Energy costs

[eggsarascal]

8 minutes ago, Woodworks said:

The only short term fix is money for the most in need. All of the problems we have were predicted and not prepared for

Yes, but that isn't happening. I sort of care none due to the way I live I'd be gutted if I was in a pile of bricks.

Edited February 6, 2022 by eggsarascal

[trigger_andy]

Should we be fracking?

We don’t need to Frack really. We need to better utalise the oil and gas reserves in the UK waters. There is masses of it still out there but for political reasons, namely “environment” and Scottish Independence we’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

Norway has far less political pressure and has within the last 5 years brought a few massive fields on-line.

[Big J]

Small scale, local renewable energy production is a good way to address some of the energy shortfall. Solar panels and both ground source and air source heat pumps. Obviously that comes with a massive need to insulate properties.

 

I feel that one of the main issues with renewables in the UK is that we don't look at them as an objectively good idea, rather as something from which we can obtain money from the government through grants or feed in tariffs. Consequently, the public funding hugely overinflates the cost and makes a lot of cowboys who are quick to start installing them very rich. 

 

To illustrate the point, I compared the installation costs of like for like systems in the UK and Sweden. A fairly basic air to air heat pump was about £4300 installed in Sweden. Over £8k here. A ground source heat pump running your central heating. £12k in Sweden. £34k here. 

 

The only subsidy there is that you get 50% of the labour cost back against your income tax bill (so you have to earn it to get it back) and they've just removed VAT from solar panels too. 

 

We're going to put a full sized solar array on our roof as soon as is practical once we get to Sweden as we have a massive SW facing roof. It's very little extra cost to put on a charging box and battery for electric cars (that we don't have yet, nor can afford).

 

The payback period on the solar is 6 years (or less, due to high electricity prices) and after that it's all free. We'll combine it with an air/air heat pump so that we get cooling in summer for free too.

 

My point is (apart from listing what we'll be doing) is that we need to make renewable energy production the default. 80% of the houses I've looked at whilst house hunting in Sweden have had water born, ground source heat pumps. And we've been looking at the budget end of the market too. 

 

We're so far behind in the UK. Did you see that 84% of all new cars sold in Norway last month were full electric?

[eggsarascal]

9 minutes ago, trigger_andy said:

 

We don’t need to Frack really. We need to better utalise the oil and gas reserves in the UK waters. There is masses of it still out there but for political reasons, namely “environment” and Scottish Independence we’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

Norway has far less political pressure and has within the last 5 years brought a few massive fields on-line.

 

Why won't the big companies do it, correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Shell pull out of the big oil fields in Scotland recently?

Edited February 6, 2022 by eggsarascal

[trigger_andy]

Just now, eggsarascal said:

Why won't the big companies do it, correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Shell pull out of an oil field in Scotland recently?

Shell pulled out due to the SNP requiring the Greens to prop them up in Government. The Greens demands are basically shutting down or stopping any new fields. The SNP are then stuck between a rock and a hard place. Depending on O&G for an independent Scotland to work and pretending to wanting to go Green. 
The Cambo field was the sacrificial lamb to appease the Greens. Shell does not have time for that nonsense. 

[Deafhead]

Having grown up during the last war in a workman's cottage, with just a kitchen range in the living room (No kitchen, just a scullery) and of course no insulation whatsoever, how did we all survive, as most in our village were in the same boat. Mind you there were some pretty impressive chimney fires. That's me aged one outside our local supermarket.

[eggsarascal]

3 minutes ago, Deafhead said:

Having grown up during the last war in a workman's cottage, with just a kitchen range in the living room (No kitchen, just a scullery) and of course no insulation whatsoever, how did we all survive, as most in our village were in the same boat. Mind you there were some pretty impressive chimney fires. That's me aged one outside our local supermarket.

 

4 minutes ago, Deafhead said:

Having grown up during the last war in a workman's cottage, with just a kitchen range in the living room (No kitchen, just a scullery) and of course no insulation whatsoever, how did we all survive, as most in our village were in the same boat. Mind you there were some pretty impressive chimney fires. That's me aged one outside our local supermarket.

Nice prambulator, rubbing along tidy Now?

[kevinjohnsonmbe]

Lots of really good points already!

 

Electric cars ain’t gonna seem quite such a good idea if ⚡️ Keeps going up - my mate, the smug bastard during the recent fuel “shortage” ain’t quite so smug at the moment 😂 and, he’s going through tyres on his Tesla a lot quicker than expected due to the acceleration - he didn’t see that coming either 😂

 

Fossil fuel usage, fracking, nuclear.... All the ‘unpopular’ systems of the recent past will be brought right back into political favour when the masses start seeing the real time cost of the aspirational low carbon future. 
 

Can’t say I like it, but I can see it happening - fracking has the potential to ‘solve’ the short term problem. 
 

Jam tomorrow or fracking today....

 

As J has frequently pointed out - UK electorate is a fickle, thick as mince, short sighted and self centred. 
 

With decades of successive governments passing the buck and ducking long term energy policy we’re only headed in one direction and Greta ain’t gonna like it 🤬
 

 

 

 

[djbobbins]

No to fracking - it’d be yet another short term decision which results in long term dependency.

Can you imagine the lobbying position of some of the companies - “you let us have this one project two years ago and we’ve invested in equipment, look at how we helped the country etc…”. IMO fracking now = still fracking in 15-20 years’ time.

We need to incentivise and drive efficiency - particularly on housing. We also need to push more on daily and seasonal energy storage - that isn’t going to come from a few containers of lithium batteries here and there, it is going to need lots more wind capacity, green hydrogen / green ammonia / sub-sea storage, smarter use of EVs and heat pumps as flexible demand and V2G.

All of those take time but the biggest screw-up was Cameron getting a few quid off energy bills in 2011-12 but consigning thousands of people to live in poorly-insulated houses for the next 20 years instead. It was obvious then what the effect would be and it boils my piss even thinking about it now.

[dumper]

What’s happened to wave/ tidal energy