How so wrong. The government is looking at these to clip the peaks of power usage, as they are generally on at peak demand anyway.
Line electricity is cheap compared to other means, unless you extract all the heat from a generator and exhaust. Not connected and the line is there? How dumb!
You need to extract the heat produced from a generator for DHW and heating purposes, to make it viable.
It's not local to me. Most of the outages affect a few hundred homes. I can only assume they don't care.
No, I wasn't.
My initial comment was along the lines of "me, I'd like..."
It's a possibly interesting upgrade to my non-condensing boiler, and possibly to others in the same position. (unreliable power) I at no time said "everybody should get one".
There were defunct Totems in a couple of Forte (as was) hotels I used to visit to service the boilers. One in the Humber Royal at Grimsby (which IIRC has been scrtapped and removed now) and one in the Crest at North Ferriby which still stood there unused up until about five years ago (my last visit). I think they had both broken down and never been repaired. Forte did eventually get tied up with a contracted heat and power company who installed units at York, Selby Fork and Hull Marina amongst other sites but someone must have been bamboozled at the contracting stage as various hotel staff told me that under the contract the supplier only promised best efforts to keep things up and running whereas if the hotel could not take the heat produced leading to unit shutdown they still had to pay for the electricity which would have been produced if the unit had continued to run. The York hotel actually installed a cooling tower to get rid of the heat in warm weather rather than stop the unit and get charged for nothing. The Selby Fork hotel unit was different in that it used a diesel engine rather than a gas engine. I don't know if the reliability was any better as I left Planned Maintenance Engineering when the units were only about 6 months old and since then of course the Forte hotels organisation has been changed considerably in many ways.
Nit convinced this is a clincher. Losses on a modern invertor are a couple of percent at most and falling fast with the latest trench MOSFETS.
They look at the figures, look at where you are on a map and agree. If you're in a National Park or certain other conservation area (i.e. places where officialdom goes to immense lengths to encourage inhabitants to leave ASAP) they are not allowed to fix the system.
That's half a winter's worth for us.
Interesting to hear of actual installations, how many other things previewed by "Tomorrow's World" have met ignominious ends?
After being involved in installing a 10kVA diesel genset and heat recovery system I was approached by a hotel in scotland that wanted to do the same with their 100kW unit, I never did hear how they got on.
The Lister has run for 5 years at about 40hrs a week now but I have little contact with the people involved now. I am fairly certain we could do better than break even on electricity cost with fuel used if we did it again, equally I am sure we could not beat a boiler plus grid connection were it available, at current electricity and diesel prices.
AJH
It makes most sense where gas is not available, and heating is needed pretty much year-round.
The electricity is pretty much guaranteed to be more expensive than mains, if you'r throwing the heat away.
Hot water maybe but space heating in July?
Well electricity is demanded by the staff each working day, so whilst the unit does have heat recovery it is mostly dumped to a normal engine radiator in summer. So my comment stands, in this case we can generate electricity with a cost in fuel (diesel) which equaled the equivalent grid cost of the electricity were it available. The capital depreciation and operation and maintenance costs were not covered by our best guess at value of heat recovered. In fact there are several little variables which make it not straightforward to value.
Now I suspect diesel has become relatively more expensive than grid electricity.
AJH
As with all these things, maintence and likely life is left out of the equation.
Indeed, on R4 today, discussing heat recovery systems, mention was made of the maintenance costs of a conventional gas heating system, but not that of a heat pump one.
There are places.
Ok, I missed the "were it available" bit.
A big UPS can make this more efficient. If you can run the full output of the generator into charging the UPS, then in hot weather, you only need to run it a fraction of the time.
Then again, there is the annoying issue that batteries aren't free, and don't last forever.
And little mention was made of the fact that it can be hard to get to compete with gas, or actual numbers.
Most/almost all ?
Only thing I ever saw on there that really hit the big time was push-fit plumbing.
Our heating has been kicking in most mornings for the last week or so... This is a bit unusual though.
Mobile phones? Shown in 1971. They did a programme about the firsts they had showed. Quite impressive.
I've tried to do this calculation but foundered on knowing the marginal cost of generating, when we are generating below optimum. I needed the specific fuel consumption at varying levels. Un fortunately I could not (was not funded to) monitor the genset.
Using Chloride lead acid deep cycle battery I calculated a storage cost of 13p per kWhr retrieved, this did not account for the generation cost.
I have just returned from a tour of a new establishment with 2.5MW of chp in 4 (IIRC) gas engines. The building has no need of heat but a constant need for cooling, they run absorbtion chillers, some of the power is needed to test the aerodynamics of a largely carbon device which the engineering drawings said was a 19b ;-). Amazing as were the
16 or so posh things in the production room.AJH
That is an impressive facility, I quite like the approach to the whole site as well. I am always grateful that one of our sales guys is more interested in signing up interesting accounts than lining his pockets :-)
Amazing how many other people felt the need to go to on site meetings there...
In message , IMM writes
"They had showed" ??
Trumped :-)
AJH
In 1971, mobile phones as we know them would be a pipedream. IIRC, you couldn't even get direct connection ones for a car - you had to go through an operator.
The first true mobile I can remember belonged to Simon Reed, brother of Oliver, who did a lot of voice over work. It was a suitcase. Sometime in the '80s.
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