CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL WARMING

[Stanley]

Despite fine words I don't think modern governments really understand the synergies available from altruistic funding of basic research. Too long term for them. In their world they need the instant return and the attractive sound bite. It's a political disease and someone should fund research to find a cure for it.
Lots of explanatory pieces in the media explaining why a week of heavy rain does very little for the overall drought picture. Same syndrome as government short-termism really, the public expects instant cures and 100% reassurance. Tough! Learn to live with the real world!

[Stanley]

Watched the 'Tonight' programme last night on the drought. Quite amazing how short-sighted some of the opinions expressed were. The gardening expert was particularly worrying, he couldn't see why gardeners should be restricted. They quoted a figure of 150l per head per day as average UK consumption, this looks low to me. On the last calculation my consumption is 123l a day and I think I am quite efficient in saving water. Bit of a puzzle. There must be fols out there using a lot less than me. I wonder how they do it?

[PanBiker]

This could equally go in Good TV as well as well but did anyone catch the documentary the other night "Rowing to the Pole"? Told the story of an expedition to row a boat to the magnet North Pole. 30 years ago the only way to get there was to trek across the Arctic ice shelf on foot with sledges and dogs. With the receding polar ice cap it is now possible to row a boat all the way. The team ran into odd bottlenecks where it took a little time to get through the gaps in breaking ice flows. The satellite images shown over the years from the mid 80's were staggering when you think of how much of the ice has now gone. The prediction is that within another 20 -30 years it will not be uncommon to see container ships using the same route.

[Tizer]

The thinning of the Arctic ice was monitored for decades by the US submarines because they needed to know where they could safely break surface, and the data was stored but kept secret. No matter what we might think of Al Gore he was the one who pestered the US Navy and flew an admiral to the Arctic to see it for himself, after which the Navy released all the data and it became obvious how serious the thinning was and that it has been going on for some time.

I was listening to a radio programme about preventing and controlling wildfires in the UK and noticed how all the people interviewed said that it was a much worse problem now because of climate change. How strange that there are still people out there who won't even accept that it's happening, never mind what's causing it.

[Stanley]

The thing that always strikes me about wildfires is that they are part of nature. Indeed, in some parts of the world like Eucalyptus forests the trees have adapted to the point where occasional fires are essential to a healthy forest. It seems to me that wildfires are assessed in terms of their effect on us and not the environment. Classic cases can be seen in Australian suburbs and the canyons in Southern California where building has encroached on the scrub and surprise surprise a wildfire is started, often by a natural cause and destroys the buildings as well.

[Stanley]

Hearing yet another 'worst for 100 years' report, this time the wettest April and watching pics of floods with reports of heavy rain again today I wonder how anyone can ignore the signs that something in our climate is changing.

[Whyperion]

But the driest April in parts of Scotland.

I dont think the UK[alone] is a good place to look for trends in climate change , our position in the midst of a rather large expanse of water and the variations in the jet stream as well mean that rain in torrents is either to the north , or lesser to the south of our location , and sometimes it falls for long or short times on our patches of ground. A ten year trend might be worrying but then we seem to go through a change in weather the following years.

But it seems that only the reduction in demand for water from industry has enabled enough usable water for a growing population and that there appears to be insufficient storage of water for times and places where its needed.

[Pluggy]

I just modified my graph plotting the national grid load to show what kind of plant is doing the work.

http://pluggy.is-a-geek.com/24hournatgrid.png

Its obvious that they do most of the load balancing with the CCGT power stations, with the coal plants slowing down just at nights. The nukes run solid all the time, the wind does what it wants and the others contribute. Most of 'others' is the French interconnector which seems to run all the time and pumped storage kicks in at peak demand times.
We have more installed gas (CCGT) capacity than coal but the coal does more, certainly at this time of the year. The coal stations run at pretty much the same load between 8 AM and 11PM. The nukes are running one station short of flat out all the time. I assume one of the 8 remaining nuclear plants is undergoing maintainance. Considering CCGT is a lot better than coal on the CO2 front, it seems CO2 isn't top of the agenda. Costs probably has more to do with it.

