Can I turn my theory into reality? Fossil fuel free, 100% off grid, but modcons

[Alan de Enfield]

6 minutes ago, Tacet said:

 

Is this the plan?  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/815664/clean-maritime-plan.pdf

 

It seems to say that it in order to reach its vision the Ambition is that by 2025 it is expected all new vessels being ordered for use in UK waters are being designed with zero emission propulsion capability.   

 

I can't see the 2035 bit you mention.  The plans says the zero emissions shipping ambitions are intended to provide aspirational goals for the sector, not mandatory targets.  What is it that prevents as things currently stand ICE ENGINED boats being built?  Is it not that there is currently no over-reaching restriction on building ICE engine boats - but that legislation can be expected?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legislation has already been passed, The Government has signed up to international agreements to achive the targets set out in the 'plan'.

The 'Plan' is simply that - it is the propsed route to achieving the agreed targets, it is not the detailed 'route-map'. Many other documents need to be viewed and read together to get the overall picture, but for example the hydrogen production plants proposed in the document are already being built or in early production etc etc.

 

As a few of the NB builders what boats they are now building and why.

 

I have provided the information so many times its all out there if you want to find it.

[Tacet]

1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

In exactly the same way that the Maritime plan states that from 2035 no new boats can be built in the UK (for use in UK [inland or 'lumpy'] waters) that are not zero emission propulsion - ie as things currently stand NO ICE ENGINED boats can be built.

 

 

32 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Legislation has already been passed, The Government has signed up to international agreements to achive the targets set out in the 'plan'.

The 'Plan' is simply that - it is the propsed route to achieving the agreed targets, it is not the detailed 'route-map'. Many other documents need to be viewed and read together to get the overall picture, but for example the hydrogen production plants proposed in the document are already being built or in early production etc etc.

 

I have provided the information so many times its all out there if you want to find it.

So, it's not the Maritime plan that states no new boats etc etc from 2035 - but other legislation?

[Chewbacka]

2 hours ago, Loddon said:

Actually no!

It says "phase out new gas heating systems by 2035"

Not the same as no gas heating systems so existing boilers will still be permitted.

Assuming a 15-20 year life of a boiler (unless it's one of @MtB s ones) 

It will be 2050 before we even start to get close to no gas boilers.

LPG may carry on, but the limiting factor for ‘mains gas’ boilers will be determined by the date they swap natural gas to hydrogen.  However I would assume the industry to start selling hydrogen ready boilers that can be converted.  But the demise of ‘mains’ natural gas is inevitable.

[peterboat]

2 hours ago, Chewbacka said:

Whilst it is not yet law the “In the Heat and Buildings Strategy, published in October 2021, the government announced that they’re aiming to phase out gas boilers in UK homes from 2035.”

 

2 hours ago, Loddon said:

Actually no!

It says "phase out new gas heating systems by 2035"

Not the same as no gas heating systems so existing boilers will still be permitted.

Assuming a 15-20 year life of a boiler (unless it's one of @MtB s ones) 

It will be 2050 before we even start to get close to no gas boilers.

 

2 hours ago, MtB said:

 

News to me. 

 

There is a declared intention to ban the installation (but not the sale) of gas boilers into new-build properties in 2025, but AFAIK that is still at the hot air stage, i.e. just politicians waffling. No concrete plans with dates to ban the sale of them at all, AFAIK.

 

A De E will no doubt have some proper facts to put to the board. 

Given that not much drilling for fossil fuels is going on around us, how long will what we have left will last?

Also a court case is happening to try to remove all subsidies on fossil fuels, if successful gas will costalot so it will just phase itself out?

57 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Legislation has already been passed, The Government has signed up to international agreements to achive the targets set out in the 'plan'.

The 'Plan' is simply that - it is the propsed route to achieving the agreed targets, it is not the detailed 'route-map'. Many other documents need to be viewed and read together to get the overall picture, but for example the hydrogen production plants proposed in the document are already being built or in early production etc etc.

 

As a few of the NB builders what boats they are now building and why.

 

I have provided the information so many times its all out there if you want to find it.

