Yet more antics from Labours.

The cost of living in London is high enough as it is, Public Transport fares are going up , WFH has meant less footfall in London so cafe's and shops have fewer customers some will not survive Jobs will be lost, the Tube and Train Strikes has the same effect, I can see fewer people using to Train from the Home Counties to get to work, Jobs lost on the railways etc

See2, you did ask, lol. 

The thing I was trying to get to was the actual energy gained.

I have a small solar powered 12v battery trickle charger, bought from Maplin’s in Cardiff for about seven quid and used to keep the battery of my Vauxhall topped up when standing for days in a clients car park. I now use it to charge two small motorcycle batteries which power a windscreen washer pump bought originally for a mini I owned in the 1970s that now pumps rainwater from water butts making a spray mist in my greenhouse.

It’s 100% recycled tech apart from the ‘windscreen washer pipe’ that came from an aquarium shop that I punched tiny holes in to make the spray.

It’s a neat way to keep the greenhouse crops watered but scaling up would be prohibitively expensive

The point of that calculation which I really do hope I didn’t fuck up is to show that really the amount of useful energy we would gain from such a piece of kit would barely be worth it.

Unless a war or Armageddon took out the grid of course. Then digging a hole to collect the shit that would go down the sewer and letting it ferment and collecting and pressurising the methane so generated would become viable. But the short chain fatty acids given off by the digester microbes would mean the smell would repel even the most determined burglar

It’s one of those tiny windscreen washer pumps which going flat out with no real resistance emptied a two pint windscreen washer reservoir on a mini in about a minute, maybe two when I fucked up the installation and got utterly soaked.

In its current form it pumps a mist out of the last four metres of an eight metre long tube about 5mm diameter and has completely empty a rainwater butt if left on all afternoon.

I generally let it go for about 15 - 20 minutes during which time it mists the 8x6 greenhouse with about two watering can fills. So I’d say what’s that one and a half to two gallons. The whole idea is it puts a fine spray mist on whatever I’m growing rather than flooding the trays …

The tomatoes and chilli peppers loved it.

Well, I did say amongst my past skills lay a spell at the dept of mechanical engineering and energy studies.

That tidal range was the maximum, of course, available one or two days in the year. As a diver I know the tide varies depending on the relative positions of the sun and the moon, sorry if I’m teaching grandma to suck eggs here but to take real world examples at Swansea which I pick because it’s where the academics thought the tidal flow lagoon might work…

the next spring tide with the highest range occurs on the 25th Jan with a high tide of 9.87m at 8.54 am and a low tide seven hours ten min later of 0.65m. So that’s 9.22 metres in seven hours.

The NEAP tide, with the lowest range, which occurred on the 16th Jan had a high at exactly 00.00 on 16/1 of 7.34m and six hours later the low tide was 2.98m so the range there was only 4.36m in six hours.

Those numbers mean a one kilogram weight would provide 90.448 Joules at the highest range, over seven hours, 12.92 joules per hour, and 42.78joules at worst over six hours, 7.13joules per hour

The problem with a large weight such as the fully laden freighter is the shear forces that would be applied to whatever mechanical device translated that vertical travel into useful work. I’m not sure what I would use but in a post apocalyptic world where I could shoot the town planners I’d go for the sort of mechanical gearing found on windmills to and possibly an Archimedean screw pumping sea water to an elevated lake from which we could build hydroelectric turbines for electricity.

I hate to think of the energy losses through friction though.

Again, the concept of free energy sounds compelling but Tony Benn once talked of electricity to cheap to meter and look where that got him.

Rapidtables convers joules to watts …

www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/Joule_to_Watt_Calculator.html

The lowest figure above, 7.13 joules in 3600 seconds is 0.0019 WATTS

A Google search for wind turbine power output claims the average onshore unit produces 2.5-3 MILLION watts.

Let’s assume the wind blows only one hour in ten and then only blows at a tenth of the required strength to deliver the full turbine output. That’s a total of 25,000 watts.

If one kilogram delivered 0.0019 watts and friction stole a quarter of that, 1000 kilograms or one tonne would deliver 1.9 x 0.75 or 1.42 watts. So yeah, the fully laden KOBAYASHI MARU would give you over three times that.

But I’m not a naval architect and the one I had on speed dial died of bone cancer thanks to not being able to find treatment in the thick of the pandemic. I would have been interested to hear his views on the cost of construction of a vessel - in the sense of a hull hulk - capable of withstanding permanent mooring fully laden, and his views on a fulcrum conversion device. The engineers I worked with at my last job might have some ideas on that last point, but I’m beginning to think the cost would be prohibitively expensive compared to a wind turbine.


But it’s good to kick ideas like these around. After all, a few hundred people continued to walk the earth thanks to me coming up with the idea of injecting them with an extract of bulls naughty bits and the list of people who have collected Ph.D’s from that one idea continues to grow thanks to the funds the drug raised. Shame Maggie threw me out before I could benefit.