Power generation hole ahead.

[Onoff]

9 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

spec sheet of wharthog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II

an aircraft i would like to have flown in real world 

sim games with were fun though 

 

Weren't the Americans retiring the A-10? I know the Russians about the same time were upgrading their Grach SU-25s (A-10 equivalent). Did they know something the Yanks didn't?

Edited February 5, 2019 by Onoff

[scottishjohn]

still in use now 

can fly low +slow very handy +is very heavily armoured 

Edited February 5, 2019 by scottishjohn

[Onoff]

7 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

still in use now 

can fly low +slow very handy +is very heavily armoured 

 

Seems they got a reprieve:

 

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a15914932/the-air-force-is-re-winging-a-10s-after-all/

[Simplysimon]

sounded like one came into Prestwick yesterday

[Onoff]

6 minutes ago, Simplysimon said:

sounded like one came into Prestwick yesterday

???

[Simplysimon]

the airport, not the town!

[Onoff]

Just now, Simplysimon said:

the airport, not the town!

 

Why did it land then?

[Simplysimon]

no idea, i was at work and heard it overhead, one of my colleagues said 'that was a funny sounding plane' and i said it sounded like an A-10 tankbuster. don't know if it was but it sounded like one.

[andy]

10 hours ago, joe90 said:

They should have built the Severn barrage many years ago. The latest feasibility study cost what it would have cost originally to build!

 

Glad that’s not gone ahead, estuary mud flats are a critical habitat for many bird species and under massive threat globally already.  There are better solutions out there that don’t devastate such habitats ?

[K78]

On 17/01/2019 at 11:16, Big Neil said:

Amendment to building regs to require each new house to have a minimum of 2 solar panels in roof. Maybe not JOB DONE, but its a start at least. How many of us have been given a DVD or VHS for Christmas and ended up buying the series. Same habit would apply i reckon.

 

What would 2 PV panels achieve in the uk?

 

As the map shows we are the one country that shouldn’t bother. Yet we have more PV than countries in Southern Europe. Because some idiots in Westminster thought it would be something to boast about if they subsidised it. The rest of the world laughs. 

 

Just like they do about brexit. 

 

We need to replace the inbred, political classes that have never lived in the real world. With real people. 

 

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by K78

[sam]

19 minutes ago, K78 said:

 

As the map shows we are the one country that shouldn’t bother.

 

Yet there have been some grid scale subsidy free PV built in the UK and there will likely be many more to come. Onshore wind is marginally cheaper but with planning near impossible PV is currently the cheapest form of generation. Cost effective sites are under £500k/MW to build.

 

The market for building on your own roof top (either residential or industrial) is distorted as 'private wire' avoids the grids distribution charges but this is likely to change soon.

 

 

On 05/02/2019 at 12:29, Ferdinand said:

Does anyone know if more offshore wind will be built around the UK?

 

 

Yes - off shore wind is still being subsidised with CfDs. I was recently involved in financing an almost 1 GW project which is now under construction.

 

 

On 17/01/2019 at 15:09, Big Neil said:

Guesstimate question. How much a 1MW grid tied battery installed and ready to go? based on the Tesla one in Australia a simple division puts it somewhere around £450 grand. What think we?

 

That's about right: £450k-£500k/MW (or MWh as most are just over 1 hour) for containerised batteries. These are currently being built almost subsidy free given National Grid's Capacity Market is almost negligible for batteries.

 

 

[Ed Davies]

1 hour ago, K78 said:

As the map shows we are the one country that shouldn’t bother. Yet we have more PV than countries in Southern Europe. Because some idiots in Westminster thought it would be something to boast about if they subsidised it. The rest of the world laughs.  

 

PV is well worthwhile in the UK as a good complement to wind. It's the countries in southern Europe with less that we should be laughing at.

[K78]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

 

PV is well worthwhile in the UK as a good complement to wind. It's the countries in southern Europe with less that we should be laughing at.

