Resource Loss
Earth’s Resources are finite. We may be able to drag stuff down from the space around us but only in very small quantities, the cost per pound of getting stuff from the moon works out to about $250,000 per gram. From low earth orbit it is probably a lot cheaper, being bargain basement at maybe $10,000 per gram, about 1/5th of the size of a level teaspoonful of sugar, so apart from its novelty value to science, it’s probably a poor return. The equivalent of 1 gramme of pure gold is about 50 cubic millimetres, and worth about $57, so even getting stuff from low earth orbit is currently around about 175 times as expensive as that, the moon 4,000 times and Mars probably around 20-50,000 times. If you regard a fully fuelled Saturn V as around about 2.8 million Kg, and the rocks it returns around 64Kg, then the moon is probably 40,000 times in the red in proportion, low earth around 1600 times, if there was in fact anything up there to grab that was worth it.
So space mining is pretty poor in that respect, even getting paper back from another planet costing in the region of $5 million per sheet. A bit of a difference between the $5 that a 500 sheet pack at the local store costs. The Mars Paper company quoting $2.5 billion per pack, any takers?
So, unless we are living in space or on the moon, the ‘Fred Bloggs, Space Miner’ books are a bit on the fantasy side. If you could mine tritium or Helium 3, then maybe the balance is not so one sided.
That said, the world is running short of resources. I see the current set of fossil fuels, or easy to get at power something like the graph below:
Probably by 2070 there won’t be any simple drillable oil available, gas will have been 50% depleted, and even shale oil will be down to about 83% of all reserves. Shale oil will be around for a very long time, but it’s likely that for each 10% used up, obtaining the next 10% will mean using twice the energy to do it. So the last 10% may take half a million times the energy of the first 10% to release it. Get to this stage and mankind is back to the stone age within decades, possibly for 50,000 years and resources taking this long to recover to usable levels.
This of course may have happened in the past, and we occasionally see remnants and relics just hanging on, hoping for a return to glory.
Light speed, can we bypass it? That is the question. At the moment we need stellar energy level capacity to do things like warps to send single craft out. Play around with antimatter and get it wrong, nobody would know, even at planetary distances, as the planet you did it on may never be detected again, mistaking it for an asteroid field. Without faster than light capacity. entropy means dead craft being aimed at other stars. With accretion we might even mistake them for inter-stellar objects.
I must admit, I am not sold on the idea of purely man made CO2 driving climate change, but I am aware of it having little effect, and the fact that to reduce our CO2 outputs we are using up resources at a faster rate than just producing CO2. The pragmatic view is that this will continue whatever we do, and mankind is still sitting on one target with a big bulls eye painted on it waiting for extinction.
We have a number of key resources in the world: Air, water, foodstuffs, animals and animal diversity, land, sun, wind, minerals. Many are being subverted, hogged, and used up at an alarming rate, thinking or planning as if there is no tomorrow. Things already produced cannot be unproduced, so their production pollution has passed and irrelevant, but new or planned have additional pollution. We have the fixation that ‘old is good, new is bad,’ not based on any logical consideration. Any new product is bad, but, any new product that is better than the previous one and is there to directly replace it because the old one is now unusable, is good. Simply producing it when things do not need it usually turns out bad. A full pollution for continued use, against full pollution of production and continued use equation. This gives a completely different set of practical values than the theoretical figures borne from ideology. We live in the real world, not a model or the theoretical, which are just estimates, and dependent on the theoretical starting values, theoretical running values and the theoretical ends values depending on what or not is included by an individuals choice, views and the society they live in. Even then, models are only good as if you know exactly how things work and what alters what. Most people think they do, but don’t, so you end up with a model which is an estimate of an estimate of an estimate of a guess, exact to 4 decimal places.
