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For SpaceNut re #675
Thanks for the reminder that the People of New Hampshire ** have ** accepted an early form of nuclear fission energy, despite all the drawbacks of the early designs.
You have been in daily (frequent) contact with two people who offer a vision of nuclear power producing hydrocarbon fuels of various kinds.
It would seem (to me at least) that New Hampshire could produce all the hydrocarbon fuels it needs for it's own use, and have some left over to sell to others.
The impediment is disbelief!
I am confident that absolutely NO ONE in New Hampshire believes the pitch that Calliban and kbd512 are offering.
You are (almost certainly) in that number.
It is perfectly natural and normal for an ordinary person, not equipped with the knowledge and insights available to Calliban and kbd512 to disbelieve that it is possible for New Hampshire to make it's own hydrocarbon fuels, it's own electricity for the grid, and have enough left over to trade for goods and services with other States.
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tahanson43206,
You're confident that absolutely NO ONE wants affordable and reliable energy plus jobs in New Hampshire?
Did you ask every last one of them? If not, then how would you know?
New Hampshire already hosts the Irving, Midway, and Fielding's oil refineries. Do a Google search. Look at a map. Obviously someone living there wants energy.
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For kbd512 re #677
You're ON! Congratulations! I am betting you will NOT find a single person in New Hampshire, including SpaceNut, who believes that the presentation you (and to some extent Calliban) have been making repeatedly in this forum, is feasible.
I am one of the few people on Earth who believe that you could pull it off if you had the support of a Nation State. As far as I can see, there is NOTHING in your presentation (or for that of Calliban on the nuclear side) that is fantasy or wishful thinking. Neither of your presentations needs invention of anything. Everything you have described doing has been done somewhere on Earth, and much of it is old reliable technology.
What (I predict) is that no living person in New Hampshire (or anywhere else) would believe (as I do) that you could pull it off without the resources of a Nation State.
Now, it just so happens that an enlightened group of human beings have authorized the United States to tackle climate change in a big way.
If you had the confidence of those who will be trying to find the best place to invest those dollars, then you ** might ** be able to secure enough funding to build a pilot plant on an industrial scale.
Solar power would seem (to me at least) the best bet for the Southwestern US. On the other hand, New Hampshire would seem (again, to me at least) to be a good site for a nuclear fission powered plant.
Show me a single person in New Hampshire who thinks you (or anyone) call pull this off.
It's not the physics!
It's not the engineering!
It is a complete and total lack of human leadership skills that stands in the way of success.
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We also do waste oil recovery and its sometimes sold and other times just given away from a variety of junk yards and collection locations to be used in heating.
The scope of business creation has many factors. There are even businesses out there that are in the business to aid creation of them.
There’s more than one way to officially set up a business.
It's not just about an idea anymore and what people want.
Back a while a thought was to use the Ilse of shoals to create a deep-water terminal end for tankers and an undersea pipeline to bring the oil to land for such an oil refinery but that was not to happen.
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tahanson43206,
People in Europe are already doing this out of necessity. It's a matter of survival for them. What others believe is possible is irrelevant to the fact that they're already actively doing it and they're not going to stop because someone or everyone living in New Hampshire thinks it's a fantasy.
It's more like a complete and total lack of understanding of basic math and science is what's standing in the way. That requires a level of understanding that most people don't have. If basic knowledge of math and engineering constitutes "enlightenment", then we have much bigger fish to fry. Anyway, I've connected all the dots in layman's terms. The engineers are already busily pursuing the solution, again, out of necessity.
What I recognize and accept is that intermittent energy sources have a limited number of ways that they can be most useful, or to provide the most "bang for the buck". Trying to power an electric grid that requires constant base load power for tens of millions to billions of people is not the best use of that energy resource.
Germany already has 200% of their total peak demand, in terms of installed generating capacity provided by wind and solar, yet it provides 7% of their total energy demand. For easy math, assert that it provides 10% of their total demand. Now multiply 200% by 10, and you arrive at a figure of 2000% of peak demand, in terms of total installed generating capacity, if you insist on generating that using wind and solar power alone. It should be obvious to anyone who is not innumerate that such an installed capacity figure is an absurdity.
