The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[monkey]

I remember reading an article by Will Hutton years ago about the stupidity of debt for nationally-important infrastructure in the UK at least 15 years ago.
He proposed a mechanism whereby the government provides the capital (essentially by printing more money) and then as the debt is repaid, the money is removed from circulation, thus there's not a net increase in the amount of sterling and thus, per the monetarist theory, there won't be an increase in inflation. That debt could be serviced at very low interest rates, 'cos it's a special fund set up by the government for this purpose & you aren't paying for the bank's profit or for their risk-hedging (since the government would have stepped-in to own an important national asset like a nuclear reactor if the operator went bust anyway)

I have often wondered why all the money created through Quantatative easing went straight to The Banks, rather than being used to pay for useful stuff before going into Bob the Builder's bank account and ending up as an asset for them anyway.

[monkey]

Governments can borrow at stonkingly low interest rates. Which is why PPPs are nuts, as the government is effectively purchasing public services and assets at commercial rates of borrowing.

But it didn't count towards national debt, so you could claim you were being fiscally prudent, while still borrowing money.

[bjn]

Governments can borrow at stonkingly low interest rates. Which is why PPPs are nuts, as the government is effectively purchasing public services and assets at commercial rates of borrowing.

But it didn't count towards national debt, so you could claim you were being fiscally prudent, while still borrowing money.

One of the reasons I was grumpy with Brown.

[tom p]

Governments can borrow at stonkingly low interest rates. Which is why PPPs are nuts, as the government is effectively purchasing public services and assets at commercial rates of borrowing.

But it didn't count towards national debt, so you could claim you were being fiscally prudent, while still borrowing money.

One of the reasons I was grumpy with Brown.

It was the biggest reason to be grumpy with the grumpy sod (until he failed to stop Blair dragging us into an illegal war). With the size of labour's majority guaranteeing 10 years of rule & a client press, there was a perfect opportunity to explain clearly to everyone why Labour weren't going to do PPP - to be truly fiscally prudent - and then they could have got on with investing properly.

[Grumble]

Hornsea 2 still not working yet, cost Orsted about $230 million.
https://energynews.pro/hornsea-two-un-r ... -millions/

[Grumble]

Hornsea 2 still not working yet, cost Orsted about $230 million.
https://energynews.pro/hornsea-two-un-r ... -millions/

Hornsea 2 about to finish commissioning - delay was down to Omicron preventing staffing of ships.
https://electrek.co/2022/08/17/worlds-l ... nd-farm-2/

[Bird on a Fire]

Germany now has hydrogen trains! Had no idea that was a thing people were working on.

https://t.co/V8KjluJ8LX

[bjn]

Germany now has hydrogen trains! Had no idea that was a thing people were working on.

https://t.co/V8KjluJ8LX

Their H2 fuel will almost certainly be from cracking natural gas with no CCS (ie: "grey hydrogen"), it would be more efficient to burn the CH4.

[Grumble]

Germany now has hydrogen trains! Had no idea that was a thing people were working on.

https://t.co/V8KjluJ8LX

Their H2 fuel will almost certainly be from cracking natural gas with no CCS (ie: "grey hydrogen"), it would be more efficient to burn the CH4.

For now, sure, but green hydrogen is possible and trains are one use case that makes sense if you can’t electrify the line for some reason.

[bjn]

Nature article on the electrification of shipping.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y

TL;DR

At $100/kWh, battery shipping below 1500km is economical vs traditional shipping with minimal impact on cargo capacity. It’s 5000km if you include environmental costs. At $50/kWh the range nearly doubles.

On a related note, researchers playing with yet another battery chemistry, aluminium/sulphur getting very good results, with a material cost 1/10 that of LiOn batteries and simpler chemistry to create it (they used shop bough kitchen foil for the electrode). However it needs a molten salt to act as the electrolyte and has to work at 110C and exposing the materials to water while hot will generate hydrogen sulphide. So not a thing for phones and small vehicles. Good for static storage and industrial use. It may work commercially, it may not.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08 ... -a-minute/

[Little waster]

Nature article on the electrification of shipping.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y

TL;DR

At $100/kWh, battery shipping below 1500km is economical vs traditional shipping with minimal impact on cargo capacity. It’s 5000km if you include environmental costs. At $50/kWh the range nearly doubles.

