How Much is this Costing Me?

Worldometer does show its info sources. For the UK coal reserves they cite:
Statistical Review of World Energy - British Petroleum

Who am I to suggest BP is anything but unbiased.....

The British Geological Survey www.bgs.ac.uk should be 'unbiased' but most links are payable.
**LINK** links to some accessible info including
**LINK** which is an interesting read with comment about offshore seams as thick as 30 metres.

Use of coal is another matter. For industrial use until there are practical alternatives, one should consider own reserves rather than import. For energy use we do need better than wind and solar.. perhaps looking more at tidal and deep geothermal.

Ebenezer's link is about the possibility of exploiting undersea coal unreachable by conventional means. It's the Syngas process I referred to when I said 'Energy can be recovered from thin seams by setting fire to them and allowing only enough air for a smoulder. Pumped out and cleaned up the resulting gases is rather like original Town Gas. Unfortunately even keen coal fan-boys become NIMBYs on finding their house is to have burning coal underneath!'

I'm not against Syngas in principle because it's a useful way of making petrochemicals and it's low-carbon - mostly Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide. However, it's not a quick fix to the UK's energy needs, nor is it coal that can be burned in a traditional power station.

Extracting and processing Syngas at sea is considerbaly more difficult and expensive than doing the same on land. Injecting enough oxygen into an undersea seam to keep it burning is more than oil-rig technology. Fairly easy to dig or bore a large shaft on land, doing the same in deep water is quite a challenge. Not impossible, but tough work.

I have three problems with simply throwing more fossil fuels on the fire:

• Oil and Gas are diminishing resources - both can be expected to be high cost within 30 years. Three decades is a long time in terms of grandad towing a caravan, but it's not really long enough to make the major infrastructure changes needed to replace oil and gas. Note this is an argument in favour of starting on Syngas now!
• Coal is good for 2 or 3 hundred years, but in the long run it's needed for more important jobs than making energy. An electric car doesn't need fossil fuels for power, but it does for lubricants, insulation, switch-gear, electronics, brakes and tyres.
• The evidence that Climate Change is both real and seriously dangerous has been building steadily for 30 years and - so far - no new evidence has emerged to contradict it. Plenty of people saying they don't believe it, but opinion isn't evidence. Humans need to stop putting Carbon Dioxide and Methane into the atmosphere. As the brakes should have been applied 20 years ago, it's probably already too late to avoid serious consequences in my children's lifetime. The objection is to burning Syngas, not to extracting it.

Dave

Statement in covering letter re house insurance :-

""New Financial Conduct Authority pricing regulations introduced on 1 January 2022 ensure price equality for renewing and new customers. So, while some customers may find their price goes up, the good news is that your price will be the same or lower than anew customer who starts a policy in the same way you did""

Well whip woo, so much for customer loyalty.

Regards Ian.

like the OP I have pondered on the cost of running my workshop. I have looked in to this in more detail recently because the local council has organised a group buy of solar panels and battery storage. I registered my interest in battery storage, I have a 4kW PV array with a diverter that presently provide "free" hot water.

From the limited details I gave to the people running the scheme it seems that I need a 6kWh battery costing ~£5.9K. I'm sure that will rise after the site survey.

Anyone else considering going in to one of these schemes?

For me the figures just do not add up. It will save me about £200 a year, (if I have done my sums correctly!). Assuming battery life is 10 years (ignoring charging/discharging cycles) the system will be nowhere near paying for itself.

The scheme has been vigorously promoted by the council and their partner, independence from the grid in the event of a power outage, one a year on average for me, I can live with that. Saving the planet, I would like to do more but at what cost?

John

Who is the Council's "partner", I wonder...?

It is the fashion these days for organisations to have "partners" - just as as shop staff are suddenly all "colleagues" for no obvious reason - but I do think it is an easy hiding-place for "partnerships" that they don't want enquiring into.

So is the "partner" here, actually the systems' sellers?

More to the point though is that the real capital, installation, maintenance and eventual replacement costs of all these well-meaning schemes are never made too clear.

How do we know if the claimed, notional savings of £x000 over y0 years is calculated, if calculated at all, on real experience from thousands of sales up and down the land?

Or if they are from spurious "average" buyers and "average" homes about as real and relevant to your own case, as the wealthy, fictitious example "families" and "university students" once inhabiting Which? magazine's own leafy suburbia, its finance-complifying articles?

.Frankly, for an average one power-cut a year, you'd probably be better off just buying a caravan generator and battery-pack!

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Years ago, when the grey moss of solar arrays started to grow on leafy-suburban roof-tops, I investigated for my own home. It transpired my roof was too small, not sufficiently South-facing and too shaded for part of the day; to make it viable. Only a few years later I moved home so although I had not envisaged that at the time of enquiry, it would never have recouped more than a fraction of outlay despite the "feed-in" tariff still available at the time. This assessment was agreed by my brother, who worked for a "green energy" firm then, but 400 miles away, so with no financial interest.

(He has installed in their home, near Glasgow, quite an impressive solar electricity and water-heating scheme to his own design, complete with turntable-mounted PV array that tracks the Sun. The circuit-diagram and control panel, in a glass case in the hall, would not look out of place in an oil refinery!)

