Did you realised that our National Grid and power generating capacity is being replaced by expensive, short lived, high maintenance systems and equipment?
Sounds crazy doesn’t it, who would knowingly do that?
Well our ECO friends running COP26 are all for it. They say getting rid of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and convert to “renewables”. Well as you will see in an item shortly to be posted here Windmills and Photo Cells are fine for adding small amounts of intermittent power (about 3% globally by 2021), the rest comes from Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power. The future post will expose the disastrous ecological damage that would be caused by trying to depend on the ‘renewables’. Look out for a Post titled Unobtainium, SO green.
As an example of a system already well down the track of being ECOfied and “renewable” here is a little documentary about Texas in February 2021. In the coldest weather ever recorded over several weeks (due to Global Warming LOL) there was a power outage across the State – they simply didn’t have enough fossil fuel power generation available in working order to keep the lights on. Of course the Solar Cells were covered in snow and the Windmills iced up and shut down, even their Nuclear generators struggled because the cooling water supply was frozen up – a perfect storm as they say.
Its a good job they weren’t relying on electrically power vehicles as they are only about 50% efficient at low temperatures and of course there was no power to charge them up. Not a good start.
Here’s an Engineer’s view of what really happened and what we can learn i.e. keep fossil fuelled power generation – at least as a comprehensive emergency backup.
What they should have done is have a gas holding tank underground physically next to each gas fired generating unit. That would have given each one independence of functioning and enabled autonomy of operation, and protection from the weather. The gas tank is in effect a battery. Continuous maintenance is needed to keep water out of the gas distribution pipes, that would have been smart too. I’m sure these notions will have been discussed but ‘optimised out’ by accountants who would not appreciate their value or function. The real problem was that system resilience was not one of the main design goals, if not the main design goal. Resilience costs money but usually saves vastly more than it costs. You can only ever optimise one goal.
In the UK we have been mothballing its Gas fired Generators and eliminating our Coal fired ones for several years now. Instead we are importing wooden pellets made from newly chopped down trees from the USA. They are transported across the globe by diesel powered ships to use instead of using the coal we have stored in the ground next to the generating stations. We are importing vast amounts of gas whilst abandoning Gas Fields in our Seas and under our Lands. Worst of all we have deliberately damaged the resilience of our Power system all in the the name of ECO vanity. This is ECO insanity.
So far we have just got away with it by sacrificing efficiency for cost, but costs are mushrooming (Gas up 250% in November 2021). Its likely that all fuels will double in price by the end of 2022. It’s time to pay for the ECO follies.
Here’s an example of the seriousness of other nations to carbon reduction … taken from the Telegraph a week after COP26 !!
China and India will push coal demand to record high
“Burning coal to generate electricity is set to hit a record high in 2022 despite the push to stop global warming, the International Energy Agency has warned.
Soaring natural gas prices have forced a resurgence of the fuel over the past 12 months, it found. The IEA expects use in the US and Europe to fall next year, but warned China and India will push global coal demand to its highest ever level in 2022.
“These two economies, dependent on coal and with a combined population of almost 3 billion people, hold the key to future coal demand”
The surge in demand for coal-fired power comes as economies rebounded from the pandemic, creating a surge in energy demand that could not be met from low carbon supplies.”