IIRC there are also groups working on reintroducing sails or using large "kites" for cargo vessels.

I imagine you could combine the two quite effectively to decrease the cost further while addressing some of the respective technologies drawbacks.

[Grumble]

Nature article on the electrification of shipping.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y

TL;DR

At $100/kWh, battery shipping below 1500km is economical vs traditional shipping with minimal impact on cargo capacity. It’s 5000km if you include environmental costs. At $50/kWh the range nearly doubles.

IIRC there are also groups working on reintroducing sails or using large "kites" for cargo vessels.

I imagine you could combine the two quite effectively to decrease the cost further while addressing some of the respective technologies drawbacks.

Wind powered ships? It’ll never catch on! Some ships are so big it might make sense to stick an actual turbine on them.

[Woodchopper]

Wind powered merchant ships are like dirigibles. I’ve spent my life hearing about cool technology that’s just around the corner which will revolutionise transport.

However, the benefits have been outweighed by the sails’ increased production, maintenance and personnel costs, and that they increase drag when the wind is in the wrong direction.

[Grumble]

Wind powered merchant ships are like dirigibles. I’ve spent my life hearing about cool technology that’s just around the corner which will revolutionise transport.

However, the benefits are outweighed by the sails’ increased production, maintenance and personnel costs, and that they increase drag when the wind is in the wrong direction.

I know what you mean. I think the benefit of kites is that they aren’t necessarily pulling the ship but rather generating electricity.

[Gfamily]

UK contracts to buy future offshore wind energy at about 1/9th* the current CCGT rate.

Not for a few years, but definitely helpful
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-re ... -than-gas/

*Initial headline based on gas at the start of the month.

[IvanV]

Nature article on the electrification of shipping.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y

TL;DR

At $100/kWh, battery shipping below 1500km is economical vs traditional shipping with minimal impact on cargo capacity. It’s 5000km if you include environmental costs. At $50/kWh the range nearly doubles.

My initial reaction was, $100/kWh, can we have that? Apparently at point of manufacture, the cost of the cells inside a battery pack has already fallen to $100/kWh. Then there's packing it on top. And whatever else it needs around it. The cells thus seem to be a relatively small proportion of the cost of a 3.5kWh domestic storage battery ready to install at your house, for which my father was recently quoted £3,500 including installation and VAT.

Electricity supply to facilitate the recharging of ship batteries is non-trivial. They have a battery ferry to the Westmann Islands in Iceland. It only recharges on the mainland, as it would be impractical to provide a sufficient supply on the island. While it recharges, it draws about twice as much electricity as the island itself, which has a population of 5,000 people and large fish processing plants. This required major network reinforcement to supply.

[bjn]

One side effect of the war in Ukraine is that the world is burning less coal, as the price has gone up so much. Europe may be burning more, but the rest of the world is burning much less, so much so that emissions from generation have gone down 1% when comparing the first half of 2021 against 2022. During the same period global power demand grew by 2.5%. Hopefully the corner turning sticks and is improved upon.

More good news, coal plants in construction or newly proposed in SE Asia dropped from 27% to 10% due to cancellations. While renewables have jumped from 21% to 49%.

Source, energy analysis company belonging to S&P. https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis ... ving-.html

[Little waster]

Opposition to fracking is “sheer ludditery”, often based on the public misunderstanding the science says noted climate-change denier, who failed his GCSE Dual Award Science twice, even with a string of expensive private tutors*.

In other news the full-time Scrooge cosplayer and all round f.ck-nugget continues to refuse to tolerate any sort of new fangled Babbage Calculating machine in his candle-lit office.







*That last bit may not be entirely factually "true true".

