ENERGY MATTERS

[Stanley]

Tiz, Same here and I see you're in the firing line again later today. Never mind, high humidity is good for Mrs Tiz's complexion!

[Pluggy]

The nice man changed my 'magic' electric meter today :

This morning :



This afternoon :



The new one doesn't run backwards, The old one had been hovering around the 78800 mark for the past 6 weeks. On dull days gaining a bit, on bright days losing a bit. It weighed on my mind. Its over

[Stanley]

I still have a credit card pay as you go meter that the previous owner must have used. When I first came here I asked them to take it out but they never bothered.

[Tizer]

That friend of mine came to collect the lawn mowers yesterday. He's an ex-bobby but his interests keep him involved in mechanical things and engineering. We got to talking about PV panels and he said he won't install them because he reckons they are going to last no more than 10 years before they need replacing, which makes them too expensive. This prompted me to have look on the Web and I found a detailed page on the Centre for Alternative Technology's web site that is much more optimistic. It's worth reading and I haven't seen much about longevity of PV panels before:
http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/lif ... -PV-panels
Here is some more information:
http://homepower.com/article/?file=HP11 ... eExperts_1

[Pluggy]

Those are in line with what I've read else where. The established weakness is the inverter, which is a fairly costly item but isn't a big job to replace. They reckon an inverter lasts around 10 years. They are generally guaranteed for 5.

[Stanley]

One of these might last a bit longer. I can't find the pic of the even bigger one I did at the print works at New Mills so I had to borrow this one from Wiki. An industrial size Mercury Arc Rectifier.....

[Pluggy]

Wrong way round, Stanley, it needs to make DC into AC.

[Tizer]

I thought he'd mixed up this thread with the Mystery Objects one!

[Stanley]

You're right, apologies for the senior moment. What you need of course is a DC motor driving a small alternator.........

[Pluggy]

Mrs pluggy might not be a fan of having a sizeable motor (3 HP give or take) running all the time the panels have an output. The inverter is next door to silent, it makes a faint humming if you put your ear to its case and when its working hard it can be audible from a couple of feet away. It hasn't been doing that very often this month, I might make the same in June as I did in March.

I can't help thinking modern day elf 'n' safety would have a field day with mercury arc rectifier, several pounds of liquid mercury in a glass envelope running at blood heat to keep the mercury vapour coming..........

[Stanley]

The one I saw at New Mills was enormous, more like several gallons of mercury. I must have a pic of it in the files somewhere....

[Tardis]

in the Craven Herald is the rejection of an anaerobic digestor plant

Considering that it is a farm site there are a few objections, but mainly because most of the material has to be brought onto the site

http://www.planning.cravendc.gov.uk/fas ... mit=Search

or planning permission number 12339 on the Craven District Website

[Stanley]

Centrica (British Gas) announce latest figures and while consumption of gas and electricity has gone up but slightly, profits on sales have gone up by an average of about 15%. A cunning wheeze?
LINK to the BBC story.

[Tardis]

The Civic Hall is part way through the installment of Solar PV Panels

This was one of the things that i put forward when I volunteered for the Pendle LSP and the Low Carbon Zone project

Hopefully, we can get LCC to put some on their buildings too, so that the Public voice matches the actions on energy security.

[Stanley]

Over 600 million consumers lost power in India for extended periods of time due to a failure in the national distribution grid. This paralysed the stock market and government and has led to speculation about the stability of a government which can't control power supplies. I hope our masters are taking notice and learning lessons....

[Pluggy]

Biggest problem here is NIMBYs foaming at the mouth about attempts to bolster our grid against such events.....

[Whyperion]

I thought the India problem was not a shortage of generating capacity but that somehow the phases from different plants had somehow slipped out of synchronization , this can cause all kinds of problems , needing a planned shutdown of plant and a new start up from one plant then building up to all the others on the grid connection. ( small power plants from solar or wind have technology in the inverters sensing any synch problems and they dont feed into the grid until synch is sensed. so i am told.

[Stanley]

Reports indicate that biomass power stations are growing too fast and the demand for fuel is going to be about 40million tons a year when we can only grow 10 million tons in UK. Drax are building wood pellet factories in overseas countries.

[Tizer]

Biomass gets support because it's renewable - but it still produces CO2, just as coal does, so it doesn't get us any closer to reducing CO2 emissions.

[Tardis]

The UK currently imports over 80% of it's timber requirements.

10% of the need is supplied by the Forestry Commission even though it has a minimal land in proportion to private woodland

On top of which people will still kepp planting trees which are of no economic use

[Pluggy]

Biomass gets support because it's renewable - but it still produces CO2, just as coal does, so it doesn't get us any closer to reducing CO2 emissions.

If the biomass in question is grown to become fuel, arguably its carbon neutral as it absorbs the CO2 from the atmosphere to make the carbon it contains. Burning it puts the CO2 it absorbed back into the atmosphere. Burning coal, oil and gas releases the CO2 absorbed by ancient plants, which the scientists say is what made the atmosphere breathable for animals.

[Tardis]

Appears the UK is now growing elephant grass to service the demand for biomass (farming today r4 this morning)

[Whyperion]

21/08/2012

Students build UK’s first hydrogen-powered locomotive

http://profeng.com/tech/students-build- ... locomotive

[Pluggy]

Hydrogen doesn't really achieve anything under present conditions, most hydrogen is a product of cracking methane, the other product being CO2, so its carbon is released before its burnt. If/when hydrogen is produced mainly from the electrolysis of water and the electricity was generated from nuclear/renewables it will become a different story. Either way, its not very efficient, it would be much more efficient to burn the methane directly, but then we wouldn't be reading about it.......

[Whyperion]

Producer Gas plant towed behind the vehicle ?