Member postings for Martin 100

What that glossy story about the Danes doesn't tell you is they regularly dump excess wind energy to the Norwegians at zero or negative cost, who then throttle their hydro generation, only for the Danes to buy energy back at full wholesale price later in the day. They also regularly dump excess energy at zero or negative cost into the German grid system, where there is already an excess from their own offshore wind turbines and with an ongoing lack of North-South transfer capacity within Germany to the major load centres in the south, which then causes the Germans to spill excess energy to the Poles and the Czechs, causing overload problems on their own grids that has led to them installing quadrature booster devices to restrict and control power flow through their networks. The Germans also have significant problems with too much solar PV so the wholesale price regularly goes negative, with solar plant constrained off the system to prevent local overvoltage and ultimately total system collapse.

Denmark has interconnectors to Sweden, Germany and Norway, but It is actually less interconnected in energy transfer terms than either Scotland, the West Midlands, North West England, Yorkshire or the East Midlands. Their total electricity market annually is around 10% of that of the UK. (30TWh vs 350TWh) That such a tiny country (Population similar to either Scotland, Yorkshire or the West Midlands) could 'for one day' generate 140% of their requirements from wind turbines is no real surprise, all it needs is a lack of conventional generation online (for district heating) an overdeployment of wind generation and a suitable weather system.

The UK has interconnectors to France (the first one was built in 1961) The replacement rated at 2GW was built in the early 1980's, with 1GW to the Netherlands, 500MW to the Repubic of Ireland 500MW and 250MW to Northern Ireland.

In addition we have an undersea 2.2GW HVDC interconnector from Hunterston to Deeside about to go live later this year, plus 3.5GW of multiple onshore interconnector capacity to Scotland, with significant onshore transmission upgrades in Scotland such as the Beauly-Denny 400kV circuits specifically built and upgraded to cope with Scottish renewables.

There are also additonal interconnectors to France, Norway and Iceland either already in build (Norway @ 1.4GW scheduled for commmsioning in 2021) or in advanced planning / seabed survey stage.

Also despite all the wind turbines in Denmark their CO2 emissions per capita are higher than the UK 6.51 tonnes vs 6.16 tonnes in 2015 despite starting at around the same level in 2005.

Their electricity prices for domestic consumers are also the highest in Europe and 40% higher than the UK

But when it's dark and not windy anything but renewables is what you require. Just over a week ago a Reactor was taken offline at Torness after 397 days continuous operation, it's now back in service with the next planned shutdown planned for September 2018, 600+MW 24/7/365, In excess of 5TWh per annum per reactor of very low carbon electricity and genuinely keeping the lights on, meanwhile circa 10GW of grid connected wind generation is right now delivering just 645MW and meeting just 1.8% of demand.

From

https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=GB

65149.00 GWh of generation for 2016

To take just the UK reactors still operational across their lifetimes (and ignoring the enormous contribution by the MAGNOX reactors)

Dungeness B1 89.36TWh

Dungeness B2 93.44 TW.h

Hartlepool 1 102.26 TWh

Hartlepool 2 97.68 TWh
Heysham A1 97.49 TWh
Heysham A2 92.86 TWh
Heysham B1 116.61 TWh
Heysham B2 111.90 TWh
Hinkley Point B1 135.46 TWh
Hinkley Point B2 132.33 TWh
Hunterston B1 136.13 TWh
Hunterston B2 130.22 TWh
Sizewell B 164.56 TWh
Torness 1 110.02 TWh
Torness 2 107.68 TWh

A total of 1718 TWh

That's about 170 billion quids worth of electricity at 10p a unit, five years worth 100% continual supply at the current rate of 350TWh per annum

Given the generation mix the UK would otherwise have used, the operation of those reactors has directly avoided the release of around 1700 trillion kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere that would have been produced by the equivalent coal fired generation (using the IPCC WG III median g CO2 eq/kWh) Plus the avoided Sulphur Dioxide, Nitrous Oxides, and particulates and millions of tonnes of very low level radioactive waste produced by every coal fired power station.

The savings in human life are also significant too

**LINK**

How many windmills for 100 billion quid?

About 30000 rated at 2.5MW. Lets assume 75GW nameplate capacity, that's some six times what we have now onshore and offshore. Site them all optimally offshore and you have a capacity factor of around 38% per annum, or 250TWh per annum of generation (theoretically 70% of our annual electricity demand) but with absolutely no degree of dispatchabity

Now lets shut all those dirty power stations down because they are no longer needed and in any case the operators cannot make any money to justify their operation.

