Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

Frugalsod, I think it was you commenting about windpower in Shetland? Dunno what it's like where you live, but we have a lot less wind that the northern isles in my part of southern ingerland. It isn't comparing like with like.

Yes the wind here can be extreme as it comes off the sea with little to block it, though we do get calm days throughout the year. Offshore wind farms would be viable here. Though even Shetland gets long sunny days so solar works well there especially during the summer. Using one alone is not sensible but combined they do complement each other fairly well, and the storage problem could be solved a number of ways. The battery problem might be irrelevant as they sell the cars but lease the batteries so the lifecycle issues of batteries may not be relevant to home owners.

culpepper

I don't see why there cannot be businesses that run off direct power such as the wind and water which could also feed into the grid or store the extra energy for use in their cars.

I have read that in some parts of the USA, one can plug in a generator (from solar panels or some other home produced power source) and feed the power produced , INTO the grid, thus generating income for the house .

Anyway I think the government should look at producing information leaflets with advice about home generation and the costs etc.
Not just talk about feed in tariffs but also about trustworthy suppliers and different options available for the ordinary person.

fuddle

I just think, and I don't know the ins and outs, that there's money to be made in fossil fuels and my guess is that in renewable energy there isn't so.

I'm dubious as to what the motives are when I hear that wind/solar cannot sustain us. Maybe not but wind/solar can help sustain each household - adding to the grid any surplus.

Who would fund that though? The government? My landlord? Myself on a 6 month rental contract?

That's why I think renewable is the way forward to help ease, back up and contribute but we just to poo poo it on a grand scale because it's going to cost money and not make money.

Like I say, I don't know. Just my musings.

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

I think The Jokerman doesn't understand that the UK isn't a smaller version of the US with a few quaint accents, but maybe he's never even visited or tried running his ideas past a native Brit? A few hours of discussion would have revealed that you can't extrapolate across from a continent-spanning superstate to a small country just because we share (or mostly share) the same language.

Dmitri Orlov is an interesting read, as is JK Kunstler, on the idiocy of suburbia. We don't have anything like that here in the UK, due to a settlement pattern which predates the car by thousands of years.

We do have a sort of suburbia problem. Look how many people commute long distances to London every day. I live in the huge area that is part of the London commuter belt and people will commute from even further afield. Without cheap transport these areas will suffer significantly should there be another energy crisis.

We do have different ways to calculate unemployment and unlike the US people do not simply fall off the measurement simply because they have been unemployed for 2 years. Here they become long term unemployed and vilified by the media as scroungers only fit to appear on poverty !!!!!! on TV. In the US they simply disappear off the figures, which is why you need to look at the labor participation rates as well, which are at multi decade lows. I think it is at a rate lower than the early 1970's before women entered the work for en masse. In the UK we hide the unemployed in zero hour contracts, enforced by benefit sanctions.

We do have a comparable problem with private debt which is handled differently everywhere. In the US if your home is worth less than the mortgage in many areas you can simply hand the keys back and your liability ends, this is known as Jingle mail. In the UK we have recourse loans which means that they can go after other assets for several years afterwards. In Spain and Germany if you fail to pay your mortgage they can chase you for life for the outstanding balance.

There are differences everywhere but you need to cut through to the basic facts that private debt is too high, and if we do pay that off then the economy suffers. The wealthy own homes outright. The average person who buys a house has to leverage their finances to do so. This works well in when the bubble is inflating but is savage when it is deflating. This is why median wealth fell so much during the last crisis. So all the efforts of the last seven years have been to save the banks, firstly from declining property values which if valued correctly would devastate bank balance sheets. In the US, this was done partly by getting hedge funds to buy up huge numbers of foreclosed property so driving up prices and rents. In the UK we had Help to buy schemes to help push up prices. It is all going to fail eventually. Reality must bite some time. A £500 000 house with interest rates of 3% costs say £15000 a year in interest. So if interest rates normalise to say 8% that same interest would only cover a mortgage of £187500. So unless you can afford an extra £25000 in interest annually you will be repossessed. That home will probably be only worth £187500 so the bank will chase you until you declare bankruptcy.

