Re: And don't work too fast either!
Ah, a classic youthful error, assuming you're the first to think of something and not thinking through what's likely to happen next...
2255 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2018
d - denarii : From the Roman coinage.
As a side note the £ sign is just an L with a cross stroke, the L from Librae and s is Solidii both from the Roman.
Lindbeige is your man here. (about 5 mins into the video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2paSGQRwvo
Edit: Norman beat me to it :)
A very simplified example to illustrate this point -
Your toaster literally gets red hot, all the excess heat radiates away without problem.
Wrap the toaster in a thin blanket*, the heat can't leave quickly enough and eventually... oh dear.
Toaster > Earth / Blanket > global warming.
*Do not try this at home.
Of course the MD knows better than anyone (because he's the MD^) how to do stuff, had the lappy continued to work (out of pure luck*) then his money saving idea would have been extended to everyone else thus proving his superior level of genius.
^Many MDs are expert at 'something', the smart ones know when they've stepped away from that.
*The few Vaio I've seen had very delicate keyboards that fall apart far too easily.
'Correctly sized' is the issue, you'll need to know your normal hour by hour power draw over a year (8,000+ data points) then install the solar+battery to fit.
The problem comes when a family on a tight budget looks at their numbers and finds they'll need double the installation that the single bloke across the road has to get the bill down to the same level.
If the power company decides that batteries are the way forward for load balancing, they can either buy their own battery packs and slap them next to the distribution substations or pay outright for a set to hang off my solar, I'll be happy to let them and I know which one will be cheaper by the mw.
If I decide to install batteries to compliment my solar I'll make sure that come an 'event' my money is keeping my lights on and not subsidising a power companies fubar. As it stands at the moment my solar is useless during a power cut because the system disconnects at mains failure to avoid putting power into the grid that may have engineers working on the cables. this can be remedied but so far outage frequency isn't worth the cost.
It'll cost SCE $30,000 if they take the full 5kwh from each of the 3000 owners they expect to sign up ($10 each), but still it's only 15mwh total and apparently that's enough to power 11,250 homes @ 1.3kwh each on a Californian summer evening - No A/C units running I take it?
15mw is less than half the output from a single MT30 gas turbine generator which costs far less than $30k/hour to run but does cost a few million to pick up in the first place so it would take the powerwalls perhaps 200 one-hour events to catch up.
This provides such a marginal benefit (less than half a watt per Californian!) that it seems to me they're just putting a marker down for using other peoples hardware to avoid investing their own money in generator capacity. Their future blackout excuse being 'If only we had all the home batteries connected, this wouldn't have happened'.
Jou (Mxy.. came up with 30kw, that's valid* to provide power for 24h from the 6-8 or so usable sunny ones.
£250k is for the battery farm and the small field of panels needed to generate & store that power during the summer months.
Like AUS, most UK home installs are around the 4kw mark and at similar (sub £10k) cost, these generate enough power midday to cover 'most' home activities, overall they add up to not needing another GW scale gas/coal power plant operating during office hours for maybe half the year.
Winter heating in a UK home is in the order of 50kwh per day, it's utterly unfeasible to attempt that on site with solar this far North.
*if you're careful.
Tesla megapacks will put out 1.5Mw for a couple of hours*, they're the size of an ISO shipping container and weigh in at 23 tonnes each. 12 units will give 24h of power and to recharge from Solar will require another 36 units and 72Mw of south facing solar panels.
Batteries : 48 ISO containers 1100 tonnes. (72Mwh total capacity)
Panels : 360,000 m2 or more than a third of a square kilometre.
1.5Mw output allows a touch under 47kw per floor.
This is based on a very optimistic 8 hours per day of max sunshine and 200w/m2 panels keeping a few hours of capacity in reserve. Near the equator it may be possible to be off grid all year, in the UK not a chance over winter.
Total cost - eye watering.
From here for home sized units;
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/solar-panels/article/solar-panels/solar-panel-battery-storage-a2AfJ0s5tCyT#batterytable
£5,000 gets you 8kwh capacity at 4kw output (2h runtime), and take up a quarter of a cubic meter. To cook your Xmas turkey you'd need two running together for an average electric oven draw, a third one would let you use an electric hob for the veg but do you really want half a tonne of Lithium battery inside your house?
