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Post by steppenwolf on Nov 21, 2023 8:39:32 GMT
The situation is that the govt is trying to get people to ditch natural gas and move to heat pumps. I tend to think that they should have viable production examples of what they want people to replace their boiler with BEFORE making laws to force people to change. I'm sure there are a lot of possible ideas that "may" get round the current problems, but until they're commercially available and affordable I'm simply not interested. And the use of ammonia for reduction catalysts is all fine but it wasn't popular and cars (cost, size) and the lorries that use it are often modified to bypass the technology (because it's cheaper). No thanks.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 21, 2023 11:55:41 GMT
The situation is that the govt is trying to get people to ditch natural gas and move to heat pumps. I tend to think that they should have viable production examples of what they want people to replace their boiler with BEFORE making laws to force people to change. I'm sure there are a lot of possible ideas that "may" get round the current problems, but until they're commercially available and affordable I'm simply not interested. And the use of ammonia for reduction catalysts is all fine but it wasn't popular and cars (cost, size) and the lorries that use it are often modified to bypass the technology (because it's cheaper). No thanks. The problem is ramping production up to a scale where the price of heat pumps makes them a better deal than gas. I was looking at a recent example of a heat pump installation where the chap proved he was getting lower bills with his heat pump than using gas, even though gas is 1/3 of the price. So that is encouraging and also that the modern ones (last 5 years) do not have the icing up problem. So the good news is main of the grumbles are either fixed or caused by the idiots that install them in the UK. The bad news is the capital expenditure, which was not factored in to the claimed saving over gas. For capital expenditure you would have to amortize the costs and for that you need a figure for life expectancy. I think this problem could in part be countered by those new compressors. There is less surface to wear out in the mechanism and I think you could make a material saving in their construction as they are a simpler mechanism. My view is any moving part is trouble, which is why a gas boiler lasts a very long time, although it does need de-coking every now and again.
Regarding the economics of it, any government subsidy will make the unsubsidised price higher, and of course we all pay the unsubsidised price cos the government earn FA for the country and on the contrary draw large salaries (no such thing as free government money). The problems we have are those who provide the products would rather sell them by lying than put the effort in to sell them cheaper by product and manufacturing process development. Where it is easier to cheat there is no advantage of producing the best spec because the liar will always produce a better spec until you get the thing home and find out you have been conned. Finally this country has a real problem manufacturing stuff. I did a direct comparison between an engine assemble plant in China that produces BMWs and a plant in Crewe which assembles Bentley engines. The British Bentley factory had less automation than a factory I was looking at from an old video of a Jaguar factory circa 1960. Our fuckwits are literally going backwards regarding technology. It's all hand made. In the Chinese factory the engine goes along a conveyor into a bay and then about ten different robots simultaneously bolt on a ton of parts. In the UK we seem to be incapable of making anything properly.
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Post by zanygame on Nov 22, 2023 10:25:39 GMT
I know government reports are incredibly tedious to read, so this American chap has condensed the main points in an easy to understand way, plus adding in some relevant points on what other countries are doing. Hydrogen power was looked at by a Cambridge academic who looked at each user application in turn. We also have different types of hydrogen: green, grey and blue. Only hydrogen buses were considered at all feasible, but the problem with them are they are dangerous and can explode. This report comes with numbers as well. The numbers, if true, are pretty conclusive and may surprise some of you. It does not mean zero carbon can not be achieved. It's just telling us to not waste our money on hydrogen when there are better alternatives.
Excellent video Baron. Laying out clearly what we all know. |
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Post by zanygame on Nov 22, 2023 10:34:36 GMT
The situation is that the govt is trying to get people to ditch natural gas and move to heat pumps. I tend to think that they should have viable production examples of what they want people to replace their boiler with BEFORE making laws to force people to change. I'm sure there are a lot of possible ideas that "may" get round the current problems, but until they're commercially available and affordable I'm simply not interested. And the use of ammonia for reduction catalysts is all fine but it wasn't popular and cars (cost, size) and the lorries that use it are often modified to bypass the technology (because it's cheaper). No thanks. One of the things that puzzle me is the costs of supply and fitting quoted. We fitted 3 heat pumps to our home with a separate electric boiler for our water (You could choose a gas boiler for that if you wanted) The 3 heat pumps and electric boiler cost £2070 to buy and install. We like our bedrooms cooler, so to be fair if we wanted them the same temperature as the rest of the house we would need a 4th heat pump so the total would have been around £2,500. It is the stupid insistence that heat pumps must heat your water and supply radiators that makes them so expensive. But retail outlets have used them to blow warm air for decades very successfully. And I promise you mine work very well. A good compromise might be a small direct gas heater for your water and heat pumps for your central heating. The only reason I can see for the governments insistence on the far more expensive (And frankly ugly) giant pipe and radiator system is that someone is getting a bung. |
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Post by zanygame on Nov 22, 2023 10:38:51 GMT
Baron.
