Re: OT: cost of renewables

You condemn climate change, deny that CO2 levels are rising, and oceans are becoming acidic.

This is one instance where you are in the pay of fossil fuel interests.

Some of us have children and rather not risk damaging their future. You appear to have none, so not surprising you choose to be blind to certain scientific facts.

That's a lie. And only in your dreams.

The Natural Philosopher snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid posted

That doesn't show it isn't a useful thing to do, though. If you had sufficiently large solar arrays in heavily insolated areas, might they be able to produce hydrocarbon volumes significant enough to contribute to the solution?

The Sahara desert would be a good place assuming you could keep the panels free from dust, and such a scheme has been proposed in the past. See

What TNP condemns is the creed that the latter is caused by the former.

I don't deny CO2 levels are rising. They most certainly are as the widespread greening of arid areas indicates. I merely observe that the presumed temperature rises are simply not occurring to anything like the amount predicted and are well within natural variation, and that the models are deeply flawed. If any dynamic system contained as much positive feedback as the IPCC models, it would be so unstable that the earths past temperature record could not have existed as it did,

Engineers live and fie with [computer] models of stuff they need to build,

The ocean is broadly alkaline, The Ph is around 8.1. It maybe used to be

You have totally lost your marbles Fred. I am no fan of fossil fuels. They are practically at the end - of life. And the only interest I have is a block of Shell shares which I inherited from my mother which nicely hedge my heating oil bills.

It is precisely because I fear for other peoples children's futures that I am so vocal about the very real - not modelled, not imaginary - dangers of renewable energy.

And the fact that I can see it so clearly is entirely down to a broad training and lifetime practice of building electric circuits and programming computers.

I just happen to have quite coincidentally all the tools necessary to analyse certainly the implications of a renewable grid, and indeed have done so, and the result horrifies me.

All the people with enough technical understanding to do so, come to the same conclusions. We are sleepwalking into an existential crisis, not of temperature rise, but of man made ignorance and greed based on political troughing in the renewable energy trough, and in fact the people who are most likely behind it are the established oil and gas interests of Russia and the middle east.

So much of the green movement was funded by the Soviet union as part of their generalised anti-nuclear agitProp, that is was merely a short step to push in money and their own people and steer it into a nation and continent destroying enterprise.

In short the people who are really in the pay of Big Oil and gas are in fact the greens and the all the acxtivists like XR IB, and the Great Chunderberg.

You only need to look at say Germany, whose 'Energiewende' has in fact not dented their fossil consumption one iota, merely raised their electricity prices and their dependence on Russian gas, just as it was designed to do.

One think that will destroy the value of Russian Saudi and Kuwaiti gas is nuclear power, since the vast majority of gas goes into making electricity or heat, and nuclear power does both of those are very low cost. .

The second thing is fracking. Devalues their reserves massively if other people discover gas and undercut their prices.

Cui Bono? Who benefits from renewable energy and the green activists anti-nuclear anti-fracking idiocy? Russian and Middle Eastern gas does.

Why would they *not* covertly feed money into these organisation? Whilst utilising the Big Lie that renewable energy challenges fossil fuel, as a reason to ensure no one ever cottons on.

It's not a lie.

The problem is that you have comfortable beliefs that are carefully handed to you and designed to make you feel good about yourself whilst any wealth you accumulate is stripped from you ostensibly to support noble causes, but actually to support the lifestyles of Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, and a plethora of extremely rich men who perfectly understandably have in private nothing but contempt for you.

The reality that we are in the grip of such men, and they are not based in UK or even mostly US oil businesses, but else where, and they are not our friends, and they are in fact fighting a resource war, to ensure that when the s*it hits the fan, they own the world, not the people who built it, and they are a bit miffed at Putin for going of in such a half cocked 19th century way.

The climate is not our enemy. Big Oil is not our enemy. The people behind the 'climate change movement' are our enemy. The ones who have turned traditional Marxism through modern mass media and marketing, green washed it, and refined its propaganda and Agitprop to make a highly successful weapon with which to destabilise nations they want to eventually weaken enough to take over.

As I said. Putin jumped the gun, and invaded the wrong nation. He could have had Germany on a plate., He owns it already. But he picked a nation more familiar with his techniques.

The difference between you and me, is that you deal in beliefs, whilst I deal in facts.

People can be controlled via beliefs. Machines and climate cannot, they must be controlled by facts, and that is much harder than wishful thinking.