Say you had an airplane that required 100MW of takeoff power, like a Boeing 787. Each GE-9X turbofan provides about 50MW of power by transforming jet fuel into thrust. Now assert that your "airplane" requires 2,000MW (2,000% of the original takeoff power figure) to reliably become airborne. A Boeing 787 has a pair of GE-9X engines, one on each wing. Now imagine hanging 20 GE-9X engines off each wing and asserting that we suddenly need that much power to takeoff. How ridiculous would that be? Unless something else about that jet changed, and ignoring the fact that it would over-stress the wings with the plane sitting on the ground doing nothing, then the plane would run out of fuel moments after becoming airborne.
A static power generating infrastructure / install is not governed as severely as the same physics as powered flight, but it is bounded by input material and therefore energy demand, which equates to cost. The same is true of the engines that power the Boeing 787. The 787 has 2 engines instead of 4, due to cost of operating 2 versus 4 engines. Each of the 2 engines generates so much thrust and is so reliable that it can fly on one engine, all the way across the Atlantic ocean, if need be. Yes, each GE-9X costs more than two of the JT9D / CF-6 / RB-211 engines that powered the 747, but it doesn't cost more to fuel it and the GE-9X engine has demonstrated reliability to do so. Since the gas bill is the biggest bill by far, exclusive of employee salaries and benefits, that governs what makes a practical jet airliner.
So...
This is the absurdity we're supposed to believe, as it relates to "green energy". We're "just" going to install 2,000% of our peak demand, in terms of total installed generating capacity using wind and solar, and that will magically solve our emissions problem. "Just" is a filthy four-letter word in engineering, as foul as any other four-letter word in the English language, as it relates to engineering.
Can you produce 2,000% of anything else without also producing dramatically more waste and emissions than you did with more reliable methods that don't require such an absurd over-capacity during "normal operating conditions"?
If you can't answer this question honestly and appropriately, ignoring whatever your ideology finds aesthetically pleasing, then you're not living in reality.
There's a reason we use so many gas turbines and combustion engines. No other solution is as practical and maintainable. It's not because we don't care about the planet or other people living on the planet. It's not because we have some ideological commitment to self-destruction, nor any other such utter nonsense.
There's a reason we built so many nuclear power plants before fake environmentalists yelled and screamed the loudest, thus becoming the most obnoxious amongst us in the eyes of our so-called "leaders", which "convinced" our ignorant and mostly innumerate politicians to quit building them.
1 kilo of nuclear fuel stores and then delivers about 24,000,000kWh of electricity.
1 kilo of coal stores and then delivers 8kWh of electricity.
1 kilo of Lithium-ion batteries stores and then delivers 0.16kWh of electricity.
You need 150,000,000kg / 150,000t of Lithium-ion batteries to store the energy equivalent of 1kg of U235 or the Pu239 that the rest of the fertile U238 becomes inside a fission reactor. I'm not claiming that cars should be powered by 1kg of U235, because that sort of energy density is not required and probably wildly impractical for that use case, but then our "green energy" zealots shouldn't claim that such batteries are a suitable replacement for gasoline or Uranium, either. They are not the same, and nowhere close to ever being the same. A few of those different technologies clearly started out with insurmountable advantages over the others, primarily in the total quantity of waste generated by using each source. After 75 years of nuclear power being used around the world, we still can't fill a single sports stadium with the waste generated, even after extracting just 2% to 5% of the total energy quantity in the nuclear fuel. If we can't appropriately deal with that much waste, then how in the hell would we ever deal with more than that? You think Lithium batteries are non-toxic? You'd better not ever ingest one, or you won't be long for this world.
You have to truly suck at counting to not see a serious problem there. This is the issue with our "green energy" evangelists / pseudo-environmentalists. They're innumerate. They can't even count. It's not any kind of an insult to point out simple truth, either. They never engage in counting contests with those of us who can do basic math because it's so painfully obvious to curious onlookers whose solution works better.