You need to meet 53GW of demand at the winter peak and the availability factor for wind at that time is assumed to be 21% based on historical records.

The result? A high probability of electricity supply for less than 2 hours per day around the winter peak

Significant periods when supply fails throughout the year

Significant periods overnight when supply is ahead of demand and with no means of storing any excess

Clearly not a winning idea on how to spend 100 billion quid and nowhere near enough to keep the lights on across the UK

Edited By Martin 100 on 27/04/2017 16:05:57

To continue:

The published £92.50/MWh for Hinkley Point C (and £89.50 for both if Sizewell C proceeds) is demonstrably lower than all offshore wind entries in the CfD register  and at a predicted output of 26TWh/ annum secures around 25% of our current domestic electricity needs for over half a century beyond 2027 ish and 7% of total electricity needs.

No existing power station or wind turbine or solar panel or Tesla powerwall is capable of either by basic design or a life extension to do that. Our oldest coal fired station operated for 49 years but churned out loads of CO2 and paradoxically, huge amounts of radiation in the ash and dust, way beyond permitted releases from UK nuclear plants. How much dust and ash? Well look at Gale Common, right next to the M62, partway between the A1 and the A19. Relatively flat land for miles around, yet a huge hill complex, the combined dust and ash output of Ferrybridge C and Eggborough power stations for forty years. Huge quantities of coal burnt, huge quantities of electricity reliably generated for decades, making a far greater contributoin to the wealth of this country than renewables ever will, but ultimately both are gross polluters.

I've not always been a fan of nuclear, sometimes quite anti, often upset by the pain and suffering coal has required to get out of the ground. Regardless of the level of new build coal, which incidentally has decreased noticeably in the past couple of years, there is a huge amount of new nuclear build ongoing across the world. Yes it requires huge capital investment but it just sits there for year after year producing low cost reliable electricity with near zero carbon dioxide. Taking the option of wind turbines and solar balanced by gas results in 469g CO2 eq/kWh CO2 for the gas portion, 12g CO2 eq/kWH for the wind portion as against around 16g CO2 eq/kWh for an all nuclear option (median figure table A.II.4 page 189 IPCC 2011 Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation)

My first choice of nuclear reactor would not be the EPR as chosen by EdF for Hinkley but it will work, and be operational within a defined commissioning window, otherwise under the terms of the CfD we 'the UK' do not pay a penny, in additon we 'the UK' have an option to review after a number of years and there is an effective cap on returns to EdF. It's not the ideal solution of a UK wholly owned and financed national nuclear company but it's the best we can get at the moment. If we 'the UK' had not disposed of Westinghouse a decade ago things might have been different.

It is quite clear that local generation by solar or wind cannot demonstrably meet all local requirements across a typical day, at any point in the year without some storage requirements. When the demand is in an urban environment the deployment of sufficient generation massively exceeds the land / roofspace available.

Even if you could deploy sufficient renewable generation then storage using current or projected chemical methods cannot level the output of renewables to meet actual demand within the day, week or seasonally

The only sane, viable, long term solution to both meet our current needs and genuinely decarbonise our entire energy sector is nuclear fission. Fusion was 20 years away in the 1960's and as far away as that now.

For those that wish to mull over the facts of UK energy and the practicalities then I can recommend Without The Hot Air, a volume by the late, great Sir David Mackay, who from 2019-2014 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

As for a 'rather backward understanding of the system' maybe I've just wasted many decades in the power generation and transmission business on four continents.

Edited By Martin 100 on 27/04/2017 14:14:48

All renewables, with the exception of hydro with unlimited rainfall are undispatchable in their delivery. They also have huge variation and thus the deemed contribution in calculations towards meeting peak winter demand from wind for instance is currently just 21% of nameplate rating. National Grid Winter Outlook Report 2016/17

Tidal barrages have a maximum load factor in the region of 16%, with a £168/MWh CfD being requested for Swansea Bay. £168/MWh implies a subsidy of around £140/MWh agains t current wholesale rates. So install a tidal barage with a very large quantity of concrete and aggregate and 320MW of tidal turbines to get an average of 50MW in spikes with a capital cost of 1.3billion, producing around 450GWh per annum attracting a subsidy of £63m per annum

Furthermore it would appear that phasing of multiple tidal generation around the coastline of the UK does not appear to provide any degree of levelling of output.

