The Death Of Fossil Fuels

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:05 pm

Ecotricity the daily express are starting a campaign to "save our gas boilers" from the government and their dastardly plan to turn them all into heat pumps.

Apparently "green gas" made from grass is the way to go.

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-news/2 ... ur-boilers
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by monkey » Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:43 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on.
Bit of an aside here, but one of my favourites that I read about is covering irrigation channels. You get solar power and you use less water because you lose less to evaporation.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Wed Sep 22, 2021 8:19 pm

Going back to Ivan, we aren't finished yet on price reductions from either wind, solar or batteries. We won't see another order of magnitude drop over the coming decades, but the prices will still come down regardless of how close the technology is to thermodynamic limits because of things that have nothing to do with thermodynamic efficiencies.

Just looking at wind turbines, power scales with the square of the turbine radius. So doubling the length of the turbine blade gets 4X the power. However, costs of wind turbines don't square as you scale them up, even better, the higher off the ground you are, the more consistent the wind flow, so you get a higher capacity factor. So the larger the turbine, the cheaper will be the electricity it produces, whether it's at the Betz Limit or not. This is why we are seeing monster turbines come out like the Halide-X with blades over 100m. People are continually pushing material science and turbine design to make even bigger beasts. On top of that you have price reductions due to industry learning curves and the cost of capital for operators continuing to drop. It's going to get cheaper. (Nature article, PDF)

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:01 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:05 pm
Ecotricity the daily express are starting a campaign to "save our gas boilers" from the government and their dastardly plan to turn them all into heat pumps.

Apparently "green gas" made from grass is the way to go.

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-news/2 ... ur-boilers
Sounds like a recipe for habitat destruction to me.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:27 pm

Grumble wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:01 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:05 pm
Ecotricity the daily express are starting a campaign to "save our gas boilers" from the government and their dastardly plan to turn them all into heat pumps.

Apparently "green gas" made from grass is the way to go.

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-news/2 ... ur-boilers
Sounds like a recipe for habitat destruction to me.
I did the maths on the going bust thread:
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:24 pm
plodder wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:13 pm
are they saying anaerobic digestion will give us the gas we need? ouch.
Yes. "The world's first green energy company" is campaigning against government subsidies for heat pumps because they are about to open a single plant that "will use 3,000 acres to power 4,000 local homes". (source is the Express).

Given 27 million homes in the UK, that's a mere 20.25 million acres of grass. Out of a total agricultural area of 23.07 acres. Only 87.7% then. (I know there would probably be big economies of scale, but not that big.)

I mean, it would even be more effective to burn that green gas in a power station and use electric heaters.

I can see a place for biofuels in aviation and shipping, which are still technologically difficult to decarbonise and often unavoidable. But powering a decentralised network of domestic heaters? Total (grass-fed) b.llsh.t.
Kids: say no to biofuels.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by FlammableFlower » Thu Sep 23, 2021 9:15 am

Additionally, from that Ecotricity webpage, this is so disingenuous:
This is not theory. Existing technology known as anaerobic digestion does the job. Working like a cow’s stomach, fed with grass like a cow - but with the methane harnessed and used to power our country, rather than power the climate crisis. Our only by-product is fertiliser. The thing (well, one of them) that Britain is critically short of this week.
It wasn't fertiliser we were critically short of, it was the CO2 that was a by-product of fertiliser production, that itself was shut down due to becoming unprofitable with the steep rise in gas prices (due to being massively energy intensive; good old Haber-Bosch). Now this may cause a reduction in fertiliser in the near future, but unless we've reached a JIT fertiliser production point, they'll still have stocks. We never went critically short of it.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Thu Sep 23, 2021 3:54 pm

