ENERGY MATTERS

[Tripps]

" I'm old fashioned but having a reserve of fuel already paid for is preferable to pay as you go."

It has its hazards though. Reminds me of the words of a song "The high part of the town" by Jez Lowe -

They tried to teach me Geography
But I found it much too hard
They asked me - where does coal come from?
I answered - next doors yard.

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz contacted Southern Electricity today because they've debited more money instead of giving a refund for supply to her parents' house which is now sold. They owe her parents about £600. She had told them the house is sold and to terminate the account and refund the balance to their bank account. Instead they've debited the final amount from M&D's account and say they can't do it any other way - "We can't do a refund until the present debit is cleared which will be at least two weeks". I can think of all sorts of names for them but can't write them on this forum!

[PanBiker]

No reply from BG yet on my billed 86,000Kwh of gas and similarly inflated electric usage for a single month as reported in this thread earlier. All going to be passed to the Ombudsman shortly to see if he can get some sense out of them. Ombudsman can award compensation if they don't explain themselves. Stupid ostrich policy might end up costing them.

[Stanley]

You both have my sympathy but fat lot of good that does! Sheer bloody incompetence and a complete disregard for the customer. Can it get any worse?

[hartley353]

Search for my radiation records has hit a brick wall, letter arrived yesterday saying they were unable to find them. It also went on to say this doesn't mean they dont exsist, they may not have enough info to search accurately. All my working life I have kept diaries, so I gave locations and dates, and relevant details of consultancies I was working for. The records have to be kept for 50 years, maybe they forgot where they put them.

[Stanley]

It's probably time I let the stove go out during the day.... House core temperature is 22C.

[Big Kev]

The new kitchen extension, which is very well insulated, and the installation of underfloor heating throughout the ground floor has made a big difference to heating usage. It's not been on for the past 3 days. The underfloor heating hasn't been connected to the boiler yet, there will be a transition period of a couple of days, while I remove the old radiators and pipework and connect the new UFH circuits but, the insulated barrier that carries the pipes on the floor is very efficient too.

[Stanley]

My gas usage has been virtually zero over the winter. I know it still works because the boiler is very intelligent. It starts the pump up every now and again to keep the bearings free. Funnily enough, quite often while I am having a pee! (It's next to the toilet)

[Tizer]

I've listened to a recorded Radio 4 Costing the Earth programme from 4th March titled `Nuclear Waste's Final Destination' and it was very good. A lot about France because they have so many more reactors and therefore so much more waste and now they are doing tests to check the safety of burying it deep in clay - not the stuff we see in the garden but compressed rock-like material at great depth. The French technical man said the clay was deposited about 160 million years ago in what's known to geologists as the Callovian-Oxfordian era. Being a clay-based rock it has plastic properties and doesn't fracture under stress, so it looks like being a better place to store the waste than in hard, brittle rock. But there was a funny moment when the BBC man asked if there was similar rock in Britain and was told yes, in south-east England which brought the comment "Well that won't be popular then will it! (In fact it's a similar age to the Kimmeridge Clay which we all know and runs in a band south-west to north-east through Oxfordshire and at the northern edge of the Home Counties.)

[PanBiker]

If they dump it down south it will make a change from carting it north of us and reprocessing at Sellafield!

[Stanley]

If it's going to be buried I am all in favour of doing it in the south. Have you noticed how, when this is discussed the locations are all remote from London? Or is this just me with my North/South Divide hat on..... Douneray was a favourite at one time wasn't it? Can't get much further north than that!

[Tizer]

Some sense being spoken at last...
UN set to warn countries over 'dash for gas'
By Roger Harrabin BBC environment analyst
Governments are likely to be warned next week that a "dash for gas" will not solve climate change. The chancellor and prime minister have promoted gas as a clean option for powering the UK. But a draft report for the United Nation's third panel on climate change says gas cannot provide a long-term solution to stabilising climate change. Gas is only worthwhile if it is used to substitute a dirty coal plant - and then only for a short period, it says. Instead the world should be trebling or quadrupling the share of renewables for electricity, the authors say. The report will offer ammunition to the Department for Energy and Climate Change, which has fought attempts from the Treasury to switch more of the UK's energy sources to gas with the projected "shale gas revolution".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26975090

[Pluggy]

They don't say much about it for fear of enraging the hard-line greenies, but the national grid has been using coal above gas for a while because coal is cheaper to generate electric with. If it were a similar price gas would be cheaper because its more efficient (its also more flexible), but coal is cheap and gas is dear so.....

Wind is gradually creeping up in the long term as more plants come on line, but its moment by moment contribution depends on the weather.