[Tizer]

Gas is not as good as it seems in terms of the greenhouse effect. A lot of the gas (mainly composed of methane) leaks away into the atmosphere during extraction and distribution and methane has 72 times greater greenhouse effect over a 20-year period than CO2 (25 times over a 100-year period). Even so, a recent study suggests it's still worthwhile switching to gas: LINK

[Whyperion]

Still think it makes better sense to use coal in large generating plants for maximum efficient and treatment of wastes including greenhouse gases and for Gas to be used as domestic / industrial heating and that use of gas / LPG for power generation is inefficient.

Isnt most of the coal imported (columbia and the like ) these days ?

[Pluggy]

Still think it makes better sense to use coal in large generating plants for maximum efficient and treatment of wastes including greenhouse gases and for Gas to be used as domestic / industrial heating and that use of gas / LPG for power generation is inefficient.

Isnt most of the coal imported (columbia and the like ) these days ?

Almost all of the gas plant is CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) which is (at least when its all warmed up at maximum efficiency ) more efficient than straight coal plant. Its possible to use coal in CCGT but it needs to be changed into a gas to feed the gas turbine stage first. Its a process similar to making town gas. Methane when burnt also gives off less CO2 than coal since it has hydrogen which burns to form water vapour. Coal is almost all carbon and produces almost all CO2. A good CCGT plant is 60% efficient, a good coal plant is 40% efficient. As tiz says methane itself is a greenhouse gas, but most of the losses will already have occured before it reaches our shores.

Most coal is imported, Maggie pretty much killed off the mining industry in the 80's. There is some open cast mining done here.

[Pluggy]

CCGT is most efficient when they've got the steam plant running as well but like coal plants that takes several hours to bring on-line. The gas turbine first stage can be run up and producing electric in a couple of minutes. Then its no so efficient because a lot of very hot gases are going to waste. Many CCGT plants have the facility to up the output by injecting more gas into the exhaust from the gas turbine (just like an afterburner on a jet aircraft) so that the steam stage can produce more power if required. Also not so efficient.

This flexibility makes it ideal for load balancing I suppose.

[Stanley]

Whatever happened to wave power and barrages....
April continues to break records, announced yesterday it was the coldest on record as well. Second hottest April day, wettest and now the coldest overall. I think we've been lucky in Barlick, not a bad month on the whole in all respects.

[Stanley]

Tuesday morning, 'The Life Scientific', James Lovelock.

[Tizer]

Will be listening to hear Lovelock give his own story. Wave power is alive and well, we just don't hear much about it because it doesn't excite the media luvvies. Big projects up and running off Cornwall and Scottish coasts. Severn barrage scuppered for now, largely because they wanted to go down the wrong design route which would have been a threat to large areas of Britaina round the estuary (not to mention the shipping route to Avonmouth and Bristol).

Coal mines in Britain - see UK coals operational map...
http://www.ukcoal.com/about-us/operational-map

[Pluggy]

Been reading up on coal mining - thanks Tiz. UK coal produce 14% of the coal burnt in the UK (thereby implying that 86% comes from elsewhere)- 5.5 million tonnes a year, 80% from 4 deep mines (I thought open cast was bigger). Coal production was in decline from the 60's but there was still over 100,000 tonnes a year produced into the early 80's (pre minors strike). Unsurprisingly, most coal in the UK is used for electricity generation. Only the most profitable pits,basically those that lend themselves to mass automation, have survived. Its cheaper to import it.

Solar PV installations have dropped right off since the reduced FITs and extra hoops to jump through came in in March and April. Fits are going down again in July. It became a victim of its own success, the prices have come down and it became very popular and overrunning the governments budget for FITs. They left it a bit late and tried to reduce it ahead of schedule in December last year, they were forced by the courts to keep it going, the extra publicity that brought pushed installations up to beat the new deadline in March. In April they introduced new hoops for installations. Installers on a renewable energy forum I visit are saying work has practically dried up. There's around 1 GW (1000 Megawatts) of 'plate' capacity been installed. Approx 300,000 installations of average 3kW each. Germany has around 20 GW of solar installed in comparison.