Green Mythology - Tidal Base-load Power in the UK

For that same 1.3 billion capital investment you could easily get the equivalent of 2GW of combined cycle gas fired generation (2016 completed build at Carrington Manchester £500m for 884MW) The only 'subsidy' that carries is that from the UK capacity market auction of around £20/kW/annum, or in the case of Carrington, a 'subsidy' of £17m, with a theoretical output of around 5TWh at 30% load factor. Of course unlie the tidal barrage you need to buy the fuel, but maintenance should be considerably less. Plus at 58% efficient it also produces relatively little CO2, but still way ahead of any nuclear reactor across its entire operation.

"The government certainly did not react to the FITS level of payments early enough, but they knew that more adopters were needed to keep the lights on at the time."

There was absolutely no shortfall in UK generation capacity, indeed as mentioned above UK demand across the year has fallen year on year since 2008, and winter peak demand has similarly fallen. We are now some 10GW down on our all time winter peak demand. Following many years of gas fired builds there was an excess of conventional generation, which enabled lots of plant closures under the Large Combustion Plant Directive before winter margins eventually tightened to breaking point.

Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2005-2012

Digest of UK energy Statistics 2012-Date

National Grid Winter and Summer Outlook Reports 2009 - Date

From the most recent winter outlook report wind turbines are deemed having an assumed availability aka equivalent firm capacity of 21% of nameplate for winter peak planning requirements, coal being 87%, nuclear 84%, Gas 88%, Hydro 86%, open cycle gas plant 94%, and pumped storage 96%. National Grid Winter Outlook Report 2016/17

Take for instance this past winter, with near zero contribution from solar and with 53GW of predicted winter demand, we'd theoretically need 240GW of wind turbines, some sixteen times the current fleet to possibly meet winter demand, and to cover a week of a blocking high with near zero winds, we'd need 7TWh of storage, some 750 times the storage capability of Dinorwig, and we'd also need the means to recharge that storage whilst maintaining supply, so we might need another 120GW of wind turbines.

Or to meet our entire current electricity requirements we'd need less than twenty Hinkley Point C's occupying around 430 acres a piece. (sixteen generating @3200MW, one on standby with three refuelling)

The source of the 430 acres? None other than HMG DECC who published this infographic and then someone, somewhere got very upset when presented with the facts and it was 'removed' Fortunately it was preserved by numerous publications.

Electricity consumption in domestic premises is around 30% of our total national electricity demand. In daylight, in summer it can mostly be met by those with suitable roofs. The reality is many live in high density housing or do not have a suitably sized or oriented roof. and the output rarely meet even local demand.

Our domestic electricity requirements are a fraction of our total domestic reqquirements, and a fraction of the UK's annual energy requirements.

The reality is that solar is not low cost for 'everyone else' The feed in tariff for the earliest adopters (2010/11) of solar panels is now £506.70 / MWh That is for all energy 'generated' regardless of local (personal) usage, plus 50% of that produced is deemed exported and reimbursed at £35.70/MWh regardless of any measured export.

So a total cost of £524.55/MWh, a figure massively subidised by all consumers. Indeed if that rate was reflected in the costs to every consumer we would all be having annual electricity bills of around £4000 per annum even for the lowest consumers. These subsidies for existing installations continue for a couple of decades to come. Unsustainable and a massive subsidy for the already rich by those in energy poverty.

In comparison to this £524.55/MWh Hinkley Point C is priced at around £90/MWh and there are wind turbine projects under construction at £160/MWh and more, see CFD Register While the the current wholesale rate over the past day in the UK is around £31/MWh, with short peaks of £158/MWh and £231/MWh, and retailing across the entire year, all 8760 hours of it, to the domestic consumer at around £100-120 MWh.

But going back to the concept of local solar with local storage, If you factor in a 7kWh Tesla powerwall, with its limited lifespan, you do indeed timeshift your solar towards the 5pm / 6pm peak and may have some for next morning, but realistically only in summer. In winter you have 10% of the daily solar generation you have in summer, so a 4kW solar array producing say 3500kWh/annum will only have a daily output of 2.2kWh per day in December. Your daily consumption will always be in excess of what the panel and battery can provide, typically 10kWh or more per day. Five days generation with zero demand will recharge the battery, that will last 16 hours, for that it costs upwards of £500 per annum for a five year life asset.

Offgrid only works if you seriously compromise on modern devices and have a massive excess of roofspace over the average, or have the 'garden space' to accommodate a large (multi kW) wind turbine, or live on a hillside in a very high rainfall area with the possibility of microhydro. it also helps if space heating is wood fired, a possibility in rural areas but increasingly becoming untenable in urban areas, with smokeless woodburner exemptions being retrospectively rescinded for many existing 'compliant' devices in the years ahead. Extremely high levels of insulation with passive solar gain works too, but with a replacement cycles of around 100 years or more for domestic premises we are a long way from that, plus the current build standard for new property is light years away from what is actually required.

