Electricity Supply

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.

— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005^[73]

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.

— Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008^[74]

World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s

The peak of world oilfield discoveries occurred in the 1960s^[16] at around 55 billion barrels (8.7×10⁹ m³)(Gb)/year.^[75] According to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), the rate of discovery has been falling steadily since. Less than 10 Gb/yr of oil were discovered each year between 2002 and 2007.^[76] According to a 2010 Reuters article, the annual rate of discovery of new fields has remained remarkably constant at 15–20 Gb/yr.^[77]

^{The people who made the above statements were not loonie save the planet beardy weirdies but top people in their fields.}

A major world wide energy crunch is coming, probably around 2030. Unfortuneatly a major world wide food crunch is also coming around the same time.The water crunch is here now in some places and will be spreading world wide maybe around 2030.

I was in Utah earlier this year and filled my fuel tank for 2.27$ a gallon. Why is it so low well the American govrnemnt subsudise the search for oil and the development of new production sources. We are talking billions.

The American leaders know that there is a short term gain for their economy and their popularity at the polls if they keep fuel prices low.

But it can not go on forever.

Sure we can switch to electric cars and trucks but where are the new power stations and what will fuel them?

A back of a fag packet calculation shows we can only generate enough for a small fraction of todays trucks and cars.unless we build a shed load on nuclear power plants like the French.

By 2050 it is pretty clear that supplies of oil and gas will be declining rapidly, this will lead to world wide famine which will hit China and India hardest. Both countries have nuclear weapons.

The fall of civilisation is 4 square meals away

A terrifying prospect, John.

Not only are new reserves harder to find they are also, unsurprisingly, in areas harder physically to exploit.

I wonder if China's massive international investments now, are in advance of these threats?

It won't want nuclear war if it can get what it wants without fighting, because it knows what would happen to it in return; but everything else it is doing points to a very carefully planned strategy for self-preservation with economic development and political influence as part of that strategy. Its leaders may be a bunch of ruthless old die-hard dogmatists, but they are not fools...

Somehow I am glad I am 66 not 16.

Just looked on the internet. Most sites give the energy equivalent for one litre of petrol as 9.1Kwhr. I pay over £5 for a litre of petrol and about 16 pence for a kilowatt hour (ignoring the standing charge). Electricity is clearly cheaper 9.1 x £0.16 = £1.45. (I should explain to the nit pickers among you that the above figures are only approximate). Of course, a large proportion of the petrol price is made up from government imposed taxes. As other people have already pointed out, the government will have to find a way to replace the lost revenue when we all go electric.

From Transpower the NZ grid network owner

**LINK**

" We will see the mainstream commercialisation of distributed solar, electric vehicles and energy management systems. These will start to significantly change the profile of demand and operation of the system with solar and batteries as well as other distributed energy resources enabling load to be partially flattened within a day but also adding additional intermittency. Despite growth in distributed supply, there will also be significant growth in grid energy demand. In the short and medium term we do not expect these batteries and distributed energy resources to be sufficient to flatten the daily or annual load curve, however it has an important potential to shave off peaks and it is critically important that it doesn’t accentuate existing peaks and troughs."

and

"Many of our existing assets will need significant investment in the next couple of decades. The assets of greatest concern are the conductors on some of our key 220 kV lines, many of which are built over urban areas. We need to sequence them carefully to manage our and our contractors’ resources, to avoid volatility in our transmission charges and to ensure sufficient capacity headroom to enable the grid outages required for the work.

Further future opportunities exist. New tools leveraging our data using learning algorithms such as artificial intelligence will increasingly play a role in managing the network as a complement to the distributed energy resources in individual homes and businesses. The increasing storage in the network could eventually create a network with extensive storage in which the grid’s role shifts."

Edited By Doubletop on 10/06/2019 03:54:09

Edited By Doubletop on 10/06/2019 03:55:09

Sorry guys. My last post was a complete load of rubbish. I managed to confuse litres with gallons and got totally the wrong answer. At £1.20ish per litre, the price seems comparable with electricity. That what comes from computering in the middle of the night. Bit about tax is still right I think.

I will now read the latest posts and see how severely I've been reprimanded. By the way I can still remember when a GALLON of petrol did cost £1.20.

Edited By Anthony Knights on 10/06/2019 06:05:36

Regarding the supply of oil, I have vague memories of a TV program in the early 70's which predicted we would already have run out by.now.

How can you possibly claim that £1.20 for a litre of petrol is equivalent to electricity? Electricity can cost from zero to about 16p for one unit, depending on source and taraiff. Mine would cost about 10p.

12 units of electricity could carry me me well over 36 miles. How many miles would you get from one litre of petrol in your car? Energy cost might be equivalent, but do remember that 75% of the petroleum energy is simply lost as heat, either out of the exhaust or via the radiator, etc.

Your vague memory is wrong. Peak oil or reducing output may have been mentioned by a few forward thinking brains. North sea gas was accepted as running out by now, back then. It is still struggling on, but could not supply energy needs of the UK, now. That is for sure. We rely on the Russians for supplies.

.

I still remember my Dad pulling into the local garage [pre 'self-serve' fuelling] and asking for a pound's worth of petrol.

The shocked attendant cried "a motorbike won't hold a pound's worth!" but Dad then explained that his had a five gallon tank.

MichaelG.

Me too, my dad filled up his Ford Anglia for a pound. Of course back then a pound was worth 20 shillings...