The real energy geeks can keep up here : http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

[Tizer]

That's an amazing web page Pluggy, thanks for the link, it's gone into my bookmarks!

[Stanley]

I've done the same.... I like the fact that the meter dials are all marked Smiths Industries!

[Tizer]

Reports have appeared in the newspapers about the US navy planning how to free its warships from a dependence on petroleum oil, for instance by making jet fuel for carrier aircraft from seawater. The reports talk about harvesting hydrogen and carbon dioxide from the seawater then reacting them together with an iron catalyst to get hydrocarbons. It sounded a bit pie-in-the-sky to me - after all, the CO2 concentration in sea water is very low - and I looked for more information. The US publication Navy Times has a little more detail but then I found another web page that gives more:
http://jalopnik.com/the-navys-seawater- ... 1563115554
Although the US navy is claiming it might cost only a few dollars a gallon I'm sure their objectives are much less on cost and more on independence of supply. The process would need a heck of a lot of water pumped through it - but then they've got nuclear-powered carriers so plenty of energy to put into the process.

Incidentally, while I was on that US `Navy Times' web page the light on my hard disk was clicking on/off regularly every few seconds in a way I've not noticed on other web sites. I opened System Monitor and took the screen shot shown below - you can see the network activity in the lower graph. Now I wonder what all that was about? This was the web page:
http://www.navytimes.com/article/201210 ... o-jet-fuel
and this was the System Monitor screenshot:

[Pluggy]

I can't repeat that behaviour here, I suspect its linux doing a bit of housekeeping rather than the website. The network graph is auto scaling, and the peaks are are only 1KB/s which is next to nothing. You could try it whilst downloading a big file or watching iPlayer or something which will put it in context.

[Pluggy]

I did a bit more digging into the network traffic when I got traffic on the network when I had no programs open. Ubuntu 12.04 and later maintain connections with Canonical servers, one of the functions is IP geo-location. Apparently to make some location dependent applications easier to work with, The paranoid think its for Canonical spying on them. Heres one thing I found :

http://askubuntu.com/questions/135602/i ... nd-how-can

Besides what Google, Microsoft and others do when you connect a PC to the internet I think its very small potatoes. I think if you're really paranoid, you wouldn't have an internet connection at all, or a telephone, debit or credit card, or a car and you'd live in a cave in the middle of nowhere.......

[Tizer]

When I start up the PC and login I usually get a burst of hard disk and network activity after about 10 minutes and it last for about a minute. By that stage I've already downloaded email, opened Firefox and I'll be into, say, the BBC news site or OGFB. I've always assumed it's some kind of benign `calling home' by Ubuntu and I don't worry about it. What was odd about the navy mag web page was that it's the only time I've seen a regular pattern like that on System Monitor, it went as soon as I shut the page and it started again next time I went to it. The web page didn't show any loading data at the bottom left of my screen like you get when there are cookies coming down. I'm not bothered, just curious...and anyway, I'd be flattered if the yanks thought me worth monitoring!

[Stanley]

I think I was aware of the fact that Canonical were keeping an eye on me because I suspect they send some of the big downloads automatically so they are ready to apply when you tell it to, they are so fast! I'd worry more about other people, Canonical have never done me anything but good.

[Tizer]

I should have thanked Pluggy for pointing out that "The network graph is auto scaling" in System Monitor; I hadn't noticed that - the other two graphs have the y axis in % units. The auto scaling is necessary with such a large range but it can fool you if you don't notice and a 1Kb peak can be as high as 1000Kb!

[Stanley]

Come to think, the same process appears to be used by spin doctors when interpreting Treasury statistics!

[plaques]

Hands up all those who would understand if a chart had their axis in a log(base10) scale never mind a log(base e). All designed to confuse if used on what may be described as general public data.

[Pluggy]

I understand a log(10) based graph and I understand why they are used. I use them on my home monitor system. Click on the link on my signature and the top graph is Log(10) on the Y axis. I used to have 2 linear graphs to do the same job which really was a pain. They are used to make a graph give relevant readings over a very wide range of values. In my Energy graph I will get readings from below 100 to sometimes 20,000. At very low levels, on a linear graph that goes up to 20,000 (20kW) the graph becomes meaningless. as the level is indistinguishable from 0.

A log(e) graph is a compromise between a linear and a log(10) graph.

[Tizer]

BBC News, 17th April 2014
EU green light for UK carbon capture and storage project
A UK project to capture CO2 and bury it under the North Sea looks set to receive a 300 million euro boost from the EU. The European Commission has confirmed that the White Rose carbon capture and storage (CCS) project is in line to win the cash (equivalent to about £250 million). The gas will be siphoned off from a new coal-fired power station [Drax] and stored in undersea rock formations....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27063796