The issue is who pays for this solar / renewable electricity? £500/MWh is unsustainable.

The average homeowner would far sooner spend 10-15k on a kitchen or home entertainment or a new car than spend the same on super insulation, triple glazing and heat recovery ventilation.

Local battery storage can timeshift to some extent in summer but is useless in winter and across 26 million homes would cost around 50 billion pounds. for timeshifting around 21 pence worth of electricity per day per household or less than £400 worth across five years worth of the life of the device. A 50 billion pound spend for around 10 billion pounds worth of possible benefit..

The level of storage for the average property requires in the region of 70kWh to cover a week of domestic consumption in winter. Plus generation to meet storage recharging and the current demand. 4kW solar PV does not come close to meeting those requirements, 40kW might, but we'd then need houses with some fifteen times the current roof area. Gains in efficiency from the current 20% would not come close to meeting that shortfall.

On top of that the space heating requirements need to be met in a decarbonised world, On an annual consumption of 10-12000kWh per annum (3 bed semi typical) a demand of 350-400KWh per week would not be unusual in midwinter. At one time the target of 2050 for gas being used in any domestic properties was mooted.

As ever get the facts, do the maths, and then realise the reality. The sooner we stop mucking about with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries for storage the better.

It's 288MW per unit, with six units, Circa 1728MW for around five hours or 9GWh.

Total pumped storage capability in the entire UK (Dinorwig, Ffestiniog, Cruachan & Foyers) is around 27GWh, with a maximum output of 2.7GW, or less than 10% of demand at this precise moment (just gone midnight with 27.5GW of demand).

Total supply per annum is around 350TWh and decreasing year on year since about 2008 ish.

Total demand per day is around 800GWh at the moment

But:

Most of the coal generation built pre 1970 has gone

All the oil fired generation has gone

All of the Magnox nuclear generation has gone

The AGR nuclear generation will be gone in the period 2023-2030

Gas generation built in the early 1990's has gone or is coming to the end of its viable life.

To attempt to decarbonise and power a modern economy on wind turbines and solar panels is pure madness, as is the idea of tidal barrages, or even dozens of them. Pumped storage would require huge quantities of concrete and the loss of vast areas of upland.

Battery storage is simply not scaleable. For instance one weeks worth of storage for the UK in mid winter is around 7TWh, or one billion Tesla lithium battery powerwalls (rated at 7kWh) or around 40 per household, replaced once every five years or so.

The only viable engineering solution for the UK, with very limited geography for very large scale hydro is at least 90GW of nuclear by 2040 and ultimately around twice that to come even close to full decarbonisation for electricity and space heating. If you factor in road and rail transport with liquid fuel synthesis for air transport fuels and numeorus industrial processes then our entire energy requirements will be in excess of that,  maybe around 250GW 24/7/365 or around 2PWh (2 x 10^15Wh) per annum. To put that inperspective that is around 80 sites the scale of Hinkley Point C.

To rely on market forces to meet our future energy requirements is proving nearly impossible. Private capital needs huge carrots to commit to projects lasting over half a century, with another few centuries of long term waste storage. Some countries like Finland possibly understand this. Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository

To get someone in power to actually understand the issues is impossible. To actually get someone literate in science and engineering into government would be a start. To get long term planning and commitment (20, 50, 100, 500 years) that truly extends beyond the next opinion poll would be even better.

Edited By Martin 100 on 27/04/2017 00:36:55

Must be about six or eight years ago I came across a quite early Myford lathe in the basement of a second hand shop in North Wales. I was browsing for other things entirely with a relative and certainly didn't expect to see a lathe amongst furniture and crockery etc.

Close to zero rust, not tarted up with a slap of paint, identifed later from a few photos I took as possibly an ML4 from the early 1940's, I think it was priced at around 100 quid with a selection of tooling, chucks, faceplate etc Certainly a far more viable machine tool than the one referred to in this thread.

Even the original bullet connectors used by Lucas for a few decades were actually crimped not soldered, with suitable contact grease in the couplers they will last for a considerable length of time in a salt free environment

Soldering on a car is only ever suitable for PCBs and never any flexible wiring. Fast heat soldering guns have long been deprecated for any professional use.

