Diesel

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Duncan,

Don’t be too hopeful with any politician understanding anything steam powered, or even mechanical.

Many years ago, the EU insisted that ANYthing hot had to be painted yellow.

It took a vast amount of work by the Heritage Railway Association, and a sympathetic Euro MP to prevent every preserved steam loco having to change the original livery to all over yellow.

A lot of I C Engineers believed that lean burn was superior to use of expensive catalysts, but could not prevail.

And then they were expected to reduce particulate emissions by a factor of 10 in just one year!

Easy to make promises for someone else to enact, hence “We are going to be net zero by 2030”

Howard

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

This sounds like another anti EU nonsense story to me. I have 2 gas heaters in my house. They both get hot, they are both painted black.

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

This sounds like another anti EU nonsense story to me. I have 2 gas heaters in my house. They both get hot, they are both painted black.

 

I agree, I couldn’t find any mention of any such regulation when I had a search.

[Howard Lewis]

On Howard Lewis Said:

…

And then they were expected to reduce particulate emissions by a factor of 10 in just one year!

Easy to make promises for someone else to enact, hence “We are going to be net zero by 2030”

Howard

When an old engineer tells you something is impossible using old technology he’s probably right.

Fortunately given humanities need to cope with future challenges, old engineers are often badly out-of-date!  When old engineer tells you something is impossible today, or in the next few decades, he’s likely to be wrong!   His understanding of the art of the possible now is flawed, and he has no idea what’s cooking in Research and Development.

Historically almost all innovations were denounced by the previous generation as impractical, worthless or dangerous.  If the oldsters had been right, humanity would still be pre-industrial.   And we’re not.

Net zero is what the customer wants.   Engineers exist to provide solutions, and the target isn’t impossible.  Not easy to deliver, so better get on with it.  Engineers aren’t surrender monkeys!

Dave

[mgnbukParticipant @mgnbuk]

Net zero is what the customer wants.

Net Zero is something politicians want – the rest of us just have to lump it.

Nigel B.

[MacolmParticipant @macolm]

The difficulty about ‘the art of the possible’ is that it is accompanied by super optimism of government. For example, the first modern wind farm was in California (where else?) in 1978, albeit tiny by modern standards. Nearly half a century later, the Energy Institute ‘Statistical Review of World Energy’ (the gold standard source) shows that wind and solar represent 8.2% of world energy generation. Yet somehow GB is going to be emission free in electricity in six years time, despite no credible plan being presented and with a lack of proven and feasible technologies in critical areas.

By coincidence, we had a second drop today of a leaflet explaining all about power cuts. Could that be related? Shome delushun shurely!

[Jon LawesParticipant @jonlawes51698]

Look at the statistics for how much of the UK Grid total energy is supplied by wind power. It’s far more than 8.2%. Right as I type its over 30% of the uk total demand is being supplied by wind power alone.

https://grid.iamkate.com/

[Jon Lawes]

On Jon Lawes Said:

I agree, I couldn’t find any mention of any such regulation when I had a search.

I suspect that it’s a myth…loosely based on this:

https://www.brady.co.uk/signs/iso-safety-sign-warning-hot-surface-cps-3186123?part-number=235833

MichaelG.

[MacolmParticipant @macolm]

Total UK wind generation (ie electricity only) was 32% over the past year. But the problem is all the other energy needs that do not currently use electricity. Certainly we can mandate heat pumps, electric cars, and hydrogen powered aircraft and ships, but just how much of this can happen within a few years? Will it be affordable? Will we be safe from ‘karbun’ if we do our bit, but the world in general does not?

The difficult bit for a randomly fluctuating resource such as wind is said to be getting much more utilisation than the capacity factor. So watch carefully from now on. Also, presumably the many long lead critical items were somehow ordered several years ago.

[Jon Lawes]

On Jon Lawes Said:

Look at the statistics for how much of the UK Grid total energy is supplied by wind power. It’s far more than 8.2%. Right as I type its over 30% of the uk total demand is being supplied by wind power alone.

https://grid.iamkate.com/

Wind was over 50% at one point late last year. I believe they are still building them so it could get even higher some days.

