Diesels to be banned

[IanD]

1 minute ago, dor said:

But what say every lock had a small generator in the bywash or sluice?  Or lots of small rivers with turbines - just drive up from Cromford to Matlock - there used to be something like 20 or more  substantial mills in just a few miles along a relatively small river.  Like our domestic solar panels, a lot of small producers could add up to a lot of power, and not require a hugely expensive investment.

You're missing the point, the numbers *still* don't add up. There just aren't enough rivers/streams/whatever in the UK with enough volume and head to generate anything near the amount of energy that we use. The same is true for most forms of renewable energy, the "energy density" is simply too low, or there just isn't enough space (or water, or sunshine, or...) available in the UK -- for example, getting all our energy supplies from solar cells in the UK would need something like 40000km2 of panels. Please, *please* go and read Prof MacKay's book to see how this all works...

[DHutch]

33 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

30 miles at 50mph is a PATHETIC range and utterly unuseable except perhaps for running the brats to skool and a bit of local shopping.  

It's difficult isn't it. 

My commute is 13miles at 30-50mph, even with a detour to the supermarket and kennals to collect the dog, it does, happy days. Half an hour at home I can then go over to a freinds and back for the evening or our for a meal. That's 60% of my driving needs.

But then ever other weekend I do two hours on the m6 to see my girlfriend. Else she comes to mine. At which point it all falls apart! I could train over on the Friday night, as I sometimes do if we then go to mine for the Sunday, but the trains stop very early on a Sunday night and start an hour later on a Monday morning to make work.

So I think for this to work it needs to be suitably wholistic such that I can either get a train at the time I need, or start work an hour late on Monday. Or date closer to home. And no drive to her parents in south Wales, or a holiday in Devon, or get offer for a week in Italy.

 

Daniel

[Graham Davis]

2 hours ago, furnessvale said:

I believe it is more to do with the volume that can be contained for storage rather than the available head.

Certainly the people in the know about such things, think the UK has just about exhausted all its available hydro sites.

George

Large or small scale?

As said earlier, I know there are several small community based projects being looked at around here.

[dor]

15 minutes ago, IanD said:

You're missing the point, the numbers *still* don't add up. There just aren't enough rivers/streams/whatever in the UK with enough volume and head to generate anything near the amount of energy that we use. The same is true for most forms of renewable energy, the "energy density" is simply too low, or there just isn't enough space (or water, or sunshine, or...) available in the UK -- for example, getting all our energy supplies from solar cells in the UK would need something like 40000km2 of panels. Please, *please* go and read Prof MacKay's book to see how this all works...

I didn't say it would produce all the energy, but it could make a decent contribution, just as domestic solar panels are starting to do.

[Graham Davis]

34 minutes ago, dor said:

But what say every lock had a small generator in the bywash or sluice?  Or lots of small rivers with turbines - just drive up from Cromford to Matlock - there used to be something like 20 or more  substantial mills in just a few miles along a relatively small river.  Like our domestic solar panels, a lot of small producers could add up to a lot of power, and not require a hugely expensive investment.

Quite, which is what I've heard planned around here.

[MtB]

33 minutes ago, dor said:

But what say every lock had a small generator in the bywash or sluice?  Or lots of small rivers with turbines - just drive up from Cromford to Matlock - there used to be something like 20 or more  substantial mills in just a few miles along a relatively small river.  Like our domestic solar panels, a lot of small producers could add up to a lot of power, and not require a hugely expensive investment.

 

Ah, excellent idea. This could at least replace the electricity currently used from the national grid to pump it all back up to the top again...

er hang on a sec...!

Edit to add: I imagine however, you are talking only about rivers.

[furnessvale]

14 minutes ago, Graham Davis said:

Large or small scale?

As said earlier, I know there are several small community based projects being looked at around here.

Yes, I am talking large scale.  There are many small scale locations which could, and should be used.  There is one near me at New Mills, but it will take an awful lot of them to make a dent.  The ones out in the country can support local demand but large cities do not have such sites available and they are the big users of electricity.

George

[Boat&Bikes]

2040 is a while away. Go back a similar distance in time and we had no internet, mobile phones etc. I hope mainstream petrol/Diesel engines have long gone by then.. not my old Z1 though I hope! 

[WotEver]

23 years ago we had no CDs, VHS was the 'in thing', TVs were much, much deeper than they were wide, we only had 5 TV channels, no mobile phones, Google was just a number, email was unheard of, Eva Herzigova was advertising the Wonder Bra, and Wet Wet Wet's 'Love Is All Around' was number 1 in the charts. 

