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Article on the BBC about battery storage


vivienz

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What i want to know is, why do people do it for 'non-financial reasons', I suppose knowing that you doing something positive is good, but if its going to cost you money whats the point? Surely in 10 years time everyone will be wondering what on earth to do with all this battery waste.

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12 minutes ago, MikeGrahamT21 said:

What i want to know is, why do people do it for 'non-financial reasons'

 

Lots of potential reasons:

  • Because they can afford to (ie, extra costs make no difference to their lives).
  • Virtue signalling.
  • Genuine desire to encourage and support wider adoption - if there are no early adopters of a new technology, it'll never take off.
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On a more serious note, it is going to be a struggle to get adoption of these sorts of systems until the price is really low.

I was chatting to a biker yesterday and we started to talk about EVs and climate change.

His view was that you never pay back the embodied energy and carbon on batteries, climate change did not exist as 'the climate has always changed', RE was too expensive, solar and wind power just 'don't work at all'.

I asked him where he got all this information from and he could not say.

He also thought old cars and bikes where better as some produced the same power as today's vehicles.

He then told me that methane was the real problem as it had a higher GHC potential than CO2. So 'we need to burn that instead as it only produces water'.

I pointed out that not eating meat would have a greater benefit, but he did not like that idea, so it was rubbish (and it is in some ways).

 

I come across these sorts of 'fact' quite a lot.

 

I really think that there needs to be proper education on this, not popular newspapers spouting total rubbish all the time.

I am not sure how to do that without it sounding like a sermon.

 

I always pose the question 'what benefit is it to you keeping things the same?'.  Usually goes unanswered.

Edited by SteamyTea
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1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

I really think that there needs to be proper education on this, not popular newspapers spouting total rubbish all the time.

 

 

There be tyrannical dragons.

 

Rather than promoting a single State sanctioned version of the truth, the solution lies in freedom of expression and the narrow casting diversity available on YouTube today. Broadcast media is a failing 20th century invention.

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2 hours ago, MikeGrahamT21 said:

What i want to know is, why do people do it for 'non-financial reasons',

 

I do it because I can and I find it interesting. It's a very expensive hobby!

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2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

climate change did not exist as 'the climate has always changed'

 

Well he's 100%, unequivocally right on the second phrase - presumably you missed something off the first bit!

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16 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Or i just shows how people can pick things to suit their vision of the 'truth'

 

 

The truth is whatever a majority in a society chooses to believe, the world was once flat until someone sailed around it. With regard to global warming best focus on persuasion rather than reaching for definitive truth.

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24 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

The truth is whatever a majority in a society chooses to believe

That may have been true until the 'science method' came along and people like Betrand Russell and Karl Popper showed what nonsense had been going on before.

A majority or consensus does not make something true.

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I must admit, after reading that Drax report the other day, it certainly hits home just how reliant we are on Gas as a heating medium.

 

It's certainly spurred me on to look more seriously at energy storage - be it heat (Sunamp) or electric (Tesla) - as mentioned above the financials don't stack up particularly well but a lot of what I've been doing at home is about minimising monthly bills and investing for the future.

 

You could have broadly similar type of argument about cars - every day they are costing you a small fortune (depreciation, tax, fuel, maintenance) but we don't even think twice before ploughing money in to them.

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15 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

That may have been true until the 'science method' came along and people like Betrand Russell and Karl Popper showed what nonsense had been going on before.

A majority or consensus does not make something true.

 

 

I think you would enjoy ploughing through Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari. At the end you might end up agreeing with me on the definition of truth.

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18 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama all recommend the book, that is good enough for me.

3 people who are well known for working in research science.

I feel a 'Storm' moment coming on.

 

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1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

The truth is whatever a majority in a society chooses to believe, the world was once flat until someone sailed around it. With regard to global warming best focus on persuasion rather than reaching for definitive truth.

 

The Greeks knew that the world was a sphere well before anyone sailed round it. Whilst truth is always liable to modification, it's not a democratic function.

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There can be no sensible debate about MMGW unless you include in that debate the NUMBER of people on the planet. That is the taboo nobody wants to mention.  So do we reduce pollution per person, the number of people, or both?

 

I still WANT battery storage, but it needs to be an economic decision.

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56 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

3 people who are well known for working in research science.

 

 

Your typical mid-ranking test tube shaker who has just missed the next best thing since penicillin in his petri disk because he is distracted by a Guardian editorial probably lacks the cerebral horse power to comprehend a Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus.

 

Scientific Method is for the easy narrow focus stuff e.g. Black Holes. Comprehending the history and future of Mankind is far more difficult and I would accept the opinion of those who have shaped history over the test tube shakers any day.

Edited by epsilonGreedy
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Guest Alphonsox
9 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 I would accept the opinion of those who have shaped history over the test tube shakers any day.

 

Gates, Zuckerberg and Obama - now I know you're having a laugh. That's the guy who didn't see the internet coming, the guy who didn't see fake news coming and the guy who didn't see Trump coming. I think I'll go elsewhere for my prophets thanks.

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