Whatever your perspective the problems from 2007/2008 were not fixed and will basically wipe out all of the so called gains since then. The only question is when. Which is why deflation is going to happen.

Doveling

The hydroelectric stuff (technical term ) in Wales looked good to me. Went to visit when on holiday at YHA Borth, I think. Steam railways and red kites featured as well as CAT centre.

Can you guess we tend to visit Wales a lot. Love it

mardatha

Just looked up the population density of my region and its 23. I'm feeling quite happy about that lol- FEWER ZOMBIES

Frugalsod

mardatha wrote: »

Just looked up the population density of my region and its 23. I'm feeling quite happy about that lol- FEWER ZOMBIES

Yes but what about all those who died in battle around there? There were certainly a few battles along the border which could resurrect lots of additional potential zombies.

Frugalsod

Here is a SHTF for one particular family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh_d5mMBFhA

GreyQueen

Interesting discussions as always on this thread. One of my go-to places.

The difficulty with sorting the wheat from the chaff in terms of honest information publicly available about renewables is that there are very few trustworthy sources without axes to grind in one favour or the other.

And as fuddle wisely points out, a lot of us are only renting our dwellings, and will not have the means, ability, or foolishness to invest in dwellings which we do not own and control.

Technology such as large turbines and solar requires a functional oil-fuelled industry to provide the raw materials for manufacture and assembly. By golly, has anyone else when visiting CAT stood inside the hub of the wind turbine head? I'm not far shy of 6 ft and the internal diameter of this thing was comfortably taller than me.

I suspect that the future will be one of much lower energy consumption than the present, although it will remain to be seen if we are to decline gracefully into a lower energy future or go kicking and screaming. Given the history of humanity, I suspect that the powerful states will fight to the last of their ability before giving up access to oil and natural gas.

Frugalsod, yes, about commuting. But a lot of commuting isn't driven by a compulsive desire to live in A whilst working in B. It's because housing in B is unaffordable on the kind of wages which can be earned there by that person, and there is either no work, or not work of the right kind/ sufficient pay, where they can afford to live.

London exerts a terrible drag on the rest of the country, people even daily-commute from my city, which means that their journeys to and fro will add up to nearly another 8-hour day. Some high-earners do this, or people of my acquaintance on short-term highly-paid IT contractor work. The money's good but the commute leaves them wiped with exhaustion.

Of course, London isn't unique in this aspect, most cities and some large towns have the same pull over their own hinterlands, and some individuals have job roles which take them constantly across a region, or even across the country. Usually by car.

Property ownership is seen as a very good thing in this country, and it's almost heretical to suggest that it is anything other than something we should all to aspire to. Given the inequitable nature of the landlord-tenant relationship, and the expense of private rented accomodation, owing your own home can seem the only way to have some security at a reasonable price for a reasonable amount of time.

However, owning property can be a major drag on mobility and prevent people taking work elsewhere, when there were no other objections to moving such as children settled in their schools, family ties in the present area, emotional preferences for living somewhere as opposed to somewhere else.

Where we live and work, as well as what kind of domestic set-up, will be key to determining what kind of energy use we will have in the future. Research historically across Europe has shown that the single-family home has been our preferred domestic set-up for thousands of years, and that we strive to replicate that in everything from a bender to a thatched hut to a modern home. I can't really see people adapting to dormitory-style accomodations without great mental distress.

Although I have long had a conceptual fondness for the pre-European style of multi-family clans living in long-houses, as practised by the indigenous peoples of the north-east US/ Canada, as it is now known.

greenbee

GreyQueen wrote: »

Although I have long had a conceptual fondness for the pre-European style of multi-family clans living in long-houses, as practised by the indigenous peoples of the north-east US/ Canada, as it is now known.

We'll review your opinion on that after the Christmas break... I have a feeling you might be quite pleased to get back to your own little space :cool: