more renewable troubles. Pass me the extension cable..or an angle grinder?

Swamp forests in the US are being felled to help keep the lights on in the UK:

In NZ we've just approved a new open cast coal mine, if you guys would like some coal.

Oddly enough NZ is the one country that might actually derive small benefits from windpower, because you have so much hydro to co-operate it with.

I was not aware NZ had any coal to speak of?

Great little country. Try to stop socialism from ruining it.

We have plenty of coal, just not got the balls or the investment to use it I suppose. What is really weird is that many many years ago on Tomorrows world they were on about a coal fired power station with minimal emmissions, so what went wrong?

Brian

I used to love TW, especially in the days of the John Dankworth theme tune, but have you ever since seen anything that was on it?

I also liked James Burke's Connections, but that seems to be a collector's item nowadays, and costs a bloody fortune.

Non stick pans and word processors are two that jump immediately to mind but TW seemd to do regular articles on a very early form of renewable energy "Salters Ducks" - whatever happened to them.....

Project failed to secure the next round of research funding with claims that the design was unreliable. Salter argued that it was a prototype and hence wasn't properly production engineered. Then I think he gave up. It did strike me that it was so good at taking energy out of waves that it would have value as a coastal defence with a bit of energy on the side.

Film at the time showed calm water on the land side of the ducks, significant waves out to sea.

Last time I heard, we have enough coal to last at least 1200 years. Yes windpower can make sense in NZ, with 70% hydro power. There's also geothermal power, and I don't know why we don't use tidal power. The tide in a couple of places (Kaipara, Cook) is enough to run the whole country. With earthquakes and active volcanoes, there's nowhere safe to put nuclear power.

Politicians.

JGH

May 4th 1979 ->

SNAFUs. The costs were badly over-estimated and a research grant of several millions allocated to the project never actually got to the research team. Add to that falling oil prices and the project simply faded into the background. The idea has been revived in recent years but ISTR they never completely solved the problem of very rough seas flipping the ducks over.

Colin Bignell

CDs I'm sure there was some other stuff too.

Mobile phone 1979

Digital camera

Compact fluorescents (the original Philips SL18 with a magnetic ballast and starter). Inkjet printers. Probably more if I gave it some more thought...

That was excellent.

We *had* plenty of coal, a few hundreds of years in known workable seams. However, once mines have been abandoned and allowed to flood/collapse, it's unlikely to ever be possible to retrieve it - the costs and risks have become astronomic, because the mines can't ever be made stable enough to work in again.

the problem was the USA had coal for hundreds of years almost on the surface, which they could scrape up in a dragline excavator, and it took less enery and manpower to do that and stick it on a boat than it does to get it out of the ground here.

watt hour for watt hour, we would probably get nore out per unit invested mining British uranium.

UK coal industry was dead on its feet from 1970 onwards, apart from a few pits.

Which is why we started building nukes. Then came cheap North sea gas and high interest rates and the economic arguments for nukes vanished for 30 years.

All these qualitative comments are fluff and bollox.

There is a huge fusion reactor in the sky 93 million miles away capable of putting pout more energy than we know what to do with.

Sadly a tiny fraction arrives here, and an even tinier fraction is usable, and at massively high overall costs. Which is why solar panels are a total waste of time.

It doesn't matter how much coal oil gas uranium or renewable energy we have if we cant use it or it costs a bomb to use it.

Depending on what is discovered, right now fracked gas should be the cheapest way to go for 20 years+ Long enough to build the nukes.

So when it too gets too expensive (NOT 'runs out') we just phase in the nukes in an orderly fashion.

having phased out all uneconomic renewables by 2025, and kept the gas plants instead..

Is that when scargill declared war and caused the run from coal?

Wrong sort of coal. By the 1970s, it was cheaper to ship open cast coal from Australia than it was to get it from British deep mines. However, our coal seams are quite well suited to underground gasification.

Colin Bignell

Aha, from my former Uni's campus... (now demolished!)

That was the pioneering UK version of the technology before we (well post office and the home office) decided there was no value in it, and left it to the likes of Ericsson and Nokia to flog that dead horse ;-))

All ten episodes are on youtube. Watchable. (just)

I put it on my birthday list. I daren't spoil the surprise, since I'll have the real thing soon enough.