UK Gas supply- Capitalists fuck up, everyone sufers

[potential]

I beg to differ. I run an electric car quite comfortably from the 5kWp ish on the roof and in the garden of my suburban semi. Solar is already fairly cheap over the lifespan of a panel but will become no more expensive than any other roofing material before very long. My solar installation paid for itself in less than two years and generates several kilowatts more than I need, earning me hundreds of pounds a year for the next few decades. Over their lifespan, my panels will earn me at least £20,000 in addition to providing me with free power.

£20k where do you live in the nevada desert...

 

[tom k&e]

£20k where do you live in the nevada desert...

20k/40 years =£500 a year, = 8000kWh (at current prices) = 1600 hours at full power. Seing as there's 9000 hours in a year, that's a very doable figure.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

If you do the sums, the limit of what we can gather via solar is so immense as to be effectively limitless. Short of particle accelerators being household appliances, just the rooftops we already have would be more than enough, ignoring the extraordinary potential for solar farms in desert regions or floating farms. All of the fossil fuels that exist in reserves or have already been used amount to about a tenth of a percent of the solar energy that falls on the earth on any given day, it's an unimaginably vast resource. As you say, other shortages will kick in long before we outgrow that.

I think we've still got a lot of room to improve agriculture. Just reducing meat consumption in the west by a few percent buys us capacity for millions of people. Irrigation of deserts, marine agriculture, GM and a plethora of other options could buy us capacity for several billion more people, easily. Our current attitudes to agriculture have a lot wrong with them but a meander through the supposedly densely-utilised British countryside shows that we still have vast amounts of land going unused. Reform is needed, granted, but excessive pessimism is undue in my opinion. If it comes to it, market forces will take us all back to a vegan or mostly-vegan diet and sort it out for us. The move to solar will again help us immensely given how oil-intensive current western agriculture is.

A couple of quick points on this, and then I've got a train to catch.

A large proportion of the Earth's surface is and needs to be covered in vegetation, not least because we eat some of it. Crops and most other kinds of vegetation, fix solar energy at about 0.1% efficiency. As I was suggesting above, we're already pretty close to the limit of how much grain we can grow without cutting down the Amazon rainforest. The fundamental point here is that food and energy compete for land use, particularly if you're trying to move entirely to renewable energy. Obviously it makes sense to use the land that's already built on to collect as much solar energy as possible for power production.

I agree that we can use the food we're producing a lot more efficiently than by producing feed-lot beef with it. As for energy use in agriculture, a lot of what we're doing now with oil and gas isn't nearly as feasible with electricity produced by solar energy systems or whatever, although irrigation seems feasible if you've got an aquifer that isn't depleted already. On a global scale though, water shortages are a very serious issue already and that situation seems set to get worse due to climate change.

A fair bit of that energy use is substitution for human or animal labour though, in order to make agriculture more profitable rather than more productive. Another large chunk of oil energy is used to move food and farm wastes around according to the dictates of the market (as opposed to using them as close as possible to their origins to save energy) and to package them for supermarkets etc. Fertiliser manufacture is inherent to the whole industrial agriculture approach. If you can't easily make megatonnes of fertiliser out of fossil fuels, then nutrient recycling becomes much more important and that leads back to some of the stuff about eco-villages, Cuban style urban agriculture co-ops etc.

Anyhow, time for me to run. Back in a few days.

 

[poet]

You've mentioned your solar power setup in passing a few times, but would you mind explaining the details? 5kW of pannels is what, about 50 square meters (at 10% efficency and 1kW/m^-2 solar radiation)? How on earth did you get that many PVs for two grand, when the price for them seems to be about $6/W?

I bought b-grade cells, for a little under 70 cents/wattpeak if memory serves right. They're either slightly cracked or have a couple of fogged or split sub-cells so they run at about 90% of what they should, which just means you need 10% more. The pro installers don't want to touch them as most solar setups are corporate greenwash money no object affairs and more for show than anything and these things look rather ghetto, so the wholesaler I got them from had 40 foot containers full of the things despite everything else flying off the shelves. I did the wiring and installation myself using mostly recycled materials. Don't tell the council, but there's also a pair of 1200Wpish wind turbines exploiting an uphill thermal made from scaff pole, rebuilt winch motors and GRP turbine blades. Were you to do the job 'properly' you'd be looking at spending a lot more than I did, but you'd be able to get a grant for half your cost. A professionally installed 2kWp grid-connected system costs about £5000 at current prices and with current subsidies and will comfortably cover the power needs of a normal family given some efficiency measures. A homebuilder (or a coop/group buy affair) could do it at about half that cost were they to do a couple of dozen houses at once.

Re: profit, solar is more effective on overcast days than people think and my energy consumption is ruthlessly low. Once you start accounting for every watt of power you use it's quite easy to get down to trivial levels. I'm currently using a mere 44 watts - 23 for my laptop, 4 for the router, 7 for my room light, 10 for my amplifier and a couple of hundred mW for the network-attached charge controller. Heat comes courtesy of a scrap-fuelled woodstove. When I'm filling up the (rarely used) car it'll gobble down a few kWh but most of the time I'm scarcely using more than a couple of percent of my capacity. £20,000 is an extremely conservative estimate considering the potential for energy cost surges in the near future. Given upcoming gas shortages and our reliance on it for electricity I expect the cost per unit to come close to doubling before long, certainly the days of the 9 pence unit are looking limited.