My home now may be better suited geographically but the money saved by not buying an array - and rebuilding the roof to take it - will go towards the one inescapable cost quite possible for a near-septagenarian before the array has returned anything worthwhile.

Similarly with all this other much-vaunted stuff: air-source heat-pump, battery-electric car, all-electric home, etc..

I think I'll convert my Harrison lathe to treadle-power.....

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My brother also revealed something surprising. Scotland is not usually short of precipitation feeding its myriad streams, so I asked him if his firm was involved in the small-scale, local hydro-power systems catching on in England.

"No", he replied, "It's not worth it. The planning system is so bureaucratic and against it, that you would probably lose all the possible savings in costs, even if they give you the permission."

That was several years ago so things may have changed since, but I'd have thought that one country where the planners would embrace such plant wholeheartedly; with its advantage of coping with long, dark Winters.

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Nigel G2, the council partner is "Solar Together". They seem to have jumped in to bed with a number of councils. looks like this company are facilitators, they will decide on which "reputable" installer will do the work based on the best price for the group buy. They are not the suppliers/installers of the equipment.

When I researched the pros and cons of solar panels I very soon realised that I needed to find reliable sources of information to see if it was worthwhile, turns out it was, that was when the FIT tariff was worth having. I estimated that the panels would pay for themselves, based on FIT payments, in the last quarter of the eighth year, actually happened in the third quarter of that year.

For a battery, finding reliable unbiased information has not been easy. Much of the information seems to come from people with a vested interest. Based on what unbiased information I could find a battery is not for me.at the moment. As you say, too much based on the "spurious average".

Intrigued as to why your roof would need to be rebuilt to support a PV array, not heard that before.

According to the people proposing a metallurgical coal mine in West Cumbria, there is 770 million tons of recoverable coal in the 200 sqkm they have surveyed beneath the Irish Sea. They are putting up private capital, so I don't see why they would exaggerate. This would keep a decent coal fired station going for over 100 years. They don't propose to use it to make electricity, but to make iron. The only other way of making iron appears to need lots of hydrogen, which we don't have, and are unlikely to have in large quantities in the near future as the only way if making green hydrogen involves lots of electricity. Using our own coal to make steel is greener than importing it, you don't have to transport it. If we don't make the iron, someone else will.

John,

I have 4kwh of solar panels, after they were installed I decided to fit batteries to store the unused solar, I have ended up with 12kwh of battery storage and it cost me about the same as you are being quoted (5.9k). You need to shop around, deals vary a lot in price. During June this year, it’s the latest stats that I have, I drew 38 kWh from the grid, that was for the whole month, we are big users of electricity but despite this there were many days during June we were self sufficient for electricity all due to the storage capacity of the batteries. I am so chuffed that I have sorted my solar system to what I configure as the best setup for our needs and all before the really huge increases of electricity prices are set to bite. One very underrated advantage of batteries is that if you opt for an economy 7 tariff then during the winter months you can charge the batteries overnight on cheap rate electricity, in our case currently 18p per unit and then use it during the day when the rate is 36p per unit, a very distinct advantage of batteries. Dave W

This would keep a decent coal fired station going for over 100 years

Is this what we really need? That is so likely to leave your grandchildren, and their children, with a right real catastrophic global climate change mess to try to sort out - if, by then, it were even possible.

It is well known that there are still billions of tons of coal that could be mined - and converted to atmospheric carbon dioxide.  It is about time we (the human race) wised up and reversed these increases in  levels of that gas in our atmosphere - it is the only one we have, in which to survive.

Edited By not done it yet on 12/08/2022 20:26:43

I did point out it was for metallurgical coal, but used the figures to debunk the 'only 2 years supply left' argument

John -

Thankyou for explaining it. So effectively Solar Together is just an agent... presumably adding its agency fees to the cost!. One might have hoped Councils would have Departments capable of doing such shopping around, but perhaps that belongs back in the days of Borough Engineers.

The house is about 100 years old, I think, with quite thin rafters under the slates (no roofing-felt) of a roof not in the best of health! It would probably not take the weight of the array.

' '

Duncan -

I fear the problem here is that the politicians cannot understand the importance of iron, and the basics of iron-making; but worse, are too lazy or snooty to learn.

Some months ago the Cumbria mine question came up in Any Questions. Not one of the panel had any clue why we need the coal. The most they managed was a vague guess in a questioning voice that "coal" is used for making "steel".

For Goodness' sake, this was school Geography and Science lessons material!

Meanwhile the owners of Port Talbot iron-works is appealing for Government help so they can install electric-arc smelting furnaces. I don't know where they are going to find the electricity, or what is their intended reducing-agent, but at least they fighting to continue in business. Fighting against a Government that is strapped for tax-payers' cash besides not knowing how the one metallic element vital for pretty much everything we do, use or own is extracted from its ore.

It is nothing new though. The Swedes and Germans were using electric versions of blast-furnaces 100 years ago, but my reference, an old electrical-engineering book describing them, does not state the reducing-agent. The electrodes themselves perhaps?

Dave, the technology to harvest the Syngas is already there, drilling fracking and gas injection is simple stuff, the infrastructure is there to send the gas ashore too. There are also interesting ideas for generating power offshore and tying into the power lines that have been run in for the wind farms. This would allow the waste to be reinjected into depleted reservoirs.