That one measly kilo of coal stores 50X more energy than the battery. What that means, is that even for a very low total power requirement such as land-based passenger vehicle, the one powered by batteries ends up being drastically more energy efficient over its entire life cycle. You cannot validly draw a box around the electric car and say it produced no emissions. If you saw how it was made, then you could never come to that conclusion. The only place where it had fewer emissions was when it was being driven down the road. At all other points in its lifecycle, it's an ecological disaster. It's like trying to put a pretty face on Cobalt mining in Africa. It's a very dirty, dangerous, and ugly business for those involved. Make no mistake about it, they're only engaging in that business because you're willing to pay money for what they're producing. If you recycle that kilo of coal by recycling the CO2 it emitted when combusted, then it's obvious that any application beyond a cell phone or laptop, which sips mere Watts of power, is a grossly inappropriate use of battery energy storage technology, which may never be appropriate for moving serious weight, or to supply staggering quantities of continuous power in a reliable manner.
We're using super computer years of processing time, combined with AI-enabled electro-chemistry, to try to concoct batteries that use common materials, are not toxic, and last long enough to make them worth the input energy expended to make and recycle them. A person like me would step back and say, "Well, maybe we've simply bet on the wrong horse and need to adjust our acceptance of what is, versus what we want." A person who fetishizes electronics and battery-powered gizmos would see that as "progress towards a sustainable future".
I have a memory of what was, what is, and what most likely will be. Everything on this planet will not be battery-powered "greenness" within our lifetimes. Beyond that, there's nothing "green" about batteries, except for the money required to make and use them. In short, I'm a "pick yer poison" sort of fellow. We know how to deal with rising sea levels. It's called "moving". It's been done many many times throughout human history. We also invented these things called "dykes" or "levies" to keep water out of places below sea level. If all of that fails, we've also invented boats, barges, and ships to live on. Those of us with enough money seem to frequently buy their own "ship" and then sail it around the world. We don't have any solutions to, "Now we only have a fraction of the power required to produce all the food we eat and water that we drink." The notion that we're going to wholesale change everything about how we live and work, on the mere prediction that something won't happen 50 to 200 years into the future, is impractical and silly nonsense. You'd have to be completely unable to count all the doomsday predictions that ultimately came to nothing, in order to believe it.
Everything is a trade-off here. Engineers understand this implicitly. We make a series of trades to get most of what we want, and either accept that we can't have everything we want or further compromise in certain other areas to get more of something we prioritize. Compromise is a good thing. Compromise is why we have cars that go from Point A to Point B, affordably and reliably. Practical cars for the ordinary working stiff can't be powered by rocket engines, they can't fly, and they can't be Gold-plated.
As someone who values utility over ideology, I also greatly value useful trade-offs. For example, a small battery that can accelerate a vehicle up to highway speeds and then allow a more appropriate small combustion engine to take over is a very pragmatic trade-off. We could literally use 1/3rd of the fuel we presently burn through each day, and still have reliable and affordable personal transportation for the masses. It means a low-cost vehicle can literally have double the fuel economy of most existing vehicles. It doesn't resort to using aerospace materials in the construction of the car, which are typically confined to aircraft construction on cost grounds, it's not powered by a battery that literally weighs as much as small cars from the 1950s weighed, so it doesn't mandate absurd levels of over-consumption of scarce battery making materials, because economic sources of those can and will easily run out within our lifetimes. When the time inevitably comes to recycle the car, a dozen or more cars have the same weight of batteries as a single all-battery powered car.
Compromise is good, if the desired goal is to actually reduce total global emissions in sustainable ways.
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I could launch into a lengthy diologue on the engineering practicalities of energy production, but I would be pouring time into vacuum. I believe that what TH is getting at, is that the average 'Joe' doesn't have enough understanding of the physics and engineering of energy production to understand what the art of the possible is. I don't know how to go about fixing that problem. Most people aren't terribly interested in physics and engineering. Their eyes glaze over when presented with hard facts. And what they believe is a function of what they want, based on deep seated emotional prejudices. It usually has little to do with what is real.
When human beings find the world around them threatening, they tend to build up idealisms inside their heads. Mythologies that help them make sense of the world. One of those idealisms is the idea of naturalism. As strange as it may sound, energy production tends to be an area that takes centre stage in the naturalist mythology. The idea that it is somehow morally superior to run all human affairs from the direct inputs of solar energy. The reason this idea has been pushed to breaking point in places like Germany despite the obvious absurdities that it entails, is that the idea was never about trying to achieve a practical goal. Naturalism is an ideology, and human belief in ideology is a lot like a religion. The people involved have invested their hearts and souls in what is essentially a faith. Technical realities are not going to convince these people, because their belief system was never rooted in logic. The only way to break this kind of stupidity is to let it run its course. Let it bring society to breaking point. When this happens, the people pushing the iodiology are left discreted and removed from power in disgrace. Their hard core adherants will continue to believe in the BS and become bitter recluses. The rest of society moves on.