You can believe all you like about 'Big oil' and 'climate change' and the like. That will dictate how you are fleeced of your wealth. But the climate and the electricity grid run on solid hard facts. You do not make a windmill reliable by choosing to believe that it is, any more than a man who dresses in women's clothes and uses makeup and high heels can transform himself into a woman and rid himself of the hormones that have made his body and mind what they are.

In this context the only real fact you have to offer is that atmospheric CO2 is in fact rising.

There is no material change in weather patterns global temperatures, patterns of ecosystem change ocean alkalinity, that cannot be fully explained by normal natural variations.

The only impact of the CO2 seems to be to promote plant growth.

However the intimate relationship between civilisation and excess energy, and the only rational way to supply that excess energy being from either fossil fuels or nuclear, has led to a geopolitical convenient lie of the greatest magnitude.

Who controls energy, controls civilisation.

What better way to take over the world than by declaring that the energy that supports civilisation represents a clear and present danger to civilisation, and beyond, and therefore must be *centrally controlled*.

Remember, the new Left are in fact the people the old Left warned you about. And a UsefulIdiot? is born every minute

You didn't read my other post where I classified solutions from non working to ecomicially viable.

Of course you could, but it is simply WAY cheaper to use a nuke instead.

The criteria that 'it works ' means nothing in engineering or economic terms.

I can build a car with hexagonal wheels that *works*.

To be worth having, new design has to work better, at lower cost than what went before.

Let's take a really nice green idea - sailing ships, that use no fuel at all. So in order to work, they have to follow the wind, which isn't there all the time, its often somewhere else or in the wrong direction. Then again instead of half a dozen guys loafing around pushing buttons, you need a crew of 200 to take the sails in by hand. Hey. Look. More green jobs!

At their zenith, clipper ships were capable of over 20 knots. And yet they faded from existence when coal powered steam tramps barely capable of 8 knots replaced them. Why? because the steam tramps had a *reliable*

Wind turbines and solar panels are the modern equivalent of sailing ships. They work, but they do not work better or at lower cost than what they are supposed to replace. On the other hand nuclear plants *do* work as well as, and at similar cost - and now with gas prices up, at lower cost - than gas power stations.

The only reason we have renewable energy at all is on account of people lobbying government to make an unprofitable 17th century technology economically profitable in the 21st century.

We cannot afford to do this any longer.

Any energy technology that cannot on its own wholly replace a gas power station needs to be costed in conjunction with, over its full life time, all the extra gear it needs in order to be a relaible and stable power generation source - the backup, the grid stabilisation kit, the extra long grid connections, the mobile gas guzzling service craft needed to access its remote location, the cost of its maintenance in carbon and in money...and the like, and compared with an equivalent nuclear power station.

If it isn't as cheap it's not a solution any one needs, or wants, except those who profit by raping the consumer with government subsidies.

"An engineer is someone who can do for five bob what any damned fool can do for a quid".

You can take a rather large kettle, fill it full of refined uranium and make a flash boiler that would run a car. It would probably kill the driver and run out of water after ten miles, but it would work . As well as a BEV anyway.

Obviously you would have to 'adapt to the technology' by wearing lead clothes. But apparently that is the fashion, these days.

Thank you .

Climate change is the new christening. Imagine the england of Chaucer..

"Twere an biggun wind last nighte" "Aye, it be god's will, and them that fornicate with widow Hawsei do have summat to answer for" "An I here that John the miller is predicting no corne this summerday" "Aye and its all to do with children not being birched enough, God is angry at their impudence, and will cause famine to kill them"

"In the medieval chronicles of Europe, the summer of 1258 was described as unseasonably cold, resulting in poor harvests that were devastated by heavy floods. That summer thousands of people were buried in mass graves in London, possibly a result of the bad weather and the lack of food. "

It were Godde's Wille, and Mortal Sinnes, not 4x4s clanking down chelsea kings road.

"The Great Famine started with bad weather in spring 1315. Crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer harvest in 1317, and Europe did not fully recover until 1322. Crop failures were not the only problem; cattle disease caused sheep and cattle numbers to fall as much as 80 percent. The period was marked by extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, and even cannibalism and infanticide."

"Between 1310 and 1330, northern Europe saw some of the worst and most sustained periods of bad weather in the entire Middle Ages, characterized by severe winters and rainy and cold summers."

