Texas electric

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pelmut
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Re: Texas electric

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rode_kater wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 9:31 pm
Sinned wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 12:50 pm There has been mooted to stop the installation of new gas boilers from 2025 but what will replace them is not clear.
Over here they're replaced with heat networks using waste heat from industry. The waste heat from the Rotterdam harbour can heat the entire province, it's just a matter of transportation. Otherwise there's geothermal. If you insulate your house properly you can go electric heating as well. It can be done.
Waste heat and geothermal on any useful scale have never been mentioned in the U.K.  Successive governments have just proposed more and more punitive legislation against the current technologies before any practical alternatives are in place.
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Re: Texas electric

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pelmut wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 9:45 pmWaste heat and geothermal on any useful scale have never been mentioned in the U.K.
First and foremost, the recovery of waste heat only works in densely-populated areas where said heat can be transported before the inevitable losses take over. Ditto geothermal; dwellings and destinations need to be fairly close to the well-head.
Successive governments have just proposed more and more punitive legislation against the current technologies before any practical alternatives are in place.
That's just plain pig-headed.
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Re: Texas electric

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Waste heat presupposes that there is a nearby industrial producer to allow for transportation. We don't have that in most areas, industry having been exported years ago. The number of say, steel works has reduced to less than a handful. It's dubious if our climate is warm enough for heat pumps and I haven't a clue if we have geothermal energy close enough to the surface to be useful. And anyway with geothermal does each house have its own tapping point? Satellites are being developed that can take solar energy and beam it back to earth as microwaves?

Pig-headed as maybe but welcome to Britain in the 21st century. It's never stopped politicians promising the fanciful before now despite the technology not being there to fulfill the promises. Electric cars at a time when the majority couldn't afford them, not enough produced to satisfy assumed demand and not enough charging points in the country. Also, petrol/diesel prices are relatively stable across the country but the cost across charging points isn't.
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Re: Texas electric

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Sinned wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:38 am Waste heat presupposes that there is a nearby industrial producer to allow for transportation. We don't have that in most areas, industry having been exported years ago.
The last two generations in the U.K. have had crazy planning policies of grouping industry and housing separately, that is one of the major avoidable causes of the excessive demand for transport.  Another has been the grouping of schools and hospitals into ever larger 'more efficient' units; reducing one budget and creating a much larger hidden cost on other budgets.

The answer isn't to make transport essential and then wring your hands and punish people because they use it; the answer is to make transprt reduction a factor in planning decisions.
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Re: Texas electric

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Sinned wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:38 am And anyway with geothermal does each house have its own tapping point?
In principle yes, though there is a minimum distance between tapping points which means in cities you need to work together at street level at least. It's just a heat pump, but instead of outside air you use heat from the ground.
Sinned wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:38 am Satellites are being developed that can take solar energy and beam it back to earth as microwaves?
That is totally feasible, though not exactly short term.

On the whole though, the UK seems to be of the "do the regulations and people will magically make it happen", whereas it'll probably take a bit more work than that.
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Re: Texas electric

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rode_kater wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:46 pm
Sinned wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:38 am Satellites are being developed that can take solar energy and beam it back to earth as microwaves?
That is totally feasible, though not exactly short term.
Well, that'll create one heck of a "no-fly zone" near the beam (which will be several tens of kilometres wide when it reaches the ground with megawatt power-levels) and will fry everything in its path (birds, wildlife, people, aeroplanes).

This is one of those ideas that looks good on paper but doesn't scale into practicality.
On the whole though, the UK seems to be of the "do the regulations and people will magically make it happen", whereas it'll probably take a bit more work than that.
The US suffers from that malady as well because too few people actually understand the engineering problems involved with stuff like this at scale.
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Re: Texas electric

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crfriend wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 4:16 pm
rode_kater wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:46 pm
Sinned wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 9:38 am Satellites are being developed that can take solar energy and beam it back to earth as microwaves?
That is totally feasible, though not exactly short term.
Well, that'll create one heck of a "no-fly zone" near the beam (which will be several tens of kilometres wide when it reaches the ground with megawatt power-levels) and will fry everything in its path (birds, wildlife, people, aeroplanes).

This is one of those ideas that looks good on paper but doesn't scale into practicality.
You're making one fatal assumption - that the people proposing these ideas don't know of these effects :D They'll develop some cutsey name for it such as "high-enegry zones" or "happy rays". Any incidents/accidents will be referred to as "selective charring". "Birds will get killed?" Just write legislation that they aren't allowed to fly through them, and post a sign.
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Re: Texas electric

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crfriend wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 4:16 pm
Well, that'll create one heck of a "no-fly zone" near the beam (which will be several tens of kilometres wide when it reaches the ground with megawatt power-levels) and will fry everything in its path (birds, wildlife, people, aeroplanes).
Funnily enough they've thought of this. The trick is to make the antenna really large and use frequencies so that the beam intensity on non-metal things is less than what the sun delivers on a clear day. Or just suspend the antenna grid off the ground and use the space underneath for other things, like crops, grazing land, etc. You could live underneath it if you didn't mind living under chicken wire. Planes are too small to have meaningful impact. This is a straight up engineering problem.

The sun produces 1000W/m2, so a single football field already gets 5MW of power which we just throw away. With tens of kilometres wide you can be beaming terawatts of power without anyone noticing anything.
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