Large Scale Heat Pumps

I thought this was quite an interesting article on the BBC News website *** Super Sized Heat Pumps *** An improvement on the Governments ideas about replacing domestic boilers with heat pumps. I was particularly impressed by the proposed use of old mine workings to provide the heat source.

John

That's very interesting. One good thing coming out of the Russian gas "crisis". So simple yet so effective.

The poor journalist has the journalists' usual struggle to get the tech details right about "under pressure the liquid turns to gas". If it works like a conventional fridge system I think that should be under a lower pressure the liquid turns to gas. But only nitpicky old HVAC engineers would ever notice.

There must be a lot of those old coal mines and older tin mines etc full of water that could be used in the same way. Throw a few wind turbines up to power it and away you go.

The more expensive things get the more alternatives become viable

Interesting reading -

Hopper , re wind turbines, in fact regarding all the 'green' power concepts that have the world by the short and curly's...Seems to me wind turbines are another way of putting today's (new) problems on a train headed to the future, problems to be resolved by our kids or their's...

Wind turbine blade life is supposed to be 20-25 years, but stats show that blade lifetime is more like 10 years, taken across the world. Those blades are massive, do not decompose in the elements, are not repurposed/recycled to any tangible extent anywhere - simply landfill for future generations. Current estimates of blade waste is around 50,000 tones in Europe alone. If current 'land-fill' process continue, expect an accumulated blade waste of 40Mton by 2050, with an annual blade waste generation of 2Mton by 2050..

The only present re-use concepts focus on shredding, which is hugely power hungry, and shredder blades are replaced after 4 turbine blades are shredded...Typical shredder blade weigh in at 380kg per blade, 3 blades in a shredder. They weigh less than 100kg when they are replaced - hope they collect that metal dust for re-use..!

The blades first have to be sawn into chunks that can fit the shredder...

Lots of 'innovative' ideas - use them to make roofing ( and fill the gaps how??) , build bridges ( how many bridges can one build??)

Else burn the composite blades, like in Brazil....

The blades are really big - longer than a 747 wing half...And the chord is as wide a 3 to 5 people tall...And each one releases 7 to 10kg of really noxious fumes into the atmosphere in its manufacture while curing.

My rant for the day

Edited By Joseph Noci 1 on 20/03/2022 12:13:09

Another point about wind-turbines...

Do the raw materials for the synthetic-resins in the blades, the lubricants and hydraulic fluid in the machinery, the electrical insulating plastics and the high-grade (epoxy?) paints on the masts; not all come from petroleum derivatives....?

They do, which is why it's important to stop wasting oil by burning it. Oil isn't an unlimited resource that lasts forever. When it runs low there will be serious shortages. About 16% of the world's gas is used to make fertilizers, without which our great grand children will starve.

Joe correctly points out that wind turbines are also polluting and mentions 2 million tons of blade waste per year. Sounds bad, but that's tiny compared with the 32,000 million tons of Carbon Dioxide dumped into the air annually. (Five times more than in 1950)

Green may not be perfect - nothing is - but burning fossil fuels is far worse.

Dave

No doubt that burning oil is worse, but I despise the mentality that approaches fossil fuel eradication by painting any such eradication bright green.

A 3MW turbine blade is typically 50m long, weighs around 12,500kg and costs around $300k to make - lasts 10 to 20 years. 2 million waste blade tons/year - approx 150 blades per year - They don't stack well, and 'land fill' is a misnomer - when dumped they don't fill any holes any where - they are dumped and occupy huge areas of land - mostly in the deserts where they are out view, and its that mentality that then kicks in - out of sight, out of mind...

Each turbine takes around 200 to 250 liters of lube oil, lasting 12 to 18months. Where does that oil go? Refine it and put it in cars? That is around 87 million litres of oil every 2 years from the current world estimate of 350,000 turbines operating.