So, we currently live on a world where its utility is diminishing. The government and business world see a theoretical infinite amount of resources according to their ideologies, where nothing will run out. ‘Growth is necessary for a healthy economy,’ being stated as a universal and unchallengeable truth, but the actual truth, not the fiction or fantasy quoted is that a 5% yearly growth over 100 years requires 131.5 times the resources that were needed at the start, so a small country will require about the current worlds resource provision just for itself at the end of that time period, and the current universes resource provision after a couple of thousand years. Even a modest 1% per year will need 3 times the resource provision after 100 years and 400 million times the start after a couple of thousand years. This is clearly living in a fantasy world, yet this fantasy persists and runs everything on the planet.
We therefore have a free market and little control in the world on provision or trivial use of resources, little control on energy, much being volatile and with little resilience found anywhere, trusting on luck rather than judgement, on a planet that is unstable and in the middle of a shooting gallery. Are we alone in the universe, nobody knows, except people who believe we aren’t without providing any evidence to back it up, just unqualified and unquantifiable theoretical figures. Just thinking of a number at random between 0 and infinity will probably be more accurate, skewed to 0.
Current government ‘thinking’ is that to help with the environment we should devote our time to certain paths. Electric vehicles being phased out quickly, but requiring all of the world’s lithium resources for just the UK to do this. Power being based on clean and renewable sources, but being neither clean, really renewable, extremely fickle, and prone to breakdown and restrictions. Much of the thinking is based on compartmentalised and discrete theoretical ideas, forgetting about dependent and related areas completely, only including them as an afterthought when things start to go wrong. A lot of ‘quick fix’ ideas with obsessive people pushing through bad, unpractical or unfeasible ideas, becoming part of the problem, not its solution. Out energy policies are so bad we probably couldn’t make them worse unless we decided that was what we originally intended and decided to intentionally damage the energy industry. Even now we are working towards a full removal of any energy resilience, having made moves in that direction for decades with an obsession on price without having sense of any value. ‘Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
If we’re it, then the likelihood is that all life will end with us. With so many government and business leaders planning for total extinction of all life, the odds are against us. The only option is maybe a persistence project. https://doomwatch.org/persistance/
What about the shortage of lithium? This, at that moment, is a vital constituent of most high efficiency batteries. It used to be lead, but that has gone out of favour as a power sources except for standard fossil fuel engines as a starter and regulator. There isn’t really a shortage of lithium, just lithium we can get at. So where is the problem? Lithium occurs at around 200 parts per billion in the world, there is about 250 billion tonnes of lithium in sea water alone, s there is a hell of a lot of it, probably in the region of 20 million tonnes worldwide easier to get at. The problem comes from only 100,000 tonnes a year being produced, up from 28,000 ten years ago. This has changed little until about 4 years ago when there was a big jump and doubled, then tripled, but seemingly has just reached a new plateau rather than a continuous gain. Now the increases are similar again. Therefore, it’s become a rare resource, being demonstrated by its price going up by 7 times during the past 10 years, or +20% a year on average.
It first started to open up when the first lithium batteries were produced in about 1970, that only properly took off in the 1990’s. Since then, virtually every electronic device that needs some form off battery storage uses lithium in some form.
Most of the lithium is produced by evaporation, using the sun to do the work and provide the energy for concentration. To not do so would mean doubling the cost and losing a lot of the advantages of this source of power. But it does mean large numbers of standing pools, environmental damage and loss of land use for other things that is often not included.
Standardisation of electric car batteries mean that you probably need about 40kg of lithium per vehicle, but the bigger and more mileage you want from your car, the more lithium, so could be as high as 85kg. So, if all lithium was diverted to vehicles and none for anything else, such as mobile phones and portable devices, this would be about 2.5 million standard vehicles worth a year, maybe 1.5 million long range. Practically, people wouldn’t like to lose their mobiles completely, so you’re probably looking at a maximum of 1 million standard electric vehicles a year at the current rate of lithium production, maybe increasing by 10% a year, or 0.5 million enhanced range ones with no sudden changes in view. Considering there are 1.4 billion operational cars in the world, this mean it would take maybe 1400 years to replace all of them. Very good in theory, resources calculated 0 to infinity. Not a lot is known about the longevity of electric vehicles but I expect they would be similar to fossil fuel ones, but more vehicles these days are now dying and being scrapped because of electrical failings than mechanical ones or rusting away. What we gain in the reliability of solid state components being lost in sensor and ECU failing, trying to keep cars to a non-capable long term standard.