Hi, I can remember when My elder brother filled up his car the price of a gallon of petrol was one shilling and nine pence, that's £0.0875 (8.75 pence) in todays money and there was an outcry when it jumped up to one shilling and eleven pence, that's £0.095833 (9.58 pence) a rise of 0.83 pence in todays money. Today that would put the price of petrol at the pump @ about 2 pence per litre.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 10/06/2019 11:14:02

Thrid time trying..very trying

Rolec charge points 32A single or three phase

Let's say 7680watts( assume cos phi near 1)

Assume 80-90 percent conversion in charger and battery

6144 watts

Modern showers worse than that

Tesla model 3---60 kwhr

So that's overnight

All do able

Apart from when everyone is doing it and your kerbside parking is not near your house tonight...not all have drives

And just imagine all those charging leads across the pavement?

The world will adapt.
Lampost chargers now available in some areas so no need for wires across the pavement.

One can speculate re parking meter chargers, all car-parks being required to install systems progressively to all bays. New builds havng to allow for the same. Many EV's can use a simple 32A Commando socket or even 13A (albeit v slow charge rate on latter). If one accepts that city/town cars only need 100mile range for commute, kids to school, shopping then 30KW battery is enough so even at 3A overnight.

Wherever folk park can be converted over time.

I noted today that we now have two sites with 350KW CCS chargers UK - all we need is a vehicle capable of accepting that rate (Porsche have made such a future claim).

It's the car that controls the charge rate.

Any change to full EV will take at least 15yrs with a hyrid mix meantime. By then the dream of genuine autonomy may even have happened and folk just order up a car as needed.....

According to today's news the dangers of tyre and brake particles also significant. I havenlt figured out how they're gonna manage without tyres but regen braking reduces dust markedly.....just those iron rims are going to make for a bumpy ride...we need to train coopers again.

New buildings... The ones that will in future also have to be heated entirely by electricity?

Chargers on lamp-posts would surely mean having to install extra supplies, but they will only be any good to those who can park right by the post, and there are very many areas that not only have on-street parking only but also the street-lamps are a long way apart.

What might usefully happen is the many rural garages forced by commercial and fiscal pressure to stop selling fuel and concentrate on servicing and sales, will find it worthwhile fitting chargers on the former pump-islands. Until the Government slaps corresponding tax rates on vehicle electricity so making this service in turn, uneconomical for small businesses to provide.

The dream of autonomy... Just how many cars, and parked where, will be needed to make it even slightly useful? It might work for the occasional shopping-trip, but not much else.

I think in future, car ownership will revert 100 years to the luxury of the wealthy.

In another 100 years, car ownership may be bygone necessity. Long overtaken by other means of transport or readily available, for all, at the press of a few buttons on whatever the mobile phone metamorphoses into over that period of time.

Forecasting this is a fools errand with many scenarios. The death of the High St is down to Internet shopping and probably as much due to traffic and parking charges. If service stations die away then so be it but BP's plan is to move towards EV charging with cafe and snacks in the short term. It's easy to speculated re other silly things like internet showrooms and a myriad ways of entertaining folk and taking their money while they wait. Taxation will likely be seperate from buying fuel (electricity).

The Tesla dream (which i personally think is pie in the sky) is early autonomy - currently new cars cannot be bought after lease termination.. they are claimed to become part of his new fleet of robotaxis along with any other customer who wishes to put their car onto that fleet when they don't need it themselves and earn revenue. Quite apart from autonomy and auto charging one needs a way of keeping them valetted and stored when unused. 3 yrs is tosh, 5 yrs is a very outside chance, 10 yrs may be doable...

Far from becoming the province of only the wealthy if such a system does occur (eventually) then fewer total cars, car sharing, no need for owning and depreciaing and servicing/insurance etc - could end up cheaper to use a car. Convenience will be a problem rurally but there's lots of cities where car ownership is uncommon and taxis roam everywhere.

Foreacast 100 years and pick your choice between a utopia of fusion power or a skeleton planet after the starvation riots and migrant wars. My head in a jar will tell you i told you so.

Let’s just get cracking on a transporter. Beam me up Scotty.

Mike

My favourite pub topic. As member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and retired electricity distribution engineer, you are pretty on the mark. Apart from the total required generation, the 415volt cables in a street full of electric cars coming on line at the end of a working day would be a disaster ! In the best scenario, the fuses at the local substation would blow, given a very high load or worse, under a more modest overload would cause cables to overheat and fault permanently. In my opinion, the drive for "smart meters" is to enable tariff boosts or, even, disconnection for load sheding to control this.

I would be more than enthusiastic to see all electric vehicles but it requires an astronomical investment in the electriicty infrastructure.

David

I'm with you. A case of "The Emperors Clothes”.

At some point the stakeholders are going to have to wake up and realise that it is time to take this seriously rather than the piecemeal solutions that are being bandied about.

.

Street lighting is being either upgraded to LED, or put 'out of use' in many areas, in the interests of saving energy [*]

At least some element of the required infrastructure therefore already exists.

MichaelG.

.

[*] which appears to be more important than public safety, but let's not digress

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Edit: Admittedly the consumption by a Sodiium lamp is surprisingly small

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 11/06/2019 07:00:14

UK figures show about 30 million cars and around 2 million new cars annually so realistically if all new cars were EV it'd take 15 years for a swap-over. Reality is that even in the most prolific country taking up EV (as a proportion of new cars it's 40% in Norway) you can guesstimate that swap-over to all EV/hybrid is at least 20years away UK.

If the infrastructure changes can't cope then there will be more hybrids as a percentage than pure EV's and over 20years there will be further changes.

Yes it takes some planning just as cabling for the internet, swapping over to 5G etc all do. Even if it ends up taking 30 or 40 years it doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.

The alternative is a superb public transport system but gov is hopeless at bringing in that sort of project.

Even if total automation doesn't work it may be possible to send your car off on it's own to go park-up and charge itself at an out of town facility and come back ready.