Old houses versus new building

[Stubby]

4 minutes ago, htb said:

Everything has  a chemical formulae, even oxygen O, whether it is natural or man made is the difference.

Yea , but is it carcinogenic for sure ?

[htb]

50 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Yea , but is it carcinogenic for sure ?

Only time will tell.

[djbobbins]

I have trouble putting much thought to this subject as I am confident that new tech,materials and advances in clean electricity generation will solve this problem long before ever more polluting materials of insulation would, I say polluting in the way of manufacturing and disposal of insulation.
We are better of in the long run to keep what we have and not produce polluting materials like rockwall ect and let the heat escape , as long as we have clean electricity we can waste all that we want? The answer IMO is to concentrate our efforts and cash on generating clean electricity.

Sorry to be blunt, but having spent the last 15 years working in the electricity generation industry, this is wrong in so many ways!

Owing to poor insulation, heating demand in the UK is really peaky - much more so than current electricity demand - I think something like 50GW (50 million kW) peak demand for electricity but about 300 - 400 GW for heat.

Since it is not possible to store electricity in large quantities, without spending huge amounts of money (2kWh of batteries (enough to heat my house for about 20 minutes in winter) is a couple of grand) building enough generation capacity to meet current demand levels, if all heating was done using electric, would need about six or seven times as much generation as we have now. With the peaky demand for heat, most of that generation capacity would be sitting idle most of the year. So much as I’d love to be kept in a job for many years to come, it’d be wildly expensive to just keep building generation.

Note that even using air source pumps instead of resistive heating, the CoP can drop to about 1 when external temperature is minus 5 - i.e. when people really want their homes to be warm.

Also note that all that generation equipment has to be built (mining of ore, smelting, transport, engineering) maintained etc - so just building low carbon generation may just move the problem elsewhere.

Economically and from a whole energy system perspective, the focus has got to be on efficiency improvement to reduce consumption. This has added benefits - for example, if a property is really efficient the heating can be turned off for a couple of hours whilst power is used for cooking, without the room temperature dropping. In turn that has additional benefits - such as not needing to upgrade entire electricity distribution systems to cope with max heating and other electrical use.

[donnk]

12 hours ago, Stubby said:

Yea , but is it carcinogenic for sure ?

the US government has enough worry about it to start an official study. No way id have it where my family reside and sleep even if it was 1% cancer risk when there is known safe alternatives.

 

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[donnk]

11 hours ago, djbobbins said:

 

Since it is not possible to store electricity in large quantities, without spending huge amounts of money (2kWh of batteries (enough to heat my house for about 20 minutes in winter) is a couple of grand) building enough generation capacity to meet current demand levels, if all heating was done using electric, would need about six or seven times as much generation as we have now. With the peaky demand for heat, most of that generation capacity would be sitting idle most of the year. So much as I’d love to be kept in a job for many years to come, it’d be wildly expensive to just keep building generation.
 

 

 

Actually it is possible and will be more so, probably legally enforceable in the coming years. As the majority move to electric vehicles in the next 20 years with an average capacity of 80 KW/h (we use 18kw/h day)these will be used at home and work to balance the grid. Think of it as a mobile Tesla powerwall x 16. The house /work will pull from the vehicle when demand is peak and put it back when there is excess.

 

And yes you will always have enough juice to get home as it would only need to sell a small percentage of your total battery to be allocated to the national 'pool'.

 

I've had a Tesla powerwall for 2 years now and since moving to a time of day tariff have never paid more than 4-5p KW/h for electric due to the time shifting of power use. This will be the standard for all of us. 

[djbobbins]

 
Actually it is possible and will be more so, probably legally enforceable in the coming years. As the majority move to electric vehicles in the next 20 years with an average capacity of 80 KW/h (we use 18kw/h day)these will be used at home and work to balance the grid. Think of it as a mobile Tesla powerwall x 16. The house /work will pull from the vehicle when demand is peak and put it back when there is excess.
 
And yes you will always have enough juice to get home as it would only need to sell a small percentage of your total battery to be allocated to the national 'pool'.
 
I've had a Tesla powerwall for 2 years now and since moving to a time of day tariff have never paid more than 4-5p KW/h for electric due to the time shifting of power use. This will be the standard for all of us. 

It’s a very good point. I didn’t take the conversation down the Vehicle to Grid route but you are right that from a technical and economic perspective that should be what happens - using domestic or EV batteries as a swarm is the best way to avoid the capital cost of building a load of grid scale storage.