The recent premature scrapping incentives, supposedly replacing dirty old inefficient cars with clean new efficient ones was more a marketing and sales triumph rather than anything do do with reality and the environment, where removing cars that still had a useful life and weren’t in fact that much different in pollution terms, so increasing pollution and making the problem worse shows how far we still have to go, where rhetoric and bad science rules the day.
Somebody said that the car batteries will probably be recycled, but not at the moment. There is a claim the batteries may last 15 years, so they may start to return into lithium amounts in 15 years time, not immediately, if we can recycle them. There are very few objective statistics on this matter. If they don’t last that long then more will come into the pot, but the expense of new batteries will increase above that suggested by a 15 year life. How many fossil fuel cars prior to 2005 are still on the road? Does an electric car with no batteries have much of a value or use, probably costing more to restore it than it originally cost. With little continuity of support from manufacturers I doubt few of the parts will be easily replaceable, so the only option is to scrap it completely. How many people are prepared to pay money to have iphones below 5 repaired even. The iphone 4 was produced 12 years ago, and very few people want to, or still use one, even though most would still work. So we have the latest in automotive consumable and discardable products.
Are Western Governments Ideas About Electric Cars a Pipedream?
Electric cars have a lot of advantages. Overall, they are more efficient at providing power and because electricity generation can be done on a large scale using power stations of various types they will be cleaner overall. The problem comes with how to provide that mobile power on the road. This is done mainly with lithium batteries, most of the other forms of power being a fail in that respect. LPG cars, although cleaner than petrol or diesel never really took off, in most cases being an afterthought than really designing cars for this fuel.
Electric power is still a relatively new source of motive power, though this is changing slowly, there being few electric power points and those that are there tend to be expensive compared to charging the car from home, sometimes 4 times the cost. Because of the recent problems with electricity provision the cost of power using those is getting close to the cost of petrol, forgetting that at the moment the depreciation for electric cars is around twice that of petrol or diesel. So, in economic terms, if you use the car travelling around a lot and things like quick charging stations you will probably be paying about 50% more in cost than conventional fuels for doing so, adding to the transport burden of your business, resources that will need to be accounted for in conventional pollution.
The UK intends to phase out petrol, diesel and even hybrid cars, following in the world’s footsteps, but is this even a practical intention? AT the moment there are about 1.4 billion active cars in the world, about 34 million in the UK, only a small proportion currently being electric. Electric cars in the world at the moment number about 6 million, 1 million of those in the UK. But the figures are generally fudged, counting all vehicles registered and produced in the world and UK rather than those that are still viable. To do so for non-viable petrol and diesel cars in a similar way pushes the number of cars up by 50%, probably to over 2 billion and 45 million in the UK. Cars that are less than 40KWH for their batteries are becoming rare and the batteries are becoming larger rather than smaller to try and emulate the range of petrol and diesel ones. A good petrol or diesel car can manage about 450 miles on a tank in all weathers, a good electric one around 250 miles.
The idea then is to produce more electric cars. The trouble is that apart from a few very suspect changes most will require a lithium battery. The other forms of battery are still in the provable but commercially unlikely stages, similar to fusion reactors that have constantly been on the cards for over 70 years, making trivial advances, but getting nowhere near a working and commercially viable device. The money spent on this area would have made major advances in other ones, but the research finances available have been virtually hogged by the devout who believe they can make it actual.
Electric commercial vehicles are really only in the car derived level at the moment, electric heavy goods vehicles, planes and ships impractical due to the difference of characteristics between types of motors. Electric trains have become commonplace though, none of them being from mobile storage, and all needing heavy duty cables direct from the grid for power. Try doing this for HGVs, shipping or airlines and you need a lot of cable. It may be possible to create a underground grid for this purpose in a small country, but there may be unacceptable problems and especially extra power losses in doing this. We have pylons to reduce energy loss when massively stepping up power and interconnectors don’t deliver as much power at the other end as goes into them at the start.