The problem of course is that this may bring entire nations to ruin that they never recover from. Germany is one place that will probably never recover from the the own goal scored by the naturalists, because it so many other problems weighing against it. China is another.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-08-20 23:21:28)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban and kbd512 and SpaceNut ... thank you for taking a look at the opportunity I see in New Hampshire.
For Calliban ... thanks for considering my proposition .... Your interpretation seems to be that folks without formal training in engineering and physics are subject to mythical presentations.
My argument is that it is the ** leadership ** that is the key in this situation.
The leadership that kbd512 offers would lead to a facility that would produce hydrocarbon fuel from air and water using some energy source. His argument has been that solar energy is capable of solving that problem.
You have consistently and repeatedly argued that nuclear fission power could solve the problem equally well or perhaps even better, in that less land is required for the facility.
Either way, it is the ** leadership ** by single human beings that would lead to creation of such a facility.
If a prospective leader spends all his time criticizing and demeaning the people he would lead, then (it seems to me) he would make little headway in enlisting their support.
In this situation, we have a simple proposition....
The State of New Hampshire could become independent of external sources of energy, if it were to enlist nuclear fission to meet all their energy needs, AND have energy left over to trade with other States for goods that are not available in New Hampshire.
SpaceNut has clarified (for me at least) that New Hampshire ** has ** a nuclear fission facility.
What New Hampshire has ** never ** had is leadership with vision sufficient to the challenge.
What I deduce from what I observe, is that New Hampshire had leadership in the past, sufficient to convince the population that a nuclear power plant could produce electricity, and that they (the leadership) could be trusted with the resources to actually build the plant, and that it would work afterward.
A prospective "leader" who would like to build a plant able to make hydrocarbon fuel from air and water would NOT have to invest a lot of time or energy convincing the population that the physics and engineering would work. Everything has been done already, that needs to be done.
it is the ** scale ** of the enterprise that would give every person who hears it a bad case of skepticism.
It is clear (to me at least) that SpaceNut effectively reflects a healthy skepticism when new ideas are presented in this forum.
If you can convince SpaceNut that you (either of you) are capable of providing the ** leadership ** to guide thousands of people in New Hampshire to make a huge bet on a desirable future, then you would be 90% of the way to success.
One thing I recommend is keeping arguments extremely short, so that SpaceNut can consider the individual points and make a reasoned response.
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For SpaceNut re funding for clean energy projects in New Hampshire...
The Inflation Reduction Act will expand these opportunities, bringing an estimated $490 million of investment in large-scale clean power generation and storage to New Hampshire between now and 2030.
The Inflation Reduction Act Delivers Affordable Clean Energy ...https://www.whitehouse.gov › New-HampshirePDF
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Tax stuff in the bill; the prius while it would be deductible is not until a few years from now on the federal tax return and the same holds true for solar + batteries if purchased as lease will not count.
I need to look up the link and read some more for how and what it can provide.
As far as politics we get just 2 + 4 total for the senate and house. This is also why it's been the voice of the nation in early primary for some time now.
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tahanson43206,
The type of leadership required is political, because politicians have control of the purse strings for projects such as this. I have zero desire to ever involved myself in politics. I don't care for the unhelpful aspects of political ideology of either the Democrats or Republicans. At the present time, one group, the Democrats, happens to be more of a problem for ordinary people than the other. Democrats control most media, academia, and pop culture. Some of them have never been outside of their echo chambers to see what the average person thinks about what they've done. If they did, they'd have a different perspective than the alternate reality they create inside their heads. This would not be a problem if Democrats did not take positions on issues that are self-destructive in nature, but since that's what they've increasingly done in the past 10 years, they are a problem.