Further to discussion in this thread and elsewhere about low wind this year, here’s a screenshot from gridwatch. Hopefully things will improve a bit but we’re more than 1GW down on average wind power production this year compared to last.
BBC378F0-4D09-4E61-BE5D-B2C132D78DE5.jpeg
BBC378F0-4D09-4E61-BE5D-B2C132D78DE5.jpeg (82.52 KiB) Viewed 1878 times
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:13 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on. They're technologically compatible with mixed land uses, rather than requiring virgin land or needing to be situated away from dwellings like wind. That also cuts down some of the need for long-distance infrastructure, as those places are already on the grid and using power. (The grid itself would still need adapting, unless there were also lots of local, small-scale storage - though again that's currently what often happens with batteries, and lots of such places are going to have BEVs plugged in all day.)
All this is correct. But let's make some order of magnitude calculations.

Currently the average electricity output of the UK is about 30GW. Now let's suppose all our heating and transport is electrical. This will probably require our average electricity output to be about 75GW. Note that our total energy use at the moment is something like 120GW-equivalent, but electricity enables more efficient power usage, such as heat pumps for buildings and battery cars. So I have only increased it by a factor of 2.5 rather than a factor of 4.

Now let us suppose that something like 50% of electricity usage has to be time-shifted, because renewables are not very good at being there all the time. In particular, solar doesn't work at night, etc. So 37.5GW - equiv is time-shifted. Let us further suppose that the round-trip efficiency of time-shifting by electrolysis and burning the hydrogen is 50%. I think it's probably worse than that, but this is back of an envelope. So actually we need 75GW to supply the 37.5GW that is time shifted. So actually we are now into needing about 110 GW overall.

Typical solar panel is, conveniently, 1kW per square metre. Whilst solar panels might get a lot cheaper, somehow I don't expect they will beat that one very much. And a million square metres is conveniently 1 square km. So at 100% capacity factor, 110 GW is 110 sq km of solar cell. But in average UK conditions capacity factor averages about 9%. So actually the amount of solar cell required in Britain (assuming it is our main electricity source - a useful assumption to assess these things) is of the order of 1,200 sq km. That compares with a total area of the country of 243,000 sq km, ie, about 0.5% of it.

About 6% of the UK is "built-up". But in fact only about 20% of "built-up" land is actually covered over with structure or surfacing. So you are talking about currently only about 1.2% of the UK's land having some kind of surfacing on it now - including road, car parks, footways, buildings, and other non-natural surfacings. 1200 sq km of PV cells is an enormous amount to put in a crowded country like Britain. And that's before you take into account any space between the cells for access, etc. I remember after the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster a couple of years ago, Elon Musk was saying he could replace it with solar cells and batteries. Using some actual land areas of actual solar farms and actual large scale battery sites, I reckoned he'd need about 7% of the land area of Puerto Rico.

If you put PV cells on the roof of a house you know, how many sq m could you reasonably install, and how does that compare with much surfaced over land that house occupies? What about all that road, footway and carpark? I don't think you'd be able to use anything like half of the currently surfaced over land for PV cells.

If you did it somewhere like Algeria where you'd get a capacity factor about 3 times higher, you'd only need 400 sq km. And you'd have vast spaces of very empty desert to put it on.

And that is before we think about how much land is required for the electrolysis and batteries on that scale.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by lpm » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm

We can easily get to 110 GW capacity from wind - aiming for 40 GW by 2030. Of course capacity isn't generation so need to do wind's equivalent of the 9% solar thing. But the more you have, the more geographically spread out it is. And the more you trade with neighbours.

None of that wind needs land, because it's basically the sea plus the uninhabited deserts of Scotland's denuded landscape.

And nuclear can provide 10 GW for the 24/7 customers, even with the UK's limited program.

A lot of the time shifting can be done by end consumers, i.e. automated recharging of cars, under-stairs batteries, even Economy 7 storage heaters.

I'm not sure about your assumption for taking current energy use of 120 GW to 75 GW. EVs are far more efficient - 3x better than ICE in mpg equivalent because they don't waste huge amounts by being so hot. Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses. We're going to have to insulate houses to within an inch of their lives, someone should campaign for that, but even so there's going to be a big need for direct electrical heating. Gas central heating is pretty efficient in the type of UK homes most people live in. 75 GW might be optimistic.