So, what of lithium? It’s a highly reactive metal that is very common, but being so reactive and useful it is hard to get at unless you use a lot of power to do so. Evaporation using the suns power to concentrate it, preferably at an elevated altitude, is the most cost efficient, so large pools of standing water that evaporates currently are the practical necessity. Unless a large concentrated deposit is found this is unlikely to change. The downside is the effects on the local area of doing this. You can’t use it for much else and can make the area unusable for anything else for a long time, so doing it in a farming or wildlife area is completely out.
Currently the lithium production is around 100,000 tonnes a year. Various figures concerning amounts of lithium in batteries have been considered and generally a figure of 0.16kg of high-grade lithium is required for 1KWH of motive power. Although people working out practical use of lithium carbonate have come up with figures as high as 2Kg per KWH being the provision, that works out at a 5.3 industry standard to about requiring 0.377Kg per KWH, slightly over double that figure, so a figure of 0.26Kg per KWH is probably currently in the ball park.
Lithium production is about 4 times the level it was 20 years ago when lithium batteries really took off, being in most portable devices, mobile phones being a large amount of this, but only really jumping to its current level 6 years ago when two new production sites came on line with production at the moment unlikely to change much except by small percentages over the next decade. I think it likely that lithium will probably not exceed 250,000 tonnes within the next 10 years, so the requirement will probably push the prices up as fast as this relatively scarce resource have in the past. Due to economies of scale lithium batteries are now 1/8th of the price they were 10 years ago, still requiring a similar amount of lithium, but the cell pack and other cell contents have dramatically reduced by about 9 times. This has happened even though lithium prices have quadrupled in that time, the total lithium content being around 3.5% of the cost of its production 10 years ago and 19% of the cost of its production now, so the overall cost will probably now be on a steady plateau.
Unless there is a dramatic and immediate new set of methods for power storage we are stuck with lithium, at least for the next decade, maybe two. Of the lithium produced for batteries, very little is recycled, most of the processes now being investigated using too much power to make them viable. Old car batteries can be taken apart and repacked with new cells replacing those that have failed and repurposed for home storage, but with a more limited life. The best option would be to simply break them apart and dump them in standing pools of water allowing nature to concentrate the metals, but you would have similar problems of environmental damage that the environmentalists would violently object to, so is probably not a socially acceptable option. They tend to want keep their cake and eat it.
So, allowing for 50% mobile phone and other battery storage equipment and 50% cars and other vehicles we have the UK directive that half of new UK vehicles to be electric by 2030, 8 years’ time and all of them by 2050, 28 years’ time. So, saying about 2 million vehicles a year, drivers not wanting less than a 50KWH battery in each, at about 0.26Kg per KWH that would work out to a requirement of about 26,000 tonnes of lithium a year, or half the world’s current allocation and production at 50% for cars.
I think it unlikely with the prices still likely to double or quadruple in that time the world will allow the UK or any other government to do similar and to hog half of its production of lithium to achieve this, and governments will need to re-think their current naïve assumptions and plans.
Most LED’s operate at a low voltage, ones for ceiling lighting needed to be stepped up before they are stepped down again. You can get CREE type with a diffuser rather than focused to give an adequate set up for emergency lighting that operate between 3-5v. You then need deep cycle type leisure batteries linked in parallel charged from the mains and if you have solar panels or a windmill type generator a controller to allow them to be charged by sunlight. Car batteries can be used for short periods, but they are not usually designed for this purpose and shorten their life if the charge is consistently taken too low. It’s best to have separate systems you manually switch over rather than clever circuitry that can fail or short and have discrete systems rather than mains connected. Most laptops are 12-19v, so a car type charger for them should be available. A 12-5v is also useful. If an area is out then the mobile mast may be too, so internet may be down for the area. Only something like a satellite internet link would then work if you could power it. Unless exchanges are excluded or have their own long-term generators a lot of fibre will be gone as will most petrol or charging stations.
