Register eco-stuff about gas and coal

Its all crazy as I heard a guy stating that some coal fired stations are being converted to Gas. It seems to me that its a total shambles and nobody really knows what the plan is or even if there is a plan. All I do know is that as an all electric household I will be really pissed off if lots of power outages come to pass due to the inability of people to plan for the obvious. Brian

On Wednesday 16 October 2013 10:32 Brian Gaff wrote in uk.d-i-y:

There is a plan:

Make it to the next election without getting blamed for anything...

It's madness using gas to generate electricity when we already have a nationwide gas distribution network so it can be used directly by the consumer at the consumer end.

JGH

It isnt nationwide.

I can't use gas from this nationwide distribution network. Because the network doesn't come anywhere near us. To use gas, we have to have it delivered by truck.

Ok, nearly nationwide/most of the population, doesn't counter the argument that gas should be used directly at the consumer end, not converted into heat, then converted into motion, then converted into electricity, then sent along long wires, then converted back into heat again.

JGH

Balderdash! Most of the gas used for generating electricity for uses other than heating. Also 15% of the UK households don't have access to mains gas.

It has always struck me that to use gas in a power station is a "waste" of a finite and precious resource. Gas is ideally suited to use in small domestic size boilers to heat homes. Coal is less suited to small domestic burners and better suited to large scale industrial burners where it might be possible to remove some of the nasties in the exhaust.

Use gas on a massive scale in power stations and you run out sooner that if you "kept it back" for places where it is more convenient.

You can't remove the radon from the exhaust gases though, or the uranium from the coal ash. Wait a minute though ...

Don't forget that in a combined cycle gas turbine you get quite a high thermal efficiency. Maybe one day it will be economic to generate your electricity locally from gas and use the waste heat for heating, but we are not there yet. And given the number of postings we get about gas boilers, you are reducing your diversity unless you keep a mains electricity supply.

You are right about the efficiency of large coal burners, but even "just" removing sulphur is expensive in both capital and running costs. Removing carbon dioxide just sounds daft to me.

I used to take the "X is running out" arguments very seriously 50 years ago. That's why I went into the nuclear power industry in 1970, because oil was going to run out in the mid 80's. Nuclear was going to let us keep cars, at least of restricted range and performance. Coal was going to be the feed-stock of the chemical and plastics industry and obviously too valuable to burn.

You have clearly got a few years on me, when I was at school oil/gas was going to run out about 2000 but we had at least 300/400 years worth of coal under our feet.

On Thursday 17 October 2013 14:01 news wrote in uk.d-i-y:

We still do, but thanks to Thatcher/Scargill having their buggerfest, a lot of it is now considerably harder to get at.