Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

EricMears

ABrass said:
Kingspan or Celotex. Polyisocyanurate foam, very good at insulating things.

That may be what he had in mind but it wouldn't be "PIR" !  'PiF' maybe or even 'PCF' ?
But good as it might be at insulating,  the stuff in skips is likely to be small offcuts and joining them together to preserve their insulating properties could be a tad challenging.

Martyn1981

EricMears said:

ABrass said:
Kingspan or Celotex. Polyisocyanurate foam, very good at insulating things.

That may be what he had in mind but it wouldn't be "PCR" !  'PiF' maybe or even 'PCF' ?

But good as it might be at insulating,  the stuff in skips is likely to be small offcuts and joining them together to preserve their insulating properties could be a tad challenging.

Nope, dead easy, and you can buy 'damaged' sheets cheap too. Knife or blunt saw for cutting to size, just as you do when building a wall and inserting PIR in the cavity.
I made ~10m2 of removable panels for the animal shelter, which convert two wood frame and wire walls, into well insulated sections, simply by turning some wood stays 90d. Then the panels go into two rope slings near the roof to help reflect some sunlight, whilst fresh air circulates.

Martyn1981

Change of tune from the FF majors, stop lying that AGW isn't real, and that they didn't know this 50yrs ago, and instead now, blame the consumers. Hopefully most of the pillars denying AGW and the climate crisis, have now fallen, which might (just might) mean more action is taken,and sooner ..... but I won't hold my breath.

New Study Decodes ExxonMobil’s ‘Modern’ Climate Misinformation

Where it’s no longer credible to deny climate change, the fossil fuel giant puts the focus on ‘risk’ and blame on consumers, in echo of tobacco industry PR, researchers find.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

QrizB said:

Martyn1981 said:

... they will take RE leccy generation and use it to heat up a thermal store, preferably one filled with sand, that has pipes running through it, and a heat exchanger can add heat to the store, or remove it.

Geothermal, but using a man-made heat store? It will be interesting to see how their pilot plant gets on. The conversion efficiency to/from electricity will be key (someone's already invented storage heaters for space heating, after all).

Actually, I thought that the cost of 'normal' heating v's the cost of leccy generation from RE would be key. But I'm assuming that the resistive heating element (see what I did there?) of this will be close to 100% efficient, and the losses in the system would be perhaps 10-20% (just a guess). So can RE leccy prices compete with FF costs? Can hot air, compete with higher costs of a heat pump, but better COP
...... and so on.

Then I started pondering, should we consider the cost of generation from a PV farm (for example), or the cost of the 'excess' RE generation that would be diverted to schemes like this.
After that I thought it might be seen as a way of creating a price floor for RE gen, let's just say 1p/kWh (£10/MWh) purely as an example in the UK, even if that resulted in heat at 2p/kWh, it would add another string to RE's bow, since anything raising the minimum price, or reducing/avoiding negative prices, will only make RE generation more profitable/viable.
It all still sounds too 'easy' to me, but I'd love to see this Gov (or any other) invest some of their battery funding to a small project, perhaps for a new build housing site, or commercial building, and see just how it stacks up.

My last thought kinda went off the rails - we are redoing our patio soon, so should I dig a great big hole, line it with 'free' PIR (as skips are full of it, shove in some pipes and sand, then join Agile and start diverting cheap or even negative priced leccy into it ...... I'm guessing they'd have some questions for me regarding where the hell it's all going. 

Inter seasonal heat storage:
https://www.icax.co.uk/interseasonal_heat_transfer.html

michaels

The IEA report on how climate change targets could be met is the big news of the day, it should really be the lead story on the BBC:
Climate change: Ban all gas boilers from 2025 to reach net-zero - BBC News
In the UK we seem to be a long way from the recommendations which include:

• No new gas boilers from 2025
• No new fossil fuel investment FROM NOW beyond what is currently in the pipeline
• End ICE sales by 2035 (phew, one we are ahead of the curve on at least in theory)
• Close inefficient cola and coal plants by 2030 (SA, Brazil, China, India, Pepsi etc will struggle with this)
• Developed world electricity net zero by 2035 (what is UK target?) and whole world by 2040!! (and this includes obviously most transport and domestic heating having gone electric)

Report Link

QrizB

michaels said:

• Close inefficient cola plants by 2030 (SA, Brazil, China, India etc will struggle with this)

I know you meant to type coal but this had me laughing out loud for a moment, imagining everyone having to switch from Coke and Pepsi to Freeway and Happy Shopper

michaels

QrizB said:

michaels said:

• Close inefficient cola plants by 2030 (SA, Brazil, China, India etc will struggle with this)

I know you meant to type coal but this had me laughing out loud for a moment, imagining everyone having to switch from Coke and Pepsi to Freeway and Happy Shopper

Had you not considered how much Co2 all those carbonated drinks are releasing into the atmosphere?

Martyn1981

I'm sure I've mentioned ships with giant kites many times, but not sure sails, particularly of the Flettner Rotor type, have been mentioned much or at all. These could reduce fuel consumption by 5-15%:

Ofergawdsakes Wind Power For One Boat Is Not Such A Big Deal…Is It?

The new sails were developed by the firm Norsepower under the name Rotor Sails. Our friends over at Rocky Mountain Institute put Norsepower on the CleanTechnica radar back in 2015, with this handy explainer:

“The Norsepower Rotor Sail Solution is a modernized version of the Flettner rotor—a spinning vertical cylinder that harnesses wind power to propel a ship. The rotor generates thrust for the same reason that a spinning baseball curves through the air after it’s thrown—the Magnus effect. When air moves across a rotating body, it exerts a force perpendicular to the direction of the air.

“In favorable wind conditions, Norsepower Rotor Sails allow the vessel to throttle back the main engines, supplying the power needed to maintain speed and voyage time while reducing fuel and emissions.”

QrizB

It wasn't exactly screamed from the headlines, but the UK's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) opened this week. Large fossil fuel users (power stations, airlines, and other businesses - there's a list here) need to cover their carbon emissions with carbon credits. These get traded on a commodity exchange, much as pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange jiuce does.

The exchange opened on Wednesday:

UK ETS launches with UKA Futures opening at £50

UK ETS: Post-Brexit carbon market opens for first time with carbon price topping £50 per tonne

£50/tonne is around £5/tonne more than the equivalent price on the EU ETS market, but it's early days yet (the market has seen relatively few trades).

Based on a bit of Googling, a MWh of electricity from CCGT takes 0.4 tonnes of carbon (so £20, if carbon trades at £50/tonne) but if generarted from coal takes 0.9 tonnes (£45).

michaels

QrizB said:

It wasn't exactly screamed from the headlines, but the UK's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) opened this week. Large fossil fuel users (power stations, airlines, and other businesses - there's a list here) need to cover their carbon emissions with carbon credits. These get traded on a commodity exchange, much as pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange jiuce does.

The exchange opened on Wednesday:

UK ETS launches with UKA Futures opening at £50

UK ETS: Post-Brexit carbon market opens for first time with carbon price topping £50 per tonne

£50/tonne is around £5/tonne more than the equivalent price on the EU ETS market, but it's early days yet (the market has seen relatively few trades).

Based on a bit of Googling, a MWh of electricity from CCGT takes 0.4 tonnes of carbon (so £20, if carbon trades at £50/tonne) but if generarted from coal takes 0.9 tonnes (£45).

Out of interest will this have direct impact on energy bills - for example possibly shifting the landscape towards renewably generated electricity from gas?