weather

[Michael Rolls]

for the fifth successive day the barometer has stayed steady. Only started taking note of the barometer earlier this year, so I don't know how often it stays steady for such a length of time. What I do know is that today will be the first day since Saturday that the thermometer is due to get above freezing - around lunch we can expect 1C, but only for an hour or so before it falls back down - and snow is forecast for tomorrow.
Oh, and since Saturday, the 12 windmills that I can see a few miles ago have just sat there sulking and contributing absolutely nothing.
Happy days!
Mike

[Ashy]

I'd be interested to know what Italy does in this context. Whenever I look at a surface pressure chart for Europe, the isobars over the Mediterranean are either absent or a long way apart which suggests there is hardly any wind there, as has been the case over the British Isles recently.

Whilst the concept of wind power is a reasonable one, its implementation is hardly good for the environment and wildlife, and the output is totally unreliable.

[Diasi]

We should have gone with a combination of 100% nuclear & hydro-electric when we were still the world leaders in nuclear power generation.

Our problem has been the powerful Luddite lobby who oppose nuclear power.

[Ashy]

I'm always willing to learn but I don't think we have very much potential for pure hydro-electricity. I mean we don't have any great rivers like the Amazon or the Nile, or Niagara etc.

[klondike]

Pumped hydroelectric might make a storage solution for intermittent renewables but I doubt we have many sites even suitable for that.

What we apparently do have is a large reserve of shale gas under the North of England. Fracking for it has been queered by protest groups spreading fear with the public. I have read that much of this is  Russian financed  to protect their dominance of that market. Which their leader has destroyed anyway in less than a year.

[Ashy]

I doubt if pumped hydro can really do very much other than cover short duration peak demands. PH Schemes take up a large area and naturally have to have the appropriate geography, and of course, take power when recharging.

When we recently had two or three whole days with no wind and sun, to cover this would require an enormous PH scheme or schemes.

Mining for gas seems sensible enough to me.

[klondike]

Plus of course I expect that pumped hydro is very inefficient and needs to be located quite close to the renewable source used to pump it up which probably poses even bigger geographic constraints.

Grid watch shows 0.34GW being generated by pumped right now and the gauge only goes to 3.5 GW maximum.

[Ashy]

I wonder what the answer is. I think we might start by saying the technology has not developed to a satisfactory point yet. We might store more energy locally (distributed storage) and in a usable form where practicable. How many of us still use economy 7 fire bricks to store and release heat? 

What are the alternatives?
Loaded hydraulics (Tower Bridge)
Clockwork (Springs and weights)
Natural hydraulics (Hydro-electric schemes)
Tidal hydraulics/waves
Chemical batteries
Capacitors
Fire Bricks
Pneumatics

[klondike]

There is currently no practical, efficient and economic way to store the amount of energy needed to power the UK for even a day. That is unlikely to change any time soon IMO. That means that intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar will need an easy to start up backup source of energy when they no longer deliver. Right now the only viable source is gas powered generators. That is unlikley to change any time soon too.

One possibility would be to use excess solar and wind energy to electrolise water to produce hydrogen which could then be burned to produce steam to turn generators. We would need a hell of a lot more solar panels and wind turbines to have any excess renewables energy. SFAIK that isn't planned and may be impractical/too expensive. When they give up on lithium battery cars which are impractical at the sort of numbers of ICE cars currently then the obvious alternative is hydrogen too.

Meanwhile we need to get fracking or expect to be impoverished.

[Michael Rolls]

of course, the easiest things to store are gas (shame about the gasometers) and coal (shame about the politics)
Mike

[klondike]

I think to store large quantities of gas it needs to be liquified. Those gasometers went years ago. Probably soon after we stopped producing coal gas in small plants. There was some big storage plant which the Tories had closed down although how politicians were involved I don't know. Maybe subsidies were involved.