 

On a individual basis for a self builder? I’m not being argumentative by the way. It’s a genuine question. 

 

Governments in Southern Europe don’t see the initial investment as worth it for the return. The reasons we see so many in the uk, are the ridiculously high initial FIT (now scrapped) and the usual salesmen and cowboys jumped on the bandwagon. 

 

Many people were conned into thinking they were getting free solar panels. When in fact the installers were taking the FIT and using their roofs. I honestly think the whole situation is a scam, but it’s only my opinion. 

 

Similar with EWI grants. Although at least EWI works even if the price is ridiculous. As soon as the grants started, so did the 2 day £2000 courses to become a “certified” installer. 

 

The fact we have the highest percentage of homes with solar panels in Europe, when we have the worst conditions for them is crazy. 

 

Shows what inept fools we have at the top level making these decisions. The money put into pushing solar could have been much better spent. 

 

Wind obviously makes sense in the uk, but solar?

 

I remember when they were telling us diesel cars were “green”.

 

I don’t think we should be laughing at any country in the Eu at the moment. I’m genuinley ashamed at the current state of the uk. 

[Big Neil]

3 hours ago, K78 said:

What would 2 PV panels achieve in the uk?

 

Create real interest by putting ownership of systems in the hands of more people. I could just as well have said 20 per house...

[Jeremy Harris]

Interesting debate.

 

I'm with @Ed Davies on this, in that PV seems to be a worthwhile investment here.  Our PV system generates around twice as much energy per year as we use, and I'm about to add a battery storage system to make us even less grid dependent (I don't much like using the grid as a battery, which is what we do at the moment, in effect). 

 

My car has been charged at home almost entirely from self-generation for the past three or four weeks, and I think I can probably run it solely from our self-generated energy until about October, when the PV output will drop. 

 

The house is usually self-sufficient on most days by around 09:00 at the moment; even in the dull weather this morning we were grid neutral, with the Sunamp charging at a low rate and all the house background load being provided by PV.  That continued, despite the cloud and rain, until about 17:00, when we started to import again.

 

With the battery system installed the house should be grid-independent (in effect) from around the end of March until October each year, and then be running mainly on off-peak electricity through the winter.

 

With the decrease in the cost of PV, which is directly related to it having been subsidised to kick start interest, it's now perfectly possible to install a PV system that will generate for around 20 years or more and recover its capital investment within about 6 to 8 years.  I'd be the first to say that the government mismanaged the whole FITs fiasco, yet despite that it seems that we have achieved a significant level of uptake.  Even in the dull weather today PV has supplied well over 25 GWh to the grid.

[ProDave]

The market for renewables has been highly skewed by the RHI and FIT payment schemes and the requirement attached to those that it must be installed by an MCS registered installer.  It is funny how the install costs from MCI installers seems to track the payout from the grant schemes meaning they are the ones that benefit the most, rather than the installer.

 

PV is still worthwhile with no FIT if you can install it cheap enough, and at the moment that does NOT mean get an MCS installer to fit it. I have just installed mine and hope the capital cost will be repaid in electricity savings in 5 years.

 

 

[Ed Davies]

If one assumes that within a few decades the world will need to supply something like 9 to 11 billion people with energy [¹], say, about 3 kW per capita, about the current amount used in the UK [²] so maybe 30'000 GW, then it's difficult to see an alternative to renewable resources.

 

Fossil fuel production would have to be ramped up tremendously to meet that demand. Current production is, last I looked, floating around 80 to 90 million barrels a day. One barrel of oil is around 6 GJ (~7bbl/tonne, 42 GJ/tonne) giving 6250 GW of primary energy which gets converted to final energy with varying efficiencies. OK, there's gas and coal but it's still not even in the right ball park to give the human population of the planet a decent standard of living even if there weren't the immediate health problems with their use and the climate change problems.

