Preparedness for when

mardatha

Coal is there and there's loads of it.Some day we will need it and they will find a way to open them up again.

GreyQueen

mardatha wrote: »

Coal is there and there's loads of it.Some day we will need it and they will find a way to open them up again.

There's coal and there's oil, but the low-hanging fruit is long gone. When it comes to energy, you run smack into EROEI - energy returned over energy invested. Which means that oil in difficult to access places will have to stay there as no one can spend 2-3 barrels' worth of energy to extract one barrel's worth of oil, and then spend further energy refining it and shipping it for use.

EROEI will also apply to coal reserves and natural gas reserves. If your mine is a mile deep, how are you going to keep that dry enough and the air pure enough for it to be worked? What happens about gas explosions and underground fires? You'll be using oil to power the extraction of coal, as we use oil and natural gas to power modern agriculture (oil = diesel/ petrol for machinery gas = fertilisers). EROEI is the crucial thing to understand when you're thinking about any form of energy.

Of course, things like solar and wind turbines are also the products of an oil-powered industrial civilisation, and cannot be built/ repaired/ replaced, without the oil-infrastructure behind them. You can build for water and wind power, they call 'em water mills and windmills, without an industrial infractructure, but they have their limitations, but they're still a huge advance on the quern stone and the metate.

It's a tough nut to crack, isn't it?

Frugalsod

There are better alternatives but you will not hear them mentioned because of vested interests. Numerous studies have worked out that you can run a nation entirely on renewables. Germany is a good way along in that process.

By putting solar panels on every roof bar say historic buildings you can generate lots of either hot water for domestic use and electricity for sale into the grid. With windmills for round the clock additional generation and using the batteries of electric cars as a peak load supplier this eliminates the problems of cloudy and windless days. I think that there was a trial near slough that used this concept to see how it worked.

To encourage energy conservation but allow energy companies to make profits you regulate the price of energy for low consumption but allow unregulated prices above a set usage. Also prices regimes should be positive so very low users pay the very lowest rates and those that use more than say a family of four +20% should face the risk of very high bills as the unregulated price can be set at any price whatsoever above the regulated level. This gives everyone an incentive to cut use. Over the longer term you could lower the cap on the regulated price slowly to keep people cutting energy use. There is no need for nuclear or coal in such a scenario.

GreyQueen

I would be very much pro tariffs which advantaged low consumers like myself. My household uses an average of 2.5 kWh per 24 hours, with consumption slightly higher in the winter months. But I have to keep chopping and changing as suppliers move to having standing charges, which are very detrimental to the small consumers like myself.

I find myself provoked almost to violence by the ridiculous wastefulness I see. Such as a building I pass daily which has uplighter lamps on its facade, illuminating slices of brickwork. They are on constantly, even in the strongest sunlight or the middle of the night when no one is around and have been for years. This is a business, for goodness sake, how can they be so inefficient as to waste so much power, year in, year out?

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

jk0, I have concerns about the viability of the opening up of the now-closed coal mines, should urgent need arise. I can recall from reading sensible media at the time of the closures that what was being closed were very deep mines, including some which extended out under the bed of the North Sea. Even the landlocked mines were deep enough to require water and air pumping 24/7/365. It isn't a case, I believe, that these resources are effectively moth-balled and can be re-accessed without too much difficulty. It may well be that they are completely uneconomically unviable once they had been let go.

A number of mines were kept on a care and maintenance basis when British Coal closed them. These were reopened by RGB under the UK Coal brand. The last of them Ellington closed in 2005 when water broke through the long wall. There was approx 11 million tons of reserves left, but it wasn't economically viable to drain the mine and resume operations. (Over a million gallons a day were pumped out of the Big E, or three tons of water for every ton of coal - and that's before the inundation)

Of course, the issue with the mines wasn't about energy policy, it was about the ongoing PTB project of crushing Everyman. Documents which came to light under the 25 year rule showed clearly that the high-ranking politicians backing That Woman were determined to continue what they had begun and were openly referring to conducting a class war against ordinary people. They had a shortlist of half-a-dozen unions which were candidates to be provoked into action so that draconian anti-union legislation could be passed. The miners rose to the bait (and I don't blame them) and the Tories couldn't have been happier, as many of their senior men were still smarting from defeats by the miners in the 1970s.

More than a year before the strike, an article appeared in The Economist about how to break the trade union movement. There were three key unions, the dockworkers, the miners and the railwaymen - a detailed plan was laid out for each. A plan that was followed almost to the letter - reading your enemy's literature is essential prepping.

Back in the 70s, Tomorrows World showed a water generator that would produce viable amounts of electricity from a two foot drop in a stream. I guess that went the way of the ever lasting lightbulb.

A huge number of the gadgets that populate modern life are actually low voltage low amp-age appliances, yet they have very wasteful transformers to allow them to run on 240v (reduced to 12 or 5V) I've yet to see any suggestion anywhere that it might make sense to install a low voltage ring in domestic property.

mardatha wrote: »

Coal is there and there's loads of it.Some day we will need it and they will find a way to open them up again.

The expertise is aging out. theoretically we could develop robots to extract deep coal, far more likely is deep opencasts, but water is still going to be a massive issue. The reserves I mentioned above are some 10 mile off the coast, the infrastructure to mine them has gone.

Just half a mile from my house was a freight rail line which served the local pit. As recently as 18 months ago there were serious plans to bring it back into use to link the town with Newcastle's Metro light rail system providing a major boost to the local economy - they've just filled in the cut and will start building houses on it in the next few weeks.

Advance planning - loses to short term profit almost every time.