Finness are all electric now with a full order book 

[ditchcrawler]

17 minutes ago, Chewbacka said:

LPG may carry on, but the limiting factor for ‘mains gas’ boilers will be determined by the date they swap natural gas to hydrogen.  However I would assume the industry to start selling hydrogen ready boilers that can be converted.  But the demise of ‘mains’ natural gas is inevitable.

Don't forget Russia already has Europe by the nuts with its gas supplies

 

[GUMPY]

What's needed is a viable alternative to gas boilers.

GSHP and ASHP are not there for older properties by a long way.

Hydrogen is not available.

Oil boiler fuelled by HVO would seem to be a resonable compromise even if its not zero carbon its a lot better than gas.

Edited December 5, 2021 by Loddon

[Alan de Enfield]

18 minutes ago, Loddon said:

What's needed is a viable alternative to gas boilers.

GSHP and ASHP are not there for older properties by a long way.

Hydrogen is not available.

Oil boiler fuelled by HVO would seem to be a resonable compromise even if its not zero carbon its a lot better than gas.

 

 

A 'couple' articles from the newspapers today :

 

Telegraph :

Owners of listed homes face bills of more than £50,000 to install a heat pump. The Government has promoted this new heating technology and offers grants for their installation.

But the grants will make little difference to historic properties, which face much higher bills because of the costs of installing insulation to make a heat pump work efficiently. On an unlisted property the pump and installation cost £12,000 to £15,000. Strict conservation rules mean planning permission is required before an air source heat pump can be installed in a listed property, adding to the costs.

Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay, of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Listed Properties, estimated that homeowners would incur costs of more than £50,000 for the insulation, excavation and new radiators necessary for a ground source pump.

 

The Mirror

Village heat pump scheme that has cost £250,000 per house: Damning report slams abandoned project to transform 600,000 homes with insulation and eco heating systems

The Government's Green Homes Grant Scheme was scrapped after six months

Only 47,500 homes got grant to transform their home out of a target of 600,000

Swaffham Prior is the latest village to see green scheme cost taxpayers millions

 

Near where I live in Cambridgeshire, the county council has thrown £12 million — including a £3.2 million Government grant — at a community heating system powered by a ground-source heat pump (which transfers heat to/from the ground).

It was supposed to be a test bed of how all properties could be heated in future. By the end of December, however, only 47 homes had signed up.

So unless there is a last-minute rush of interest, it will end up costing more than £250,000 per house.

That is as much as some homes in the village of Swaffham Prior are worth.

 

International Energy Agency

In addition to the cost of the heating unit per se, upfront costs also include installation costs (e.g. transport, piping work) as well as ancillary costs (e.g. fuel storage tank, buffer storage tank). Whether the new heating configuration combines space and water heating or requires two separate systems (e.g. a biomass stove for space heating in combination with a heat pump or solar thermal water heater) also influences total investment costs. Importantly, in some cases, switching to renewable-based technologies for space heating may also require replacing or adapting the heat distribution system. For instance, heat emitters designed for use with fossil fuel boilers typically operate in the range of 60-80°C, while heat pumps are more efficient with output temperatures below 55-60°C.2 In the United Kingdom, about half of all dwellings may require either modification of the heat distribution system or reducing heat demand through building retrofits in order to operate with a 55°C flow temperature on an average winter day. This share increases to more than 85% of dwellings on a cold winter day (BEIS, 2020). The cost of installing larger hydronic radiators, underfloor heating or forced-air heating systems can be significant ‒ as much as half the cost of the heating unit. Such investments are not necessary with solar thermal systems, which can be combined with existing installations. This flexibility may, for instance, partly explain the high interest for solar thermal systems under the United Kingdom’s recent Green Home Grant scheme, in which it represented 60% of all low-carbon heat installations (Solar Energy UK, 2021). For most other countries, however, limited data are available on the characteristics of installed heat distribution systems in buildings. Consequently, the financial cost and the levels of disruption implied by a wide-scale transition to renewable heating are difficult to estimate.