Even performed whilst sat at a well lit bench, with a proper temperature controled soldering iron by a person who has decades of experience you will not produce a joint on a connector used on cars that will have any degree of long term reliability because of wire wicking and the formation of an unsupported transition point that will crack when subjected to vibration.

Crimps are the method of choice in car manufacture not only because of their relatively low cost and speed of assembly but also because of their inherent reliability. The reliability being a huge factor in their very extensive and almost universal use in aircraft in preference to soldering.

A properly crimped joint will very easily outlast the rest of the vehicle, a soldered joint might only have a useful life of a few months.

Spend the money on a properly engineered crimp tool with crimps by a reputable supplier such as TYCO, AMP, MOLEX or Thomas & Betts)

Resist any temptation to buy a cheap crimp tool or cheap crimps from a sweat shop in the far east.

.

Steam at around 1000psi only applies to water cooled reactors such as the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell B (around 69bar and 285 deg C) The CO2 gas cooled AGR reactors in the UK have final steam conditions not too far away from contemporaneous fossil fuelled plant, the limitation not being one of 'meltdown' but very long term degradation of the graphite moderator, so the gas temperatures were maintained at close to those used with the previous generation of UK designed Magnox gas cooled reactors. The Magnox reactors did have lower final steam temperatures and pressures although nowhere near as 'wet' as Sizewell B.

Most coal and previously oil fired generation in the UK built from the 1960's onwards uses a standard of around 166bar and 568 deg C, the AGR's operate at 540 deg C with the same pressure. The UK did however build one large scale supercritical coal fired boiler at Drakelow C that operated at around 240bar and 590 deg C, some half a century before the metallurgy had really caught up

Most of the new build lignite fired plant in Germany constructed from 2007 to around 2015 has been supercritical yet still not without some degree of boiler metal issues.

On the subject of aircraft bolts this incident with a BAC 1-11 windscreen comes to mind

**LINK**

Not as I recall but an updated / reworked version was published in Projects for Your Workshop Vol 1 by Graham Meek and published by TEE Publishing - cost £13.95

Left click and hold and then move the mouse to pan in the required direction

Click on the plus or minus icons on the right hand side to change magnification (or use the mousewheel if fitted)

Zooming out to see the entire planet is possible

Glad to be corrected, I had always thought it was indicated by one, two or three etched dots.

Not that it will directly help you but this is a posting from here with referece to the oddball numbering and dimensions of the Boxford Headstock Bearings I referred to above, with the 'x' being presumably a designator for a metric bearing. Guess it's the kind of thing that only ever appeared in those huge bearing catalogues on real paper with greasy thumb prints that were probably discarded years ago.

One of the headstock bearings on the boxford 3656 lathe was originally a composite of two timken part numbered somewhat similarly to this.

What make lathe is this 100 off special?

If you contribute to FR24 as a data provider from home (using say a raspberry pi plus a USB tv stick) it allows free unlimited 'business' usage of their website with up to three devices acessing simultaneously. I know it works on a laptop on the same account when not at home, and I presume it also works on a mobile either on a browser or through their app.

Legal tender guidelines

"Legal tender has a very narrow and technical meaning in the settlement of debts. It means that a debtor cannot successfully be sued for non-payment if he pays into court in legal tender. It does not mean that any ordinary transaction has to take place in legal tender or only within the amount denominated by the legislation. Both parties are free to agree to accept any form of payment whether legal tender or otherwise according to their wishes. In order to comply with the very strict rules governing an actual legal tender it is necessary, for example, actually to offer the exact amount due because no change can be demanded."

"Administrators were called into LTC in 2012 before Chinese carmaker Geely bought the business the following year."

That somewhat glosses over the problems that took down the original company.

In an effort to cut manufacturing costs they sourced a power steering assembly from China with inherent design issues that caused safety concerns and then stopped production, the total drop off in sales took down the company. The design and intellectual property rights were then picked up for next to nothing by an 'overseas investor.from China'... who was intimately involved in the supply of the faulty steering assemblies.

Edited By Martin 100 on 22/03/2017 16:32:07

No it isn't difficult (many double sided boards with soldered top to bottom links and gold plating for edge connectors were done entirely in our lab) , but it's one hell of a lot easier to fire off the files and get them made in bulk for next to nothing in the far east. The through hole plating, solder masks and silk screens are a bonus. That's not to say you can't get them made here but the last time I did so was in the early 1990's and the manufacturing contact was through a colleague so I've no recollection of what they were called nor if they still exist. PCB design in the early 1980's was taped film, then manually on a BBC Model B and then later with some degree of autorouting on an IBM PC.