Re: Adam and David are wrong, Pat and Phil right

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 13:56:29 -0000, "Mark Williams"
<spam.me@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Nick Odell" <gurzhfvp.jbexfubc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 09:27:32 -0000, "Mark Williams"
<spam.me@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Nick Odell" <gurzhfvp.jbexfubc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Mon, 3 Mar 2008 21:12:05 -0000, "Mark Williams"
<spam.me@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"BrritSki" <BrritSki@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Mark Williams wrote:
"Robin Fairbairns" <rf10@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Mark Williams" <spam.me@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I did a quick calculation, and I reckon that our household waste
would
give
us electricity for less than 30 minutes per week.
(hence the comment about reducing consumption.)


Isn't the problem though that e.g. in Indonesia they are clearing land
to
grow these fuel crops and exposing and draining peat swamps which then
give up their CO2. I think I read in NS that it's going to take over
100
years of fuel production from those sites to break even in terms of
carbon.

It doesn't have to be as big a problem. A lot of energy crops grow on
marginal land or on lower quality land than arable land, perhaps
displacing
tea, coffe or tobacco. Where forests are cleared in Indonesia and
Malaysia,
the motive has usually been to get cash for the timber in the forests.
Replanting the land for fuel or foiod is typically a secondary
consideration. Of course a lot of the replanting has been fast growing
eucalyptus to feed the pulp paper industry, only they don't tell you
that
in
your 240 page Sunday papers because it might be bad for sales and upset
the
advertisers.

As the Malaysians point out, why was it not OK for the Malaysians and
the
Indonesians to clear their forests when the Europeans have already
destroyed
their forests hundreds of years ago? Why aren't the Europeans
replanting
heir ancient forests?

Not to mention cutting down and burning trees and farmers switching
land
from food to fuel crops so that food becomes scarcer and too expensive
for
the poor.

The very poor are typically the people who work on these plantations,
perhaps earning $400 for 3 or 4 months work a year during planting or
harvesting, but since that doubles their annual incomes, they are very
happy
with the outcome. The people who are most likely to feel the cost are
the
consumers in the developed world.who will see big increases in the cost
of
the energy they consume (the poor consume very little fossil fuel) and
increases in the cost of food (which has declined in "real" terms in
recent
years).

ISTM that governments ought to do as Germany has done and subsidise PV
panels with grid feeds so that every suitably orientated roof has one.
Would reduce our energy consumption enormously.

Except that solar panels only give about 1000 hours worth of full output
a
year (i.e. a panel rated at 1kW costing £1,000 will give 1,000kWh in a
year,
which is about £40-50 worth of electricity). Why would any one choose
to
buy expensive solar panels (or pay more tax to pay for the subsidies on
solar panels) when there are other lower cost solutions.

One of R4's eco-friendly programmes - Costing the Planet, Home Earth,
something like that - pointed out recently that in the UK the payback
time on PV cells is greater than the expected life of the product.

On the other hand, on one of the other programmes (Planet Earth?
Costing the Home?) the suggestion was raised that solar schemes in the
Sahara could be made viable because electricity transmission
efficiency has the capability of being dramatically improved. I wonder
if the main reasons for heel-dragging in this respect is that, if the
globe really did go in for solar energy from deserts, control of the
world's energy would move into new hands?

Such schemes are thought up by scientists rather than engineers. Whilst
technically feasible it would probably require significant changes to our
National Grid. It may be a national interconnection but that doiesn't mean
it has the capacity to carry all of the national power requirements from
one
end to the other. It works because most power generators are relatively
close to their consumers.

Not just our national grid: it would require significant changes
wordwide. Our national grid is an early twentieth-century improvement
of nineteenth-century engineering and would need to be dragged into
the twenty-first century with super-cooled conductors and the like.

More importantly, solar schemes on their own would not be sufficient
because
we still need energy at night. That implies either implausibly large
electrical storage or conversion of electricity to a fuel for storage
and/or
transportation. Hydrogen and methane are possibilities, but for easier to
handle solids or liquids the easiest solutions are biomass and biofuels.

If it were technically feasible that all the world's power
requirements could be met from the Sahara then I presume that it would
also be true that the same could be met from the other big, hot,
cloudless deserts set between the tropics and they don't all belong to
the "usual suspects" of oil producing nations.

There are others (apart from Saudi Arabia and Mexico)? It looks to as
though there rest is mostly sea.

True, there's a lot of sea. Not awfully useful since it's on more or
less the same longitude as the Sahara but it might be rather fun to
get our electricity from The Number One Ladies Power Distribution
Agency in the Kalahari. But moving on, there's an awful lot of hot,
sunny desert in Australia and if you saw the mess they have made of
the Atacama desert through open-cast mining, you might want to cover
it in solar mirrors anyway.

Nick O
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Adam and David are wrong, Pat and Phil right
    ... us electricity for less than 30 minutes per week. ... grow these fuel crops and exposing and draining peat swamps which then ... A lot of energy crops grow on ... Would reduce our energy consumption enormously. ...
    (uk.media.radio.archers)
  • Re: Adam and David are wrong, Pat and Phil right
    ... us electricity for less than 30 minutes per week. ... grow these fuel crops and exposing and draining peat swamps which then ... A lot of energy crops grow on ... Would reduce our energy consumption enormously. ...
    (uk.media.radio.archers)
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