Hey generali I don't agree with your signature

cells

Having said all of this I see that I sound quite negative. To try and put some positive PR out for non FF energy. Googles project makani looks very interesting to me, it could potentially cut the cost of wind power to 1/5th of what it is at now which would make it viable and workabke all the way upto 25% of primary energy.

Existing PWR (even gen 2) are proven and scaleable quickly and effective. They can go towards 35% of primary energy

Solar PV is now cost competitive in grids where its output meets peak demands (upto the difference between peak and base load)

General energy efficiency is improving all the time especially with lighting and computers. Self drive vehicles could give a rapid boost in improving transport efficiency.

Direct drive electric cars would best any and all other transport alternatives (but require electrifying roads) but at least its doable (I doubt manufacturing and scrapping 200 million x 300kg car battles each and every year is going to be a good idea vs direct drive)


Overall thank your chosen diety that coal gas and oil exist!
(Actually if they were much less available I suspect the world would have gone nuclear from the 1950s onwards rather than build out its coal/oil/gas infrastructure. Before 1950 even in the UK electricity usage was trivial eg about 1/10th of what it is now)

peter3hg

cells wrote: »

Having said all of this I see that I sound quite negative. To try and put some positive PR out for non FF energy. Googles project makani looks very interesting to me, it could potentially cut the cost of wind power to 1/5th of what it is at now which would make it viable and workabke all the way upto 25% of primary energy.

I'm sure I remember a Jeremy Clarkson documentary from the late 90s/early 00s where he looked at the exact same idea in Holland so I'm not going to hold my breath. Having said that having a major backer such as Google can only be good.

zagubov

cells wrote: »

Large (in size) countries tend to have multiple grids. Eg china has 7 grids the USA has 3. Australia might have multiple too.

also its name is misleading. Even the UK is more like multiple local grids with some interconnection rather than one national one. It is the reason power stations are dotted around the country and not all in one location.

For this reason you will find that grids in low density nations are also very cheap to run and operate especially in highly urbanised nations like Australia (although the national density is low most people live densely in big towns and cities)

Quite so; it has a lot to do with how spread out countries are. The former Soviet Union always built a nuclear plant next to any new eastern settlements they built or expanded, and didn't bother with a national grid. They'd have struggled to send electricity the long distances it needed to cross; it would all have been dissipated as heat.

As the world gets more and more urbanised it'll be easier to supply power grids. Some countries might use solar effectively, but I'd doubt that could ever work universally even in countries with intense sunlight.

Generali

cells wrote: »

I understand your argument lots of people make it but its completely wrong. Lets assume your view holds true and the grid in the UK shrinks to 1/10th of what it was you think thats going to make it unviable....but we already have a grid 1/10th the size of the UK its called the irish grid and it functions just fine

A national grid is one of the simplest cheapest and long lastig inventions there is. Even if we lived on a star locked planet (that is to say the earth did not spin) then PV would win hands down. Well even in such a world a national grid would exist as its 10p a day cost provides back up and power levels not available without a grid.

so im as certain as I can be that national grids will stay even if solar panels wrre free

The way I see it though is that if fewer people stop using electricity infrastructure the cost remains pretty much the same.

Electricity infrastructure in Australia normally has a pay back time of ~25 years and if people stop using it that cost isn't going to go away, it's going to be split between fewer people.

That is already starting to become a problem in Australia. Power stations are being closed or used with reduced capacity which removes the operational cost but the capital cost remains. The capital cost of a power station is substantial.

Aussies look at having solar panels on the roof in the same way as they view having a water butt. The rain falls on your roof so why not harvest it?

Many suburban Sydneysiders only use 'tank water' on their gardens and have a sign up out the front proclaiming it (watering the lawn with tap water is a great way to upset the neighbours during one of our periodic droughts).

In the same way, people are now harvesting the sun that falls on their roof too.

