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Post by bancroft on Jul 30, 2023 12:08:57 GMT
You are typical of the antipathy shown by ungrateful lefties who have no idea, dare I say care, of the sacrifices made by previous generations in order to ensure you have the freedom to gob off. And for your information, Great Britain was not on the winning side. Great Britain was the winning side. For the US WW2 was 1942 to 1945. They caught the second half. Which is better than they did for WW1 which for the US was 1917 to 1918. You can bend over a chair and get your boyfriend to shove your anti Great Britain sentiment where the sun don't shine. If you don't like this country you're welcome to fuck off. 8 What bollocks. Before Japan brought the US directly into the conflict, the U.K. was reduced to having its half US prime minister pleading for help. Britain had lost and half its government was seeking an accommodation with Germany. Without Commonwealth/Empire troops Britain would have sunk long before the US intervened. The trouble with your view of the U.K. and its place in the world today, is that it’s based half on romantic history and half on myth — even if your own military experience is occupying a defeated, but rapidly industrialising Germany, which was using its meagre Marshall Aid wisely, and socking the bejesus out of a few unruly Paddies.. Not quite that simple the in WWII the UK class system meant working class chaps were not given flight training. Germany is at a turning point if they stay under US control their economy will likely shrink and they have been the economic power house of the EU............. |
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Post by Orac on Jul 30, 2023 12:27:53 GMT
Britain's commonwealth was arguably also a significant liability In ww2
The principle reason for her reluctance to enter into conflict with Germany (most knew it was coming) was the 20s-30s realisation that they were defending too much with too little, that the British empire was vulnerable to any major power calling their bluff - ie a break down in the world order.
Playing Britain in Hearts of Iron 2, it is the best (easiest) strategy to recall all overseas assets except north Africa / me / med and let the Japs walk all over Asia and concentrate research resources into anti-sub
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Post by johnofgwent on Aug 11, 2023 12:04:11 GMT
We are still burning things to produce power. There is nothing particularly remarkable and new about electricity - we have had that since the genesis of the IC engine. Not with hydro, tidal, solar, geothermal we are not. Look, think logically about it.
Plan A:
A power station. It is huge, cost a lot of time and money to build, then it also costs a lot to fuel it and the whole thing is very complicated and needs constant servicing and upkeep.
Plan B:
Find a steep southern facing hillside, ideally 30-40 degree incline, dump a load of solar panels on it lying flat and staked down, rigged up to the grid. It's all plug and play, and as the manager you can just bring up a webpage to see how much power you have generated and how much cash has gone into your account for the next 25 years. You may need to clean once in while perhaps, but virtually minimal upkeep.
Suppose capital investment is cheaper for Plan B for an equivalent amount of energy. suppose solar panels become dirt cheap. These are the things we aught to be thinking about.
ok The entry on wikipedia says that Calder Hall, which dad made famous by releasing so much radioactive caesium fallout when it caught fire you can still detect an irishman who was around on the east coast that day with little more than a geiger counter, chucks out 200Megawatts when turned to full non-emergency power … To get 200 megawatts from solar panels would need … (With At best 650 watts per square metre and 30% efficiency) (200,000,000 / 650) x 3.3 square metres of panels Thats just over a MILLION square metres of solar panel. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Aug 11, 2023 13:03:59 GMT
Not with hydro, tidal, solar, geothermal we are not. Look, think logically about it.
Plan A:
A power station. It is huge, cost a lot of time and money to build, then it also costs a lot to fuel it and the whole thing is very complicated and needs constant servicing and upkeep.
Plan B:
Find a steep southern facing hillside, ideally 30-40 degree incline, dump a load of solar panels on it lying flat and staked down, rigged up to the grid. It's all plug and play, and as the manager you can just bring up a webpage to see how much power you have generated and how much cash has gone into your account for the next 25 years. You may need to clean once in while perhaps, but virtually minimal upkeep.
Suppose capital investment is cheaper for Plan B for an equivalent amount of energy. suppose solar panels become dirt cheap. These are the things we aught to be thinking about.
ok The entry on wikipedia says that Calder Hall, which dad made famous by releasing so much radioactive caesium fallout when it caught fire you can still detect an irishman who was around on the east coast that day with little more than a geiger counter, chucks out 200Megawatts when turned to full non-emergency power … To get 200 megawatts from solar panels would need … (With At best 650 watts per square metre and 30% efficiency) (200,000,000 / 650) x 3.3 square metres of panels Thats just over a MILLION square metres of solar panel. A better way to do it is look at the solar radiation in one year at any site you care to mention in the UK. There is a map online.
