On 11/04/2022 18:16, Tim Streater wrote:
> On 11 Apr 2022 at 16:46:24 BST, Mike Halmarack <mikehalmarack@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:42:14 +0100, alan_m <junk@admac.myzen.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/04/2022 14:54, Mike Halmarack wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 11 Apr 2022 12:56:00 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
>>>> <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 11/04/2022 12:36, alan_m wrote:
>>>>>> On 11/04/2022 12:02, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>>> On 11/04/2022 10:48, newshound wrote:
>>>>>>>> https://watt-logic.com/2022/04/11/cost-of-renewables/
>>>>>>> What I love about Kathryn, is that she says exactly what I have been
>>>>>>> trying to say, much better than I have the patience of the aptitude to
>>>>>>> say it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The problem is that a lot of people are now convinced that wind and
>>>>>> solar are "free" and the energy they produce should be very cheap.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Social media is full of windmill enthusiasts who also believe in no more
>>>>>> Nuclear and turning off gas and coal in the next few years because "wind
>>>>>> is working". These people also tend to be on totally green tariffs and
>>>>>> believe that ALL the gas and electricity they are receiving is green.
>>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, it amazes me to find that there are people out there who still
>>>>> apparently 'believe in man made climate change' and 'renewable energy'...
>>>>
>>>> I do. I believe in both. I believe that fossil fuel is ony
>>>> advantageous to those with vested financial interests in it, and
>>>> extremely destructive for everyone.
>>>>
>>>> The idea of allowing the present gang of corrupt incompetents to do
>>>> lucrative deals to boost their offshore accounts by splathering the
>>>> environment with multiple mini nuclear reactors is very disturbing to
>>>> put it mildly
>>>>
>>>
>>> So what is your solution to a UK reliable energy source of the future?
>>> You have ruled out gas and oil and probably nuclear but what is your
>>> suggestion for the backup for the current intermittency of the current
>>> solar and wind and what alternatives do you suggest?
>>
>> There are various storage and conversion+storage solutions.
>> I'm not an engineer but I do know when I'm being scammed and
>> bullshitted by the lovers of big bucks at any cost.
>
> What storage solutions would those be, then? Do tell, I'm keen to know.
>
You see its so easy for a stupid cunt to mislead other stupid cunts.
They wave their hands and dsay 'storage solutions'

Now a proper general engineer will know that there are only so many
generic storage solutions.

Mechanical energy storage
=================
- water up a hill, or a lump of concrete up a hill. Or wound spring or
compressed air, or a spinning flywheel. or a pendulum.
For every given amount of energy you want to store, its a simple back of
an envelope calculation to determine how big a system you need, get a
rough idea of cost, and a fairly clear idea as to how many people will
be killed if it all lets go at once - if it breaks. You don't need to
spend billions trying it out to find its a crock of shit.

Chemical energy storage
===============
Basically you take stable compounds and by adding energy, turn them into
unstable compounds. Water to hydrogen. Carbon dioxide and water to
diesel fuel etc etc. Since the optimal fuel for mobile use is
hydrocarbon fuel, that's probably what you want. Because you don't
really need to store energy for static on grid needs. I'll explain why
later. At any level this will be less efficient that running directly
from electricity, but if that is the price of portable power, and there
is no alternative, so be it. Once again all the potential parameters of
chemical fuel are absolutely well known - there are no hidden pots of
gold, only basic chemistry and physics.
All that can be possibly improved are better ways to manufacture
synthetic fuels, that's all. improve efficiency a few percent.

Heat energy storage
=============
E.g. an olympic swimming pool full of molten salt .Of all the
engineering physics the thermodynamics of heat and heat engines is the
oldest. Fundamentally stoiring energy in hot things is extremely
inefficient, but if you start with a hot thing anyway, like a molten
salt cooled nuclear power station it doesn't matter so much, so one
technology that does pass the back of enevelope test is to couple a
molten salt reservoirs to a nuclear power station in order to have
access to a short term peak power in excess of the reactor itself - a
sort of heat bank. Also if the desired output is low grade heat, then a
sodding great tank of hot ware under your house, heated in summer by
solar energy, could actually take you through a winter. The ultimate
storage heater really. Back of envelope calculations show these things
are possible and not far off economic.
As with all energy storage, the safety aspect is crucial. The thought of
a hundred thousand tonnes of red hot salt hitting a nearby cooling pond
is not attractive.

Electrochemical energy storage
=-==================
Batteries. We know almost all there is to know about batteries and what
we know that really matters is that they are not quite good enough for
cars lorries, almost useless for boats and aeroplanes, and totally
useless for storing storing grid scale energy. And they are fucking
dangerous under fault conditions. We also know from back of envelope
calculations how could they might possibly become, and the answer is
'possibly good enough for cars and aircraft and small boats, just' but
the likely timescales are decades away. Certainly not by 2030. They will
never be suitable for grid scale usage.

