in the SHC of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and water vapour and you get the power being extracted.

It has a larger fan and heat exchanger (radiator) area I seem to remember you saying.