 

[poet]

A large proportion of the Earth's surface is and needs to be covered in vegetation, not least because we eat some of it. Crops and most other kinds of vegetation, fix solar energy at about 0.1% efficiency. As I was suggesting above, we're already pretty close to the limit of how much grain we can grow without cutting down the Amazon rainforest. The fundamental point here is that food and energy compete for land use, particularly if you're trying to move entirely to renewable energy. Obviously it makes sense to use the land that's already built on to collect as much solar energy as possible for power production.

Well, I reckon we can generate most of what we need from existing rooftops and a bit of lateral thinking, but the big direction these days seems to be offshore. People are already starting to build sea-worthy floating solar installations. Picture a vast ring of PV cells or GE hydrogen-producing algae around the equator, apply a bit of mental maths (8-15% efficiency with current tech, billions of square metres) and you'll see where I'm coming from. I'm positive that a financially driven mix of efficiency and renewables will keep us from primitivism in a post-oil world.

Certainly local farming makes an awful lot of sense, as does a less industrialised attitude to farming, although I think a non-mechanised, organic approach is an attractive mistake. From what I've gathered there is a sweet spot between the massively increased yields of industrial farming and the energy efficiency of Cuban-type organic methods that lies somewhere in the middle. Having seen the results, I struggle to find any intellectual argument against the careful use of GE crops (although certainly not the overpriced, patented crap Monsanto and their ilk are peddling). To abandon agricultural chemicals entirely is in my opinion a mistake although obviously oil shortages will change what is and isn't viable.

In terms of water, I believe that market forces will cause us all to rethink our water use, this belief being based on the astonishingly low per capita water use of areas with metered, expensively desalinated water. For the moment in everywhere bar a couple of middle-eastern states the cost of efficiency measures far outweighs the cost of water, in no small part due to our statist attitudes towards water and the culture of unmetered water.

 

[tangentlama]

...the extraordinary potential for solar farms in desert regions ...

Instead of using panels of photovoltaic cells -- solar power's mainstay technology for decades -- Stirling Energy Systems uses 40-foot-tall curved dishes that focus the sun's energy onto Stirling engines.

Also called an external heat engine, the Stirling engine is a completely sealed system filled with hydrogen. Its design dates to 1816, and it's named for its inventor, a Scottish minister named Robert Stirling. The focused solar energy, which can reach 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit, heats the hydrogen, making it expand and drive the engine's four pistons.

Though Stirling engines have been around for almost two centuries, there have been few efforts in the past to harness the sun to run them, said Stirling Energy Systems CEO Bruce Osborn.

Osborn said the Stirling dishes are 30 percent efficient -- 30 percent of the sun's energy is converted into electricity -- which is two to three times as efficient as conventional photovoltaic cells.

"Solar panels are more common, and they have gotten more efficient, but they still have a long way to go," he said.

http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,69528,00.html

extraordinary! solar turbine engines!

surely sewage farms have some potential for producing energy too?!

 

[Serguei]

I beg to differ. I run an electric car quite comfortably from the 5kWp ish on the roof and in the garden of my suburban semi.

What about driving it from London to Manchester in a bad weather (or night) on a motorway?

 

[ViolentPanda]

What about driving it from London to Manchester in a bad weather (or night) on a motorway?

You appear to be assuming that when poet mentions "on the roof" he means his car.

He doesn't.

He charges the car from the electricity gathered by the cells on the roof and in the garden of his home.

Therefore he hasn't got anything to worry about either in bad weather or at night.

 

[tom k&e]

What about driving it from London to Manchester in a bad weather (or night) on a motorway?

Why would you want to go to Manchester? And if you had to go, I'd suggest taking the train, as any motorcar is liable to be stolen by the loacl vagabonds.

 

[pbman]

So we have a great resource in the North Sea which has bailed the UK out of the worst of economic fuckups over the last couple of decades.

It's a resource that has easy access to the end user and is great for heating at the far end (ie central heating) and what do the capitalists do? Do they think oh great lets use this in the most efficient way so that domestic and esssential industries can use it far into the future or do they do a "dash for gas" and build electric power stations to run on Gas which is a hugely inefficient way of using gas and is typical short termed thinking.



FFF

Here in the us, gas plants are the only plants they can get premmited.

The radical environmentalists block other forms of power plants.

And it costs us, a shitload of money so some nutcases can feel good about themselves.............

I suspect the UK is the same.

 

[poet]

Why would you want to go to Manchester? And if you had to go, I'd suggest taking the train, as any motorcar is liable to be stolen by the loacl vagabonds.

For the record, I could just about limp 185 miles with the second battery set in the back and a tailwind - not that I'd want to, I'd much rather take the train so I can knock one out in the bogs if I get bored.