New insights into global warming

Those do look like good ideas, elegran, but much of the work on them is still at a relatively early stage. They have not been shown to be efficient on a large scale yet (large enough for the whole of Britain or at any rate large areas with large populations or lots of industry, for instance), as I understand.

And these.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/tech/geothermal-energy

http://www.greenspec.co.uk/ground-source-heat-pumps.php

And these. In blue.

www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/tech/geothermal-energy

www.greenspec.co.uk/ground-source-heat-pumps.php

Some of my previous post (two up, with the links) seems to be missing. Forgot to blue the Beeb link. Tcha! You can cope, jess. And then I typed a remark about the two bits of the article which, for me, essentially meant the rest was a load of rubbish.

Then comes the badly designed German experiment.

There is an article on Public Sector News,
www.publicservice.co.uk about the fact that the government is now reneging on its promises to make new housing energy efficient.
If all new houses had to have solar rooftiles, they could be selling excess energy back to the grid, which would help the homeowners and the rest of us.

A lot of these posts are about emergent and small scale technologies. Photovoltaic cells, whether as roof tiles or add-ons only produce power in daylight and produce less power in winter than in summer. The number of sites in the UK suitable for pumped storage hydro power are few, that is why, as far as I know, the only one in Britain is at Dinorwic and that had enormous technical problems and was very expensive to construct.

Heat pumps have their uses, my next door neighbour uses one for heating his swimming pool, but they are generally small scale and can not meet the base load requirement for power and light. If every house/flat/commercial premise in a town or, even more a big city had an air to air heat pump what effect would it have on the micro climate of that community? With thousands or even hundreds of thousands of properties taking heat from the air in a small area, surely the outside temperature would fall, and the colder the outside temperature the less efficient the heat pump and, of course, heat pumps require electricity to operate. That is why my neighbour uses his for his swimming pool, it is only used spring - autumn.

Large scale use of geological heat requires fracking and many posters have made clear how opposed they are to that. Although again, in Iceland (population 350,000), where most of their power is from their super abundant geothermal sources, I was surprised just how small their power stations are. Geothermal sources, useful though they be, do not support the big 800Mw power stations necessary in the UK.

The problem with all the suggestions people are making are that they are only dickering around the edges of providing the power we need and many are small scale and need much further development. None of them can provide the large base load that is required for a modern economy. I have suggested that that can only be provided by nuclear installation or many more gas-fired power stations. Even if the variable load comes mainly from renewables we still need gas-fired power stations to back them up, the alternative is the network of polluting diesel installations the government has been installing on the sly.

The question nobody is answering is how do we keep industry going, hospitals and social facilities running and our homes powered and heated for the next fifteen years if do exclude nuclear power and new hydrocarbon fired power stations?

Good news re pump storage scheme based in N wales quarry today. See link.
But you are right about the baseload. It would take a shedload of renewables to make up one of those big power stations with 4-6 cooling towers.
Not sure that you need worry about microclimates and air heat pumps though. The volume of air is huge and much of the warmth taken from the air would be returning to it - given the tendency of buildings to leak heat at a horrible rate. At the moment cities like London have a microclimate a degree or 2 warmer than the countryside - which represents a huge amount of heat (as most of it whizzes straight up to the clouds as convection)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-23920312

Surely the point, Flickety, is that we use renewables for the background heat and top up from the others. With houses being better insulated we should all be using less electricity. That means we will not need to build nuclear power stations.
How many new houses are needed to be built over the next ten years?
They all need roof tiles, so why can't they be solar roof tiles? Why can't every builder be made to use solar tiles from now on?
And before anyone says they are not aesthetically pleasing, power stations aren't either. I've never heard anyone feel sorry that a power station is being pulled down. Unfortunately, the only way a nuclear one will be pulled down is if there is a catastrophic event like an earthquake or a tsunami. Anyway, I am talking about tiles, not panels.
Ground-source heat pumps can take heat from the earth and raise the temperature of your house or water system to be high enough for all but the coldest winter days.
Various architects over the country are building carbon neutral houses as experiments. Unfortunately the British public is so conservative on the whole that they are not even willing to consider timber-frame houses which are more energy efficient than brick. They were being designed in the 60s and 70s.

