SteamyTea

Two things: Do you adjust the input/output at all? How would you heat the house if they did not exist?

Pretty wet and miserable here today. So going to have a large lunch, pick up my book, read 3 pages and fall asleep. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Why?

Not really down to 'the government' though. They have told the industry what has to be done i.e. supply power reliably, then left it up to the industry. It is only then that the public horse trading and mudsling starts. The alternative is a system where governments micro-manage everything, that has not ended well for those countries. In my life (in the UK), apart from the scheduled power cuts caused by industrial action, I doubt if I have had 48 hours in total of power cuts. And not one of them has been caused by lack of production. Now I know some people have had longer power cuts, usually caused by exceptional weather pulling down power lines, not power stations failing to generate, there was the exception where a wind farm and a power station went off line together on the 9th August 2019. Lessons where learnt. Quite simply, if you want to isolate yourself from power outages, get a generator, going to be the cheapest option by far, and it will not use hardly any fuel as we just don't have multi day outages in the civilised parts of Buckinghamshire, or Cornwall.

You can see my temperatures here: view-source:http://7apbx6oiuuxtkegq7idqbwgwcjzbjvmwdqcddnesnptjkvd7qkvhkxyd.onion/data/1wire-3-1-2023.html You will need a TOR browser. Quickly changing weather is the norm here, we kind of like it I think. What is interesting is why old people seem to think that demisting their car windows when we go from dry and cold, to wet and warm, is terrifying.

Does swimming pool have a silent P in it?

I don't think so. We have about 50‰ extra on capacity. You have to remember that some old thermal plants were ready to be decommissioned, but not actually shut down. Keeping these going a few hours longer makes much more sense than waiting until a new solar farm, or hydro plant is built. As I keep saying, and shall say again. IT DOES NOT HAPPEN OVER NIGHT. While I don't have much faith in any individual government, I do have quite a bit of faith in the National Grid to guide the Civil Service into presenting the right options to the appropriate Ministers. Again, those decisions are not acted on right away, but they do get acted on. This debate about what happens when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine has been going on for 30 years at least. In that time we have gone from virtually no RE generation to 50‰ generation. And we have had a reliable supply. So your arguement that it can't happen/won't happen is rather wrong. When I was at university studying RE, there was an assumption that more than 30% renewables on the grid would cause massive instability. Well, thanks to behind the scenes investment, decent planning and very clever engineers, along with statisticians, we now frequently have 60%+ RE loading, and still get a reliable supply. And that is before large scale storage has happened. Storage is the next phase in this journey. Storage systems are going to cause more arguements than on shore wind turbines, and a lot more misinformation. You will be told, by someone, that storage uses more energy to make than it will ever deliver. It is up to you to find out if that is true or not, me telling you will not work.

We get them every year. It is part of the usual reporting. Just this year, people are taking an interest. Yes. The technical ones are, the rest is socio economic. They are the hard ones. But I keep telling people it is possible, and backing it up with data. So the message is sinking in. Not as quick as a power cut mind. The relevance was to dismiss your assumption that over 3 months we had very little RE generation. In reality we had lots. RE is much more than just wind generation.

Any PV will have to be level with the top of the standing seam. So the looks are going to change. So you may as well look at a different roof covering for the PV side. In reality, you will not notice the PV, or the roof covering anyway. We usually sit inside a house, half the times it is dark, and roofs are high up. My house sits nearly two meters higher than the road, I cannot see the roof when I am in the front garden.

What sort of insulation and how many x's. We consider a U-Value of 0.1 W/m2.K pretty good. But if we increase the K to a delta of 80, rather than 10, losses become significant.

Shall we look at that. So between the 1st October and 1st Jan 2023, out low CO2 generation was higher than out fossil fuel generation. The reality is that we are changing the generation type, and it is working reliably. As I said, it will not happen over night, and there are challenges to over come, but making a wild claim that cannot be backed up with data just panders to prejudice. Follow the green and red lines, the columns are my usage and irrelevant in this context. The missing 6% is imports, as I don't know the generation type and biomass, as I don't consider it low CO2.

