You're rather missing the point! WNA figures suggest that the fuel might run out in as little as 10 years. Long term, that just as insecure a supply as wind is in the short term. If it's strategic security of supply you want, that means carbon-based, most probably coal or gas from shale or coal.
Plenty? Again, this is a myth. There's a little under 400GWyrs' worth of recyclable material in the UK. Over a 60 year plant lifecycle, such as is planned for new nuclear, that's a mere 6.5GW. It's nothing like enough.
And may be others would agree with, I probably would myself, but nuclear isn't going to give you such security; only carbon-based fuels can do that, because they're the only ones for which we have supplies indigenous to the UK.
yes..getting the wind resistance and rolling resistance out has some merit as an idea, but the engineering is..interesting. And in any case we are not short of energy. Plenty of nookie leer stuff around.
What we are short of is OFF GRID energystorage - currently that's a 'tankful of kerosene' or nowt.
I take it there are not even any blue-sky or better ideas for storing large amounts of energy in batteries? [1] I know that JJ says we *must* do this that or the other, but just because we *must* doesn't magically make it so.
[1] By which I mean at least a week @ 1GW. I make that 168,000,000 kWhr.
1) how big such a loco might be
2) its range
3) whether it could pull a train of any size
4) what it would cost
5) how long it would take to charge it up
Post your results here. Otherwise it's just another JJ handwaving exercise.
Now calculate what that is in thousands of tonnes of TNT, and think what happens if you short it..
*flywheels. possible but stupendously dangerous in high energies. Efficient enough though. No one has bnilt one near big enough though
*water up a hill. about 70% efficient, so quite good, but still not nice if the dam gives way. Id rather be next to a nuke than a dam if there is a seismic event. Also needs a lot of water and big hill..
*molten salt. bloody great tank of red hoot salt underground, insulated, and you run a steam turbine off it, so usual steam turbine efficiencies of maybe 30-40%. safe enough unless the water gets in, in which case a mother of all steam explosions.Might get effs up to 60-70% using hot gas instead of water as the working fluid, and running that in a CCGT.
*make fuel. electrolysis of water to hydrogen. Again burning the hydrgen is subject to usual heat engine inefficiencies, 30-40% or 60-70% with advanced and expensive designs. Fuel cells? same applies. either very big and very expensive or not very efficient...
*lithium (air?) batteries. Possible, efficient but as with anything where the energy can come out all of a sardine, bloody dangerous in big piles. Possibly the only technology that will actually make a viable electric car mind you, which is worth a bit BUT that wont solve intermittentcy. say we have a BEV for every house. 20million of em, with
100KW hour batteries. That's probably 2-300 miles range. That will run the country (30GW) for 40 minutes...of no wind.
All these are touted as 'the answer to storage' but none of them realistically are.
and not even necessarily true. It depends on what you mean by 'costs the same'. And what the cost of money is, and what rateyou depreciate the asset at.
If there are no even blue-sky possible solutions to the desire to have
*huge* capacity batteries, what is the point of discussing them. To say we'd like them is just a statement of the bleeding obvious. Do you think people haven't been looking into this for *years*, with no significant progress?
My original blue-sky thinking exercise covered a number of different technologies, any of which may, or may not, be useful approaches. There was not one of them that would be a stand-alone solution on its own, but there were several that might make some sort of contribution. This particular one was an adaptation of an idea of Prof Mackay's. I think it may have some merit, but would require further analytical investigation.
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