In the south it is about 1MWh per m^2 per annum.
Solar panels come with an international rating of Wp. The standard material used give an efficiency of 23% under these conditions, so we can simply multiply by .23 and get 230kWh/m^/year.
Now if you look on B2B site for solar panels they are measured in £/$ etc per watt using the same standard, and then you find the one at the lowest cost per Watt, which last time I looked, if you were buying upwards of 100kW you'd be looking at as little as 16p/W. This is about the level the price bottoms out at as you go to higher quantities. You need to add in delivery as well, but it's not too bad if you are shipping whole containers of them.
The other cost is the mounting. Some have systems of mechanical alignment but it appears to be the case that if you just pinned them to a hillside that was at about 40 degrees then you would suffer some loss but it would be cheaper to buy another load of panels to make up the loss than it would be to fit the entire lot to a mechanical tracking system. The second benefit of fixed panels is no moving parts. Imagine the headaches you would have if you had millions of them on unreliable drives.
I do understand you will need a fair bit of land, but if your ideal land is a steep hill then that is very non-ideal for growing crops on, or at least trying to use a tractor on such a slope. It's a case of low hanging fruit. There will be places in the UK the farmers could get very rich by doing this, if only the national grid would give them a date where they will be allowed to dump that much energy into it at that location. This is the reason it is not expanding anything like as fast as it would if the market were free. Scaling up would reach a point where you have too much energy in the grid at sunny times. We may need to export it internationally via HVDC, another scheme being worked on but incomplete. Solar is also zero VAT rated which is helpful too.
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Post by johnofgwent on Aug 11, 2023 14:22:00 GMT
Well, you can look at it any way you like, but the bottom line is, as i know because i was paid to find out, you don't get any more than 600 odd watts of solar energy hitting a square metre of the earth’s surface at 51 degrees north (that’s Cardiff) on the brightest and mist cloudless day in the summer and the best you can hope for in the winter is 400 odd and that happens a lot less often.
Wikipedia has the power output of the well known power stations
The point is you need a hell of a lot of hillside to replace one of our existing nuclear sites. And i fear the cult of Thunberg don't want to make that very public….
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Aug 11, 2023 19:21:31 GMT
Well, you can look at it any way you like, but the bottom line is, as i know because i was paid to find out, you don't get any more than 600 odd watts of solar energy hitting a square metre of the earth’s surface at 51 degrees north (that’s Cardiff) on the brightest and mist cloudless day in the summer and the best you can hope for in the winter is 400 odd and that happens a lot less often. Wikipedia has the power output of the well known power stations The point is you need a hell of a lot of hillside to replace one of our existing nuclear sites. And i fear the cult of Thunberg don't want to make that very public…. It's the integral of the power over time that you are interested in, as per your total energy per year vs what you invested. Run the figure and you will see it makes good economic sense. The map does all the hard work for you. One other point I forgot to mention is the figure there is if you positioned the panels horizontally. You can get better performance as you angle them so the rays are normal to the panel at peak time. A few degrees here or there is no matter. You see why a hill is handy. It is more efficient use of the land. You can farm the sheep on the north face. |
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Post by Pacifico on Aug 11, 2023 21:26:47 GMT
If it made economic sense it wouldn't need subsidising.
