One For The Green Brigade.

The truth might hurt them...

"The Truth"....

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The statistics flow back and forth, sometimes towards fossil fuels, sometimes towards renewables. Luckily for the sake of my kids the trend is going more towards renewable sources.

It's a damn sight easier to be a cynic than open minded.

Nature is about give and take, it restores itself in ballance, how it happens we may not like as time rolls on.
So thinking you 100% green with zero consequences is most probably wrong. We as human beings are still going to be concentrators, we take resources from nature to produce our living standard.
For me the difference between the Oil/Coal engergy AND Green Energy, is the OIL/Coal developed with population growth up to 7 Billion plus, while the Green Engergy is let loose on the Globe at 7 Billion plus scale.
The problem is if the Oil/Coal is discarded and the Green Energy which seems wondeful on Digital Paper Projections should fail over medium term time, because its unproven at a scale of 7 Billion plus, we have an Economic pandemic on us, and at 7 Billion I dont want to see that unfold.

The current Oil/Coal was in general neglected over the globe over last 30 years......So it looks bad now. If the basic resources like Water, Electricity, Fuel, Transport, is not cheap, it loads up monetary systems to a point where it exponentially eats into itself and destroys itself from the inside out, no matter how much money you print/create ,depleating resources fast as well.
You can only be as rich as the resources to your disposal.......

Edited By Chris Mate on 09/08/2022 20:25:57

Let’s give the cynics a lifeline. IF the disastrous CO2 levels in the atmosphere are ever controlled and global warming is avoided, those carbon fuels, sequestered around 100-200 million years, ago will still be there if needed. At the rate of usage currently occurring, those fossil fuels will be gone and the Earth will have to put up with the consequences, one way or another.

I attended a lecture on tidal-power schemes, about four years ago. (Sea-floor open turbines using the normal currents, not water stored behind a tidal dam).

It seems this country is an international leader in R&D of that but of course, officially has a fetish for sun and wind only!

More to the point though, the speaker told us briefly of an estimate by BP, whom you would expect to be optimistic not pessimistic, of probable depletion of coal and oil reserves assuming extraction continues.

Its figures were based on present extraction rates and (obviously!) known tapped and awaiting deposits, but finding new ones is becoming harder and costlier:

- Oil: around the middle of this Century.

- Coal: around the end of the Century.

Errr.... then what? The politicians of all parties, Press and campaigners cannot see beyond fuel and electricity generation, so the "what" just does not occur to them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in aspiring to renewable energy, it makes sense on lots of levels but the fact is in terms of transport there is nothing available with equivalent levels of energy density and safety as diesel for some applications. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors with the greenness of certain alternative fuels that may have an overall low global CO2 profile but in reality still have significant emissions at the tailpipe (methanol or ‘green’ methanol in the shipping arena for example).

The plain fact is developing and implementing renewable power requires investment. In the same way as if you lend your money to a bank in return for interest, investors in renewable power have an expectation that not only will they get their money back but they will get back more than they put in. The costs of implementing renewable power are not limited to the hardware that transforms whatever fuel you choose to use but also the cost of complying with existing regulation or in terms of new technology developing new regulation to ensure the alternative fuel provides an equivalent level of safety to that we currently enjoy. Regulators by their nature are conservative in their attitudes and to a degree risk averse (understandable because if you approve a system and it blows up it looks kind of bad!).

So to make the progress that is desired, first we need money from investors being able to demonstrate they will see a return, government subsidy (free money, except it isn’t as all of us pay for it) and a proactive approach from regulators that is enabling whilst maintaining acceptable safety.

The bottom line is renewable energy in whatever form is going to cost all of us more and that is not what we generally want to hear! Look at what the increasing cost of conventional energy is doing right now! I don’t hear anyone saying this is good because it will make renewable energy cheaper in comparison!

Paul.

And these expensive, finicky, unreliable infernal combustion engine motorcars will never take over from the reliable, economical, sensible horse and cart I tells ya.

I thought the internal combustion cars took over from pollution free electric cars for the convenience of refuelling from a select choice of chemist shops, since the supercharger network hadn't been established. Much like our government's modernisation of the London tram and trolley-bus system to diesel buses to save money and make things better. Later they followed up by scrapping huge swathes of the railway system and encouraged public ownership of private motorcars to improve the economy. Along with just-in-time manufacturing and 'Logistics' and further encouragement to buy stuff we have the convenience of nose-to-tail lorries along all road networks to free up the canal system and railways for pleasure journeys. Trust your government's planning...

pgk

There are many ways to generate electricity, how many ways are there to store it?

One source of energy that is constantly ignored is muscle power, we can't even put screws in now without power.

When i first moved to Crewe, many years ago, i was amazed to see the number of pedal cycles in use. the 3 main roads from one side of town to the other were so full of them there was no room for cars, they were riding 4 abrest on all three roads.

The car parks at Rolls-Royce and Crewe railway works each held no more than 20-30 cars and were seldom full. The car park at what is now Bentley is bigger than the rest of the factory and is always full. 90% of the workers live no more than 3 miles from the factory !!!

