The mountioans in hos mind of course.
He thinks we will build and artficial lake 3000 feet in the air to capture rain from an area the size of wales which of course will have to be built up even higher.
Nicely summarised ...
Arfa
They have a natural gas chp in Woking, two large industrial engines and both hot water ( and chilled in summer)and electricity run in under road mains. It seems to be effective however the chief exec is a very imaginative accountant. He also has a hydrogen cell running to heat the municipal pool.
Some stirling based boilers were to be deployed in Manchester by british gas but they pulled out. The boilers had both traditional burners and some sort of hermetically sealed stirling which produced asynchronous ac, this was rectified and inverted to back feed the grid. The conversion to electricity was ~10% when the boiler was running at 10kW as a baseload, any extra heat was from the conventional side.
Back then they cost GBP5k when a conventional boiler was about 700.
There device looks more like a refrigerant cycle which uses the turbine rather than an orifice to expand the vapour and do work.
Organic Rankine cycle has been promoted for ages in the biomass energy world but I know of no successful ones. I thought it more suited to low grade heat, as from concentrators for solar thermal plants. The thing is natural gas produces high grade heat (2000C) and we use it at about 50C so there is scope for cascading devices to make use of the high grade.
Natural gas also emits less CO2 per unit heat than other carbon based fuels which is why there is so much excitement about forcing it from shales.
AJH
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Really? And how much power do these sites provide? A water mill was low-tech, and low maintenance. The village blacksmith could repair it. The alternative was - nothing at all - which is why they made sense when they were put in.
How much power can one of these produce, and what do you propose be done with it?
Another 5% job.
IIRC this company is looking for investment(*), they install the complex= boiler for free and keep the FiTs. This complex boiler becomes yours after five years and thus presumably the maintenance of it. There is likely to be only one company capable of maintaining it, so you can imagine what that price will be. Five years? They don't have much faith =
in the life of their product do they, bear in mind the FiT is 20/25 years.
And what is the efficiency gas -> electricity, 10% so 1kWhr of electric =
consumes 10kWhr of gas at what 5p/kWhr at current prices so is 50p/kWhr =
and you don't even get the 10p/kWhr FiT...
Having looked at how the thing works it doesn't look to me like it's using "waste" heat but tapping of a proportion as an when the boiler is =
running. I'd like to see the gas consumption figures compared against an= A rated boiler running in condensing mode with both producing the same amount of heat for heating/HW, over a range of outputs as most boiler modulate these days.
(*) Note looking for investment not particularly trying to promote anything "green", this is purely to make *them* money.
Not a lot a few hundred watts at most. Not a big head and fairly low flow. Say you have a wheel just ove 3m in dia and thus a 3m head and
17l/sec flow (or a tad over one IBC container full per minute) you get around 300W of electricity...Like Haryy does with his PV. Use it your self but also "sell" it to the grid at 4 times the market price.
Thanks, Dave. I see, a trivial amount of power at a few sites here and there, then. That'll really make a dent in our national energy needs.
(Sorry to hear about your diagnosis, BTW).
So an even better scam from the company's PoV, then. They pay maintenance for 5 years and then get all the FITs with no costs to them at all for 20 years.
No, the punter gets the FITs after the boiler becomes theirs
I think we should leave a bit on the plate for coming generations, rather than greedily gobbing it all ourselves. :)
I was thinking about the Severn barrage scheme that's been proposed multiple times. Building it would stimulate the UK economy. It would provide around 5% of all UK electricity needs for the next 100 years, by which time it would be nicely silted up, thus providing 100's of square miles of new agricultural land. The main thing that seems to be holding it up is that it would disturb some wild-life.
It doesn't need to be justified economically purely on the value of electricity generated. The point is to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment, so some of the money spent will reduce social security payments, etc.
Only if you build a barrage. Another possible way to extract power from the tides are "underwater wind mills". You don't get as much energy but you don't suffer the silting problems that a barrage does. Lagoons are another possibilty, you have big sluices on the downstream side that are normally closed and the water flows out through turbines. When the silt builds up you open the slucies for a few tidal cycles and flush the lagoon of silt.
AKA tidal stream.
you can work it out from the drop - usually 3-4 feet - and the volume of water.
The short answer is a couple of bhp if you are lucky. say 1.5KW. maybe enough to keep a single house going. But not to boil a kettle as well.
10 times the market price..Dave, ten times...
That's a bit low. In fact probably by an order of magnitude, or maybe even two.
Obviously finding enough such rivers to make 40GW might be hard. :/
Andy
I was taking in the context of traditional water wheels.
For the whole thames perhaps.
You can't say that with certainty, there have been case of unexpected beach erosion as a result of breakwaters up the coast. Breakwaters just extract energy like tidal power does.
And kill the wildlife?
The way of the weasel: we know it does not really work but this side effect will make it all worthwhile. For some lobbying special interest maybe, but somewhere someone pays for all this indirection.
I wonder if there will be a term in the contract to prevent you going back after the five years and saying "can I have one of your free boilers please?"
Looks like it, yup.
The best you can hope for is that the total usable energy out is about on par with a modern condenser. However in this case you take some of it in electricity, and they claim your subsidy. They also have you tied in as a dual fuel energy customer for the next five years. In an established industry where "churn" is a major cost for suppliers, then this makes good business sense for them.
Spot on... quite cute really ;-)
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