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Joined 2009
Paid Member
Sad joke post of the month.
Jeremy Bowen, taking cover, during bombing in Ukraine.
Although he is not in The Ukraine.
From The BBC.
Jeremy Bowen, taking cover, during bombing in Ukraine.
Although he is not in The Ukraine.
From The BBC.
Member
Joined 2009
Paid Member
Member
Joined 2009
Paid Member
I went camping in Scotland once and the wind destroyed the tent. I don't think they're going to have a problem with wind shortages!
Storage solutions for renewable are expanding. In the UK using old coal mines and sand to. create gravity batteries.
Storage is a problem being solved.
dave
Storage is a problem being solved.
dave
Sorta is. Except they regularly use the plate value for these powering homes figures which implies continuous generation. But it isn't, offshore turbines generate roughly 35% of their plate value over the year, declining during their working lives.
So even with the wind farm they'll still have to fire up gas turbines to deal with calm days. Until we carpet several hundred acres with storage batteries.
This is all shaping up to be something of a disaster there's so much to do and people in power don't want to talk about it in case they frighten the proletariat.
We do not have enough raw material sources like lithium or rare earth metals to do without fossile fuels.
The problem is that often these solutions aren't shown to be deployable at scale or, use a significant portion of the energy being generated in the act of storing it.
We'll have to deploy enough storage to supply several days gwh and then generating capacity to both supply national demand and regenerate storage.
I don't see how we're going to meet those ambitious targets our politicians have been setting.
You have no control over the price of gas, is that reliable? Do you think fracking can continue forever?
You can have your own solar and battery storage. Microgrids are the future.
The main issue with lithium and rare earths is that they're not concentrated and you have to dig a lot to get a little.
Environmentally they can be a disaster. Open cast mines, lots of water, lots of waste product to dispose of.
Lithium is often extracted from brines, there are old mines in Cornwall UK that may pumped because the water in them has enough lithium to make it viable.
There's a country in South America (forgotten which) with a large salt flats and the water below the flats is rich in lithium. But extraction is already causing environmental problems and dissent with locals.
As a matter of fact I lived offgrid for the last 10 months, but decided to get back on the power grid and natural gas grid because of the constraints of living and comfort when there is no sunlight or wind... it is a nice dream for most but not scalable to a whole population due to resource constraints -one needs 1000x the present lithium mining just to replace gas cars with lithium cars. Let alone the amount of rare earths needed to build huge windfarms...
In my high school days, my dad (Gulf Oil Canada top engineer), told me about all of the petroleum products in the shale, how it was very difficult to extract and would have significnt side effects, one of the most glaring, but likely not the most deadly one, but now there are scores of small earthquakes in places they never happened before and they are really pushing the frackng.
We are in an existential manmade crisis.
dave
Yes, people in Oklahoma are totally freaking out from all the small earthquakes.
All crisis are man-made. If we weren't here, it wouldn't be a crisis. It would just be.
All crisis are man-made. If we weren't here, it wouldn't be a crisis. It would just be.
Yeah but it's expensive, panels and batteries can run to $25k installed. Also of course it's effectiveness diminishes the further north you go. But yes. If you've got the sun and the money it's not a bad idea. Even in England 🙂