To be honest, when it comes to solar it's like the Covid vaccine. You're not safe until the world is safe. You have to vaccinate Algeria. And your CO2's not zero until the world is zero. Eliminating Algeria's CO2 is just as good as eliminating the same CO2 in your own country. If I had a sq km of solar panels to hand I'd ship them to Algeria and immediately triple their climate value. Shoving them on UK roofs seems a waste of a limited resource. The Covid vaccine rollout was done steadily down the age groups, solar rollout should be the same - start in Algeria, hop across the Med to southern Spain, head steadily northwards. The UK would be a long, long way down the queue.

Countries should go with what they're best at. The UK is a particularly tricky place - it's got the wind, it's got the wealth and expertise for nuclear, but it's not great for solar or storage, and it's got crap housing stock.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by shpalman » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:50 pm

IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:13 pm
Typical solar panel is, conveniently, 1kW per square metre. Whilst solar panels might get a lot cheaper, somehow I don't expect they will beat that one very much. And a million square metres is conveniently 1 square km. So at 100% capacity factor, 110 GW is 110 sq km of solar cell. But in average UK conditions capacity factor averages about 9%.
1kW per square metre is how much power there is in sunlight; Si-based solar panels are about* 20% efficient.

* - close enough for this level of precision.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:53 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm
Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses.
Ground source heat pumps need a large garden or similar space. But air source heat pumps are not very big and can be mounted on any exterior wall. They're not as efficient as ground source but will be much better than gas central heating.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:18 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm
Countries should go with what they're best at. The UK is a particularly tricky place - it's got the wind, it's got the wealth and expertise for nuclear, but it's not great for solar or storage, and it's got crap housing stock.
Not sure why you think the U.K. isn’t great for storage? The truth is the storage market is in its very early stages so far. Lots of competing ideas but not much actual storage. Many of the ideas are fine for the U.K. though.
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:53 pm
lpm wrote:Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses.
Ground source heat pumps need a large garden or similar space. But air source heat pumps are not very big and can be mounted on any exterior wall. They're not as efficient as ground source but will be much better than gas central heating.
The efficiency is highest at temperatures lower than we typically heat a house at in the U.K., which is why we need to insulate first and foremost.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:23 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:50 pm
IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:13 pm
Typical solar panel is, conveniently, 1kW per square metre. Whilst solar panels might get a lot cheaper, somehow I don't expect they will beat that one very much. And a million square metres is conveniently 1 square km. So at 100% capacity factor, 110 GW is 110 sq km of solar cell. But in average UK conditions capacity factor averages about 9%.
1kW per square metre is how much power there is in sunlight; Si-based solar panels are about* 20% efficient.

* - close enough for this level of precision.
Whoops, asleep there. Thanks. Makes my calculation even better.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:25 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm
We can easily get to 110 GW capacity from wind - aiming for 40 GW by 2030. Of course capacity isn't generation so need to do wind's equivalent of the 9% solar thing. But the more you have, the more geographically spread out it is. And the more you trade with neighbours.
110GW is at 100% capacity factor. So, as wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 25% in less good years, if you were to do this with wind turbines you need 400GW of wind turbine, or about 10 times as much as aimed for by 2030.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:30 pm

Correcting my post for the error shpalman spotted, which makes it 5 times worse than my first attempt.
IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:13 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:51 am
One handy thing with solar panels is that you can just stick them on the roofs of buildings, and cover car parks, and so on. They're technologically compatible with mixed land uses, rather than requiring virgin land or needing to be situated away from dwellings like wind. That also cuts down some of the need for long-distance infrastructure, as those places are already on the grid and using power. (The grid itself would still need adapting, unless there were also lots of local, small-scale storage - though again that's currently what often happens with batteries, and lots of such places are going to have BEVs plugged in all day.)
All this is correct. But let's make some order of magnitude calculations.