 

Similarly, can anybody see a world with 10'000 Hinkley Point-sized reactors operating? Uranium is not currently mined in difficult places around the world because there's so much available to be just picked up where the reactors are already. I'm not sure that nuclear could be run on anything like close to that scale at all and think it's very unlikely without breeder reactors with all the reprocessing considerations: safety from accidents in transport and processing and from diversion to weapons.There are something like 400 reactors or power plants around the world now and we've been running them for something like 60 years. Two have popped off causing major disruption to the surroundings so that seems like once per 12'000 operating years (quite a good record) but with 10'000 running one would go off roughly once every 14 to 15 months.

 

So any policy which relies on fossils or nuclear is essentially racist: it assumes large swathes of people in the “third world” can be made to do without energy which we deem essential to ourselves.

 

I think renewables are the only plausible option (with update saying it's actually a bit more plausible than my first version).

 

So what should the UK do? Wind, both onshore and offshore obviously, but PV can help a lot particularly to reduce the storage requirements because PV generates a bit most of the time and particularly when it's less windy.

 

Some PV in the UK is probably best on solar farms but putting significant quantities on suitable domestic and commercial roofs seems like a no-brainer to me.

 

I totally agree that the UK government made a mess of the FIT scheme. The start up rate was too high and the way it was reduced was completely ham handed. It should have been brought down to some moderate level a lot quicker then tailed off over a much longer period with a lot more clarity about what the plan was.

 

It's also worth pointing out that the main reason PV prices have come down is the high uptake in Germany as a result of their, also generous but better managed, FIT scheme. Ditto the various schemes which have expanded wind power there and in Denmark, Austria and so on. The UK FIT scheme has made a contribution, too, of course.

 

For the individual builder, installing PV seems like buying insurance against that lot further messing up the energy industry and causing higher prices yet.

[¹] Note, that's energy, not just electricity which tends to be about 1/10th to 1/6th of a country's energy use.

[²] I.e., slightly more than the EU28 average of around 2.8 kW/peep and roughly half that used by USians or Australians.

[ProDave]

David Attenborough highlighted many years ago, just how few people the planet could support it they ALL consumed energy at the rate we do in the West. And that number is a lot less than the current population.

 

Don't get me started on Fast reactors.  We (the UK) decided to abandon those along with all our nuclear capability.  Now if we want a reactor we have t buy a foreign one.

 

Chernobyl went pop due to unautorised experiments with the safety system disabled. That is not typical operation of a power reactor.   Fukushima went pop after being inundated by a tsunami and the cooling system could not cope with the damage and loss of power.  I hope lessons have been learned from that. (location, resiliance of safety systems etc)

[Ed Davies]

48 minutes ago, ProDave said:

David Attenborough highlighted many years ago, just how few people the planet could support it they ALL consumed energy at the rate we do in the West. And that number is a lot less than the current population.

 

My back-of-the-envelope calculations say the opposite so I'd be interested to see some numbers for that.

[epsilonGreedy]

14 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

Similarly, can anybody see a world with 10'000 Hinkley Point-sized reactors operating? Uranium is not currently mined in difficult places around the world because there's so much available to be just picked up where the reactors are already. I'm not sure that nuclear could be run on anything like close to that scale at all and think it's very unlikely without breeder reactors with all the reprocessing considerations: safety from accidents in transport and processing and from diversion to weapons.There are something like 400 reactors or power plants around the world now and we've been running them for something like 60 years. Two have popped off causing major disruption to the surroundings so that seems like once per 12'000 operating years (quite a good record) but with 10'000 running one would go off roughly once every 14 to 15 months.

 

 

Would thorium salt reactors change the risk equation for you?

[jack]

4 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Would thorium salt reactors change the risk equation for you?

 

As discussed briefly in this thread:

 

 

[Ed Davies]

6 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Would thorium salt reactors change the risk equation for you?

 

No idea. People witter on about thorium, etc. Frankly, it's up to the nuclear industry to prove it. Great if they can but it'd be stupid to make any serious bets on it until there are a few reactors up and running.

[ProDave]

If we still had AERE we could try one.