[Alan JacksonParticipant @alanjackson47790]

“Wind was over 50% at one point late last year. I believe they are still building them so it could get even higher some days.”

That is the basic problem, its intermittent and cannot be relied on. So everything has to be doubled up, is that called saving?

[Jon LawesParticipant @jonlawes51698]

Other countries not pulling their weight is not an excuse for us to not bother. It’s the tragedy of the commons all over again.

[MacolmParticipant @macolm]

“its intermittent” Exactly, what is the plan for times like this ? –

(gas is magenta, nuclear green, wind is dark blue, interconnections to Europe at bottom)

 

[Macolm]

On Macolm Said:

Total UK wind generation (ie electricity only) was 32% over the past year. But the problem is all the other energy needs that do not currently use electricity. Certainly we can mandate heat pumps, electric cars, and hydrogen powered aircraft and ships, but just how much of this can happen within a few years? Will it be affordable? Will we be safe from ‘karbun’ if we do our bit, but the world in general does not?

The difficult bit for a randomly fluctuating resource such as wind is said to be getting much more utilisation than the capacity factor. So watch carefully from now on. Also, presumably the many long lead critical items were somehow ordered several years ago.

Macolm asks if Green will be affordable.  He presumably believes there’s a cheap alternative that’s going to last forever.  Not so, like it or not, fossil fuels are finite AND burning them is changing the climate for the worse.   A double whammy coming home to roost.

Not easy to fix.  Wind fluctuating is an example.   One mitigation is to spread windfarms across the UK so lack of wind in, say, Cornwall is counterbalanced by windier weather further North.   Works moderately well.   At present, though the balance is mostly achieved by shutting down gas turbines whenever renewable energy is available, and bring them back on line when renewables sag.   This saves gas, which remains available for use another day, and reduces the rate at which Carbon Dioxide is added to the atmosphere.  I guess most of understand the value of turning off the central heating on sunny days?  Also possible to store renewable electricity in various ways, such as big batteries and electrolysing Hydrogen, so expect more of them in future.

Of course there’s a lot to be done and there will be winners and losers.   But change on this scale isn’t new.   When cars first appeared, there were no garages and no tarmacked roads.  There were no traffic lights, car-parks, motorways, flyovers, satnavs, insurance, MOTs, or Haynes Manuals.   Cars were unreliable and lacked the flexibility of the horse.  Many objected to the hundreds of thousands of horsy jobs that would go.   Many other examples of the world as we know it today requiring brave forward thinking and large-scale investment.

Sadly, ‘do nothing’ isn’t an option.    Does anyone seriously imagine the world in 2124 will be just like today?  Or even in 25 years?

Dave

[Jon Lawes]

On Jon Lawes Said:

Other countries not pulling their weight is not an excuse for us to not bother. It’s the tragedy of the commons all over again.

Yes I agree. It’s a silly argument, not least because cutting our own emissions results in cleaner air to breath.

[MacolmParticipant @macolm]

“He presumably believes there’s a cheap alternative that’s going to last forever… “

To respond to your points roughly in order, I am quite aware that fossil energy must be wound down, despite the increased energy costs and therefore a reduction in living standards. However, a very likely result of present policies is failure to solve the problem, accompanied by crippling energy price increases.

Spreading wind generation widely over large areas has been evaluated many times, and there is no evidence it makes any useful difference. Here is a graph from 2016 that shows how much averaging may be possible across all of Europe (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Ireland, Denmark, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Czeck Rep, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Cyprus). There seems no prospect of useful benefit.

Bulk storage to make good deficits in renewables would appear to require a scale of things virtually impossible to afford and to resource. The existing pumped storage facilities were a good fit for the short term needs of morning and evening peaks in demand, and remain a useful resource for that. Recently, storage in the UK has been added to address the problem of grid stability due to reduction in synchronous inertia. However, this amounts to only minutes rather than the weeks needed to shore up wind and solar intermittency.

Here is a graph relating to long term storage derived from UK wind from July23 to June24. A horizontal dividing line has been chosen so that the deficits below the line shown in red equate with four times as much shown in cyan above the line. This is what is necessary to compensate for the losses due to hydrogen electrolysis, compression and other storage losses, and the efficiency of combined cycle gas turbine generation with a varying load. It can be seen easily that months rather than weeks of storage would be necessary. Are there, perchance, alternative more efficient, project ready technologies available?