Electric cars suffer from the same mentality - where do all the hugely increased requirements in copper, lithium and all the really toxic rare earth metals come from? A vast majority of the raw material stem from 3rd world sources. Copper, about 20% from USA, the 77% from Chile and Peru - the latter are so far out of view of the clean green West that the ecological mining disasters developing there are out of the western minds.

Lithium, highly toxic - for all the Green Batteries...Here we must look at reserves versus production - Australia I today the largest Lithium producer - because its reserves are easily extracted. China is about 3rd or 4th in production. But as for reserves, Chile has the worlds largest - in fact, 80% of the world reserves are within Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. And we all know the great ecological track records of these nations. While West looks the other way - as long as in our 1st world cities we can be clean and green.

And what happens when all the Green West's wishes come to fruition - no more petrol or diesel, Car manufacturers not making vehicles with internal combustion engines anymore - what happens to Africa and other 3rd world nations? Namibia is a country with only 2.6m people - when travelling from central Nam to the North, you plan your route according to Fuel stops - distances of 500km to 1500km abound, some fuel stops are 400km apart. 90% of roads are unpaved, 40% REQUIRE of-road vehicles - Central Africa is worse, and it gets worse further North. Food and materials travel by road in these countries. Trains do NOT star. And roads are BAD.

So what happens - The Nambian country and desert becomes a dumping ground for the famous Green Electric car, while it waits for Charging Stations to spring up? Seems they cannot provide enough in the UK for even the few electric cars running about there, let alone in Africa and Namibia.

Or does Africa ( and the Australian outback..) become a permanent receiver of western aid and food packages...

Mind you, failure of road transport in Nam would do wonders for the Desert here - no more idiots tearing up the desert plains, the Lichen fields, etc...One would just not be able to go and see the clean fields either..

Burning oil is not the answer and must go, but the head-in-the ground attitude of eliminating it at all cost is even worse.

A very informative ‘essay’ Joe … thank you for sharing your knowledge

I only wish that Caroline Lucas could be encouraged to engage ‘receive mode’ for a few minutes !

**LINK** : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Lucas

It was painful to watch her on the BBC’s ‘Politics Live’ 21-March, all fired-up with Missionary Zeal.

MichaelG.

I have just heard that local to me a new housing estate of 3,500 houses, is proposed where every house has solar panels for the roof and a heat pump is to be installed in to the closed coal mine beneath to heat the houses. The solar power will provide energy to power the heat pump with a few windmills will be located nearby as alternate power source. The estate is to include two schools, health center and shopping mall etc.

David

Those are big numbers for sure and need to be addressed. But they don't mean much unless we compare them with present coal fired power stations (Which I made a good living helping to construct, including in Hwange, Zimbabwe BTW)

I don't know how the wind turbine and battery waste would compare with the coal plants. Dave already quoted the 32,000 Billion tons of carbon released into the air from smokestacks. Other than that, to compare with wind turbines, one would have to take into account all the same kinds of things: The massive volume of filthy coal ash carted away by trains from the power station and dumped/used I know not where. The making of the massive quantity of steel and concrete in a power station and its 500 foot smoke stacks. And the recycling of that steel and disposal of the concrete. The consumption of water over the 50 year lifespan of the station, the nasty chemicals used to treat such water for boiler and cooling tower use, steam turbine and general machinery lube oil, standby/start-up diesel generator fuel oil and lube oil, emergency power supply batteries, all the fuel burned by the mining equipment that digs the coal and transports it to the station, ie 200 ton dump trucks, scrapers, dozers trains, etc etc. and all their batteries etc. Plus there would be hundreds of tons of plastic in a power station, from heavy wiring insulation, boiler lagging, right down to the smoko room chairs.

To be fair all that needs to be balanced against the stated stats of wind turbines. No idea how that would turn out but the experts who look at such things seem to think the wind turbines are the lesser of the two evils. But certainly you are right that wind turbines etc do not quite have the holy aura granted to them by some idealistic "greenie" types. Nonetheless, they are the way of the future if for no other reason than economics. They are on the verge of putting the coal fired stations out of business in Australia. Wind power and solar are cheap. Big business likes cheap. Big business owns the governments these days. Or at least has "institutionally captured" them. As always, money talks.