Here's one for you to investigate for me (Bit cheeky I know)
Are electric night storage radiators now becoming viable with modern tech telling them when to charge up and night rates of as little as 7.5p per kWh?
Be interesting to see your conclusions.
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Post by Dubdrifter on Jan 31, 2024 14:48:23 GMT
Just listened to a Sabine overview on the feasibility of a Hydrogen future: It makes some good clear precise points … and winds up at the end concluding the British Committee conclusions on H2 were pretty sensible and sound …. …. the video also settles some of the points you guys raised below: … well worth a look … Secondly I think they're a bit hasty in dismissing green hydrogen as a storage medium. It's true that it is highly inefficient (25% as against 75% efficiency of a battery), but the fact remains that we DO need to store electricity from renewable sources and it will NEVER be viable to store it in batteries - too expensive and not environmentally friendly. So what alternative do we have other than green hydrogen. At the moment lots of renewable energy is just being discarded because it's generated at times when no one needs it and we can't store it. So even if green hydrogen is inefficient it's vastly better than just discarding it. It could be viable, but obviously it would need a lot of govt involvement to set up the infrastructure (and modify the grid to accept returned energy) but all of this is do-able. At the moment the govt seems to think that they can force people to buy BEVs and private industry will provide the charging points - but the latest figures for pure electric car sales indicate that sales are falling (especially to private buyers) and private industry is not installing chargers because they're very unprofitable. Thirdly heat pumps are not viable for most of the property in the UK - and they're too noisy and expensive even for those where they could be used. Non starter. I said many years ago that the govt should be devoting more thought to the transition from fossil fuels, but so far they seem to have done basically nothing except make a few daft laws and hope people will comply. It's NOT going to work. Storage is a mutli-level problem. There is storage for a few seconds to deal with any power surges. The things that can deliver the highest power in the shortest time are super capacitors. Next up we have storage on a daily cycle. I think the best contender is the flow battery, but you can reduce the overall amount of storage by time-shifting uses of large amounts of energy. You can charge your cars in the middle of the night when usage is low. You can go and smelt some aluminium when there is cheap electricity. To do this we need an intelligent grid which prices electricity in real time and uses edge computing devices running AI algorithms. Your water heater can go looking on the internet to see the weather for that day and the cost of electricity and decide on how it is going to make best use of cheap electricity to keep your water warm. You can use storage heaters as well. Your heat pump can pump heat into a thermal storage medium in the night to give you the base supply of heat, then you use more expensive electricity to fine tune it to cope with temperature variations. For longer term and short term you use the grid to average out the power production, especially with wind that is very erratic. However for the longest storage of all at the cheapest price I don't think you can beat thermal storage if done on a giant industrial scale. You could store energy from summer to be used in winter if the facility were large enough. These is far cheaper than using batteries, but you are probably looking at only 75% recovery rate. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 31, 2024 14:58:39 GMT
Have you seen this?
This is the world's biggest wind and solar farm, out in the Kubuqi desert and producing 455GW of power.
It is now expected China will exceed its own government carbon targets earlier than they planned to, so peak carbon emissions will now be 2025 rather than 2030. The three reasons for this is it is cheaper than oil and gas, it will deal with China's air pollution problem and it will secure the nation's energy needs, so no yankee can screw them up by blockading ships and god knows what else. When the energy comes from your own land there is nothing the US can do to interfere with it.
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Post by Dubdrifter on Feb 1, 2024 8:41:28 GMT
No I haven’t … thanks for dropping it here.
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Post by jonksy on Feb 1, 2024 9:12:27 GMT
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