It’s not going to be straightforward though, for once I don’t envy Ofgem their problem on how to resolve this.

It will need some significant change to the regulations in relation to licensed supply and how this is considered, so that final consumption levies (Climate Change Levy, Renewable Obligation, Feed in Tariff etc) are only charged on the net consumption behind a meter, not the total amount that flows through the customer’s boundary meter in either direction.

Otherwise, levies will be being overcharged (if they get applied to all the electricity which goes through a meter towards the consumption point, but are not credited back when the electricity is exported) or undercharged (if the battery exports electricity which originally came from a solar panel on the roof of the building, thus never incurred consumption levies at the customer meter point). It’s doable but needs changes in regulations and some neat metering.

For what it’s worth, I heard a sound bite at a conference a couple of years ago that said it’s ten times cheaper to store heat than to store gas, and ten times cheaper to store gas than to store electricity. This was from network operators, who were clearly looking at total spend, not just the incremental spend of using already existing assets for a slightly different purpose. I’ve got no hard figures to back this up but it doesn’t sound wildly wrong.

[donnk]

1 minute ago, djbobbins said:

 

It’s a very good point. I didn’t take the conversation down the Vehicle to Grid route but you are right that from a technical and economic perspective that should be what happens - using domestic or EV batteries as a swarm is the best way to avoid the capital cost of building a load of grid scale storage.

It’s not going to be straightforward though, for once I don’t envy Ofgem their problem on how to resolve this.

It will need some significant change to the regulations in relation to licensed supply and how this is considered, so that final consumption levies (Climate Change Levy, Renewable Obligation, Feed in Tariff etc) are only charged on the net consumption behind a meter, not the total amount that flows through the customer’s boundary meter in either direction.

Otherwise, levies will be being overcharged (if they get applied to all the electricity which goes through a meter towards the consumption point, but are not credited back when the electricity is exported) or undercharged (if the battery exports electricity which originally came from a solar panel on the roof of the building, thus never incurred consumption levies at the customer meter point). It’s doable but needs changes in regulations and some neat metering.

For what it’s worth, I heard a sound bite at a conference a couple of years ago that said it’s ten times cheaper to store heat than to store gas, and ten times cheaper to store gas than to store electricity. This was from network operators, who were clearly looking at total spend, not just the incremental spend of using already existing assets for a slightly different purpose. I’ve got no hard figures to back this up but it doesn’t sound wildly wrong.
 

 

 

Tesla have this feature already built in but not enabled. The biggest cost is the storage itself which the grid would be getting for free in effect, there is already a lot of work being done so expect pilot trials to roll out next 12 months. 

 

The tesla powerwall already works but is static, they just need to account for the metering when your car can be connected to many meters throughout the day.

[Rough Hewn]

I've been planning an ecological friendly "house/workshop battery" for a long time now.
It's quite niche, but very simple.

You have two or more large ponds, on a hill side.
One near the top, the other near the bottom.
You use a small wind pump and a solar pump to push water to the top pond.
A small turbine in the down hill.
A water battery.
The bigger the ponds, the greater the fall of water, the more potential energy.
Wouldn't work everywhere for everyone, but it's my plan if I don't have a river.
[emoji106]

[donnk]

2 minutes ago, Rough Hewn said:

I've been planning an ecological friendly "house/workshop battery" for a long time now.
It's quite niche, but very simple.

You have two or more large ponds, on a hill side.
One near the top, the other near the bottom.
You use a small wind pump and a solar pump to push water to the top pond.
A small turbine in the down hill.
A water battery.
The bigger the ponds, the greater the fall of water, the more potential energy.
Wouldn't work everywhere for everyone, but it's my plan if I don't have a river.

just cut out the efficiency losses of the pump and use the windmill to generate electricity directly. You will get more.

[Stere]

Quote

Actually it is possible and will be more so, probably legally enforceable in the coming years. As the majority move to electric vehicles in the next 20 years with an average capacity of 80 KW/h (we use 18kw/h day)these will be used at home and work to balance the grid.

Not sure there is enough minerals in the ground for everyone to drive an electric car.

 

Is Tesla's Warning of a Battery Minerals Shortage Nearing Valid or Not

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Also huge enviro impact from mining

 

The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction

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As the world scrambles to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, the environmental impact of finding all the lithium...