Longer distance electric car use will be out.
Most gas central heating will fail as they are usually mains controlled, but gas cookers will still have it. The biggest killer may be lack of ventilation. We will probably see a lot of disruption of signals with so much cutting in and out, so digital signals may be pretty poor, needing a lot of boost, and an old battery radio may be of use or walkie talkies for short distances. It might be best to forget TV and streams and resort to portable DVD’s, most having batteries and car type chargers available.
With longer power outages that the BBC have been warned of opening a freezer, especially an upright fridge freezer may lose its contents or contaminate if within a few days. If you see puddles, it’s probably compromised.
With any of these systems the time to try them out is now and at night, with the mains switched off, not when it happens and you find they don’t work and scrabbling in the dark to get them working.
Why do civilisations and societies fail. Neglect. The assumption that a system can look after itself, not requiring constant tending, updating, maintenance and a backup if things go wrong will be the downfall of it. It can’t work, but many in this country think it can, minimal provision in everything. You can’t run one area at full capacity and efficiency while doing nothing in another, all needs to be balanced and preferably run at an optimum. Some things can run fast, others slow, but if you run a fast system above the levels of the slow system you either get backlogs, or require storage, adding to the burden, not reducing it as you need to maintain both now as well. The idea that you can skimp on supply or maintenance, running systems at below necessary requirements because they’re not needed for a while, means they won’t be there, or will likely fail much easier when used. Future failure is built into the system.
Neglect takes time. It takes time for neglect to filter through, governments and councils have been following their ideologies and neglecting their duties. If you don’t maintain a car and only maintain and use routes that you approve of, all around doesn’t suddenly just stop. Little things start to happen, then larger things and finally things break down. This is what is happening, so outside the narrow interests, things decay and finally only the main area functions, but the supplies dwindle as the areas that supply it fail. Then the main routes and central area also fail as it cuts back everything to minimal levels, not expanding, but always cutting back and neglecting or removing.
Outside London and the major cities commerce is dying. Then being bought up and the locals outbid in fire sales by London and the major cities as things like second or holiday dwellings and seasonal tourist businesses. But the local capital is gone and rented out at higher rates than the locals can afford, so they move out closer to cities or abroad. And so, the communities die, often closed up until the next ‘city holiday season,’ but the long-established local infrastructure also goes with it, smalls roads, churches, community centres, etc, the holiday area only minimally maintained and mainly populated by minimum security while closed. Big projects go on all around in isolated pockets, but only use the area as an access throughway, like a necessary muddy track or farm lane. Gradually it gets ruts too and becomes unusable, so direct roads are built, but being of benefit to nothing local, just for links to the cities.
The first thing we need to do is get the transport system back up and running. The rail network outside the major towns, especially London, is a shamble, the bus services outside the major towns, especially London, are a shambles, the roads outside the major towns, especially London, are crumbling, the motorways outside links to the major towns are jamming up all the time, and even those are becoming parking lots, alternative routes failing constantly with ill thought out, planned, and implemented repositioning. Londoners and those in big cities say ‘we see none of that here, what’s the problem?’ Centralisation is the problem.
We see lip service done to environmental matters, but now everything needs to go by road, so heavy vehicles, getting heavier all the time, are damaging them. Saving money for big firms that can afford them, but killing the road infrastructure. Distribution centres for big companies are in mostly rural areas whose roads are dying because of it, so links for those big companies are the only things planned or built, areas outside this neglected. Smaller vehicles, preferable electric from that point, would cost more, but be cleaner for cities.
The most environmentally friendly system is rail by far. Implemented well it would be the cheapest too. Linked to dock systems by rail, not the cheapest deep ports that are rare, but the newer and more efficient ships. Massive container ships, the cheapest per item option are not necessary as a problem there is amplified by the size. One major failure can block all the rest. The owners not losing that much, just the area paying for it, or supplied by it.