What has changed is the belief by politicians that magic solutions can be mandated by them and their acolytes, rather than painstakingly developed using the traditional engineering method. But there is an affordable technology that has been proven to be cost effective and safer than the alternatives. That is nuclear power. Now I am not a keen enthusiast of nuclear, but the alternatives are worse. It was evident by the 1990s that wind and solar would prove deficient at scale, and so it has proved. If ‘net zero’ is essential, we have indeed wasted half a century (and counting) in putting in place the only enabling technology so far shown to be feasible.

 

[Paul KempParticipant @paulkemp46892]

Malcolm,

You are pursuing a lost cause I am afraid.  In the perfect world of Dave there is plenty of generating capacity to support the demand of customers transitioning to electricity from other forms of energy, the grid has plenty of capacity to distribute this energy and once everyone has moved from any kind of fossil fuel it will all be as cheap as chips.

Any mention of practical or real world barriers to the process will result in you being labelled as a climate denier irrespective of any acknowledgement that a transition from fossil fuels to alternatives is a good plan.

A quote from one of Dave’s recent posts really made me chuckle.

“Fortunately given humanities need to cope with future challenges, old engineers are often badly out-of-date!  When old engineer tells you something is impossible today, or in the next few decades, he’s likely to be wrong!   His understanding of the art of the possible now is flawed, and he has no idea what’s cooking in Research and Development.”

Not that there is no truth in that statement but Dave obviously sets himself apart and even above the old engineers and even comment from people currently involved with renewable energy and has kept himself intimately current on latest developments to be able to speak with such authority on the subject.

Paul.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Absolutely, when it was decided that electricity produced by nuclear fission might be a good idea they spent 3 years on R&D (remember it hadn’t been done before) and 3 years building. Calder Hall then ran for ~40 years. Nowadays you couldn’t get planning permission in 6 years, and all the budget would be spent on lawyers. Why doesn’t the government just decide that if a site has had a nuclear reactor, replacing it with a new one is a repair and so doesn’t need planning permission. Get some SMRs built, a lot cheaper than the mega stations currently under construction/proposed as they are built in a factory rather than a field, and producing many off to one design saves an awful lot of design /safety case expenditure

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

Absolutely, when it was decided that electricity produced by nuclear fission might be a good idea they spent 3 years on R&D (remember it hadn’t been done before) and 3 years building. Calder Hall then ran for ~40 years. Nowadays you couldn’t get planning permission in 6 years, and all the budget would be spent on lawyers. Why doesn’t the government just decide that if a site has had a nuclear reactor, replacing it with a new one is a repair and so doesn’t need planning permission. Get some SMRs built, a lot cheaper than the mega stations currently under construction/proposed as they are built in a factory rather than a field, and producing many off to one design saves an awful lot of design /safety case expenditure

Yes, Duncan, but like me, you may not have been old enough to remember that, back in those days, the magnox reactors were primarily for production of plutonium for atomic bombs, and electricity generation, for use on the grid, was of secondary importance.🙂

50 or 100 SMRs might be needed for a GigaWatt of power – but the whole lot would not need to be shut down at the same time for replenishment of fuel.

Thorium reactors should be designed and installed – less problems with waste.

Get the renewable plan, for several GW of power from Morocco, started.

Just stop burning fossils as soon as practicable.

Install as much home-produced renewables as possible – as soon as possible.  That is what taxes should be raised for, not for the government of the day pursuing OAPs to pay for their jollies and ‘buying’ votes for their limited doctrine.

[V8EngParticipant @v8eng]

I read an article yesterday that showed burning waste in incinerators to produce electricity is producing close to the amount of pollution as the coal we used to burn!
The story was on the BBC web but I was unable to link that.

Perhaps all we’ve proved with our industrial history is that the Luddite types were right after all.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Only Calder Hall and Chapel Cross were used for bomb grade plutionium, the rest of the Magnox fleet were subject to IAEA inspection. Yes civil reactors produce plutionium, but it is not bomb grade.

We had 11 Magnox stations, with 26 reactors, so building 50-100 SMRs isn’t that big an ask. Their successors, the AGRs have been reliably churning out power for decades. Day and night, windy or flat calm.