It is very odd I answered this thread a couple of days ago and my post seems to have gone missing.

jendurham renewables are too unreliable to use for base load, wind only blows how and when it feels like it and can be turned off but not on when needed, Wind output is small compared with total energy demand and cannot form too big a proportion of our power supply because the tendency of wind to come in sudden gusts and lulls makes grid control very difficult and the chances of local or even national grid blackouts has increased significantly since the introduction of wind power and government is already implemented the installation of diesel (very polluting, back up resources to get the grid going again when this happens. Photovoltaics only work in daylight and produce less power in the winter and on cloudy days.

Countries like Iceland and Norway can rely in renewables because there populations are smaller (Iceland's is around 350,000) and they use geo-thermal or hydro electricity, both 24/7 renewables, from the abundant natural resources they have been supplied with by geology. Wee have very limited resources of both of these.

Domestic energy is only a fraction of total energy demand. The main consumers of energy are industry, commerce, transport and the public sector (hospitals, schools etc). There is currently no alternative to nuclear power with a significant proportion of hydro carbons to produce the power we need.

As for no one mourning the demolition of a power station. I live near the Didcot power stations and the closing and demolition of the coal fired power station means the demolition of the iconic cooling towers whose siting was decided by Sir Frank Gibberd, the eminent landscape architect has been greeted with great sadness by many local people, including me. There was even talk of having them listed. Unfortunately for technical reasons they cannot remain.

Rooftop solar panels are a hazard to firefighters apparently.

Interesting bags Of course if it is dark there is not electricity going through them. I'll be interested to get OH's take on this (as our house is covered in 'em - hope the tenants don't set it on fire, panels or no panels)
That is interesting about the landscaping of Didcot. They did nestle into the landscape - you could spot them from many places on the northern slopes of the Chilterns.
Good post about the base load. Tides are our only reliable natural resource - but you have to have a big estuary apparently. I asked DH why the Menai Straits not suitable and apparently not enough volume of water to make it worth while.

Strange that there have been no more postings given the news coverage of the IPCC meeting and report.

Oldgreymare, I put this on a different thread, but here it is if you want it here.
www.theguardian.com/environment/ipcc

I will miss my first glimpse of the cooling towers as the train approaches Didcot where my DS2 and family live. Are they going to be blown up, Flickety? That would be an interesting sight!

Another article on fossil fuels. Mary Robinson says we have to leave fossil fuels in the ground if we are to meet climate targets.
opendemocracy.net/truls-gulowsen/how-to-deflate-carbon-bubble

Jendurham sorry but I am unable to view the attachments you post, I'll have to go the long way around.
My post, above, was a little 'tongue in cheek' given that previously there has been huge debate about 'Global Warming'.

I've just checked them, and I can get on the links. Admittedly the opendemocracy one took a long time but the Guardian one was almost instantaneous, if that's possible. Try
www.opendemocracy.net
It's the latest comment on the main page.

It's moved down one now, but it's still on the first page.

Thatbags, I do not think we are talking on the same scale here about rooftop solar panels. I can see 4 rooftops with solar panels on them. Only about a quarter of the roof is covered.
Anyway in this country surely the firebrigade would not climb onto the roof until they had put the fire out in the factory.
When we lived in Hull we used to live near a factory which made bread, and also Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire puddings.
One day my husband set off for work and did not get there for over 90 minutes because there was a fire in the factory. The cooling system was on fire, so the whole of Spring Bank, Spring Bank West, Argyle Street and half of Anlaby Road were closed to traffic. That's three main roads and one link road into the city centre.
The firemen were using cranes to put out the fire. They were not on the roof as that would have been dangerous.

JessM, Ecotricity is researching into wavepower, something called Snapper. It's on their website.

annodomini We are not sure yet about how the Didcot cooling towers will go as npower has only just signed contracts with the demolition contractor.

One group of three are too close to a high pressure high capacity pipeline and the National Grid connection for the other power station to risk demolition with explosives, but all us explosomaniacs in the area are hoping that the second group will go down in a controlled explosion.

Didn't have to wait long..... see the thread 'Kill the IPCC'.

Leave them to it, Oldgreymare. The IPCC has already started on their next report. People who do not want to take responsibility for climate change are never going to agree with us. They'll soon get fed up of agreeing with each other all the time.

Elegran, I was just looking at your post about Lockheed Martin.
I have often wondered why we cannot use the infrastructure we already have to store and move electricity.
Any gas or oil rig in the North Sea which gets shut down should be able to be used for some form of renewable power platform, I would have thought, rather than just being abandoned.
The same with the pylons I see marching across the skyline. The infrastructure is there, and just needs to be altered to have a wind turbine rather than a pylon.
Obviously I will now be told I am naive by certain people. I prefer to think of it as lateral thinking.