Democrats have such a need to be the antithesis of the Republicans that Democrat and Republican politicians can't even agree on what "law and order" looks like. That is very new. When I listened to Presidential / Vice Presidential debates and Senatorial debates as a child, it was often difficult to tell the difference between the two parties, so they were aligned on the issues that mattered most- law and order, economy, appropriate use of military force, and only differed in minor ways on spending priorities, which I was totally cool with, and wouldn't take issue voting for either party. Now there are stark differences between the parties. Democrats seem hellbent on driving us off an economic cliff, to what end, I don't know.
It's the wild and outlandish nonsense that both parties do these days that creates problems. The Republicans have started wars we did not need to fight and the Democrats have given away trillions of dollars to their wealthy donor class. Very little of that money went to where it was supposed to go. Even Bill Maher commented on that fact- most of the COVID money didn't go to struggling families the way it was supposed to. I look at where the money ends up, not what either party says about what the money is intended to do. Good intentions don't matter. Results matter. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer because the Democrats are, in point of fact, handing out public money to their wealthiest donors and corporations that don't need our tax money. They've become what they accuse the other side of being.
All that said, I'm not interested in "getting in" on "The Great Giveaway" of public money. I want both parties to prioritize our spending. We can't have free this / that / the other. Someone will always end up paying for these stunts, and that group is always the working class. We need a stable and reliable energy source. Solar-to-fuel can provide that.
Spending some money on reducing emissions is fine, but real change is process change and structural change. Extracting resources from the ground is very different from synthesizing them from the air and oceans. It's clear we need the energy resources. It's not at all clear why we've not committed to CO2 recycling, knowing full well that there's not an unlimited supply of anything on this planet. Sure, it's expensive, but how expensive is running out of energy? I'll wager running out is more expensive than any economy can bear.
Batteries can't power everything. You need other sources of energy. Throughout all of human history, ALL energy sources have only ever been additive in nature. We didn't stop burning coal after we struck oil. We didn't stop using oil after we split atoms. We didn't stop splitting atoms after we learned how to fuse atoms. We still burn dung for energy. Think about that for a moment. We sent men to the moon 50+ years ago, we have AI-enabled super computers, quantum computers, but we still burn poop for energy. How ignorant of history would you have to be, in order to believe wind or solar power were ever going to replace anything?
Sure, we'll use more wind and solar because we have the technology perfected to the point it can be mass-produced, but it's not cheaper than anything else at the scale required, you still need gas burners to provide backups, and the notion of ever powering a national energy grid off of batteries remains the stuff of science fiction. I have solar panels on my home. I have nothing against using something that works, but base load power it will never be, especially without storage. We have 2 Tesla PowerWalls. They can't run the AC units at all. What we can do and what people think we can do are two very different things.
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Found it for NH https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u … pshire.pdf
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u … /Texas.pdf
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u … rizona.pdf
I wonder how much is different in each....
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Calliban,
I think cities could be entirely pedestrian traffic if what we actually mean by the word "cities", are singular buildings housing 100,000 people. That is perfectly doable using modern technology. Larger cities such as London or New York or Houston would contain multiple city-towers. Clusters of city-towers would be spaced far enough apart so that if one ever fell, it would not endanger the other towers. Movement between the towers would be facilitated by light rail.
Movement between cities would be facilitated by rail and airliners. We would eliminate most short-haul airliners by making trains fast enough to reach their destinations in the same or less time as a trip to the airport, waiting in line for security, waiting for the aircrew or the aircraft to be ready to fly, taxi from the gate to the runway and potential wait time for other aircraft to takeoff or land, air travel time, taxi from the runway to the gate, baggage retrieval at your destination, and subsequent travel to your final destination city-tower. Fewer people are needed to support ongoing railway operations as compared to commercial aviation. If the total transit time of the trains can be within about 15 minutes of a short-haul flight, then there's no point to flying. You spend more time in-transit, but the same time overall, and you should be able to work on the train without the series of interruptions associated with air travel.
Residents would still be permitted to have their own cars, but these vehicles need to be stored in parking lots well away from the towers. If they want to travel between cities, then they leave the parking lot for the nearest highway. If cities were contained within towers, then I think most people will begin to view owning a car as an expensive and unnecessary and superfluous luxury item that has little practical use. They can go anywhere they want to be foot or rail or airliner. The issue is having everything so spread-out that trains and buses are impractical and very inconvenient. You might still own a single large SUV that can take your family to national parks or other remote locations for vacationing away from the city-towers, but the vehicle will be intermittently used a few times per year. As time progresses, it's likely that vehicles become shared property between neighbors.