Public transport is not a luxury, but necessary, most people not using it because it is so unreliable, a mad dash to town and out again each mainly within one hour. With modern technology a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 350 days a year operation is required for a secular society. But, people don’t need to work 40 hours a week, probably only half that to be efficient, some people not being employed, but not seen as skivers and parasites, but potential resources and taken care of well and maintained. Work being a privilege. It gives people purpose, so they have time to contribute to community requirements. Parking needs to be taken out of the hands of the profiteers. For a bare bit of tarmac more than £1 per hour outlawed for private, free for council or public provided, maybe more than £1.50 per hour for multi-storeys, overrunning charged at maybe 50% higher, not 5,000%, big fines illegal. Free parking for employees only really happens at present for the very big firms with their own car parks.
The ideal system would be free electric bus transport in the cities in the whole country, maybe new efficient diesels and smaller minibuses for long trips and country. Free, with no accounting system, just monitoring, they wouldn’t need all the extra provision, payment systems, accounting, banking, cash collection, floats and change. Seasonal transport variations and shop opening needs to be outlawed. Either you provide it, or you don’t and somebody else does, neglecting local communities considered a crime. Decent cycle ways need to be constructed completely away from traffic, well lit, monitored, policed, with limits on speed, bikes exceeding it confiscated, standardised modular batteries used, not the personalised and unique ones that mean massive expense and short-term obsolescence. Maybe not even owning batteries, so battery swaps and stations, even vending machines, would be common. The same is required for cars, but a heavy-duty system.
Next, comes communications. 5G and super-fast broadband is touted in London and the big cities. Plus, 3G everywhere is being switched off, but many parts of the country outside big cities and especially London haven’t even got a decent 4G. 3G is all they have, or had, and is being switched off. Lack of decent communication is damaging the whole of society. Super-fast broadband is being pushed, usually digging up the roads to do so, but the throughput is almost the same as before, especially for rural areas that rely on old and outdated routing, priority bands given to big cities, especially London. Data access is a nightmare in the UK, uneven, unfair, badly charged and able to quick cut off, so a public data access is a requirement. It doesn’t need to be fast, just the minimum 4G standard throughout. The wire based telephone system has been abandoned mainly, so in areas with poor 4G access there is no backup if broadband goes down in the area, so resilience is shot. Without the broadband business and modern life that runs on it is cancelled.
Housing. We have ‘shanty towns’ of caravans in nearly every major city where damp, mould and poor sanitation is the name of the game, caused by such high rents and next to no support, occasionally moved on and removed by wealthy people’s objections to the eyesore who do nothing to help, just doing things to make thing more difficult and worse.
At the moment we have vast systems to stop people getting more than they are entitled to, but none to ensure they are getting what they are entitled to. The government has a policy that telling benefits claimants what they can get is a disciplinary offence. This has to stop. The benefits system is a right, not a privilege, not a skivers paradise, but a backup system for underutilised resources, so to swindle the public out of their rights is a social crime, not a noble task. The idea that the minimum, or less than minimum to survive in modern society is adequate, needs to end. Government in a human and civilised society needs to prove that people shouldn’t receive benefits, not prove they do. The governments for the past 50 years have been fanning resentment of those lucky enough to find the employment they want, turning the fortunate against the unfortunate. The ones that realise this quite often have been victims of that abusive system and everyone is at risk at some time. Situations can change for everyone; injury, illness, deaths, age, relationship breakups, accidents, it benefits us all to know there is some kind of system to cushion it, not automatically classed as ‘the enemy.’
There needs to be a minimum standard for all, accommodation, food, drink, entertainment, health services, transport, probably through minimum income which will allow for some form of choice, but a society that doesn’t provide this can claim to be neither ‘decent’ or ‘civilised,’ just a mass of competing animals out for only themselves. Nothing noble, just there and also discardable by anyone in control, or if situations change. People shouldn’t live in fear of where their next meal is coming from, or where they will sleep for the night. This is the mark of the cruel and uncaring despots who build in their own downfall, and societies too if you let them.
