UK Windfarms “Lost opportunities “

[Johnsond]

10 hours ago, agg221 said:

Somewhere around 2005 I was in Bucharest on business. The engineer at the company we were visiting picked us up from the hotel in his 1973 Dacia 1300. It was winter and the car was certainly memorable in many ways - lack of comfort being one of them. Most memorable was that driving in heavy traffic seemed reliant on faith rather than engineering - every time we went across an intersection, the driver would cross himself and go for it. I don't know if it worked, but we made it!

Alec

We ain’t gonna agree on anything I fear. I’ve not got the time to cover all the points but take a look at the picture I’ve attached and tell me that the building of those on our shores would not benefit thousands of working class families not just a few scientists or phd holders etc looking for genomes. By sea from Singapore 👍👍green energy my arse it’s all about profit. 

[sime42]

Somewhere around 2005 I was in Bucharest on business. The engineer at the company we were visiting picked us up from the hotel in his 1973 Dacia 1300. It was winter and the car was certainly memorable in many ways - lack of comfort being one of them. Most memorable was that driving in heavy traffic seemed reliant on faith rather than engineering - every time we went across an intersection, the driver would cross himself and go for it. I don't know if it worked, but we made it!

Alec

Glad you mentioned Dacias. I was going to but thought they might be a bit too obscure. They were the Romanian equivalent of the East German Trabant or Russian Lada. Virtually every car was a Dacia 1300 when I went to Romania the first few times in mid-late 1990s. Lack of comfort, lack of power, lack of style ........... No lack of spare parts though I guess!

Interestingly both Lada and Dacia are now owned by the French Groupe Renault.

[agg221]

1 hour ago, Johnsond said:

We ain’t gonna agree on anything I fear. I’ve not got the time to cover all the points but take a look at the picture I’ve attached and tell me that the building of those on our shores would not benefit thousands of working class families not just a few scientists or phd holders etc looking for genomes. By sea from Singapore 👍👍green energy my arse it’s all about profit.

I see the picture, and if the UK had the skills and infrastructure in place to be the global supplier of substations I agree it would employ a lot of people to build it. The fact is that it doesn't, and investing in the whole underpinning infrastructure to develop the capability would not be cost-effective, particularly considering that it would only ever build a very small number to serve the very limited domestic market.

 

I agree we are unlikely to agree. I would however suggest that your choice of words suggests that you have a preconception about certain industries - 'thousands of working class families' cf. 'just a few scientists' and I would challenge this. Taken from Wikipedia (but properly referenced and I have checked them): The pharmaceutical industry in the United Kingdom directly employs around 73,000 people and underpins over half a million jobs. One in five of the world's biggest-selling prescription drugs were developed in the UK. In 2007 the industry contributed £8.4 billion to the UK's GDP. In 2007 exports of pharmaceutical products from the UK totalled £14.6 billion, creating a trade surplus in pharmaceutical products of £4.3 billion. That's not just about a few PhDs - I would say that is a pretty big industry making a global impact and tipping the balance of trade a long way in the UK's favour?

 

Alec

Edited August 16, 2021 by agg221

[Johnsond]

43 minutes ago, agg221 said:

I see the picture, and if the UK had the skills and infrastructure in place to be the global supplier of substations I agree it would employ a lot of people to build it. The fact is that it doesn't, and investing in the whole underpinning infrastructure to develop the capability would not be cost-effective, particularly considering that it would only ever build a very small number to serve the very limited domestic market.

 

I agree we are unlikely to agree. I would however suggest that your choice of words suggests that you have a preconception about certain industries - 'thousands of working class families' cf. 'just a few scientists' and I would challenge this. Taken from Wikipedia (but properly referenced and I have checked them): The pharmaceutical industry in the United Kingdom directly employs around 73,000 people and underpins over half a million jobs. One in five of the world's biggest-selling prescription drugs were developed in the UK. In 2007 the industry contributed £8.4 billion to the UK's GDP. In 2007 exports of pharmaceutical products from the UK totalled £14.6 billion, creating a trade surplus in pharmaceutical products of £4.3 billion. That's not just about a few PhDs - I would say that is a pretty big industry making a global impact and tipping the balance of trade a long way in the UK's favour?