Currently the average electricity output of the UK is about 30GW. Now let's suppose all our heating and transport is electrical. This will probably require our average electricity output to be about 75GW. Note that our total energy use at the moment is something like 120GW-equivalent, but electricity enables more efficient power usage, such as heat pumps for buildings and battery cars. So I have only increased it by a factor of 2.5 rather than a factor of 4.

Now let us suppose that something like 50% of electricity usage has to be time-shifted, because renewables are not very good at being there all the time. In particular, solar doesn't work at night, etc. So 37.5GW - equiv is time-shifted. Let us further suppose that the round-trip efficiency of time-shifting by electrolysis and burning the hydrogen is 50%. I think it's probably worse than that, but this is back of an envelope. So actually we need 75GW to supply the 37.5GW that is time shifted. So actually we are now into needing about 110 GW overall.

Typical solar panel is, conveniently, insolation is about 1kW per square metre, and typical solar panels about 20% efficient. Whilst solar panels might get a lot cheaper, somehow I don't expect they will beat that one very much. And a million square metres is conveniently 1 square km. So at 100% capacity factor, 110 GW is 110 550 sq km of solar cell. But in average UK conditions capacity factor averages about 9%. So actually the amount of solar cell required in Britain (assuming it is our main electricity source - a useful assumption to assess these things) is of the order of 1,200 6000 sq km. That compares with a total area of the country of 243,000 sq km, ie, about 0.5% 2.5% of it.

About 6% of the UK is "built-up". But in fact only about 20% of "built-up" land is actually covered over with structure or surfacing. So you are talking about currently only about 1.2% of the UK's land having some kind of surfacing on it now - including road, car parks, footways, buildings, and other non-natural surfacings. 1200 6000 sq km of PV cells is an enormous amount to put in a crowded country like Britain. And that's before you take into account any space between the cells for access, etc. I remember after the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster a couple of years ago, Elon Musk was saying he could replace it with solar cells and batteries. Using some actual land areas of actual solar farms and actual large scale battery sites, I reckoned he'd need about 7% of the land area of Puerto Rico.
...
And that is before we think about how much land is required for the electrolysis and batteries on that scale.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:31 pm

Grumble wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:18 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:53 pm
lpm wrote:Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses.
Ground source heat pumps need a large garden or similar space. But air source heat pumps are not very big and can be mounted on any exterior wall. They're not as efficient as ground source but will be much better than gas central heating.
The efficiency is highest at temperatures lower than we typically heat a house at in the U.K., which is why we need to insulate first and foremost.
Yes, though insulation is a priority whatever method of heating is used.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by shpalman » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:37 pm

(Assuming that capacity factor figure doesn't already take the efficiency into account to some extent.)

Suburban sprawl is good for solar panels since every family has their own couple of square metres of useful roof area but even that wouldn't be enough to satisfy the energy needs of the house. High-density apartment blocks in cities are even worse for that.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by dyqik » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:37 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:53 pm
lpm wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm
Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses.
Ground source heat pumps need a large garden or similar space.
Not if you drill the loop vertically, which is becoming the standard way when retrofitting.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:38 pm

dyqik wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:37 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:53 pm
lpm wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 2:46 pm
Heat pumps, on the other hand, are going to be a real problem. I don't think they are suitable for most houses.
Ground source heat pumps need a large garden or similar space.
Not if you drill the loop vertically, which is becoming the standard way when retrofitting.
Yes, that's a good point. I was thinking of the ones I know about, but they were installed a while ago.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by IvanV » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:57 pm

bjn wrote:
Wed Sep 22, 2021 8:19 pm
Going back to Ivan, we aren't finished yet on price reductions from either wind, solar or batteries. We won't see another order of magnitude drop over the coming decades, but the prices will still come down regardless of how close the technology is to thermodynamic limits because of things that have nothing to do with thermodynamic efficiencies.