In the coming decades the looming population collapse may dictate this type of living arrangement in order to drastically reduce the number of people required to maintain all the infrastructure. Farmers may be the only people still living in the countryside as a result. If we move some of the farms to the cities and power them with next-generation nuclear reactors, there may only be grain farms left and some cattle ranches, with the fruits / vegetables / spices / fish grown in their own city-towers nearby. The sharp reduction in transport costs, input water / nutrients, and fuel may ultimately "save" farms and farmers, even if they do their "farming" inside a climate-controlled building.
The largest skyscrapers are "walkable" by dint of fact that floor space is kept within such a relatively small physical footprint on or above the ground. If our definition of "city" includes at least 100,000 people, then each city-tower building is a mostly self-contained city, apart from food, water, and power. We can stockpile those commodities in other nearby towers or storage tanks. Otherwise, I fail to see how this concept works. The moment we try to build a conventional city but make it "walkable" in a serious way, it becomes a logistics nightmare.
Modular underground nuclear reactors will both contain radiation following any accidents and also keep the power source literally buried beneath the building so that wiring runs are extremely short relative to what we presently have.
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While I did get some gas last week at a different spot at $3.69 my usual fill up today is down 10 cents from a few days ago at $3.79 a gallon.
This means in time that I will see an even lower cost for gasoline in my area without driving out of my way to get a lower price.
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Where I live in the north of England, natural gas is costing around 8p (10 US cents) per kWh. That is about 9p per kWh of harvested heat in an efficient combi-boiler. I am able to buy kiln dried fire wood for 6p per kWh, which translates into 8p per kWh of harvested heat in a 75% efficient multifuel stove. So wood is already cheaper for space heating and I can get at least some of what I need for free from driftwood and get some heat by burning household waste cardboard and paper.
Perhaps most importantly, I can buy wood and store enough of it to heat my house for months. I can't do that with natural gas and the price is only going to go up as the european energy crisis bites this winter. Gas can be cut off, a wood pile provides a goid way of hedging against that possibility. So I am stocking up with as much wood as I can. I would advise anyone that can to get a multifuel stove fitted in their house to do so, if they don't have one already. Stockpile as much fuel as you can.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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I am concerned for Europe including you. This is not gloating; I just want to point out the difference between our situations.
There is a price rise in Natural gas here, perhaps for real reasons or hype.
But the situation when dealing with shale, at least as Peter Zeihan has put it, is that the more oil they drill for the more Natural gas they have to dispose of. Of course, down the line more natural gas will be exported, but for now, with oil prices high, I anticipate a glut of Natural gas in places in the North America, and that will possibly also be due to possible requirements of not allowing it to leak.
But I should be careful, there are no good things that the high masters do not want to interfere with to keep the minions in their place.
Done.
Last edited by Void (2022-09-09 10:55:49)
Done.
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For Calliban re #689
Thanks for telling us of your calculations of energy value, and of your plan to stock up for the coming winter.
Those who live in rural areas in Europe or the US or parts of Asia may be able to follow your lead.
However, this is action by individuals taken when cooperation with large numbers of people to achieve a favorable result for everyone seems out of reach.
You and kbd512 and (probably) others here in the forum have published well formed and well support visions of how energy (and I'm thinking here of nuclear energy primarily) can be enlisted to improve circumstances for everyone.
We are in the Current price topic, so I'll tweak SpaceNut just a wee bit, once again.
yesterday I picked up 5+ gallons of regular gasoline for $.01
The penny was the price of failing to release the dispensing lever as the cost approached the magic number.
The magic number was $19.00, which the "Avis" grocery chain awarded me for buying from them instead of the much larger "Hertz" grocery chain.
I am going to once again head off the usual predictable objection that the price is higher at the Avis chain than the Hertz chain. It is most assuredly NOT. Every product is identical or less.
My guess is that management has made a calculated bet that by foregoing 1% of profit on the individuals compared to their larger rival, they will secure many more customers, so the bottom line will be greater.