[DHutch]

27 minutes ago, dor said:

...people will be rewarded for turning off their car chargers, washing machines or water heaters and other high current devices for a few minutes.  One house doing it won't mean much, but several million switching off for ten minutes here and there could give a significant reduction in generation capacity when averaged out.

Yes. Quite a number of years ago I read about having industrial cold stores and the like being linked up such that they cut out during short periods of high demand, to smooth out spikes in demand.

Personally I think this is what 'smart meters' should be. But at the moment even that is but a pipedream.

20 minutes ago, WotEver said:

...23 years ago we had no CDs, VHS was the 'in thing', TVs ... ..only had 5 TV channels, no mobile phones, Google was just a number, email was unheard of...

 

29 minutes ago, ianali said:

2040 is a while away. Go back a similar distance in time and we had no internet, mobile phones etc.....

Also very true indeed.

We are certainly in a time of change.

[peterboat]

2 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

That sounds like plain silliness for the sake of good telly. Even a 13A extension lead would take tens if not hundreds of hours to supply enough energy to recharge a car motive battery.

30 miles at 50mph is a PATHETIC range and utterly unuseable except perhaps for running the brats to skool and a bit of local shopping.  

 

Fraid not Mike my twizy for a year was that car and I never paid to charge it and only once had to charge it at the pub! Fifty miles is more than enough for a lot of people some only do that a week [remember I had a garage so know very well how many miles people do a year] I only got rid of the twizy because I had the Tuk Tuk which is even more fun with 197cc and is nowhere near as quick as the twizy

[MtB]

2 minutes ago, peterboat said:

Fraid not Mike my twizy for a year was that car and I never paid to charge it and only once had to charge it at the pub! Fifty miles is more than enough for a lot of people some only do that a week [remember I had a garage so know very well how many miles people do a year] I only got rid of the twizy because I had the Tuk Tuk which is even more fun with 197cc and is nowhere near as quick as the twizy

 

I do fifty miles several times over, most days!!

[peterboat]

2 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I do fifty miles several times over, most days!!

and 50 other users do 50 miles a week Its no good complaining about it your made in Germany vito will soon be battery powered as I believe they are going all electric before us!!

[Murflynn]

I predict that our car-owning and using habits will be quite different by 2040.  

In order to facilitate long journeys the projected Tesla system can be used where the battery is replaced in no more time that it takes to fill with petrol.

Alternatively it may become common to rent a car for long journeys, changing cars at charging depots.  i.e we buy the USE OF a car, rather than buying the car itself. It seems inevitable that cars will be able to run in guided lanes on motorways, possibly separated from each other by only a metre, at speeds comparable with today's speeds.

For the vast majority of today's cars that are used only for domestic purposes, electric is entirely practical (assuming you can recharge them at home) because typical domestic use is the school run, shopping and local pleasure trips.  For longer journeys the hire system will provide the answer. As for towing a caravan or a boat, driving a motorhome, or taking a roof-rack load of stuff to the tip, other solutions will need to be sought.

The government's initiative (along with similar initiatives all over the world including India and China) will drive the development of new battery technology.  We can also expect hydrogen fuel technology to be developed in parallel, the hydrogen being generated by solar power in remote or arid locations (e.g. Arizona, the Gulf, Africa), and by off-peak electricity in temperate climates.

Cars will be relatively easy, but as has been pointed out, trucks and planes present a different challenge; maybe hydrogen will be the new wonder fuel for such applications.

Edited July 26, 2017 by Murflynn

[peterboat]

2 minutes ago, Murflynn said:

I predict that our car-owning and using habits will be quite different by 2040.  

In order to facilitate long journeys the projected Tesla system can be used where the battery is replaced in no more time that it takes to fill with petrol.

Alternatively it may become common to rent a car for long journeys, changing cars at charging depots.  i.e we buy the USE OF a car, rather than buying the car itself. It seems inevitable that cars will be able to run in guided lanes on motorways, possibly separated from each other by only a metre, at speeds comparable with today's speeds.

The government's initiative (along with similar initiatives all over the world including India and China) will drive the development of new battery technology.  We can also expect hydrogen fuel technology to be developed in parallel, the hydrogen being generated by solar power in remote or arid locations (e.g. Arizona, the Gulf, Africa), and by off-peak electricity in temperate climates.