There will be those who choose abuse the system and just do nothing, but they should be pitied, as they have and serve no purpose. They might benefit, but they know deep down they have no value to anyone, even to themselves. They will probably get ill and die young anyway, people who neglect things and others often neglecting themselves in the end, in a constantly downward spiral Everyone can play a part, an efficient and professional system just trying to work out how, not just discarding because they the people in charge aren’t clever enough, or as much as they think they are. This means valuing everyone and trying to give them a purpose, not just those you personally respect through wealth, fame and fortune. Their lives exist because of those lower down. Take the lower down away, they fail and fall with the rest and become as the lower down.
This feeling of a lack of representation and control is generated by actions; things falling apart everywhere, and people who are supposed to manage it blaming all kinds of other groups for their own failings. ‘If you can’t blame somebody else, blame somebody using a new perspective of history.’ Technocrats believe technology and AI will solve everything, managers believe re-organisation and better management will cure all, isolationists believing stopping people coming here and ejecting people will sort it all out, financiers believe generating more money will solve all problems. All only having grand ideas about a small blinkered area of interest, but essentially interdependent on all the others.
It’s like a machine that normally works fairly OK at certain settings, but somebody who plays around with the settings as they think they can improve things by major changes, but end up madly fluctuating from one extreme to the other, nothing good being produced, only problems to be fixed.
We need free enterprise, but we also need certain things to be under government control, such as water, gas, electricity, waste and sewage, public transport, health, education, maybe even the communications and data infrastructure as none of those are currently working well, and all failing one by one under private management.
We had a mixed economy in the UK, which worked OK, then a change to a mainly public one that didn’t work, now we’re in a mainly private one that doesn’t work with no concept of supporting structure and relationships, taking away a strut here, a bolt there to save money, the idea that each part must make a profit ensuring the downfall of the whole, discarding the baby with the bath water.
With power, we need to get away from this naïve view that all energy is electricity, it’s not. For us it’s only a small proportion. So, people who crow away about the levels of wind and solar are just like donkeys braying in the wind. Dependence on wind and solar is unreliable to a level high of total incompetency at present as a core source of energy. It’s the Trump view of life, ignoring the obvious and things facts if you don’t like them and persuading others to think the same. It’s ideology and fantasy, not science. Nuclear is consistent, but full of risks, and everything is being tried to manage at minimum cost, balancing total countrywide disaster against revenues. Chernobyl was just a routine test that went wrong, Fukushima, where the whole of Japan got very, very lucky. Winds and currents in the wrong direction, Japan might have been over. In the UK we have a lot of coastal nuclear, Fukushima was a bit unique and a problem waiting to happen, but we could lose say Somerset, Kent or Hampshire if things go badly wrong. If we lost Kent and maybe contaminated London who would say a nice electricity supply was worth the risk?
Currently for the UK:
Gas accounts for about 43% of energy.
Oil accounts for 32%
Coal accounts for about 3%
Burning stuff; wood, waste, etc, accounts for 10%
This is 88% of the energy used in the UK, the rest, 12% is electricity. The others usually are so small in comparison that they’re not worth mentioning.
12% of our energy is electricity, where over the year about 40% is from gas, 12% is nuclear, 12% is wind, 2% is solar, 8% hydroelectric, 10% is burning stuff, and 6% we get from interconnectors from other countries. But, you can’t just go on rare maximum outputs for assessments of anything. All you do is just delude yourself and others.
This means that really the overall the percentages for energy are around:
Gas, 46%
Oil, 32%
Coal, 3%
Burning stuff, 12%
Nuclear, 1%
Wind, Solar and Hydroelectric, 3%
Other countries, 1%
Other bits of those combined and largely unrecordable, 2%. There’s no bonfire or personal generator census.