Now there are a couple of things that make Aus different to the UK:

- There is a cultural norm of using solar. The majority of back yard swimming pools are already heated with solar water heaters and even for home hot water they have been common on rooves since the 1970s
- Electricity is extremely expensive in Aus
- The is a cultural norm of being as self-sufficient as possible, probably the legacy of being a frontier nation
- It's a sunny country with short winters

zagubov

ggb1979 wrote: »

For me this a question on consumerism, even if cars, aeroplanes and domestic energy needs are met by some alternative (nuclear / solar / wind probably) mass consumerism is going to continue to increase (in fact such green energy usage can only be achieved if the whole world get a whole richer and can therefore afford the expensive alternative energy sources, thus consumerism will inevitably increase.)

Oil (for oil read oil based ie. Crude, Nat gas, shale gas) will still be required in huge quantities to firstly provide the raw materials (as cells points out many derived from ethane) but also unless we embrace nuclear globally the oil will still be required to produce the quantities of energy required to process these raw materials into useful things in an economic manner. The economic manner is important not just fr keeping things globally affordable but also because all such intermediaries are globally traded commodities and if e.g.. the UK insists on not using Nat gas for industrial energy then China or someone else will quite happily undercut us.

I'm no expert and don't have numbers to hand regards the exact proportions of use but I do work in the oil intermediaries industry (which includes the occasional visit to grangemouth) I have learned alot I didn't know previously particularly with regards to how almost everything we touch in our daily lives, from the coffee cup I'm holding, to the duvet I'm under, the plastic fan next to by bed, the carpet in my room, the curtains, the clothes, the coating on my mdf furniture , the cover on my tablet, the body work on my car, the dashboard, my front door, the eps insulation in my walls, the packet my dinner came in, the fertiliser that grew the cereal for my breakfast and on and on and on - all contain significant proportions of oil derived raw materials (excluding energy) and were also so affordable because a huge proportion of their cost is related to the use of cost effective energy way up the production process (forgetting entirely the way they got here - ie logistics)

It's just been eye opening for me that where I used to think of oil/gas as energy and fuel + plastics that now I realise how deeply involved in everything that we rely on and cannot be substituted, unless we made everything from stone and wood.

Viva the shale revolution

Ps. Can't figure out how to add a signature

There are so many things we could do with oil products I honestly think future generations will scarcely believe we burnt hydrocarbons to power vehicles etc. when there are alternatives (OK for powered flight maybe there aren't but for most other things there are).

If they ever invent time travel, they'll probably use it to come back and punch us on the nose for wasting scarce resources so frivolously. Don't worry, they won't kill us because of the grandfather paradox.

It would be ironic though if they also brought back antibiotic-resistant bacteria because we overused the bloody drugs. Yet another free gift the world gave us that we threw away.:mad:

vivatifosi

Generali wrote: »

The way I
Now there are a couple of things that make Aus different to the UK:

- There is a cultural norm of using solar. The majority of back yard swimming pools are already heated with solar water heaters and even for home hot water they have been common on rooves since the 1970s
- Electricity is extremely expensive in Aus
- The is a cultural norm of being as self-sufficient as possible, probably the legacy of being a frontier nation
- It's a sunny country with short winters

The cultural norm point is an important one. I don't think you can overstate Aussie attitudes to self sufficiency.

My Aussie relatives in cities have solar and grey water harvesting. But the ones in towns take it to a different level.. they have to for their own survival. I can't think of any towns of 20-30,000 people here where you have to have such a high degree of self sufficiency.

My rels in Qld don't just have to have the water butts and solar, they also have to have their house built on stilts and keep a month of dry goods in the house in case if flooding as well as building fire breaks on their land due to bush fires. The power grid just cannot be relied on in that situation, so they have back up generators too. Plus many able bodied adults are trained for community emergencies such as fire fighting. It is a totally different mind set.

cells

Generali wrote: »

The way I see it though is that if fewer people stop using electricity infrastructure the cost remains pretty much the same.

Electricity infrastructure in Australia normally has a pay back time of ~25 years and if people stop using it that cost isn't going to go away, it's going to be split between fewer people.

That is already starting to become a problem in Australia. Power stations are being closed or used with reduced capacity which removes the operational cost but the capital cost remains. The capital cost of a power station is substantial.

Aussies look at having solar panels on the roof in the same way as they view having a water butt. The rain falls on your roof so why not harvest it?

