Peter Scott wrote:
On 22/10/2010 21:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Peter Scott wrote:
On 22/10/2010 19:44, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Peter Scott wrote:


All uyou have to do is multiply the average insolation of the UK,
times
teh efficiency of PVS times the actual power requirements of the
UK to
see that PV has not, never had, and never will have any hope of a
significant impact on UK power generation.

You don't even need to **** yourself looking at the costs.

Putting every single acre of land under a PV is not an option. It
would
be too dark, and we would need all the power just to light it up
again.


PV exists as a technology solely because of subsidy: which may be
withdrawn at a whim, and hopefully will be.


Perhaps you are right. But how is it then that people can go off grid
using only PV arrays in their own land?

By using very very little power indeed, and not expecting that all the
stuff they buy ois manufactured and/or delivered in the same way.

The per capita burn of energy in this country is about 3KW per head,
from memory. Oh, David Mackay reckons 120Kwh/day, which I make 5Kw.


UK average insolation is about 1Mwh/year meter squared or about 2.7Kwh
per day. Almost nothing is received in the winter months.
http://www.contemporaryenergy.co.uk/solarmap.htm

At 20% efficiency (highly optimistic) with 100% efficient winter and
night storage that is 550wh per sq meter per day

a single person would need about 240 square meters to meet *all* their
energy requirements. To supply all UK energy needs, assuming we had
100%
winter and overnight storage.

There are 60 million people in the UK

England is 130,000 sq kilometers.
Its population is 50M or so.


That's 12,000 square kilometers of panels.
So half of wales...

And it only works properly in summer at midday, and we have to store
all
that for the middle of winter.

Yeah. Its only waiting for the price to come down.

Right. And I am Elvis.

Green**** ecobollox mate.



I don't have the data to allow
me to calculate whether we could power anything other than homes. Fact
is PV and storage is going to come down dramatically in cost and will
become easier to install, so as I said above it will be one of several
sources of 'clean' energy. The exact percentage I don't know.


It will never be more than ****ing in the wind and it will never
compete
with proper large scale projects.

Its only value is where the cost of running a mains cable is higher.

There is no point connecting any PV top the grid at all, except to
provide by insane legislation.

Solar energy ion this country, and windmills are TOTAL FRAUDS on you,
the public. Wake up. Smell the coffee. They do nothing but divert cash
into the pockets of Dynamo Hansen and his ilk, and make not one jot of
difference to our carbon emissions.

Denmark has a higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions than we do,
despite using less energy per capita.*

(UNDP Human Development report 2007)

So much for windpower .

There is only one form of green energy generation that meets UK
requirements that is current stable and mature and cost effective, and
doesn't eat up acres of valuable land space, and emits no carbin, and
that's nuclear.

Bite the bullet. Swallow the pill,. Its the ONLY answer on the table
whatsoever.

You may not like it. I may not like it. The fact remains that it is the
only viable option for the vast majority of our energy needs at sane
costs.

And since its pretty inescapable, why **** around with silly windmills
and PVs at all? when at best they might be 1% of the total solution
before the costs of integrating such wildly fluctuation sources into
the
grid become totally prohibitive.

There is no justification, in cost, in lack of carbon emissions, or in
any way whatsoever for all renewable energy generation, bar hydro, and
burning of organic waste.




A very convincing set of calculations that even a household can't
supply all of its current needs with PV. Actually elsewhere in this
thread I said that PV is one useful part of where we might get our
energy from. I agree with you that nuclear must be a part of that too.
Less dangerous than fossil burning and reliable. However viable
uranium will run out

in 700 years or so,.

which is longer than we have been using coal.

And may JUST be long enough to develop fusion..

and there is a large energy/carbon dioxide cost in building the plants

no more so than the 100,000 wind,ills that would be needed oetherwise.

FAR less concrete in the nukes.

,
extracting and purifying the fuel and finally decomissioning. Each
method has its overhead. I just think we should not ignore any method
at present before we have seen what we can do with them. PV is very
clean and is likely to become more efficient and cheap. Hopefully we
will see fusion one day, but shouldn't hold our breaths. The crystals
won't take it captain!


All I am saying is that if the renewables won't do the job, and every
calculation shows they wont, why throw OUR money at them that would be
better spent on more cost effective measures, like insulation, and
levelling the playing field for nuclear, which WILL work.

All teh policy of RO and FITs assumes that renewables will work. No one
has ever actually asked, let alone answered the question 'but will they?'

The Danish experience is that they haven't worked at all.
They have more CO2 emissions per capita than we do, despite using less
energy. And paying three times the price for electricity that we do.




Peter Scott

I dare say people once said that about powered flight.


I am sorry, wishful thinking about advances in technology cant break
basic physical laws.


Flight doesn't break physical laws. Green claims for renewables do,
The sun is a huge and reliable energy source.

Its a large highly dangerous and radiating nuclear fusions reactor.


I am sure we could put a moon sized mirror somewhere in orbit and focus
it on a steam boiler, but I would consider hat about ten thousand times
more dangerous than any reactor.


And similarly more expensive.


We get radiant energy
which we can turn into leccy or hydrogen through PV, hydro or wind which
can turn turbines and produce waves, gravitational energy which makes
tides and evaporated water which can be dammed.

Yes, at an average energy density of about 100W per square meter. At
these latitudes If nature doesn't concentrate that for us, as in hydro
power, we have to use a vast area to get sod all. That area is also
needed for people and wildlife to live in daylight, fly planes in, send
radio signals through, sail boats and ships in grow crops in and
generally have a life. You may think that turning the whole earth's
surface into one bloody great energy collection machine is the answer. I
do not.

Besides, there aren't enough minerals in the earths crust to build that
amount of structure.




It makes no sense not to
use as many of these as are viable.

Completely false logic. Why not use horse drawn trams as well as buses?
Because they are utter crap,. expensive,. polluting and bloody dangerous
and bloody slow.

You never proliferate uncompetitive inappropriate technology just
because you can.

Unless you are a Greenwasher or a politician of course.


Just because something isn't viable
with current technology doesn't mean it can't ever be.

Tell me how something that needs six times as much materials to produce
less reliable and the same amount of power can EVER be competitive?

And that's not a feature of 'clever design' it because any advances in
turbines for example, could equally apply to any other mechanical
electrical generator.

Its this stupid-think that pervades the whole greenwash movement: More
intelligent green party people accept that nuclear is the *only* way
forward, if you want reliable cheap carbon neutral 24x7 energy at
anythung approaching current demand levels..


Nuclear is good
but it too has large energy input costs,

No it doesn't. It has very LOW energy input costs. The whole cost is in
building teh bloody things. After that the actual energy unoput is
trivial,. And watt fir watt, they are three to six times cheaper than
wind and about 40 times cheaper than PV, and they work 24x7, which no
renewable does. Apart from hydro and biomass burning.



so it isn't as 'clean' as it
looks. In the end we *must* use as much solar energy as we can.

No, its actually a lot cleaner And uses a LOT less copper, iron and
steel than wind power,. Which still needs conventional power stations to
back it up anyway, as does PV.

kly the sae amount of fuel to keep them working, and they use more
materials (in te case of wind) to be usable at all.

In every engineering and cost accounting sense they are a complete utter
disaster. A fact that has been noted by recent studies in both Denmark
and Germany. They have done less than nothing to reduce the carbon
emissions of both countries, at enormous costs to the consumer, have
diverted skilled personnel away from more productive work and money away
from more appropriate solutions, and put the while climate change agenda
back 10 years..

A resounding success for stupid-think.