Heat Pumps

Pot, meet Kettle.

Neither of you have given any figures at all here.

Andy

Indeed, I learnt that from you

All my calculations are here.

Then you have people like me. I live in an historical artefact - a timber framed thatched cottage. It's Listed so it's not just me that thinks it's nice.

It costs more to maintain, and it's just not possible to install things like double glazing or cavity wall insulation. Thatch incidentally isn't as warm as you might think - I've been in the loft on a windy day, could feel the wind blowing through it.

I feel it is worth preserving things like this (I can tell USians that my house is older than their country :) )

Should I get a discount on my heating oil? I certainly can't install an ASHP!

Andy

I will accommodate the error :-) But it's not there for me:

The requested URL /downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf was not found on this server.

To me, the most important is reliability. If it isn't available when you need it, it isn't reliable. Without large-scale battery storage, solar only works half of the time at best, and windmills don't work when there's no or little wind.

Only nuclear fits that. What are we going to do when the current ones reach the end of their (probably already-extended) life, and haven't built enough to replace them?

It Works For Me (tm).

Tried a different browser - got it now, thanks.

Nuclear does shut down, in an unplanned fashion:

"A report released by the French Court of Auditors highlighted the issues regarding the safety and operation of nuclear power plants because of the increasingly unstable supply of the water necessary for cooling reactors. Drought and low water levels caused some plants to be turned off temporarily last summer. The auditors warned that the 56 existing reactors, as well as the planned ones, must be analyzed in the context of climate extremes such as prolonged droughts and rising water temperatures in rivers."

Just saying...

Thomas Prufer

Isn't that neccessary to ensure it dries out though?

Thatched round houses from our fairly distance past achieved bug/insect control by allowing the smoke from the fire to permeate and then exit though it.

Cork plaster for some insulation????

Climate change results in more unpredictable weather including longer periods without wind :)

Everything fails now and again, but that was a failure of unforeseen circumstances due to climate change; it wasn't the reactor which failed per se. In any case, it would make little difference if the power plant was coal, oil, or gas - all require water cooling. If water cooling becomes a critical issue, it would make sense to locate new reactors by the coast and use seawater cooling.

Solar, by it's nature, fails at least 50% of the time (there's only an average of 12 hours of light a day, and only a fraction of that will provide full output). Wind is more reliable, but even that fails if it's too weak or too strong. Those are effectively inbuilt design faults.

It seems to me that the problem we are facing is not so much with power generation, but with energy storage.

A silly question I've never considered before... how does rain work in a thatched cottage? Is there some kind of underlayment to prevent water penetrating? Or just rely on the thickness of the thatch catching any water? If you can feel the wind blowing through the thatch, presumably water can penetrate too?

Or are you just saying that your loft is ventilated like almost every other loft (which is why people put insulation on the loft floor)? ie it's the ventilation that's leaky, not the thatch?

Theo

As a student, I worked at Portobello (coal fired) Power Station in Edinburgh. The cooling came from sea water.

If you need storage for,say, 2 weeks without wind then you also need a lot of excess generation to supply the normal load plus that required to top up the storage in a timely manner. You just need to look at the data over the last winter period to see how dynamic was the generation by the wind. One day 35% of our demand and on the next day less than 1%. Add the number of complete periods of 5 days or more where wind produced very little, combined with solar also producing bugger all.

Rather than storage why not build a reliable generation source that can meet demand 365 days a year. Long term storage for the Grid doesn't make sense, either practically or financially.

You are quite right concerning the lack of substantiation of figures relating to the energy supply.

For approaching thirty years we have been told that renewables are cheap, yet no figures are produced.

And we’re told, as a justification, that ’the wind always blows somewhere’, but no such claimant ever refers to the Weibull Modulus of wind speed and how that affects the energy output of wind turbines.

And while the UK’s carbon emissions reduce, no-one at all says by how much the global temperature has been affected by that.

But that doesn't help unless near 100% of your wind turbines are always located at the position where the wind is blowing. Perhaps they all could be placed on the back of trucks and moved to the Land's End one day then John O'Groats a day later.

Oh, quite so.

What the enthusiastic supporters of wind power never mention, is that when there is a 3000-mile-wide high pressure area over Europe, wind turbines will have to be located in central Russia and the mid-Atlantic.

I’m sure the enthusiast’s answer to that is that the turbines could produce power while being driven about.