Cars will be relatively easy, but as has been pointed out, trucks and planes present a different challenge; maybe hydrogen will be the new wonder fuel for such applications.

Or maybe it will be through tracks lain in roads and inducted into the lorry/bus and of course the driver will be obsolete

[MtB]

10 minutes ago, peterboat said:

and 50 other users do 50 miles a week Its no good complaining about it your made in Germany vito will soon be battery powered as I believe they are going all electric before us!!

 

I guess I'm complaining more that I commonly travel a hundred miles each way to a destination highly unlikely to have a charge point. And having to stop and wait for five hours to recharge in a motorway services wrecks the viability of the trip in the first place. 

[Graham Davis]

1 hour ago, furnessvale said:

Yes, I am talking large scale.  There are many small scale locations which could, and should be used.  There is one near me at New Mills, but it will take an awful lot of them to make a dent.  The ones out in the country can support local demand but large cities do not have such sites available and they are the big users of electricity.

George

But at least numerous small scale ones reduce the load on the Grid nationally, allowing more capacity for the cities.

[GUMPY]

1 hour ago, WotEver said:

23 years ago we had no CDs, VHS was the 'in thing', TVs were much, much deeper than they were wide, we only had 5 TV channels, no mobile phones, Google was just a number, email was unheard of, Eva Herzigova was advertising the Wonder Bra, and Wet Wet Wet's 'Love Is All Around' was number 1 in the charts. 

What planet were you on not the same one as me. I had a cd player from 1984, mobile phone in 1992,  and my first email address in 1983 (Telecom Gold). Admitedly I worked in an industry that was a very early adopter of technolgy.

34 years ago and I might have agreed

 

[system 4-50]

I've had this fantastic idea - why don't we have smaller schools close to where the pupils live, and send the pupils to the school nearest their homes, so that they can walk there? (Walking - its a sort of synchronised swinging of those lower bits of your body. Even politicians can do it, with a bit of effort.)

[MtB]

1 minute ago, Loddon said:

What planet were you on not the same one as me. I had a cd player from 1984, mobile phone in 1992,  and my first email address in 1983 (Telecom Gold). Admitedly I worked in an industry that was a very early adopter of technolgy.

34 years ago and I might have agreed

 

 

Yes I was thinking this too. I'm pretty sure even as a plumber I published my first website in 1995, using AOLpress. And email a couple of years before. Not that there was anyone to email me, other than early adopters finding my website!

I also STR 1p a minute being regarded as a damned good cheap rate to be getting from one's service provider to be on line, with a 14kb/sec modem that cost £100-ish.

And newsgroups being the forerunner to discussion forums. Go online, download the headers to all the new messages posted, disconnect, decide which messages and thread updates to download, go back online, download them, get back offline... tedious! 

[WotEver]

Yeah, yeah, I was 10 years out. I was thinking of the early 80's

11 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

And newsgroups being the forerunner to discussion forums.

And BBS being the forerunner to newsgroups. In fact the forerunner to the internet. 

[MtB]

7 minutes ago, WotEver said:

Yeah, yeah, I was 10 years out. I was thinking of the early 80's

And BBS being the forerunner to newsgroups. In fact the forerunner to the internet. 

 

Ah now I never quite grasped bulletin boards.  

[WotEver]

1 minute ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Ah now I never quite grasped bulletin boards.  

You can edumacate yourself if you wish:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

[LadyG]

12 hours ago, Murflynn said:

there are 2 other factors that the powers-that-be seem to avoid all the time:

1. the human population is far too high to be sustainable whatever form of fuel we use.

2. our habits of travelling long distances and transporting goods from the other side of the world, or across our own country, need to change.

 

.................  oh, and pray tell me how do we replace hundreds of thousands of jet planes?  I predict that cheap air travel will be hounded out of existence by punitive taxes on the fuel they use.

Nah, we are all [voters] too used to air travel now and the aero industry has lots of political power.

I can easily solve overpopulation:

 

 

 

Make tight underpants obligatory for all males over the age of twelve.

[system 4-50]

4 minutes ago, LadyG said:

Nah, we are all [voters] too used to air travel now and the aero industry has lots of political power.

I can easily solve overpopulation:

 

 

 

Make tight underpants obligatory for all males over the age of twelve.

You'll never get that passed, its sexist. You'll need to make it tight pants for all persons over the age of twelve.