Just looking at wind turbines, power scales with the square of the turbine radius. So doubling the length of the turbine blade gets 4X the power. However, costs of wind turbines don't square as you scale them up, even better, the higher off the ground you are, the more consistent the wind flow, so you get a higher capacity factor. So the larger the turbine, the cheaper will be the electricity it produces, whether it's at the Betz Limit or not. This is why we are seeing monster turbines come out like the Halide-X with blades over 100m. People are continually pushing material science and turbine design to make even bigger beasts. On top of that you have price reductions due to industry learning curves and the cost of capital for operators continuing to drop. It's going to get cheaper. (Nature article, PDF)
I was commenting on the paper the paper which reckoned on order of magnitude cost reductions still to come for batteries and solar. I agreed these were possible.

The paper also showed some limited potential for wind turbine cost reduction. But to get to the economy they are talking of, you need order of magnitude cost reduction. So wind power becomes some little side game once PV gets order of magnitude cheaper. Even in dull Britain.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Gfamily » Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:46 pm

A propos nothing much at all, but the five F-1 rocket engines that lifted the Saturn V rockets to space had a combined power approximately equal to that of all UK's power stations going full blast. [1]
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Sep 26, 2021 2:06 am

IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:30 pm
Correcting my post for the error shpalman spotted, which makes it 5 times worse than my first attempt.
It's even worse than that. Currently, many people are in a situation where people have fairly indepentent transport, heating, and lighting/miscellaneous.

If there is a power cut, you can get some heat from a gas cooker (most central heating will stop because there's no power for the pump), you can travel to get a takeaway or other supplies (candles? charge your phone at a coffee shop?).

If the gas is cut off, you can make tea and coffee with a kettle and get a hot meal using your microwave. You can use temporary electric heaters, and travel to get supplies.

If there's no petrol or diesel, you can stay at home and maybe even work normally, depending on your job.

Getting everyone to use heat pumps and electric vehicles means that everything will be dependent on electricity. When there is a power cut, nothing works. You may be able to travel a short distance, but risk getting stranded unless you can get outside the affected area.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by bjn » Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:18 am

I’ve never had a power cut back in my 30 odd years of living in the UK. Sample size N=1.

Regardless, continuing to burn stuff is not compatible with with mitigating climate change. Electrification of everything is the only way to achieve CO2 reductions needed not to cook ourselves.

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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:09 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 2:06 am
IvanV wrote:
Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:30 pm
Correcting my post for the error shpalman spotted, which makes it 5 times worse than my first attempt.
It's even worse than that. Currently, many people are in a situation where people have fairly indepentent transport, heating, and lighting/miscellaneous.

If there is a power cut, you can get some heat from a gas cooker (most central heating will stop because there's no power for the pump), you can travel to get a takeaway or other supplies (candles? charge your phone at a coffee shop?).

If the gas is cut off, you can make tea and coffee with a kettle and get a hot meal using your microwave. You can use temporary electric heaters, and travel to get supplies.

If there's no petrol or diesel, you can stay at home and maybe even work normally, depending on your job.

Getting everyone to use heat pumps and electric vehicles means that everything will be dependent on electricity. When there is a power cut, nothing works. You may be able to travel a short distance, but risk getting stranded unless you can get outside the affected area.
Home batteries can normally ride through small outages.
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Re: The Death Of Fossil Fuels

Post by Grumble » Sun Sep 26, 2021 7:11 am

bjn wrote:
Sun Sep 26, 2021 6:18 am
I’ve never had a power cut back in my 30 odd years of living in the UK. Sample size N=1.

Regardless, continuing to burn stuff is not compatible with with mitigating climate change. Electrification of everything is the only way to achieve CO2 reductions needed not to cook ourselves.
Most power cuts are very short. Running rigs that shut down when there’s a power cut I’m more aware than most of a blip, they happen a few times a year at least around here. Never to the extent that you’d notice it affecting heating or whatever.
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