SteamyTea

I have my sword out and making the Sign of Zoro in the sand now. Z is for Zachariah.

And what did you use before that, the crap you were trying to flog?

Insulation is a strange thing, and often misunderstood. For every doubling in thickness, you generally only get a 50% improvement. While not ideal, you may find that adding just 25mm of just about any sheet insulation greatly improves the place. Before you do, start by finding all the air leaks. Sorting them will make the biggest difference.

Could you change it to a roller bearing? Lateral forces have to be taken into account, but that is true for all bearings. Do you know if the cat will use it?

I think it is a case of they have to lend.

Fill them with soil and grass seed, then it will be a self sustain wall. Add a bit of bamboo and you can incorporate the structural elements. Got to be better than hazel twigs.

@Dave Jones Can you tell me where uranium comes from, and what the reserves and resources are. You really do talk a load of bollocks sometimes.

Government policy. Quantitative easing, government debt, interest rates, planning rules, low inflation rates (until recently), minimum wage (caused middle income jobs to become cheaper, boosting corporate profits). The country has been awash with cash for nearly 15 years. We are going to start paying for it now though.

You need to drive a couple more times around the island before you start to get dizzy. Or drive it faster. I suspect I drive further for a coffee than you can.

Not law, though I had to study it at university. I currently pretend to be a chef. It is the only consistent work in Cornwall.

Some of the smaller, early cars have problems. This may be down to lack of understanding on the owners behalf i.e. driving them to the limit (which with the original Zoe or Leaf was pretty low performance) and over reliance of fast charging. I am sure that if I bought a Hyundai i10 and drove it flat out for a couple of years, it would not last another 2 years, whoever owned it. One of the hidden environmental costs of ICE vehicles is the serving and repair side. There are literally thousands of businesses that repair cars. It is the nature of ICE vehicles that they need routine service and maintenance. Each business has an environmental footprint. BEVs have less need for routine serving as it is going to be carried out in a totally different manner i.e. a man in a van turns up with the vehicles reports a problem, not just when the clock hits a number. Coming up with spurious reasons why not to have an EV is not going to change anything, we are heading down that path, globally, so why fight it.

I don't think it is rigged at all. The retail side is very low margin, and in a lot of cases, run at a loss. Ill conceived privatisation, which is highly regulated for quality of service i.e. you cannot supply an inferior product (say 180V with frequency between 20 and 90 Hz) was doomed to failure. A few years back, there was a lot of dual fuel' deals, all this really saved the supplier was a bit of admin. Oddly though, as I am not on a he gas grid, I got a discount because I was excluded from the better deal. All a (expletive deleted)ing nonsense. If I had gas, my electricity standing charge would be double my usage price. Standing charges have got out of control.

How about keeping an EV for 20 years. The first owner of a car, of any sort, does not have to be the last, there is a large second hand market in used cars. In fact, the sale of new cars via personal finance deals is based on the second hand value.

Should be good at working out contracts. Do you get to wear 11 fancy waistcoats while drinking ginger beer. That tort them.

Welcome. What do you do for a living, is it related to building, not that it matters? If we had known, we would have stopped you joining.

How does that deal with flooding events which are another company consequence of climate change. Let alone sever cold weather events. I was at a climate conference about 15 years ago, the council's 'climate expert' showed us all a chart of future monthly temperatures. The stupid twat had just added 2⁰C to the then current monthly mean temperatures. Climate change, caused by increased global temperatures will mean more variation in the weather, some will be extreme for any location. The big impact is going to be with agriculture, there is not going to be enough local knowledge about how to farm areas that are not currently farmed, and the infrastructure will not be there to help. And there is now currently not enough time to develope new, large scale farming areas without causing secondary problems. We have seen what developing palm oil plantations has done in the Far East, and what cattle ranches have done in Brazil and Argentina to the Amazon basin. Let alone what happened to the American Mid West which was over developed rapidly. This is why we just have to transition to RE as fast as we can.

It is still pretty cheap when you think about it, 3.6 MJ for 30p. A Big Mac has 2.06 MJ and it costs £4.59. Tesco Red Lentils have 0.322 MJ in 80g, that works out at 30p, for an eleventh of the energy company content, and you have to boil them up at home.

You have to be careful when comparing how much tax people pay on earnings. There is the percentage rate and the nominal rate, they can be very different. Then there are the indirect taxes on goods and services. I have not paid any tax on a haircut for decades. Wealth and Income are not the same thing.

Only viable for low capacity i.e. 30 kWh in reality, can't see a tonne of batteries being swapped over quickly. So about 100 miles, or not enough for me to get to Exeter. Tesla have a super charger station near Camborne, one of the poorest places in Europe. Plenty of capacity to charge up there in a few minutes. Can get to look at young students as it is in the college grounds.

Well no, but you are comparing a technology that has been used for over 100 years (large scale centralised generation) with a technology that has only been commercialised in the last 20 or so, with 90% of the capacity installed in the last 7 years (ish). Like saying a 5 year old at school has not worked out what dark matter is. No one is every claiming that wind and solar can match existing generation today. 5 years ago, who would have thought that around 850,000 BEVs were on our roads, the same argument about 'not enough capacity to charge them' was said back then. Probably accounts for all the BEVs I see on the side of the road when I drive, they must go into cloaking mode to save embarrassment. Our National Grid is an engineering marvel, we should be proud of what it does, not saying that it has reached its peak and nothing else can be done. As for the French, and other interconnects, much of this is to do with economics, not capacity. We, like France, Holland, Belgium etc would be mad not to swap power at times it is not needed locally. The whole of physical Europe is interconnect, it is the way it has been designed, it is not a bail out.

17% as I type this. Wind is 26% Gas 32% French Interconnect 8% You cannot compare installed capacity of renewables and traditional generation. If you really want to compare them, you have to take the capacity factor into account.

The national grid data has never shown that. It is a bit of a myth that the whole of the UK gets hit by a winter high pressure and windturbines just stop generating. Just a matter of scaling the system up. We really do not need nuclear these days, we can manage without it, we almost are as it is.

How do you square that with Nuclear, which has a 60 + year history, is the most expensive form of low carbon generation, by a factor of 4.