 

On-going costs by country and heat source (IAE graph)

 

 

 

 

[mrsmelly]

1 hour ago, Loddon said:

What's needed is a viable alternative to gas boilers.

GSHP and ASHP are not there for older properties by a long way.

Hydrogen is not available.

Oil boiler fuelled by HVO would seem to be a resonable compromise even if its not zero carbon its a lot better than gas.

Have the government waffle spreaders included oil boilers with gas boiler legislation? does anyone know?

[MtB]

23 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

Have the government waffle spreaders included oil boilers with gas boiler legislation? does anyone know?

 

Yes we do know, and no they haven't, because if you read the thread you'll see there is no legislation, only "ambitions".

 

[MtB]

Weasel words with knobs on from ministers, as you're no doubt familiar with!

[IanD]

17 hours ago, Loddon said:

What's needed is a viable alternative to gas boilers.

GSHP and ASHP are not there for older properties by a long way.

Hydrogen is not available.

Oil boiler fuelled by HVO would seem to be a resonable compromise even if its not zero carbon its a lot better than gas.

 

If the problem with older properties is space/outside access, an HVO oil boiler needs an outside fuel tank in a bund with tanker access to fill it, which is much more of a problem to fit in than an ASHP (needs about 1m x 1m x 0.5m)

 

And if you want to use HVO as an energy source, it's still better to burn the HVO in a power station and use the power to run an ASHP (or even better a GSHP, but installation and costs are a problem) -- this also means other renewable sources (wind/solar) can be used to provide the power.

 

Fuel energy to heat efficiency for a boiler is about 80%, power station efficiency is around 40% (or 60% for combined heat and power if these are built to provide heating, which is rare), multiply this by a COP of 3 for ASHP (4 for GSHP) and you get 120% thermal efficiency for ASHP (up to 240% for CHP+GSHP) -- so as a minimum CO2 emissions and HVO fuel use are a third lower than an HVO boiler in the home.

 

Restricted HVO availability is likely to be a bigger driver than CO2 emissions (which HVO is already good for), plus the ability to use renewable energy as well.

 

HVO is a good solution for relatively small volume use (like narrowboats!) where mains electricity is not available. For most houses an ASHP is a better solution than an HVO boiler.

Edited December 6, 2021 by IanD

[TheBiscuits]

41 minutes ago, IanD said:

an ASHP (needs about 1m x 0.5m x 0.5m)

 

Most of the ones I have seen are more like 1 x 1 x 0.5 m

[IanD]

15 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Most of the ones I have seen are more like 1 x 1 x 0.5 m

Oops, that's what I meant to type -- corrected...

Edited December 6, 2021 by IanD

[Detling]

Another cost overlooked by the Heat Pump promoters is that about 75% of home built in the last few decades have combi boilers and no hot water tank so conversion to heat pump requires retro fitting of one, and in many cases there is no suitable floor space available without major building work. Fitting in the loft seems the common option but roof trusses were designed to be 'adequate' without tens of kilo's load adding.

[IanD]

15 minutes ago, Detling said:

Another cost overlooked by the Heat Pump promoters is that about 75% of home built in the last few decades have combi boilers and no hot water tank so conversion to heat pump requires retro fitting of one, and in many cases there is no suitable floor space available without major building work. Fitting in the loft seems the common option but roof trusses were designed to be 'adequate' without tens of kilo's load adding.

I'd like to know who you think these mythical "heat pump promoters" are? Do you just mean "anybody who thinks we need to fix the UK's domestic heating problem to meet CO2 targets needed to stop global heating"?

 

I already posted about the pros and cons of heat pumps, including the cost and the possible need to fit bigger radiators and a hot tank, and the even bigger cost of ground source systems. But the fact remains that in a society which needs to reduce fossil fuel usage and CO2 emissions *drastically* in the near future and where domestic heating is one of the biggest contributors, they're the best solution we have even though they're by no means perfect.

 

Anybody emphasizing these issues as a reason not to install them -- which I don't think anybody sensible is denying -- needs to come up with a better alternative, which is practical and scaleable up to millions of homes, and doesn't ignore far worse issues like "green" hydrogen -- or even worse, "blue" hydrogen -- which waste vast amounts of energy in comparison. It's exactly the same arguments put forward by those who promote hydrogen cars over BEV, which are similarly dumb.