This is common in many countries. Then you have a lot of the renewables such as wind and solar are manufactured using oil, and countries that have heavy coal industries, so even then the overall percentages may be increased for gas, oil and coal, the pollution still being produced for us, just not being in our own back yard or recorded in our figures. Like eating chips off the plate of the person sitting next to you, and claiming you’re successfully dieting.
Gas and oil for us is the main supply of energy, electricity for our gadgets and communications. We did have large storage of gas and oil, but both were mainly abandoned and resilience compromised by people who had no clue about the areas they managed and controlled. They saw money and profits as the only driver of importance, not actually having access to the them, and having a sustainable and reliable supply. They worked in theory and were totally clueless about the real world, as bad as the green movement. So, we now have no energy security in the UK, and things likely to get worse.
Oil is running out, coal is running out, and we are using up gas like there’s no tomorrow, wells and mines getting deeper every year, so we have it today, but in the next 100 or so years it’s over; gone for maybe 20,000 years. The resource wars have already started. In 100-200 years, what we have now will be regarded as total peace because of this.
Subterranean hydrogen is touted because of massive discoveries, but nobody currently capable of getting to the stuff. Probably cost more than you could get out anyway.
Wind and Solar are the future, we can provide all our needs from the sun. But, both are incredibly fickle and unreliable. We see scientific advances claimed for 2 or 10 times previous levels of outputs for solar, but none hold water, and usually are totally impractical in real life situations, costing massive amounts to implement, way more than they sort out. They are generally scientific curiosities and quirks, marketed as the new panacea, the reality is never likely to ever work, not at least within a few hundred years. Fusion is one of those areas, not one working and practical reactor created after 90 years constant research. Compare fission where the first fission reactor using technology and knowledge of that age took 10 years after the first experiments, fusion around the same time. The claims for minutes running admired, when years running is necessary, each trivial step applauded, when miles are needed. The claim for unlimited cheap and clean energy mainly made by those who are clueless about the expertise, the engineering and the dangerous materials required. Stuff you wouldn’t want within 50 miles of your family.
So, we have wind, and solar, but always quoted on theoretical outputs in perfect laboratory conditions, never reality, like claims for a new car doing 200 miles to the gallon, but only managing 60 mpg for everyone, but the fake claims allowed and approved by the obsessed, indoctrinated and religiously environmental. We need real figures, not marketing fantasy ones they’re allowed to get away with, like cheap conmen, swindlers and obscure and unhinged, but admired religious sect leaders.
The problem with electricity from renewable means is one thing; storage. I’m not talking about expensive and inefficient lithium container systems that can only balance market forces for a while, I’m talking cheap large-scale storage. Some things are highly unlikely to ever be economically viable. The much-extolled pumped hydro systems costing maybe 20 years family electricity use to implement, the running of it costing similar to oil, so you probably need the same amount of gas or oil as before running alongside it or somewhere else to function.
Currently there is no practical electrical storage system anywhere in the world. There’s a few battery plants with limited functionality, but usually they are tiny in output and duration compared to the overall requirement.
One possibility maybe local gasometers filled with hydrogen and using hydrogen instead of natural gas. The hydrogen coming from electrolysis plants using the surplus provision of wind and solar, which by necessity must be many more times than required. If the requirement for the UK is say 35GW on average, we must have 100GW actual or quite possibly 200GW worth rated. When normal, generate direct power for the UK, when surplus generate hydrogen for the gasometers, when low use hydrogen from the gasometers and hydrogen power stations. Hydrogen fuel cells for transport are possible, but again, not without storage in cars, so a storage medium must be found, possibly by converting to ammonia first. Probably much easier to change to and from than trying to get super absorbing materials to work, so ammonia powered cars with maybe hybrid fuel cell powering electric and hydrogen combustion engines.
Another possibility may be large field size capacitance systems filled alternately with layers of scrap and sintered metal and plastic. Basically, a large capacitor, charged up by a nearby power station and feeding back into the grid when necessary. Maybe cover it with a layer of solar cells and wind turbines around the edge.