Indeed, in some underground systems you can clearly see exactly what you say. It could be Paris, Rotterdam - or Glasgow - can't remember which.
They also did it for taxis at some stations - e.g. Edinburgh Waverley. But I think that was for the benefit fo the horses. :-)
Goes some way towards my grand plan that all roads will be downhill. :-)
I don't remember paying to make the coal in the first place, do you?
What an extraordinarily dumb comment...
What an idiot statement
they are not our 10.000 years, the twopence was invested long beore our time
the inheritance is in the bank, its just that it's going to run out one day and the bank charges are rocketing
Wind causes increased heat loss due to draughts, so some wind generation actually stabilises grid consumption to a degree. Naturally those in the industry are keen to go to well above that amount...
NT
Excellent. Personal abuse.
Ian
Won't work in Cornwall - if you walk anywhere you will quickly find that all the roads there run uphill.
I find that when I'm cycling. It's uphill all the way to work, and then it's uphill all the way home again.
And a headwind both ways! It was on Friday.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:
Something that occurred to me years ago, but there's too many nimbys in the British Isles. The time for such grandiose schemes was in the 40s - 70s, before the green bollox started, and yet there's the rub - what more eco-friendly system could there be than windmill-powered pumped storage? But the conservationists won't have it.
My understanding is that you still get 1kW per square metre - but the square metre has to be angled at the sun, so 55 degrees or so, and ideally tracking. I can believe the 110W peak.
But OTOH I bet the efficiency drops with age... so I can also believe your 11 years is optimistic. Especially as you have not factored in the cost of capital.
Andy
Ah yes, that report. I read it last time you posted it. I would remind you that it covers the case where intermittent sources supply no more than 20% of our power needs, and suggests that 5-10% backup would be needed. That's backup of 25-50% of the windmill capacity.
We need to cut our CO2 emissions by far more than the less than 20% this would indicate. Where will you source the 80% of our power from?
Andy
Have a quick google for "atmospheric extinction". Briefly, this is the amount of light from a star, or the sun, that is absorbed by the atmosphere the closer it is to the horizon - compared to at the zenith. (Which is why the sun is v. bright at noon, but dim enough to look at directly at sunset). At our latitude, you lose about 0.5 magnitudes due to the increased amount of air as the sun's angle is lower than in the tropics. Magnitudes are calculated as X log10 (brightness), so for 1000W/m2, log10 (1000) == 3. Knock off 0.5 for the UK latitude comes out as near as dammit to 10 exp 2.5 ~= 300W/m2. Oh dear, even worse than I thought.
Correct on both points. I was only aiming for an approximate figure. But taking all these factors into account makes me think it'll be *decades* to pay for itself, not my original guess of 11 years.
His mind numbing farts, probably.
We don't *need* to do anything.
Well true, but generally one assumes the need to actually stay alive long enough ...
Put a smaller wheel on the front and go downhill on both journeys.
We could easily decide to do bugger all for 500 years. China will produce more CO2 in the next 5 years than the UK did in the last 300. It could take many hundreds of years for a workable solution to this "problem" so why worry about short term knee jerk measures?
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