*Recharge is at the same rate.
I've 4kw of panels on my south facing roof*, it saves me perhaps 1,000kwh in a year which even now is barely £1 per day give or take.
For a few hours around every midday over the summer I'm able to use any electric appliance in my house - apart from the electric shower & oven, they'll burn 12 & 8kw respectively.
*Previous owner swallowed the 'free electric' line and handed over all the FIT payments in return for a zero cost install.
You suggest putting 150M2 (30kw @ 0.2kw/m2 ) of solar panels on a property and what else, tonnes of battery to store the power needed for winter? total cost over £250k? half the population can't afford the projected £4k annual gas/electric costs coming soon.
Take a look at the average UK house size, even the best prototype panels (@0.47kw/m2) won't fit, let alone on the south facing side.
It's all in the questions asked, and the ones that politicos decided to use in the late 80's.
Is burning less hydrocarbon fuel a good thing - Yes
Do diesel vehicles burn less per mile than petrol - Yes - ergo diesel is good for the environment.
Now please ignore the several books worth of verified science pointing out that just by using fossil based fuel we're mucking up the planet.
Depending on the model, 747s can have quite different fuel loads but the usable max is around 190 tonnes with optional tanks installed. Fuel burn rate depends on the total weight being carried and the engine type.
200+ pages of everything you've never asked about the 747-400 can be found here.
https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/commercial/airports/acaps/747_4.pdf
Captured carbon or sucked out of the air, either way that's still far better than digging yet more fresh oil out of the ground to burn as jet fuel.
Only air sourced carbon would be carbon neutral and that's a near perfect solution for aircraft, the solar requirements here are on the large side but any non CO2 source of electric will do to provide the power, the obvious one to keep the plants running 24/7 is nuclear.
We either make our own steel or we import it, to make our own there will be a requirement for coal, we can either dig ours up or import it.
Technical viability - nothing here that we haven't been doing for centuries.
Economics are a poor secondary to politics here - home production protects UK jobs at the steel plants we still have and provides new jobs at the coal mine* & quite a few spin off facilities in between.
From a carbon perspective - not shipping the coal and or steel thousands of miles is a simple benefit.
*until an economically viable method can be found to remove all the Oxygen from iron ore (Fe2O3) without binding it to Carbon to make vast amounts of CO2
It boils down to the total vehicle lifetime cost while you own it. For the budget conscious driver, yes, there's a regular maintenance bill* for old ICE powered cars, but very few reach anywhere near the annual rental cost of a new EV (cheapest up front way to run one) on a 3-5 year contract. The deposit for an EV will buy an old car outright then the monthly EV rental and recharge costs will buy a lot of petrol & maintenance.
Buying an older EV is taking a gamble with the battery life degradation curve and currently any serious maintenance is likely to be at dealer rates instead of fred round the corner.
In the UK rust from road salt tends to be the main killer of cars over 20 years old, many newer cars die when the ECU fails.
*from experience at 10-15 years old the costs suddenly peak due to everything getting old in short order, then they tail off as the age related failures become another recurring cost.
I can't see how they get around the fact that anyone walking around with an active video camera strapped to their face will require permission1 (that won't be given) to use it in so many places they'd want to go, basically that's any non public space in the UK.
Medical facilities have serious confidentiality rules, Banks will have security & confidentiality issues, Bars, Restaurants, Hotels and most shops will want to keep customer information away from competitors at the lowest level and to provide some level of semi-private space from a PR viewpoint. There's also the red zones where public opinion just won't be moved into allowing these, Rest rooms, Changing rooms, Swimming pools and almost anywhere that children congregate.
Even if I didn’t consider the wholesale harvesting of personal data as abhorrent, for simple self protection I’d not wear one just to avoid the real danger of falling foul of UK law simply by being in the wrong place as someone has an 'oops' moment. In the UK mere possession of indecent images2 is a crime, the law is deliberately framed in that way because there is deemed no good reason for these pictures to exist beyond usage as evidence in criminal trials and the vast majority of the population agree.
1In some countries that will include stepping through their own front door.
2There’s a growing list of subjects.