 

Assuming that we have limitless renewable energy and can afford to throw lots of it away is all fine but bears no relation to reality, where wasting renewable energy means burning more fossil fuels to make up the loss in the energy budget.

 

Over to you...

[GUMPY]

14 minutes ago, IanD said:

Assuming that we have limitless renewable energy and can afford to throw lots of it away is all fine but bears no relation to reality, where wasting renewable energy means burning more fossil fuels to make up the loss in the energy budget

When I was younger it was said many times that with the advent of nuclear power electricity would be so cheap it could be given away. Pity that due to successive governments it didn't happen.

We had a world beating industry that is now no longer fit for purpose. ☹️

[Mad Harold]

22 minutes ago, Loddon said:

When I was younger it was said many times that with the advent of nuclear power electricity would be so cheap it could be given away. Pity that due to successive governments it didn't happen.

We had a world beating industry that is now no longer fit for purpose. ☹️

I remember that.

"Electricity will be too cheap to meter"

Yeah, right  😃

[Alan de Enfield]

26 minutes ago, Loddon said:

When I was younger it was said many times that with the advent of nuclear power electricity would be so cheap it could be given away. Pity that due to successive governments it didn't happen.

We had a world beating industry that is now no longer fit for purpose. ☹️

 

 

So the current climate problem is actually all down to the NIMBY Tree Huggers.

If we had built up the nuclear industry we'd have clean (and cheap) energy and no "climate change".

[IanD]

32 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

So the current climate problem is actually all down to the NIMBY Tree Huggers.

If we had built up the nuclear industry we'd have clean (and cheap) energy and no "climate change".

 

If they'd carried on building nuclear power stations and disposing (or not...) of the waste like they did in the 1950s and 1960s, "clean" would certainly not be an appropriate adjective...

 

-- yes I'm aware that in comparison to "dirty" fossil fuels nuclear is "clean", but most of the public don't see it that way.

 

"Cheap" is also debatable, given the construction cost of nuclear reactors which is heavily driven by safety considerations. Even in France which enthusiastically adopted nuclear power and built a lot of power stations it was never super-cheap, though it did have the huge advantage of negligible CO2 emissions, at least during operation. But then few people knew or cared about this until quite recently.

 

I don't think there's much doubt that if the world had adopted fission power on a massive scale we'd be a lot better off than we are today with CO2 emissions. Unfortunately it would also have massively increased the risk of nuclear proliferation, making either bad-actor/terrorist use of an atomic bomb much more likely, and also a badly-maintained power plant doing something even worse than Chernobyl. Which in the big scheme of things would probably still have caused far less harm then our continued reliance on burning fossil fuel, however few people care about dead coal-miners in China but they're terrified of the threat of radiation...

 

Don't also forget that one reason for not going all-out for nasty dangerous radioactive fission reactors is that fusion power -- "too cheap to meter" -- has been 15 years away for the last 50 years...

[David Mack]

1 hour ago, Loddon said:

When I was younger it was said many times that with the advent of nuclear power electricity would be so cheap it could be given away. Pity that due to successive governments it didn't happen.

We had a world beating industry that is now no longer fit for purpose. ☹️

If it was that easy someone, somewhere else in the world, would have done it by now. 

[mrsmelly]

Our metal squirrell friend hasnt visited for over a week. Perhaps he is pricing up the lovely new diesel generater he will be buying to power his needs?

[GUMPY]

37 minutes ago, David Mack said:

If it was that easy someone, somewhere else in the world, would have done it by now. 

France has had a pretty good stab at it 70% of its electricity is from nuclear energy,  17% comes from recycled nuclear fuel.  Admittedly they are looking to reduce that to 50% by 2035

 

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx

[GUMPY]

Compare France to the UK that presently has 20% reducing to 10% by 2025☹️

Interestingly we are well down the list and there are many countries producing more as a percentage of their electricity use than we do.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-kingdom.aspx

Edited December 6, 2021 by Loddon