Hopper, you are quite right!

I fall foul of my own zeal and fanaticism, losing focus on the size of the 'other' evils!

Still not sure how to go collar our Lions with an electric car...

All human activity on the planet produce about 45 Gigatons of CO2 per annum, the planet naturally produces 750 gigatons of CO2 per annum. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing linearly per annum by a very small amount. All the efforts, COPconferences, and measures taken so far to reduce CO2 have made no difference whatever to the gradual linear rise in CO2. The planet is measurably and visibly greening. When there is a rise in global mean surface temperature, evaporation from the sea increases, and there is also some increase in offgassing of CO2 from the sea. This leads to more rain, and better conditions for plant growth. Plant life increases and absorbs the available CO2.

Phil

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So …

• is the current eco-fanaticism mankind’s self-flagellation ?
• ‘inclusive or’ do we have an inflated sense of self importance ?

MichaelG.

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Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-flagellation

Ref: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.3.0?topic=expressions-logical-boolean-operators

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 24/03/2022 06:31:29

Someone has found a use for wind turbine blades .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR4maEf-eCY

Kinda ironic that an extremely efficient machine is used on (IMHO) a very inefficient machine.

The video is a puff piece by the wind turbine industry, and they have used Danny to 'get the message across'.

Ches

The blunt fact remains that CO2 levels are increasing wherever you choose to put the blame.
this

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11638-climate-myths-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter/

You can choose to claim that it's fossil fuels, or deforestation or decomposition of human corpses but the inevitable truth is that to reduce that increasing CO2 and the potential catastrophes of its increase requires the intervention of man to reduce his impact.

I do feel that my efforts to reduce any sea level rise would be as well attempted baling the Atlantic with a teaspoon in the face of global profligacy and warfare.

It's noted today on the BBC news that since 1900 we've lost orchard land to the size of the Isle of Wight whereas logically by population it should be more than doubled - instead we transport and import because it's beneath our dignity to pick fruit?

pgk

Very carefully, Joseph. Very carefully.

And take a diesel generator with you just in case the battery goes flat!

I have no idea really how the waste from coal powered stations would compare with the waste from wind turbines and solar panels to generate the same amount of megawatts. It might be more, or might be less. One never hears about these things . But it certainly bears thinking about.

Well said Dave.

I'd be delighted if Phil's hypothesis was supported by the evidence, but it's not. Nor does it explain the global effects we are experiencing, or why they are getting worse.

The admittedly complex evidence contradicts Phil's position. The incidence of unusual severe weather events is rising in line with climate science predictions. Nor do the observed facts support the notion that all is well because 'This leads to more rain, and better conditions for plant growth. Plant life increases and absorbs the available CO2.'

Measurement shows the world is warming, causing the polar ice caps to melt, deserts to increase, flooding, droughts, storm damage, and agricultural problems across the world. The rate of warming is increasing in line with climate science predictions. Greenhouse effect explains where the extra heat is coming from and the relationship between heat and movement of mass is basic physics. The mass being moved by solar energy is water and air in massive quantities - we call it 'weather'. The extra heat is causing widespread disruption to weather around the world.  Average weather has changed too - this is climate.

I'm surprised when Engineers aren't aware small additions can make a big difference. Alloys are an example. Pure Iron is almost useless, but a dash of Carbon transforms it into Steel. And a sprinkling of Arsenic on your cornflakes will ruin the day. Carbon Dioxide isn't as harmless as once thought because it turns the whole atmosphere into a blanket.

It's clear that human activity is the root cause. Since the industrial revolution 300 years ago, humanity has released hundreds of millions of years worth of carbon capture back into the atmosphere and the idea it will be recaptured by plant life and the sea hasn't come to pass. The amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air has doubled over the last 250 years and it coincides with humans burning fossil fuels on a gigantic scale.

Houston, we have a problem...

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 24/03/2022 10:56:27