(th)
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In terms of actions that may help everyone, in Europe at least...
Most of the population of the UK live in densely populated towns and cities. It should be feasible to use district heating to meet the heating requirements of a large fraction of homes and businesses in urban areas. District heating has traditionally made use of combined heat and power plants, which dump their waste heat into the heating network. Unfortunately, traditional fossil fuels are increasingly unavailable in Europe, so a CHP system based on coal or gas offers limited utility. Nuclear powerplants are large units producing 1500 - 5000MW of low grade heat, with a temperature of 30°C. The present fleet is poorly suited to provide bulk heat for heating purposes, because they produce huge quantities of low grade heat a long way from its demand centres.
I propose we build district heating networks supplied with pumped geothermal heat, stored in large tanks. Outside of every significant town we drill bore holes, deep into the water table. The water that is withdrawn from these wells will have temperature of 10-30°C, depending on location. When excess electricity is available from wind farms (mostly autumn and winter), we pump this water out of a source well, pass it through the heat exchanger of a heat pump and into a return well. The heat pump produces hot water with temperature 70°C. This can be stored in a buffer tank, storing days or weeks of peak heat demand for the town, prior to entering the district heating network.
A heat pump with a cold source at 300K and a hot outlet of 340K, would have a theoretical Carnot efficiency of 7.5. For a large heat pump, producing several tens of MW of heat, irreversibilities will be minimised and achieving 2/3 to 3/4 of Carnot efficiency should be possible. So a coefficient of performance of 5 or more should be achievable. Total space and water heat demand for the UK is something like 500TWh per year. If 2/3 of this heat can ultimately be met using district heating supplied using geothermal heat pumps, then we need an extra 70TWh of electric generation, mostly in autumn, winter and early spring. Offshore wind power is well suited to this task, as its output is seasonal and concentrated in the colder months. That would require about 20GWe of wind power capacity with an average capacity factor of 40%. That would imply building wind farms covering 3200km2 of UK land and seabed. This is about as much wind capacity as the UK has already.
The amount of steel and concrete embedded in the wind power infrastructure per unit heat will be modest. This is because we get five units of heat for each unit of electricity input to the heat pump and the electricity received by the heat pumps does need to be buffered, because the heat storage tank provides all the energy storage needed. So the system is designed to absorb excess electricity from the grid, storing it as heat and distributing it as heat. In unusual lull periods, where wind power is insufficient to provide heat for a week of more, a boiler burning stored biomass or coal could supply the heating network. But this would be lightly used, supplying maybe 10% of the total heat load over a long term average.
The most expensive thing would be the hot water distribution pipe network. This would consist of insulated concrete pipes running under every street. Installing this would be a huge project. It would require digging up every street and installing large diameter pipes. One way or another, building a sustainable heating solution for a nation is an expensive and time consuming endeavour. If you want the goodies in life, you have to cough up the cash.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-09 12:58:33)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re (to me surprising) contribution to Petrol Price$ topic ...
I have taken the liberty of pasting a copy of your post in a topic created by Void that contains the word "Geothermal"
You idea/suggestion/brainstorm is not (exactly) geothermal, in that you do not appear to be attempting to tap the massive thermal reservoir under the mantle.
Instead, it appears to be an energy storage system that would operate on a massive scale, but which would be so easy to understand, to build and to operate, that it is remotely possible that the average person would support it.
The UK is going through a time of major change .... there is a new Prime Minister with a decidedly conservative inclination, and there is a new King, who is said to be thinking about downsizing the Monarchy.
This (like ** now ** ) may be a good time for you to take the personal and professional risk of publishing your idea in a suitable journal read by the elite of the UK.
I'm not sure what that publication might be, but I assume you do.
Please consider this encouragement from me, to overcome your habitual modesty, to see if your idea has legs.
At the ** very ** least, please consider writing a letter to the new Prime Minister (I have not yet memorized her name).
I doubt King Charles the Third would be interested, but he might, so copy him as well.
Someone will (without a doubt) recognize that your idea can be embellished to draw massive amounts of power from the Earth itself, but your modest start with solar and wind inputs should appeal to many.
Best wishes for success!
I would certainly be in favor of a suitable new topic, if you, SpaceNut and other interested Admins are able to agree on one.