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Post by johnofgwent on Aug 11, 2023 21:35:50 GMT
Well, you can look at it any way you like, but the bottom line is, as i know because i was paid to find out, you don't get any more than 600 odd watts of solar energy hitting a square metre of the earth’s surface at 51 degrees north (that’s Cardiff) on the brightest and mist cloudless day in the summer and the best you can hope for in the winter is 400 odd and that happens a lot less often. Wikipedia has the power output of the well known power stations The point is you need a hell of a lot of hillside to replace one of our existing nuclear sites. And i fear the cult of Thunberg don't want to make that very public…. It's the integral of the power over time that you are interested in, as per your total energy per year vs what you invested. Run the figure and you will see it makes good economic sense. The map does all the hard work for you. One other point I forgot to mention is the figure there is if you positioned the panels horizontally. You can get better performance as you angle them so the rays are normal to the panel at peak time. A few degrees here or there is no matter. You see why a hill is handy. It is more efficient use of the land. You can farm the sheep on the north face. Actually, it matters a great deal how the panels are elevated wrt the sun. And it varies from the scilly isles which are at 50 degrees North and receive about 660 watts per square metre at local noon on a totally cloudless day to john o 'groats at 56 or so which quite definitely does not. It was 1979 when i was paid to do all these calculations and i have therefore forgotten more than most buyers of rooftop solar panels think they know. You do realise I paid for my wedding ring, my wife's wedding ring, the honeymoon and quite a large chunk of the electricity gas and phone bills for the first six months of my married life in 1981 from the money i stashed away over about six months May - October 1979 from the SALARY I received from University College Cardiff's Dept of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Studies ? As in, before Greta's dad was old enough to need a condom, I was being paid as a graduate research tech to gather and prepare this data for use by the department.
So look, lets's make it simple. Let's say every square metre of the uk could receive 630 watts all day (which it can't) and that solar panels are 30% efficient (which they are not)
The UK is 243,610,000,000 square metres in area so that makes it 46 Gigawatts.
in 2022 the average instantaneous energy requirement of the UK was ....47 Gigawatts
And from my work back then i KNOW you'd be lucky to actually get 10 and that's assuming we panelled every single square metre
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Aug 11, 2023 22:37:49 GMT
It's the integral of the power over time that you are interested in, as per your total energy per year vs what you invested. Run the figure and you will see it makes good economic sense. The map does all the hard work for you. One other point I forgot to mention is the figure there is if you positioned the panels horizontally. You can get better performance as you angle them so the rays are normal to the panel at peak time. A few degrees here or there is no matter. You see why a hill is handy. It is more efficient use of the land. You can farm the sheep on the north face. Actually, it matters a great deal how the panels are elevated wrt the sun. And it varies from the scilly isles which are at 50 degrees North and receive about 660 watts per square metre at local noon on a totally cloudless day to john o 'groats at 56 or so which quite definitely does not. It was 1979 when i was paid to do all these calculations and i have therefore forgotten more than most buyers of rooftop solar panels think they know. You do realise I paid for my wedding ring, my wife's wedding ring, the honeymoon and quite a large chunk of the electricity gas and phone bills for the first six months of my married life in 1981 from the money i stashed away over about six months May - October 1979 from the SALARY I received from University College Cardiff's Dept of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Studies ? As in, before Greta's dad was old enough to need a condom, I was being paid as a graduate research tech to gather and prepare this data for use by the department.
So look, lets's make it simple. Let's say every square metre of the uk could receive 630 watts all day (which it can't) and that solar panels are 30% efficient (which they are not)
The UK is 243,610,000,000 square metres in area so that makes it 46 Gigawatts.
in 2022 the average instantaneous energy requirement of the UK was ....47 Gigawatts
And from my work back then i KNOW you'd be lucky to actually get 10 and that's assuming we panelled every single square metre
I did the same calculation by taking the total supply and the total land area using the mean radiation and got a figure of I think it was around 1% of the land. Could have been 1/2, could have been 1.5 but it was pretty insignificant. Economically it can work out if the panels are purchased by container load. You can get 300 in a container. What I meant about alignment is it a sine function so on a sine wave , if at the peak and you wander a little + or - then you don't drop by much. The optimum is going to vary per season as well. It seems to me the panels themselves give piss-all output until the sun actually shines. This typically happens only for a few hours in the day so you have them positioned for the middle of that period. The biggest problem of all though is the summer/winter ratio varies by a factor of about 12 from peak to trough. That is also in the middle of the winter where you would be using your heat pump to work at its most inefficient. So there you go, it is not by any means the whole answer, but right now more would see us with cheaper bills. They are still taking the piss in the middle of the summer! |