Interestingly, on the basis of deaths per terrawatt hour, nuclear is very safe, hydro is poor, people die when dams burst.

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

Only Calder Hall and Chapel Cross were used for bomb grade plutionium, the rest of the Magnox fleet were subject to IAEA inspection. Yes civil reactors produce plutionium, but it is not bomb grade.

Interesting. Presumably the plutonium could be enriched though if required for weapons?

 

[V8Eng]

On V8Eng Said:

I read an article yesterday that showed burning waste in incinerators to produce electricity is producing close to the amount of pollution as the coal we used to burn!
The story was on the BBC web but I was unable to link that.

Perhaps all we’ve proved with our industrial history is that the Luddite types were right after all.

I find it increasingly difficult to believe anything the BBC say these days but I’m sure I saw another reference to this topic somewhere that said something similar.

[Paul Kemp]

On Paul Kemp Said:

Malcolm,

You are pursuing a lost cause I am afraid.  In the perfect world of Dave there is plenty of generating capacity to support the demand of customers transitioning to electricity from other forms of energy, the grid has plenty of capacity to distribute this energy and once everyone has moved from any kind of fossil fuel it will all be as cheap as chips.

Any mention of practical or real world barriers to the process will result in you being labelled as a climate denier irrespective of any acknowledgement that a transition from fossil fuels to alternatives is a good plan.

A quote from one of Dave’s recent posts really made me chuckle.

“Fortunately given humanities need to cope with future challenges, old engineers are often badly out-of-date!  When old engineer tells you something is impossible today, or in the next few decades, he’s likely to be wrong!   His understanding of the art of the possible now is flawed, and he has no idea what’s cooking in Research and Development.”

Not that there is no truth in that statement but Dave obviously sets himself apart and even above the old engineers and even comment from people currently involved with renewable energy and has kept himself intimately current on latest developments to be able to speak with such authority on the subject.

Paul.

Paul makes stuff up to suit his argument!  Very bad Paul, it means you can’t be trusted.   For example I’ve never said anything that justifies this libel:

‘In the perfect world of Dave there is plenty of generating capacity to support the demand of customers transitioning to electricity from other forms of energy, the grid has plenty of capacity to distribute this energy and once everyone has moved from any kind of fossil fuel it will all be as cheap as chips.’

Nonsense – elsewhere on the forum I’ve said the exact opposite.   I do not believe in a perfect world.  There isn’t enough generating capacity, nor is the grid* ready, and, though renewable energy will be cheaper than fossils in the long run, it will cost big money to set up in the first place.    Instead there is a problem than needs fixing.

In this thread I said:  ‘It’s bad news. Oil and gas are within 30 years of becoming a permanent shortage. And at the same time the evidence for Climate Change has grown for 40+ years, whilst nothing to gainsay it has appeared in the same period. Both problems can be tackled, but only if we get on with it. The world is changing whether we like it or not and choosing to disbelieve unpleasant facts never helps.’

Also unjustified is: ‘Dave obviously sets himself apart and even above the old engineers …‘.   Rubbish, I am an old engineer!  What I’m warning against is relying on out-of-date knowledge rather than current best practice and what’s in the pipeline.   Nothing personal.

I don’t mind being challenged provided critics stick to the facts.  Paul breaks that rule by criticising what he imagines I mean rather than what I actually said!   Everything Paul and I have posted on the forum is available if anyone wishes to confirms who said what and when.

I don’t recall Paul offering any answers to the fossil fuel problem.  How about it Paul, what’s your plan?   I hope it’s not “wait until all the old people are dead”, or another assault on my alleged personality!

🙂

Dave

* the distribution part of the grid is OK, the problem is connecting new generators to it, and upgrading the substation to homes part.

 

 

 

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Very difficult, bomb grade is Pu239, the stuff from civil reactors is largely Pu240. The difference is much smaller than between U235 (bomb grade uranium) and U238 (the major component of natural U). Both gaseous diffusion and centrifuge technologies rely on difference in atomic weight.

To make bomb grade Pu you swap out the fuel at much shorter intervals before it has time to go from Pu239 to Pu240

[Author]

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