Which still doesn't mean that the bottom of the quarry isn't higher than the surrounding land that the trucks are taking it to, with loads being transported up from the quarry to the exit and then back down further than it came up.
That's one way. The point being we have centuries experience of transporting hydrocarbons against a few weeks of grappling with the pixie dust that are renewables.
I suggest you re-read my OP.
There's all-sorts of processes you *can* use for syngas/synfuel, germans did it in the war, fine for no expense spared military use.
But unless we are awash with "spare" electricity, then grabbing CO2 out of the air adding water and turning it into methane looks wasteful, as opposed to a great way of turning electricity into burny chemicals.
When carbon, in whatever form, whether as coal or a hydrocarbon, is oxidised to produce CO2, the reaction is strongly exothermic, i.e. it releases a lot of energy and gets hot. That energy is utilised in assorted heat engines, whether steam turbines or ICE engines, whatever. If you want to reverse the process, converting CO2 back to a hydrocarbon or graphite, whatever, you have to put that energy back in, which is a very energy-expensive business. It would require a huge surplus of electricity to do it, which we don't have and aren't going to have in the foreseeable future, and certainly not ever with renewables. By the time fusion power becomes a reality, if it ever does, it'll all be too late. Either it'll be obvious that CO2 has very little effect on global temperatures and nobody will be interested in it anymore, or we will actually have passed the tipping point (for the nth time!) and the climate will be in thermal run-away.
Until we exit a bit more from the current inter-glacial.
I did say there would be some wastage.
And while hardly "awash" the question remains - and hasn't changed in 3 generations - is how to actually make practical use of "renewables" which are hardly known for their predictability.
Current thinking (see "smart meters" thread) is to abandon all pretence of even trying and to force the market to adapt to the supply. Which even the former USSR would have rejected as a bit too much.
(Similar to the recent suggestions that the solution to fishing woes is for the UK market to completely reinvent itself by getting consumers to be happy with what they are getting).
Slow moving weights. Fast moving salesmen - it's a spivs game with the public paying for it.
I think there?s a big difference between a system imposed upon people without any choice and a system that incentivises shifting power consumption through variable tariffs, appliance remote control etc.
As you?ve pointed out, we don?t really have enough good power storage solutions to balance out the renewables but ceding some control of domestic power consumption could be an easy and relatively cheap way of dealing with some of the issues caused by very high short term peaks in demand.
Tim
they used coal as the starting point. SASOL did it during S African embargo as well
Town gas/water gas/producer gas/co9al gas are all coal-> flammable gas products.
That entirely depends.
Liquid hydrocarbons, given the abundance of atmospheric oxygen, are a great way to store energy.
If the price of fossil fuel exceeds the price of synthetic hydrocarbons due to scarcity of fossil and inevitability of nuclear power, then it makes total sense to fly your planes off them. And use off peak nuclear power to make them
Its all about getting nuclear power down to a sort of 2p a unit cost that it is in fact capable of.
If you rewrote the regulations.
even at 50% efficiency that's 40p a litre for SynJet? :-)
Look I have been over all the solutions many times and the only one that begins to make sense is a mixture of nuclear, (pumped) hydro, and synthetic fuels. Fossil wont last forever, but there's thousands of years of fertile heavy metals out there for nuclear power.
All these other solutions are reworking of mediaeval technology that was abandoned years ago because its crap.
The only new technology is solar panels. But without uber cheap storage its pretty f****ng useless.
I think that what will happen in the next decade is that
- people will realise, but will never admit, that CO2 induced global warming was a marketing scam.
- people will realise, and will admit, that renewable energy is a very expensive way of achieving almost no carbon reductionist at all.
- people will realise that a lot of fossil fuel comes with a Koran and middle eastern immigrants bolted on, and would rather it didn't.
- people will realise that in fact nuclear power is here, works, and could be a lot cheaper if it was deregulated to the point of common sense.
- at some point synthetic fuels will become as cheap as fossil fuels.
Replace "enough good" with "any".
No, that is not the question at all.
That is what they want you to THINK is the question... The real question is 'why, when LCOE of a nuclear grid is *way* cheaper than renewables did we ever subsidise a single renewable at all?
Start from a shit solution and pile on more expensive crap. and claim you are 'creating green jobs'
When were a boy a job was a euphemism for a pile of poo.
and 'green' meant 'gullible'
Ecology was entirely bought ought by commercial and political interests in the mid 1970s. Since then its been a way to justify central government control of the biggest world market. Energy. And subsidise cronies.
well yes. If a lot or electricity goes on heating, then storage of heat
- low grade heat - is simple enough
Storage heaters would have worked if the concrete in them had been ten times the mass.
Or there had been a 100,000 litre tank of warm water under the floor.
That is something you can do in new builds - increase thermal mass and run heating when power is cheap.
But storage of power outside of water up a mountain, if you have te water and et mountain, is simply uneconomic.
it would be cheaper to throw away all intermittent renewables and spend the money on standardised massed produced nukes.
And use off peak surpluses to make synthetic kerosene and diesel
Shame the welsh slate quarries are no longer in bulk production, or you could update the old solution of a horse drawing the empties uphill, and gravity taking everything down laden.
Chris
You really don't have to preach nuclear to me. I'd quite happily see the UK 100% nuclear powered and exporting it to the rest of the world. Especially getting Thorium nailed.
Not if there are enough massive arrays all around the globe, inter- connected with HVDC links. Technically ?possible, politically impossible, and expensive.
Photovoltaic ones certainly.
The ones that can heat water - even on a dull day - always made more sense to me. But of course they lack the scam factor of being able to "sell energy" back to the grid.
Even more fun, use those handy zip-wires that are installed to send the stuff down.
Which is counter to the practice of using less and less material to build houses (see story about new build shit walls I posted ...)
To much of everything is held back by "this is how we've always done it" too. AIUI straw bales can make terrific two storey houses. You can't get more carbon friendly that *growing* a house.
indeed.
yep
massive wall insulation, and a huge thermal store - just a tank of water will do.
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