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Post by johnofgwent on Aug 12, 2023 10:12:19 GMT
Well, you can look at it any way you like, but the bottom line is, as i know because i was paid to find out, you don't get any more than 600 odd watts of solar energy hitting a square metre of the earth’s surface at 51 degrees north (that’s Cardiff) on the brightest and mist cloudless day in the summer and the best you can hope for in the winter is 400 odd and that happens a lot less often. Wikipedia has the power output of the well known power stations The point is you need a hell of a lot of hillside to replace one of our existing nuclear sites. And i fear the cult of Thunberg don't want to make that very public…. It's the integral of the power over time that you are interested in Can i have that in english please. By "integral" i assume you mean "the area under the curve" as per my O Level Additional Maths, Calculus and Statistics from 1974 and subsequent. I downloaded the map. I know what Direct Normal Irradiation (the real term by the way is Insolation) means and according to the map Cardiff receives 2.4 kilowatt hours a day. Well, knowing as I do that the mountains around the city and absorbtion by the atmosphere screw capture for at least an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset, I know this because as per the picture i put up in another thread i was actually paid to actually stand on a rooftop and actually measure it (well, we also datalogged it, and fed the data tapes into the PDP8/11 so i did not have to be there ALL the time) and seeing that my weather station reports local sunrise today as 4:53 and sunset as 19:43 that means about 300-400 watts per square metre at 5:53 rising slowly to 650 (I'm being generous) at local noon falling back to 350-400 at 18:43 that's two quadrilaterals comprising a rectangular 300 watts for 13 hours and chop the two triangles and put them together that's another 330 watts for 6 hours. Total (300 x 13) + (330 x 6) = 3.9 + 1.98 = 4.88 kilowatt hours twice what they suggest but of course this week it has pissed down so again let's be generous and say the forty INCHES of rain cardiff gets a year screws over the ability of sunlight to hit the ground then the claimed figure on the map does indeed come close to the figure i calculated "a la fag packet" in the time honoured way all real engineers calculate things.....
So as i said above, you need to cover every inch of the UK land area in solar panels to get anything remotely like our power needs. Which means i'm really struggling to see how you came up with a figure that we only needed to cover 1 per cent of the land mass to do it.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Aug 12, 2023 11:59:44 GMT
It's the integral of the power over time that you are interested in Can i have that in english please. By "integral" i assume you mean "the area under the curve" as per my O Level Additional Maths, Calculus and Statistics from 1974 and subsequent. I downloaded the map. I know what Direct Normal Irradiation (the real term by the way is Insolation) means and according to the map Cardiff receives 2.4 kilowatt hours a day. Well, knowing as I do that the mountains around the city and absorbtion by the atmosphere screw capture for at least an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset, I know this because as per the picture i put up in another thread i was actually paid to actually stand on a rooftop and actually measure it (well, we also datalogged it, and fed the data tapes into the PDP8/11 so i did not have to be there ALL the time) and seeing that my weather station reports local sunrise today as 4:53 and sunset as 19:43 that means about 300-400 watts per square metre at 5:53 rising slowly to 650 (I'm being generous) at local noon falling back to 350-400 at 18:43 that's two quadrilaterals comprising a rectangular 300 watts for 13 hours and chop the two triangles and put them together that's another 330 watts for 6 hours. Total (300 x 13) + (330 x 6) = 3.9 + 1.98 = 4.88 kilowatt hours twice what they suggest but of course this week it has pissed down so again let's be generous and say the forty INCHES of rain cardiff gets a year screws over the ability of sunlight to hit the ground then the claimed figure on the map does indeed come close to the figure i calculated "a la fag packet" in the time honoured way all real engineers calculate things.....
So as i said above, you need to cover every inch of the UK land area in solar panels to get anything remotely like our power needs. Which means i'm really struggling to see how you came up with a figure that we only needed to cover 1 per cent of the land mass to do it.
Well indeed. I have a digital light meter as well and have been up near the roof. One observation I made was that even when you have direct sunlight, the height in my garden makes a lot of difference. Also the angle was not that critical so you had 20-30 degrees of operation and still get the bulk of your power. The height on the other hand would cause a factor of 2 or more difference.
Anyway, we already know they are economical for domestic supply so it would be wrong to say they would be uneconomic on an industrial scale, indeed quite the opposite. UK proles told me they were paying £2/watt in total. In China you would be paying 16p/Watt for the panels and less than 10p/Watt for the electrics, bearing in mind it is 10p a watt here, where in China the prices are cheaper.
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