 

Alec

No preconceptions just a realisation that 73000 or even half a million is nowhere near the amount of jobs that are lost when all we do is resign ourselves to importing everything. I’m happy to want a better future rather than be resigned to the current state of affairs. If I’m disappointed then so be it, if it takes years to rebuild the skills and Infrastructure we used to have so be it, our need for energy is not going to vanish in the next 5 or 10 years, I do not adhere to the balance book type of management that was thatchers trademark. I saw first hand in my own area the damage that caused in the name of cost effectiveness. I’m well aware of what pharmaceutical companies can bring to an area and take away too, I remember one company changing its name overnight at Stakeford a good few years back from Union Carbide to something more palatable at the time.
The one thing we agree on is we have a different outlook, we don’t need to be a world wide supplier of everything there is enough going on around our coast to support a well planned and managed supply chain for the industry the post referred to right from the construction to the commissioning and life cycle maintenance etc. If we don’t do something then it’s yet another opportunity lost for tens of thousands of families,  I wholeheartedly stand by what I said at beginning.  A simple minimum local content stipulation in contracts would be a good starting point. At the end of the day we are the end user and therefore picking up the bill. These companies are not doing this for the environment it’s for shareholders or in many cases other partially state owned companies benefit. 
As an afterthought this limited domestic renewable market you speak of ???. You do realise the amount of work that is currently being undertaken around the UK coastline in regards renewable energy and the billions involved I’m presuming !!, never mind  the consequential carbon footprint that comes with shipping this stuff from one side of the planet to the other. 

Edited August 16, 2021 by Johnsond

[roys]

1 hour ago, agg221 said:

I see the picture, and if the UK had the skills and infrastructure in place to be the global supplier of substations I agree it would employ a lot of people to build it. The fact is that it doesn't, 

We certainly still have a strong UK skill set, although granted we have had to move further afield and we are getting less and less as we retire. I ended up working abroad until I retired 8 years ago. I was heavily involved in the commissioning of heavy electrical equipment including substations. 90% of the people doing the supervision, quality control, commissioning, operating and training locals were, Scottish, English or Welsh.

To me it is a pity that these skills are not more fully utilised in UK. We surely still have the capability to make a substations, S&I switchgear in Bradford are still as far as I’m aware still around. 

[agg221]

17 minutes ago, roys said:

We certainly still have a strong UK skill set, although granted we have had to move further afield and we are getting less and less as we retire. I ended up working abroad until I retired 8 years ago. I was heavily involved in the commissioning of heavy electrical equipment including substations. 90% of the people doing the supervision, quality control, commissioning, operating and training locals were, Scottish, English or Welsh.

To me it is a pity that these skills are not more fully utilised in UK. We surely still have the capability to make a substations, S&I switchgear in Bradford are still as far as I’m aware still around. 

I'm more directly familiar with the lighter end of electrical engineering - auxiliary gen-sets and similar, with Cummins and formerly Lister Petter. My father-in-law worked for both, my brother-in-law did his apprenticeship with Lister Petter and I have worked with Cummins. Certainly in that field the experience mirrored another area I have worked in directly - brazing. In both cases the skills were there when the development work was first being done, and when the infrastructure was being built in the 1970s, but the people with those skills are reaching the end of their careers and the residual knowledge in the workforce is diminishing. This is inherent in building something in limited volumes with a very long service life - by the time it needs replacing the people who went through the training to do it have retired, and in the meantime they end up either re-training or working overseas. This ties in with my earlier point about the challenges of sustaining a capability with only very limited demand - you either work very slowly to make the work continuous, or you end up with peaks and troughs.

 

S&I is still around, sort of. It is now a division of Powell Inc. so it would depend on your perspective whether you regard that as British because it's where the jobs are, American because that is where the parent company is registered or global because it's a multi-national. If you approached them to build a sub-station of the type shown, I'm not sure whether it would get built in Bradford, or in one of their facilities somewhere else. I presume it would depend to a large extent on the costs, including the supply of components.

Alec

[Johnsond]

3 hours ago, agg221 said:

I'm more directly familiar with the lighter end of electrical engineering - auxiliary gen-sets and similar, with Cummins and formerly Lister Petter. My father-in-law worked for both, my brother-in-law did his apprenticeship with Lister Petter and I have worked with Cummins. Certainly in that field the experience mirrored another area I have worked in directly - brazing. In both cases the skills were there when the development work was first being done, and when the infrastructure was being built in the 1970s, but the people with those skills are reaching the end of their careers and the residual knowledge in the workforce is diminishing. This is inherent in building something in limited volumes with a very long service life - by the time it needs replacing the people who went through the training to do it have retired, and in the meantime they end up either re-training or working overseas. This ties in with my earlier point about the challenges of sustaining a capability with only very limited demand - you either work very slowly to make the work continuous, or you end up with peaks and troughs.

 

S&I is still around, sort of. It is now a division of Powell Inc. so it would depend on your perspective whether you regard that as British because it's where the jobs are, American because that is where the parent company is registered or global because it's a multi-national. If you approached them to build a sub-station of the type shown, I'm not sure whether it would get built in Bradford, or in one of their facilities somewhere else. I presume it would depend to a large extent on the costs, including the supply of components.

Alec

Limited demand 😳😳😳your whole argument falls a with that  comment alone. Sorry but the demand is so limited that multiple overseas companies are ploughing billions into supplying it. If we had taken a fraction of the money  that’s been wasted on the lunacy that’s gone hand in hand with covid we would be In a far better place. The government of the UK including the devolved money pits needs to be held to account for the failure to enforce the minimum local supply chain commitments made a few year back. 