[Grumble]

Alice completes maiden flight: https://www.electrive.com/2022/09/29/ev ... en-flight/

Long haul fights may or may not ever be achievable, but DHL do a lot of short flights in the USA and have ordered 11. Cape Air think this plane could do 80% of their flights. Hopefully gets certification by 2024

[bjn]

Western Australia is now removing remote households from the grid, tearing down the power lines and installing a self contained system of solar panels and batteries. The cost of creating and maintaining the distribution infrastructure was just too much. More then 4km of lines and they break even. As the price of solar and batteries drop they are contemplating creating micro grids for remote towns as well.

Resilient too. When a cyclone hit recently, the only places that had electricity were outfitted with one of these systems.

Such a distributed system would work well in parts of the world that are sunny and have no electricity infrastructure.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/ ... /101479136

[Grumble]

Western Australia is now removing remote households from the grid, tearing down the power lines and installing a self contained system of solar panels and batteries. The cost of creating and maintaining the distribution infrastructure was just too much. More then 4km of lines and they break even. As the price of solar and batteries drop they are contemplating creating micro grids for remote towns as well.

Resilient too. When a cyclone hit recently, the only places that had electricity were outfitted with one of these systems.

Such a distributed system would work well in parts of the world that are sunny and have no electricity infrastructure.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/ ... /101479136

That’s brilliant. What % of Australians live remotely?

[bjn]

Not a lot. 17 out of 24 million live in the various state capitals. I’m not going to guess as to the truly remote population.

Slight aside, it costs more just to distribute electricity to a house in Australia than the LCOE from a solar panel. That’s before you’ve paid for the actual generation of the electricity from whatever. There’s a reason that rooftop solar peaked at 42% of generation nation wide last Sunday. And it’s not even summer yet.

[Grumble]

Not a lot. 17 out of 24 million live in the various state capitals. I’m not going to guess as to the truly remote population.

Slight aside, it costs more just to distribute electricity to a house in Australia than the LCOE from a solar panel. That’s before you’ve paid for the actual generation of the electricity from whatever. There’s a reason that rooftop solar peaked at 42% of generation nation wide last Sunday. And it’s not even summer yet.

Solar PV goes down as temperature goes up though, so you often find it peaks in spring not summer.

[Bird on a Fire]

Yeah but if it's cheap enough just buy enough to get through winter.

[Martin_B]

Western Australia is now removing remote households from the grid, tearing down the power lines and installing a self contained system of solar panels and batteries. The cost of creating and maintaining the distribution infrastructure was just too much. More then 4km of lines and they break even. As the price of solar and batteries drop they are contemplating creating micro grids for remote towns as well.

Resilient too. When a cyclone hit recently, the only places that had electricity were outfitted with one of these systems.

Such a distributed system would work well in parts of the world that are sunny and have no electricity infrastructure.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/ ... /101479136

That’s brilliant. What % of Australians live remotely?

Not a lot. 17 out of 24 million live in the various state capitals. I’m not going to guess as to the truly remote population.

Slight aside, it costs more just to distribute electricity to a house in Australia than the LCOE from a solar panel. That’s before you’ve paid for the actual generation of the electricity from whatever. There’s a reason that rooftop solar peaked at 42% of generation nation wide last Sunday. And it’s not even summer yet.

Western Australia has a very marked split between city and rural. Metropolitan Perth is ~80% of the population of WA and the next largest places are Bunbury (~100 km south of Metropolitan Perth) and Geraldton (~350 km north). Both are part of the Perth grid, but Geraldton has it's own power station and wind turbines.

When Cyclone Seroja (mentioned above) hit WA north of Geraldton in April last year the power companies lost a lot of the transmission lines in the area and the communities affected received solar panels, wind turbines and diesel generators which they say made power more secure for them than the power lines they'd had. This change was happening before Seroja, but has been increased since, partly because these remote communities experiences.

Technically the Perth grid does extend all the way to Kalgoorlie, 600 km east and nearly half-way to the South Australia border, but Kalgoorlie also has it's own power stations and generates more than it needs, so exports to the local communities. The biggest non-resources dominated town not on the Perth grid is Esperence, only ~10,000 people and 700 km from Perth, and that has it's own little grid with power stations and wind turbines.

These micro-grids will probably only be applicable for 5% of the WA population, and are expensive, but cheaper than 100s of km of transmission lines for populations of 10s or 100s of people, which is how some of rural WA is.