Many suburban Sydneysiders only use 'tank water' on their gardens and have a sign up out the front proclaiming it (watering the lawn with tap water is a great way to upset the neighbours during one of our periodic droughts).

In the same way, people are now harvesting the sun that falls on their roof too.

Now there are a couple of things that make Aus different to the UK:

- There is a cultural norm of using solar. The majority of back yard swimming pools are already heated with solar water heaters and even for home hot water they have been common on rooves since the 1970s
- Electricity is extremely expensive in Aus
- The is a cultural norm of being as self-sufficient as possible, probably the legacy of being a frontier nation
- It's a sunny country with short winters

I can only talk about the UK as I know its systems fairly well

first the UK has also closed a good number of power stations and now still has an overcapacity. The main reason is light bulbs have gotten significantly less power hungry. A 100 watt incandescent replaced with a 10 watt led or florescent reduces PEAK demand by 90 watts. Multiply by 27 million homes and say 4 light bulbs a house gives you a peak demand reduction of some 10 GW and it holds true. Our peak winter demands were 65GW and now they are close to 50GW

A lowering of peak demand hasn't been a disaster its been quite stable

In Australia solar can probably be what efficient light bulbs were for the UK. Lower Peak demand and allow some stations to close. It won't however somehow break the system.

also the idea of a power station being hugely expensive to run is now not quite what it was. For example a 1GW CCGT operates with just 40 full time staff (working shifts so only about 10 on site at any one time). There is no significant operational cost just 40 staff to pay which for a 1GW plant is trivial.

Grid defection is a fallacy no one is going to defect from 10p a day when it provides so much. Even if every single home had PV the grid would stay.
Grids are affordable in hugely different sized nations from the USA with 300m people to Ireland with closer to 3m people.


also I have no idea why electricity prices in Australia are high but I suspect its purely to do with rules and regulations as your fuel costs are significantly cheaper (which is why yoi are a big coal exporter and soon a big gas exporter) and the technology used is the same so no reason your electricity should be more expensive than ours

My guess for the Australian system is that PV will play as a peaker plant maybe upto as much as 30GWp. Coal will remain as baseload. Gas could replace baseload if regulations force it.


batteries won't play a part in any significant stationary electricity storage. They have finite lives that are in the low thousands of cycles. Moreso than cost the tech needs to increase cycle lives to over 10,000 which is quite difficult as everything breaks down even a brick road has a finite life

cells

Generali wrote: »

The way I see it though is that if fewer people stop using electricity infrastructure the cost remains pretty much the same.

But we have real world examples which show us that a drop in peak loads and even in national consumption do not result in some sort of cost spirals which cripples grids to non existence

The UK has already seen peak loads and average electricity use fall quite significantly (approx 15% and 10% ) and we have also during that time had to subsidise into existence ~10GW of wind power and ~5GW of PV and close and clean up some nuke and coal sites. Despite all of this the current system works well and is quite affordable


On the other hand we have a country like Germany where the poor capital allocation on wind and PV is coming home to bite them on their !!! as much higher electricity prices

cells

ruggedtoast wrote: »

I have had dealings with the Saudi government as part of my job and they are trying to plan for a future without oil revenue.

If oil went to $10 they would still be a significant producer but oil revenue would be 1/10th of what it was at $100 oil

so planning for an oil revenue crash is wise but thats not the same as not producing oil.

wotsthat

cells wrote: »

Most people simply don't understand how cheap and effective and amazing a national grid is.

Why would you disconnect from 10p a day?

People do things for reasons other than money. People may make a rational decision to go off grid where that decision is cost additive. As they leave the grid other people's costs will increase and make their decision to leave too easier.

I know someone who runs a few big koi ponds in his garden and has installed solar. Being a big user of electricity he's seeing some decent savings. Right now the cost of storing electricity is too high for him to consider going off grid but if that price came down and he had a longer history of supply and demand patterns he'd go off grid even if he ended up somewhat out of pocket.

The grid is amazing but it makes us wasteful. Now my mate is generating his own electricity it's even more amazing how keen he is to use it efficiently.

I've got water butts in my garden and they won't pay for themselves for a few years (if ever). I'm not bothered one bit - watering the garden with rainwater makes me feel good.