ENERGY MATTERS

[Stanley]

The last anthracite mine I know of was in South Wales. Tower Colliery. See THIS for the history of the closure and reopening after the miners bought it back with their redundancy money.

[Tizer]

Simple proof that just `getting on and doing it' works...
`Climate change: 'Default effect' sees massive green energy switch' LINK
`When Swiss energy companies made green electricity the default choice, huge numbers of consumers were happy to stick with it - even though it cost them more. Four years after the switch, researchers found that around 80% of customers were still on green tariffs. This "default effect" happened partly because people didn't want the hassle of switching back to fossil fuels. The authors say the idea could have a big impact on global emissions of CO2....Before the switch, the numbers choosing to have green power were at around 3%. Afterwards, this rose to 80-90% of customers....It was a similar story for small business customers. Several years after the switch, more than 70% were still on the more expensive green tariff..'.

[Stanley]

Just had a talk with BG who have reduced the charge for my CH service contract to £21 a month. That includes the enhanced service because of my age and will only be BG engineers in future. I was going to cancel but that seems fair.

[Stanley]

I had a look later and they dropped it from £33 to £25.95 after the service fiasco and have dropped it again to £21 a month for one year. That's reasonable for free repairs to boiler, radiators and controls. If they try to raise it again next March I vote with my feet.

[Wendyf]

We have never had a gas supply and haven't had smart meters fitted so we dont know much about them. Col looks after son Craig's gas & leccy accounts and recently switched him to British Gas who are going to install a smart meter next week. Will it be for both, just leccy or just gas???

[Big Kev]

We have never had a gas supply and haven't had smart meters fitted so we dont know much about them. Col looks after son Craig's gas & leccy accounts and recently switched him to British Gas who are going to install a smart meter next week. Will it be for both, just leccy or just gas???

It'll be for both, if it's a straightforward swap. If it's going to take a while they'll come back to do the gas another day. They'll do the electric first, as it has the comms hub attached to it. Once that's in and confirmed as communicating with the DCC they'll physically connect the gas meter and 'join' it to the comms hub. The In Home Display is then 'joined' to the comms hub. With no issues should all be done within an hour.

[PanBiker]

If it's a dual fuel contract it will be for both. BG put my original ones in which I am waiting for them to be replaced with later generation jobs.

[Stanley]

Same here Wendy. My meters were some of the first to be installed and apart from a dodgy monitor ( Which is now in the cupboard.) the system has worked well.

[Big Kev]

If it's a dual fuel contract it will be for both. BG put my original ones in which I am waiting for them to be replaced with later generation jobs.

A lot of the suppliers I support are having their systems upgraded to work with the SMETS1 meters, they don't offer as much functionality as SMETS2 but it will enable them to work across multiple suppliers.

[Stanley]

I see that the regulator is bringing in regulation to force energy companies to return any excess credit to customers once a year. (LINK) It is suspected that these total as much as £1.4billion. It nagged me for years but as you know I solved the problem by getting them to use my smart meter and simply charge me each month for what I had used.

[Big Kev]

It must be the smaller companes that are holding on to credit, I've always had the small amount, mine has been in credit, automatically returned once a year.

[Tripps]

Smart meters.

I think I read that during the recent weather problems and power difficulties in Texas, consumers paid the spot price for their electricity, and it was occasionally enormous. Bills of many thousands of dollars. Since they had 'smart' meters - it was possible to record when they used the power, not just how much they had used.

I still have not seen any advantage to me of having one fitted.

[Stanley]

But that was Texas David. I never have to read a meter or check how much excess the company is taking from my bank account. I pay for what I have used on the 14th day of the month after consumption. I like that.

[Stanley]

March energy bill is £91. Coming down slowly!

[Big Kev]

My new energy supplier Eon Next just moved my electricity to a new tariff, the previous tariff that moved over from Npower expired at the end of March and I opted to be automatically moved to the cheapest available. No noticeable change in payment just a couple of pence difference on the daily charge, DD remains the same.

[Stanley]

I changed to the new BG fixed tariff until April 2022 with green leccy and guaranteed cheapest tariff (whatever that means!). Noticed that this year's March bill was slightly lower than last year. Not sure whether that's the tariff or the weather.....

[Marilyn]

Prince Philip Sad, sad news...(meant to post that in obits but it ended up here for some reason!)

[Tizer]

In one of the other topics we've mentioned the need for more charging points for electric vehicles. I'm getting increasingly sceptical of our chances of preventing a dangerous level of continued climate change and the issue of electric vehicles is part of it. I fear that we might be repeating what happened when we were told to switch from petrol to diesel cars and then found diesel had its own problems and now we're to switch to electric and start to find out the problems with that. The car manufacturers, having ignored electric for so long, are now diving in fast because they can sell the vehicles at a big profit at a time when sales of conventional cars are stalling. But they haven't made much effort to develop better batteries and are hoping someone else will throw money at that problem. It isn't simply a matter of tweaking lithium batteries to make them a bit more efficient - we need to find cheaper and more readily abundant materials for making batteries. And then there's the problem of getting people to change to electric cars and, once we've switched to IC vehicles, even in Britain we'll be left with millions of redundant IC vehicles.

At the same time people seem to think they are making a difference by planting trees, and companies and individuals carry on emitting massive amounts of CO2 while claiming they are `offsetting' their emissions with the tree planting. The truth is that those trees won't make much difference to CO2 levels in the next 50 years and many of them will fail to survive, or get a die-back disease, or be felled for timber (and profit) before they have any beneficial effect.

We don't have the luxury of 100s of years, we've got to make changes now and the only effective way to do that is to reduce our energy usage immediately. It's possible, but it needs leaders who can drive through such changes and get the public onside.

[plaques]

How about this for an unintended consequence of electric cars. Obviously we will burn less fossil fuel and therefore less carbon dioxide. Since we are not combining the Carbon with oxygen C+(O2) therefore a surplus of oxygen. Dangerous stuff is oxygen sets things on fire and makes things oxydise.

[Stanley]

[Whyperion]

How about this for an unintended consequence of electric cars. Obviously we will burn less fossil fuel and therefore less carbon dioxide. Since we are not combining the Carbon with oxygen C+(O2) therefore a surplus of oxygen. Dangerous stuff is oxygen sets things on fire and makes things oxydise.

I think we worry too much, the western energy has been an excess of CO2 over natural levels, mature trees balance 0 and C02 over a year. Plant hedges.

[plaques]

I think we worry too much, the western energy has been an excess of CO2 over natural levels, mature trees balance 0 and C02 over a year. Plant hedges.

Yes humans have been producing too much carbon dioxide but trees only retain a balance within themselves. CO2 in, C captured and O output until it dies or burnt then its in reverse. A balance but no more than that. Oxygen levels over the millions of years have been recorded from 17% to 35% (from memory) Most of the oceans iron has been oxydised and so have a lot of the minerals. Over to Tizer for a proper scientific answer.

[Tizer]

To begin with there was only combined oxygen in minerals, no free molecular oxygen. When primitive photosynthetic organisms evolved, all the O2 they produced was instantly mopped up in reduction of iron compounds to oxides - the oceans would have turned red and the ancient banded iron formations we see in rocks in, for example, Australia were formed. As more O2 was formed it began to accumulate in the atmosphere and reached about 35% in the Carboniferous period as noted by Plaques but fell to about 12% in the Triassic period.

[Stanley]

So there....!

[plaques]

So with more oxygen in the air will people and animals all become bigger like the prehistoric animals or will we automatically expire in spontaneous combustion and leave this mortal coil with a bang.