Electrostatic energy storage
=================
Supercapacitors. Do the sums. and give up. Its amazing they are as good
as they are., Some people have managed to get as much as a 30 second
engine run out of ultra light model aircraft. About the same as a rubber
band. You can do better with compressed carbon dioxide in a tank.

I wont say there might not have a breakthrough in insulators, but no one
is even talking about it, let alone has anything in te lab, or within 20
years of a product., Forget capacitors., Not enough storage per unit cost.

Nuclear fission storage
==============

Well it is by far and away the most energy dense way to store energy,
but short of a supernova, no one has any idea how to create fissionable
nuclear materials . So for now a primary energy source.

Nuclear fusion storage
==============
See above. Until we know how to add helium and energy to get deiterium a
primary energy source only.,

Quantum level energy storage
===================
This is the only area where any breakthroughs might in fact be possible.
We simply do not know enough about the quantum world to say there will
or will not be some way to utilise that level of matter to store and
release energy.

No one is working on it, either. Because they don't even know where to
start.

Now as far as I can recall that is it, for 'energy storage' The best
stores - like coal oil and fissionable uranium and thorium, come 'pre
loaded' and dont need charging up. They are, along with nuclear fusion,
the only primary energy sources we have (renewable energy is really just
totally fucked and stupid use of nuclear fusion at an incredible
distance and uber low efficiency) .

None of them cut the mustard. All of them are well understood and well
able to be calculated at least to an order of magnitude whether they are
remotely feasible in a real world engineering situation. None of them
really are. Even the ones we are using already - like pumped storage -
cannot be improved much or made cheaper.

And the reason 'new technology' will not comes along and save the day is
because these storage solutions are not bounded by technological
limitations, but by the actual physics of the solution.

So whilst better materials - aluminium and carbon fibre and even
titanium - have enabled aircraft to grow from a bleriot monoplane to an
Airbus, the power required to make them fly in BHP per ton, has barely
shifted. Because that's physics.

What held back aircraft development for 500 years was bhp per ton - no
engined before a petrol engine was capable of the power to weight.
In short, there is no room for 'new technology' breakthroughs in
storage. Unlkes its some quantum process.

Power generation is not new, its old hat, and it has all been trued and
calculated and what we have left that isn't propped up by
SomeoneElsesMoney™ is the residue that hasn't died from total lack of
commercial viability or government suppression.

According to Phyiscs, there is no renewable energy. All the energy and
matter in the while wide universe was created in the big bang, and we
are riding the entropy hill down to an inevitable heat death.

So called 'clean free renewable energy' is just third hand nuclear
power for our dangerous unshielded local reactor in the sky that has
been running out of control for billions of years, but will one day run
out of fuel. Harvested by expensive energy intensive inefficient
machines that do a piss poor job of delivering anything useful, and if
we 3want to live a lifestyle in excess of that provided by wanderiing
around with a couple of horses attached to a plough, itrs a bloody
awful way to fail to do it.
The only energy we have access to that is so abundant and cheap we dont
even need to worry about wasting it, that is super safe and doesn't go
bang as easily as even coal, that doesn't need storage because it comes
already as a stored element, is uranium and thorium.

If God were to design the perfect fuel that would be it.

And we are sitting on ten thousand years of it.

Why aren't we using it?

Because a lot of people sitting on billions or trillions of dollars of
oil and gas don't want their reserves to become worthless overnight.
We don't need storage, beyond maybe molten salt heat banks, at all, and
we don't need pointless windmills, at all, we can do everything grid
wise and have access to cheap reliable energy by using nuclear power.

In short as an engineer what I see is a mess, a disater of heath
robinson unreliable intermittent sources of non renewable nuclear
energy from the sun, backed up by the very fossil fuels they were
supposed to replace, compromised in stability security and cost, reliant
on the development of blue sky storage that not only does not exist, but
*cannot* exist, because it would violate the laws of physics and
chemistry. Or cost so much in energy terms to build and make safe as to
be completely counter productive, versus a simple solution of a couple
of hundred nuclear plant, nicely placed near where their energy is
needed, running into a simple grid sized just big enough to need the
peak demand over the short distances it will have to flow. And nothing
else.

And that, mates, is why I feel utterly justified in saying that we have
but one option and that is nuclear and that people who 'believe in
renewables' and storage solutions are a dangerously stupid bunch of
ignorant cunts, because that is what engineering shows the situation to be.

Not 'my opinion'.

--
The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.