Just think of all the work that was once done with hand tools that is now done with power tools, that is a lot of electricity charging up that lot.

Dek.

I used to be an optimist but years of disillusionment has made me into a pessimist.

Regards Ian.

Edited By Circlip on 10/08/2022 09:53:45

None. Mechanical, chemical, and thermal just about covers it (if you don’t understand the ‘none’, but mechanical and chemical both need the electrical energy to be transformed to the appropriate storage - and thermal needs to be transformed from some form in the first place.

There are only a few more ways to generate electricity than the above, apart from nuclear energy of either form - and energy from those sources needs to be transformed to a more useable form before electrical generation - and using electromagnetic wave transformation.

All of our now much-depleted ‘fossil’ fuels were formed from sunlight. They were ‘successfully’ sequestered by Mother Earth, all those millions of years ago, which likely allowed life, as we now know it, to develop. After those millions of years of (variable) suitable climatic conditions (for humans to eventually evolve) we have developed clever ways to unsequester all that carbon over just a few centuries of time. Go figure what, and why, the consequences of that action is good for life on the planet.

Pre WW1, cars were powered by steam, electricity and internal combustion engines. They were all equally crap, but for different reasons. Steam was understood and well developed, but wasn't really suited to small, owner/user vehicles. Electric vehicles were easy to use, powerful, quiet and reliable - but the batteries were hopeless and charging opportunities were extremely limited. I/C engines were noisy, dirty, weak, shortlived, expensive and difficult to refuel.

WW1 accelerated I/C engine development so much that after four years, the other two were doomed until electronic control of three phase motors and better batteries appeared at about the same time and made electric cars look feasible again.

And lets not forget that horses were expensive, limited in use and created a huge environmental problem.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 10/08/2022 10:44:26

This scene persisted at works chucking out time until the 1970s at the Cowley car factory, if you were against the flow then the only option was to pull over for a couple of minutes. I actually knew one of the chaps in this horde as he was an electrician when I was an apprentice. He passed away a few years ago after a decently long retirement.

Mike

I am not anti renewables but I am against technology being introduced on a large scare with no thought or provision being made to recycle that technology, before it's introduction.

Lithium will probably run out by 2030 according to some sources. Current recycling of Lithium Ion batteries recovers only the easily recoverable metals, copper, zinc etc. Where the black magnesium, cobalt and lithium mixture goes is anyone's guess.

Yes I know companies are working on this, but one technique involves chemicals, the other involves high temperatures. One then has to ask does the cost to the planet in terms of large chemical disposal and extra energy requirements to run this and the high heat process add-up. I don't think it will.

As the temperatures rise from today, here is another thought. I read recently that 80% or the worlds energy production by 2035 will be used to power Air Conditioning units.

Regards

Gray,

Progress is constantly being made on these things though. Siemens is now making wind turbine blades out of recyclable material instead of having to bury them in land fill sites at end of service life.

We are still at the Model T Ford stage of renewable energy with much improvement yet needed. It will come. But will it come in time? It took over 110 years to get from the Model T to the technological marvels of IC powered cars on today's showroom floors. Renewables have been in serious widespread commercial development for a fraction of that time frame so far.

The Model T Ford brought infernal combustion engine motoring to the masses in 1908. Steam and electric cars were never a serious contender.

Even when I served my time at the Chrysler Australia factory in the 1970s, there were still hundreds of employees -- mostly old boys -- who cycled to and from work from nearby suburbs along conveniently dead-flat roads. The other three thousand drove their cars and a few motorbikes. And yes, you did not want to stand in the roadway when the knock-off siren went. You would be flattened in the stampede.

The bizarre thing is that today we use  labor saving devices to do everything from transport to washing the dishes and pay someone to mow our lawns and clean our swimming pools and even walk the bloody dog, then we pay to go to the gym to get some exercise!

But then again, I wonder how much electricity gets used every day by people posting meandering posts on internet forums or pictures of their lunch on Facebook and their cat on Instagram etc?

Edited By Hopper on 10/08/2022 12:40:00

Edited By Hopper on 10/08/2022 12:41:36

But then again, I wonder how much electricity gets used every day by people posting meandering posts on internet forums or pictures of their lunch on Facebook and their cat on Instagram etc?

While doubtless a significant amount, it is probably very little compared to the monumental waste of resources that is crypto currencies. A little Googling about crypto currencies energy use brought up this :

Based on the number of Bitcoin transactions that took place over a 12 month period, we estimate that the total energy usage to be roughly 123 Terawatt Hours (TWh) or 123 billion kWh.

This means that Bitcoin alone uses more energy than 185 countries and is comparable to the annual energy consumption of Norway.

Add in the enormous quantities of top-of-the-line computer hardware used (and discarded after a short operating life), these operations seem to be very, very environmentally bad all round and produce what exactly ? Nothing of actual value for the vast majority of the population that I can see.

At least Joseph Noci's kitty pics lightened some of our days !

Nigel B.