On 05/01/16 09:15, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Tue, 05 Jan 2016 01:23:02 +0100, Timothy Murphy
wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:

The first requirement then is that only 11% of our power use occurs
during the hours of darkness. That seems pretty unlikely to me.

Energy can be stored, in various ways.

Care to elaborate on that?

I'm not a physicist, but I imagine there are many ways of storing energy -
batteries, electrolysis, raising water or other materials,
spinning wheels, synthesizing methane.
I'm sure an expert could suggest a dozen other ways.

I've no idea if any of these are commercially viable,
but I didn't say they were.
I simply stated, what is obvious, that energy can be stored.

As you say, a statement of the obvious, and again as you say, there
are lots of other ways, such as TNP's elastic band. The trouble is,
that there are hardly any ways of storing _electricity_, and
absolutely no ways of storing it in the amounts necessary to
compensate for days when there is no wind or sunshine, when the whole
country has to be supplied, possibly for several days. Supporters of
renewable energy sources just don't understand that. They live in a
cloud of ignorance that batteries can be used, or that we can import
electricity from Europe, or whatever. But none of that is going to be
practical. The numbers just don't add up!

Pumped storage is the only way of storing energy in even quite small
amounts comparable to what is needed. There are only four pumped
storage systems in the UK http://tinyurl.com/zv2gxr7 three of which
are less than half the size of Dinorwig, and opportunities for more
are severely limited by suitable topography.

The problem is made worse if one wants to convert a significant amount
of road vehicles to electric power. The UK presently uses on average,
840GWh of electrical energy per day. You can nearly double that if a
large proportion of road vehicles are to be powered by electricity.

So you can begin to see the magnitude of the problem. If renewables
are to be a major component in our electricity production, storage of
electrical energy in some form is essential to cover the variability,
and that is well-nigh impossible on the scale necessary using any of
the technologies presently available.

The best energy storage in the world is an atomic nucleus.

Enough energy to run the country for a year would fit into a delivery
van. And its also the safest way. At the sort of low levels of
enrichment needed, even piling it up in a big heap wouldn't cause it to
go critical, and it doesn't burn and it cant detonate.


Best of all it comes charged up with energy already. So you don't need
windmills and solar panels to charge it up.

And there are several thousand years of supply of it just lying around.
Long enough to get nuclear fusion working anyway.

And nuclear fusion of course means you dont need solar panels to capture
the output of a fusion reactor, you can do it directly.


--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Josef Stalin