Karmacat

Loving the discussion ... I don't feel I have much to contribute at that level (tho I'm also loving the solar and kelley kettles ) but I wanted to push in a banking stat from Greece: this is the diary on the Guardian today: http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/may/29/greek-bailout-markets-lagarde-us-economy-live#block-5568004ce4b097716aa3473d
Check out the post made at 09.37, about 25 minutes ago as I type this, and look at the bank deposit rate chart, between 2005 and 2009 - so the "profligate" Greeks were throwing their money around, hey? I think not!

Karmacat

nuatha wrote: »

More than a year before the strike, an article appeared in The Economist about how to break the trade union movement. There were three key unions, the dockworkers, the miners and the railwaymen - a detailed plan was laid out for each. A plan that was followed almost to the letter - reading your enemy's literature is essential prepping.

That made me think of containerisation straight away.

Back in the 70s, Tomorrows World showed a water generator that would produce viable amounts of electricity from a two foot drop in a stream. I guess that went the way of the ever lasting lightbulb.

This is painful to read about. "They" are destroying our world in pursuit of profit, quite literally.

A huge number of the gadgets that populate modern life are actually low voltage low amp-age appliances, yet they have very wasteful transformers to allow them to run on 240v (reduced to 12 or 5V) I've yet to see any suggestion anywhere that it might make sense to install a low voltage ring in domestic property.

Tell me more, please, seriously.

Cheapskate

karmacat, thanks for that link, what a scary drop in bank deposits over the last year or so!! :eek:

I've been very lax in all things prepperish recently, but have been furiously reading all sorts, from these fabulous threads to all manner of media (good, bad and ugly), and now I'm firmly back on the wagon, head absolutely in the right place, i.e. not where TPTB would like it! :rotfl:

I have cash in the house, plenty of ways to keep warm, but my food and other stocks are woefully low (for me, still more than regular peeps), so once the kids are back in school next week, I will hit the ground running.

There are 4 adults, 2 children and a cat living here, but our energy and water consumption is lower than many similar households, cos I'm a tight git who shouts at people when lights/CH are left on, is ashamed of herself when I have to throw out food etc. The adult child had the nerve to set the CH for 70 degrees to come on 2 mornings this week! :eek: It's cooler than usual, but still 9 degrees at night/early morning - trust me he's been shown the error of his ways! :rotfl:

A xo

[Deleted User]

There are manual versions of an awful lot of gadgets still available, at a price in some cases but it IS still possible to have useful non electric things. I have a thermo cooker which is a non electric slow cooker admittedly it needs the first heating over a heat source to boiling point but from then on it's free cooking. I've several food prep old fashioned things I have a Mouli Julienne which shreds and slices veg, hand cranked, I have a mouli legumes hand operated puree maker, I've just invested in a Spiralizer which is an amazing gadget that makes vegetables and fruit into spaghetti type noodles, I have the kelly kettle which as we all know runs on twigs, I have a firespout which is a portable folding wood burner that I can cook on, I have the Oz Pig which is a big cast iron pot bellied woodstove for outdoor use, not portable but very effective (mine is called FATIMA because she can feed the 5000 easily) and runs very economically on small amounts of wood. I'm looking to aquire a solar shower this year for free hot water both for washing us our clothes and dishes etc. we have solar lighting devices of several types, I have small things like a manual tin opener, a vegetable peeler, even a set of good knives is invaluable. We KNOW much can be done without using generated by fossil fuel power even keeping food cool (to a point at least) can be achieved by making a ZEER POT. Nothing I've got hasn't used energy of some kind to manufacture it but from then on, like the quern stone the only energy it needs is made by me in my body and if there was more awareness that things aren't dire and uncomfortable drudgery if you don't have an electric appliance to do it for you there might be some money saved, and more power available for the things that actually need electricity/gas.

nuatha

Nuatha wrote:

Back in the 70s, Tomorrows World showed a water generator that would produce viable amounts of electricity from a two foot drop in a stream. I guess that went the way of the ever lasting lightbulb.

Karmacat wrote: »

This is painful to read about. "They" are destroying our world in pursuit of profit, quite literally.

Unfortunately that has always been the way.
A week or two back we discussed the building of Henry VIII's navy and support infrastucture denuding the uplands of the North East (and probably much further afield) generally the land would recover and forestry reestablish itself, however adding sheep to the mix meant the trees never came back. Wool was a highly profitable trade.
Whether its clear cutting rain forest to produce cattle or palm oil, drilling for oil in the Artic or producing electricity from a fuel whose waste we have no idea what to do with, profit always comes first.

Nuatha wrote:

A huge number of the gadgets that populate modern life are actually low voltage low amp-age appliances, yet they have very wasteful transformers to allow them to run on 240v (reduced to 12 or 5V) I've yet to see any suggestion anywhere that it might make sense to install a low voltage ring in domestic property.

Karmacat wrote: »

Tell me more, please, seriously.

If you are sitting at a desktop computer, then its components run on 12v and 5v rails, there's a huge transformer allowing it to run on a 240V mains that is pumping out heat (wasted energy) your monitor (not yours GQ ) is doing likewise. Incidentally one of the printers here actually runs on 240V, but most have transformers, either external (like a laptop) or built in. The TV screen in my living room is effectively a large monitor, yep another built in transformer. Think of the number of rechargeable devices that use a wallwart - mobile phones, tablets etc. Here there's the hands free landline phones, mobiles, bluetooth handsfree kit, ereaders, cameras, many of which have a mini or micro usb connection.
I've been playing with solar chargers for a while, I need to take this further and see just how many devices can be freed from mains tethers and charged from a 5V solar array.
With the exception of the printer mentioned the whole of my office could be run on 12V, though I'm not quite sure what the best approach would be. Time to pick the brains of an electrical engineer I know.