[Stanley]

I remember when I was running Ellenroad UK coal was £70 a ton, imported was £35. I recommended to the Trustees that we continued to burn UK because we knew the pits had proper safety standards. I was over-ruled....

[Tizer]

Recording 'The Life Scientific', James Lovelock, right now. LINK

Pluggy - FiTs going down? By how much? We'd been planning to put 4kWp on the SE facing roof of our planned new house. It wouldn't be intended as investment but as a way to balance our use of electricity, i.e. use the Grid as a big battery. But every fall in the FiT makes it a longer payback period!

[Pluggy]

Recording 'The Life Scientific', James Lovelock, right now. LINK

Pluggy - FiTs going down? By how much? We'd been planning to put 4kWp on the SE facing roof of our planned new house. It wouldn't be intended as investment but as a way to balance our use of electricity, i.e. use the Grid as a big battery. But every fall in the FiT makes it a longer payback period!

You've missed the 43.3p kWh rate, its presently 21p per kWh, its going down again on the 1st July to a lower figure, that hasn't been finalised. This link says around 16p I've seen others that suggest 18p. Its still reasonable at 21p I'd be getting in now if you're going to do it.

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Gen ... d-proposed

This one suggests the 16.5p figure as well :

http://www.solarimpact.co.uk/feed-in-tariff.html

The Gov were stiffed by the courts into holding the higher rate for longer than they wanted. Money is tight and the 'tax' on everybodies fuel bills to pay for it is politically sensitive so they are making up for it without the other politically sensitive option of a U turn and scrapping FITs altogether.

[Pluggy]

I was doing the figures yesterday on the panels, I reckon we're going to be a little short on the quote we were given at the start. They don't tend to take shading into account, its not too bad now but the winter figures were very low because we have extensive shading from other properties and trees when the sun is very low. They quoted 2064 kWh per year. I reckon we'll do around 1900. We did have a very good March. We're doing very well on saved electricity (about double the quote) due to the old steam driven electric meter which very helpfully spins backwards when we're exporting. Probably a short lived advantage.

There is a body of opinion that says 'net metering' (a meter that gives the difference between import and export aka one that runs backwards) should have been what the FITs were based on rather than the generated figure. Theres a market grown up around artificially using what would be exported by having a device turn on an immersion heater when the sun is shining so that you're getting something from it on top of the FIT and export rate. (On sub 4kWp systems you don't need an export meter so you're deemed to export 50% of what you generate, regardless of what you actually do export). There's an attitude that exported electricity is wasted, which is a large point of doing it in the first place as far as the government is concerned.

[Tizer]

Thanks for the all the information Pluggy, it's good to hear from someone who is both an engineer and a user of PV panels, and also who records so much data. We knew the FiT had dropped from 43 to 21 and I think we'll pass the next drop as well because the house won't be at the stage for buying panels until the end of this year. If they take it too low they might find uptake falls too far - the UK is already far short of meeting the proposed 2020 energy sustainability targets.

[Pluggy]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 18665.html

A bit overstated IMO but the gist of it is true.

It could be worse, Spain has retrospectively reduced FITs for existing installations.

[Tizer]

Here's the next big threat to our attempts to insulate houses and save energy....mice! They eat your pipe insulation, your foam wall insulation, roof insulation...

http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/new ... e=1#Item_0

[Stanley]

Jim Lovelock was funny, knowledgeable and immensely credible. He still thinks Gaia was his finest work and I loved his reason for saying that he's be quite happy to have a concrete box of high energy nuclear waste in a his back garden so he could heat his house off it. He said he proposed it simply to wind up the nuclear protesters. The man has a sense of humour.

[Stanley]

I looked at the story recommended by Wendy of the Earby Floods of 1910. (See Medical Matters) Just like the Barlick flood of 1932, caused by an event on the moor. It struck me that we are more likely to have these events today because the weather seems to be getting more extreme.