Yes, we all have to do a little bit to help. When you go to buy a new car, you probably get one that is more economical, but probably just as quick (we are limited there) and just as reliable and comfortable. Much of that improvement is done by the manufacturers, but driven by legislation. I don't here people complaining that their new cars use too little fuel and it will all end in tears. We are currently at the start of the transition journey, it is not going to happen over night, just the logistics of manufacture alone is going to hold us back. So in the mean time, we, as individuals, are expected to help ourselves. I did, 3.3 MWh of energy used in the house last year, 2005 I used 11 MWh. And I can reduce that more if I swap out my resistance heating system for heat pumps, and stick some PV on the roof.

That is the whole idea, replace CO2 intensive generation with very low CO2 generation. It has worked well so far. Yes there are challenges along the way, but not technical ones. Worth remembering that we now use less energy than we used to.

Last night between 22:00 and 00:00 the temperature increased by 2°C, 5°C t 7°C. Now it is 9°C. I like the storms, it gets warmer.

I think there is. Here is what can happen in a decade. Both increased by a facto of 4.

Not sure, does depend on government's intervention in the market place. We may also save in other areas. As an example, if we still killed the same relative number of people on the roads as we did in the early 1950s (~5000/year) today we would be killing 65,000 people each year based on passenger miles. To a certain extends, we tend to think that fossil fuels are very cheap, but once all the prices are taken into account, they are probably not as cheap as we believe. Loosing a major local supplier i.e. Russia has been a failure of government(s) foreign and trade policy, not of energy generation. The big problem is that we cannot change the infrastructure overnight, and the current government is pretending to care, and do the right things, but have in fact just kicked the can up the road again.

You listening to Radio 4 right now? It is all about peoples attitude to climate change https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gkq8

Yes, very basic thermodynamics. The devil is in the non-linearity of it. And I shall say it again. Power and Energy are not the same thing. You can store lots of energy, quite easily; heat a rock, lift some water, heat something, change the chemistry, even burn something that has grown. Getting the power back out is the really hard thing. As a simple rule, once you have used up half your energy store, the next half will take 4 times longer, and that may not give you much useful power.

Yes, they track each other though. Hard to do the wholesale selling price as there are too many variables for each installation, but as a long terms price check, they are usefull.

Model a 'cartoon' store i.e. basic shape and whole number dimensions. Then get working on a spreadsheet. Always pick the worse numbers, rather than the most likely.

We do have a fairly good idea. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-difference-cfd-allocation-round-4-results/contracts-for-difference-cfd-allocation-round-4-results-accessible-webpage Apart from Tidal Stream and floating turbines, I think they are all around $45/MWh. Energy from waste, which still has a fair way to go is coming in at the same price as PV and onshore wind. Natural Gas is now at August 2021 prices, but still volatile. Over the last 40 years, domestic energy prices has been around 5% of median household income, no reason to think it will be much different in the medium to long term. EDF dropped my night rate by 3p/kWh, though the day rate did go up by 8p/kW. ~85% of my usage is at night, with my day usage pretty consistent at 1.3 kWh/day. It may possibly be worth me getting a kWh of storage to run the hob and oven. Or I could stop using the oven as much (used it more in the last year than I did the previous year).

We had a few cold days then, but yes, generally mild.

No. I have been to a couple of local Dragon's Den type events where local businesses are trying to raise money. The ignorance is staggering sometimes. One of the Dragons, someone I know quite well, and does have his head screwed on as he checks concepts with people that do know, likes to see the other investors loose money.

Thermosyphon, big fat pipes and no valves. Heat the lower cylinder first, then it rises to the other ones. With a bit of luck you will get reassuring gurgling sounds.

Yes. Not like when I did my work experience at Pressed Steel Company. There is a reason the exhaust pipes rattled on Rover 200/400. I designed the middle bracket hanger, took me about 45 minutes, then 3 weeks hiding and pretending to be busy.