[Johnsond]

4 hours ago, agg221 said:

I'm more directly familiar with the lighter end of electrical engineering - auxiliary gen-sets and similar, with Cummins and formerly Lister Petter. My father-in-law worked for both, my brother-in-law did his apprenticeship with Lister Petter and I have worked with Cummins. Certainly in that field the experience mirrored another area I have worked in directly - brazing. In both cases the skills were there when the development work was first being done, and when the infrastructure was being built in the 1970s, but the people with those skills are reaching the end of their careers and the residual knowledge in the workforce is diminishing. This is inherent in building something in limited volumes with a very long service life - by the time it needs replacing the people who went through the training to do it have retired, and in the meantime they end up either re-training or working overseas. This ties in with my earlier point about the challenges of sustaining a capability with only very limited demand - you either work very slowly to make the work continuous, or you end up with peaks and troughs.

 

S&I is still around, sort of. It is now a division of Powell Inc. so it would depend on your perspective whether you regard that as British because it's where the jobs are, American because that is where the parent company is registered or global because it's a multi-national. If you approached them to build a sub-station of the type shown, I'm not sure whether it would get built in Bradford, or in one of their facilities somewhere else. I presume it would depend to a large extent on the costs, including the supply of components.

Alec

Limited demand 😳😳😳your whole argument falls down with that  comment alone. Sorry but the demand is so limited that multiple overseas companies are ploughing billions into supplying it and it’s forecast to expand year on year 🤷‍♂️. If we had taken a fraction of the money over the years that’s been wasted on the lunacy that’s gone hand in hand with covid and actually trained or invested in our young people  we would be In a far better place. The government of the UK including the devolved money pits needs to be held to account for the failure to enforce the minimum local supply chain commitments made a few year back. 

Edited August 17, 2021 by Johnsond

[agg221]

5 hours ago, Johnsond said:

Limited demand 😳😳😳your whole argument falls a with that  comment alone. Sorry but the demand is so limited that multiple overseas companies are ploughing billions into supplying it. If we had taken a fraction of the money  that’s been wasted on the lunacy that’s gone hand in hand with covid we would be In a far better place. The government of the UK including the devolved money pits needs to be held to account for the failure to enforce the minimum local supply chain commitments made a few year back. 

The UK has 8 planned wind farms. Each wind farm needs how many sub-stations? 2 seems to be about right. That is demand for 16 sub-stations. Each sub-station should last the life of the project, judging by the life expectancy of existing sub-stations. I would say that a total requirement of 16 is pretty limited. Once built, that's it, the demand ends because the UK's supply is more expensive than other offerings in the international marketplace, so it does not have export potential. Other countries are ploughing in the money because they can build cost-effectively to supply an export market. This is because they are building on an existing infrastructure and have a lower labour cost base. The UK would have to invest in the infrastructure and would still have a higher cost base. It would also have to licence the IP. That means it would inherently be more expensive. Even if you believe the extra price is worth paying to serve the domestic market, and that the 'working class families' you believe this will benefit have plenty of spare cash to pay the associated increased costs of electricity that go with this, there is still not going to be any export potential so the whole infrastructure only lasts the lifetime of the UK build projects.

 

That requirement is also over a short timeframe. That means you would build all the infrastructure and train all the people to meet a short-term requirement. The alternative would be to train far fewer people and build them over a much longer timeframe to artificially create continuous demand. The average working life is now supposed to be 50yrs. The current requirement is supposed to be met over 10yrs. If you drag out construction and hold up implementation, and only create 20% of the workforce then yes, I suppose you could argue it is continuous.

 

If you geared up to deliver in the UK to the currently planned timeframe, what are all the people you have trained to do this going to do once their jobs are gone 10yrs later?

If you create the very limited supply to delay implementation in order to artificially make the jobs sustainable, what are you going to switch off due to lack of electrical power to meet demand when you don't build it in time?

 

I am quite open to alternatives, but only if they actually answer the key questions. So far you have not done this. You are quite right that we are not going to agree if you don't believe industries which underpin half a million jobs and contribute billions to the balance of trade are important, and you don't believe it is important to balance the books. I am no Thatcherite - even the GLC under Red Ken believed that was important!

 

Alec

Edited August 17, 2021 by agg221

[Stere]

In the the latest guy martin prog he tried to set fire to a lithuim battery, the newest generation ones  had some inbuilt tech that made them impressively un flamible

 

Guy Martin: The World's Fastest Electric Car?

WWW.CHANNEL4.COM

---

Guy explores the world of electric vehicles. Are they the future? Should you buy one?

 

 

Thinnk hydrogen may be future though as has energy density better than petrol

 

Quote

In a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline

 

Battery energy density are very poor so  for range needs large heavy batteries.

 

Seem crazy  imo to carrying around massive batteries for 100 - 200 miles range when most journey are under 5 miles, and not very enviromental...

 

Same for all the ICE SUV,s used around town atm... totally  inefficent.