(th)
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with respect to post 689 by Calliban, wood heat is still a predominate use split or pellet for home heat as you can gather the cords or pallets to store usually any time of year. Sometimes you get wood that is green so that you can dry it yourself from late spring throughout the summer for winter use and it will cost less.
The geothermal is not a new concept nor are heat pumps...
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wood burning for heat is consider "green", but it takes a long time to regrow the trees which recaptures the carbon.
As for the use of plastics we have dead zones in the Pacific Ocean where the plastic and other trash has started to cause quite a bit of havoc. Maybe the use of that plastic and the tree farm would be a good location.
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For SpaceNut re #694 .... while Calliban has pulled us away from Petrol Price$ with his discussion of wood, it ** is ** renewable. I wonder if anyone has done the calculations on what it would take to convert everyone from existing heating systems to wood.
There may be enough land on Earth to support a wood growing operation, if water were desalinated to supply the trees.
In any case, there is plenty of ocean surface for rafts to grow trees. I did a study a few years ago, to see what it would take to make rafts large (and deep) enough to sustain tree farms, and it turned out that it is actually fairly doable. The caveat is that the floats were made out of plastic for long term life at sea, and (of course) ** that ** means using hydrocarbons, and (of course) at present, those come from underground deposits.
(th)
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Calliban,
So as to avoid having to dig up every street in Britain, which will be incredibly expensive as you noted, as well as disruptive to the local economy when you can no longer get from Point A to Point B, what about generating more electricity from ocean temperature gradients to circulate a gas such as Argon or CO2, through an ocean-embedded heat pump system, which then drives a gas turbine to generate electricity, basically using the ocean as the heat sink?
Electricity could be stored as thermal power in electrically-heated salt tanks or massive electrically heated blocks of pig Iron, also used to spin a gas turbine to generate electricity. That solves the problem of running larger diameter buried hot water pipelines all over the place.
If you still like your idea better, then what about small diameter tunnel boring machines that don't require hacking up the roads?
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Ultimately, the best option is the one that provides heat and power to homes and businesses at the most affordable price. I do not know without costing up the inputs what the lowest cost option is.
Delivering electric power to homes will be much cheaper from a distribution capital viewpoint, because power infrastructure is already in place. We could in fact install high temperature heat storage units within individual buildings, as you suggested. These would take in three units of intermittent electricity during times of abundance and use a small steam or gas turbine to generate baseload power for the grid, 24/7. Out of the three units of electricity that are consumed by the device, one unit is sold back to the grid and two units of waste heat are used for space and water heating. The baseload electricity is more valuable to the grid than intermittent electricity and the waste heat is valuable for heating. So maybe high temperature heat storage is a good option. For individual properties in high density urban areas, ground source heat is not usually a practical solution. The alternatives are air source heat pumps, which have a COP of ~2, or resistance storage heaters, which have a COP of 1. Fitting a storage heater with a heat engine and allowing grid buy-back is an interesting solution.
The problem is that to produce 500TWh of heat, we must generate 750TWh of primary electricity, of which 250TWh is sent back to the grid. The grid must also have the ability to control millions of individual heaters within the end-use energy stores. But it could probably be made to work. Something similar to this has already been built in Germany, using heating elements, storing heat in concrete and then using a heat engine to produce electricity and hot water from the stored heat. The units are MW sized and dump heat into district heating networks. Large buildings with constant high heat and power loads could probably make better use of this system than individual houses. Though a 1kW house sized system is possible.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-11 08:22:23)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Price of gas dropped again at the pump to $3.71 a gallon and it looks like the price for a barrel of oil will be near $80 and getting lower.
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Another drop in price to $3.64 a gallon.
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Fuel prices have continued to drop and are tonight at $3.56 a gallon. Of course that is due to the drop in the oil barrel cost and volume of supply being received in for processing.
So little wonder why Oil prices will head back toward $100 per barrel as a supply crunch returns to the energy market
So they will claim supply chain issues when all they are doing is slowing production so as to create a false demand slump to drive prices up...
Some would think that hydrogen would be the answer but with less than 50% being produced from the power going in so one can expect its cost to be higher for use.
Hydrogen could ‘nearly double’ cost of heating a home compared with gas
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