To avoid that, all they'll need do is show that data transfer is only INTO the HIPPA controlled medical system, if that happens to include a regulat data dump from the corner shop...
The healthcare provider* will send regular medical updates with helpful purchasing lifestyle suggestions to patients.
Give it a few years and the non HIPPA Amazon will have enough personal data to render the regulatory separation meaningless.
* email is from Medicalone not Amazon so it's all good and above board. (until we get a rebrand to amazonmedical)
The global vehicle fleet is estimated at around 1.5 billion, that's going to need orders of magnitude more rare earth production, some vehicles may last twenty years but batteries certainly won't, especially in demanding environments.
Taking the carbon out of hydro-carbon for fuel usage is very feasible.
There would have to be a rail goods yard at the docks and another next to the distribution centre, ideally the container would also have gone cross channel on a rail carriage from a similar setup over the other side, it would remove the majority of HGVs from our roads at stroke.
The Victorian system to do just that was ripped out over half a century ago.
In the early 1950s road transport was the future. To justify the motorways (symbol of post war progress) that lets us zip along for hundreds of miles bypassing dozens of town centres we needed lots of traffic to (A) keep the factories busy (B) raise the fuel duty to pay* for it and (C) clog up the towns so everyone would demand motorways.
* The alternative was paying a s**t tonne of money updating the rail system that was clapped out following WW2, where was that cash going to come from? Cheap option, bin most of the tracks, sell the land, get some cheap diesel locos for bit left.
Replacing the current petrol/diesel distribution system will cost vast sums regardless of the choice between Hydrogen &/or Electric. The argument that we've started with electric so we should/must only carry on with that doesn’t carry much weight when the installed capacity is maybe 1% of requirements come the next decade.
Hydrogen has the benefit of being a near direct petrol replacement in terms of infrastructure with the major advantage that it can be stored for a fraction of the cost of electric and decouples electrical generation from final power usage. H production only need to keep ahead of the average long term usage which is far lower than peak.
The lower energy density of H will mean frequent top ups* but they'll only take a couple of mins, on a long trip with small children pulling up behind a car plugged into a charger gives maybe an average twenty(?) min wait before you start the recharge, what would you do if every slot is busy and also has a car waiting. Ideally there'd need to be a lot of car sized outlets in the public car park next to the coffee shops, the total draw could easily exceed 100Mw so some big cables need to be installed leading to a reliable grid (SMR not too far away?).
As an engineer the high efficiency from pure electric usage^ is very nice, but given that we’ve built and operated a petroleum system that wasted the majority of it’s energy for the last century I don’t see any problems with H being less efficient. If we decide to build the guaranteed generation capacity we need for maximum electric draw then using the spare capacity from the other 23 hours a day to produce H seems a good idea.
We can go full electric using millions of tonnes of rare earths and a vast grid to move the electric about, or use it to fill H tanks. Either way, we'll need a vast amount of extra generation capacity.
*it would only need to go as far as battery can manage on a good day and cost the same, consumer
choice will soon pick a winner.
^ from source to motive power at least. I’ve zero details for the system total life efficiency of modern batteries going from ore extraction to waste management, but I’m willing to bet it takes quite an interesting % of total life to outperform a simple(ish) cryo-tank holding H.
A lot of metal - Just for the UK, moving to an all electric road fleet (some 30 million vehicles) will require well north of 15,000,000 tonnes of vehicle batteries and I'm erring on the light side with only half a tonne (of much better batteries) per vehicle.
HGVs may have several tonnes each.
Yup, this is part what I find utterly gobsmacking about the process.
We can spot a planet (identify its orbit & size mass etc.) just by watching for a regular tiny reduction in light arriving from its host star and spectrum changes affecting very very much less that 1% of the ever so slightly reduced light reaching us is enough to give us information about the planetary atmosphere.
Yet to actually see the planet we'd need a telescope far bigger than we could build with current technology - nanometre accuracy across 100s of square kilometres, it'd be junk long before we finished alignment.
TBF, it was a deliberate feature* the Vdubs based cars had (not just the Golf or even VW), where holding the key against the spring in the unlock position for a couple of seconds would open all the electric windows.
The actual bug was passenger windows sometimes opening when you locked the car and walked away.
*90% certain it's in the manual.