It was the end of the Mediaeval Warm period - the one that Michael Mann and the climate cultists erased from the records , when the Scandinvians grew crops in Iceland and wine grapes in Scandinavia,when it was so warm that civilisation blossomed across northern Europe basking in temperatures that the IPCC has decreed will bring an end to civilisation (and of course Polar Bears..) if they were to happen today. A time when glaciers were smaller than at any time since the Roman warm periods and it is likely the Arctic was fully ice free in summer.

These are verifiable FACTS. Not ecobollox projections from simplistic computer models fed with incorrect assumptions, insufficient data and 'adjusted' in a vain attempts to make them match historic data - which they utterly fail to do anyway.

I did, actually, and kept a copy. But I'm not sure you read mine, which was about using solar arrays to synthesise hydrocarbons, whereas the idea you then criticised was using them to generate electricity directly. I don't know whether my suggestion is any good, which is why I phrased it as a question.

Is it easy to use nuclear power to synthesise hydrocarbons?

In a nut-shell.

Probably no harder than to use solar power., In both cases you either have a lot of heat, or a lot of electricity as the starting point. Hydrogen is easy. The world is awash with water, though less so in a 'heavily insolated desert'

The real problem is carbon. There simply are no easy sources of it that are not suitable as fossil or biofuel in their own right. It's such a small percentage of the air and the sea that getting CO2 from there is not very easy, and of course if you get it from say limestone, that becomes just another fossil fuel source.

One very inefficient way is to have massive LED panels and use photosynthesis...algae or similar - to pull CO2 and water out of the air and hydroponic tanks.

Anyway the synthesis of 4.H2O + CO2=>CH4 + 3 O2, is not simple or efficient, but then no one has bothered to attempt it, there being plenty of fossil fuel...petrol and diesel from coal have been done commercially when access to oil was limited (Germany in WWII and S Africa under embargo) . So its an unknown. My guess is it will happen and will in the end be the (expensive) solution for all the places where electricity or nuclear power in a more native form doesn't do the job but methane or avjet or gasoline does. Think fighting a war without diesel....

I suspect that high temperatures and pressures and the right catalyst would allow direct synthesis of hydrocarbons and alcohols from water and carbon dioxide. And that once fossil fuel prices rise to 5-10 times that of nuclear power, that will be the answer to off-grid mobile power.

(interestingly one thing that hasn't been talked about - presumably because it would actually work , is the use of the completely currently pointless rail network to move freight off the roads and on to railways using proper huighh tech automatic freight forwarding. Standard sized packages, bar coded, sorted automatically by the mechanical equivalent of an internet backbone router :

'the next hop destination for a final destination of Little Podlington on Marsh, is in fact Milton Keynes' ...Once at Milton Keynes if the next hop was little Podlington itself, well then onto an automatic driverless BEV for the last 15 miles.

So freight transport could, by converting huge swathes of the motorways to rail tracks, and possibly huge swathes of rural roads to trolley tracks, be electrified.

And its entirely possible that drive on car carrying trains that charge the BEVs could allow a sort of private motoring without IC engines, but there isnt enough lithium cobalt neodymium etc etc in the world to make it a universal solution.

But it could work for freight, and railway extension could work to reduce costs of freight as well.

As always the bugbear is storage that doesn't exist. Right now we have pre existent storage as coal natural gas, oil, uranium and the like, but the machinery to turn these into stuff that works cheaply is really limited to oil and natural gas for transport applications.

Ships can be nuclear powered 0- that works. But not bicycles, Yet.

Iceland be blowed, the Vikings were in *Greenland* from 985 to 1420

HaHa! They have been arguing about a freight exchange scheme near St. Albans for more than 20 years. Railway M1,M25 already there..

Slight problem, that is in despot territory.

There was one at Olympia for many years. It was a Motorrail terminal. This is why if you alight at Olympia from London Overground the platforms are absurdly long for normal commuter usage.

But the cost-accountants would insist that it is done for

Much easier in fact than using solar arrays, because there is much more energy available and much higher temperatures too and you can have the nukes where the synthesised hydrocarbons will be used.

In fact much easier with nukes because there is much more energy available in one place and much higher temperatures than with a solar array.

No.

That is overstated with crop waste.

But very easy with crop waste.

Or just grow quick growing crops.

Some have, but only on a small scale.

Even better with crop waste or grown crops for the carbon.

That already happens in plenty of countries using standard shipping containers.

But the rail lines don't have anything like that capacity of the road network.

Can't see that being viable myself.

Yeah, we have a million acres to spare for the crops, sure.

Don't need anything special land wise for that sort of crop.