UK Draft Energy Bill Avoids Banning Coal Or Gas Power 153
Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning coal or gas powered plants. The bill would guarantee profits for new nuclear and offshore wind plants by putting a levy on people's energy bills. The bill does not mandate a statement that minsters had previously made about having totally clean energy within two decades. The government states that provisions within the bill will ensure a balanced diverse energy mix as well has stating that future emissions from gas powered plants will have to be captured and stored. The bill also aims to increase competition in the UK energy market by making it easier for new competitors to become connected to the grid. Joss Garman of Greenpeace states: 'By failing to set a clear goal for carbon-free electricity by 2030, ministers are opening the door to a dangerous new dash for gas that will put up both bills and carbon emissions, and increase our dependence on imported fuel. This means families and business will be exposed to rocketing international gas prices. The fastest and cheapest way to bring down bills and carbon emissions is by ramping up energy efficiency but Ministers have totally failed to deliver on this.' Additionally it would appear that the guarantee of profits for new nuclear power plants may not be legal as there is a ban on subsidies for nuclear power under European law and the UK coalition government agreement."
Note that wind projects are getting profit guarantees and not just nuclear.
No mention of the power cable to Iceland. (Score:2)
Should we operate on the assumption that the UK assumes that it won't get built?
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Working some of the time out in the North Sea and North Atlantic, I can envisage some of the scale of technology and investment that would be required for a significant power system like this. It's going to be seriously not-cheap for both installation and maintenance. Which begs the question of whether it would be worth it for geothermal (I assume
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Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter
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I'm following the link to that conference, but the connection here is pretty slow.
A priori, the problems with an export cable are multi-fold : power losses in the cable ; construction and maintenance of the cable ; environmental impact.
Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't recall any time when mandatory, arbitrary efficiency/emissions standards have lowered costs.
CFL's ? they are expensive, but they last a lot longer than incandescents.
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They also have different properties, which makes them not exactly a drop-in replacement. People I know who don't like CFLs tend not to like them due to the nature of the light they product (white rather than slightly coloured) when compared to incandescents (although I believe newer CFLs can ameliorate that). Also, AFAIK, CFLs can't be dimmed.
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Unless you switch them on/off frequently. Then they don't last as long as incandescents.
It's a good thing you can get the new round space heaters (that cast off a nice glow). The ban was and is stupid. People can choose.
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Depends on your time scale. Some pain now to get us to a stage where when oil prices really start to sky rocket we are not so dependent on it that our economy is wrecked.
Kinda missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
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You could, but then it would cost more than natural gas or nuclear.
There are lots of ways to burn it cleanly, but then it costs more than using something else.
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Conveniently the north sea fields are in steep decline such that the UK is in turmoil from going from natgas exporting nation to importing nation a couple years back, so there will be no natgas competitor. Its like claiming people would never pay $10 for dinner at KFC, because they could just eat passenger pigeon and rack of dinosaur ribs. Oh wait, they're all gone. Well then.
As for the nukes, the nimby types and "hate what you fear and fear what you don't understand" types will slow that down. Add some
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Then it will not be clean by any stretch, as doing so would cost more than importing natural gas.
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The cult of AGW has gone way beyond harmless Malthusian eccentricity - it's now killing old ladies.
The funny part is that the British media complain about 'global warming' on the one page and old ladies dying from 'fuel poverty' on the next. The high cost of energy being due to the government's farcical anti-'global warming' programs seems to pass them by.
Or perhaps they just have big investments in 'wind farms'.
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I thought most media outlets were "wind farms" though...
Better headline. (Score:5, Insightful)
UK draft bill avoids fantasy land. Remains connected to reality.
Re:Better headline. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not to mention the fact that there are still large coal reserves under the British Isles which are not being mined much now because it became cheaper to import it.
With ever increasing fuel costs, at some point it presumably becomes economical to start mining coal here again, I assume the Draft Energy Bill covers that eventuality also.
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Unfortunately it may be illegal. Under EU rules it is illegal for the state to subsidize nuclear power, so the government is forcing consumers to subsidize it through their energy bills. Either way the state requires you to pay.
More worrying is the enormous cost of nuclear and the fact that all but one energy supplier has pulled out of the running to build them. They will get built on the cheap, run on the cheap and when the next government gets in and decides the subsidy was too much cut back to the absolu
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No, no, no.
That may be a true statement, but this is a headline! It has to be sensational and scandalous, or it'll never get published by a respected journalism outfit like Slashdot!
Re:Better headline. (Score:4, Insightful)
UK draft bill fails to outlaw electricity. Lights still work.
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That's nice for you. I'm using some right now.
It's cheaper, more reliable and the only approach currently available at the scales needed.
I'd far rather be using nuclear power to generate electricity but sadly I lack the personal resources to implement my own generator.
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My power is about six cents per kilowatt hour and has never gone out on me.
You were saying?
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Yep, I was saying.. I can't purchase or generate sufficient power for 6c per kwh. Nice for you that you can. You probably pay less for petrol too, and have a bigger house. Can I come and live with you?
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Nah, petrol costs about $7.50 a gallon here. And I'm renting part of a house right now, and am in the market for buying a house.
"Nice for you that you can."
Given that I just proved a counterexample to the concept that electricity = carbon, and you accepted it, I'm glad to see that we've resolved this one.
Electricity != carbon. *Some forms* of electricity generation equal carbon, but there's no reason to say that they must always dominate.
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Petrol's just under $10 a gallon here, and non-carbon electricity costs over 15 pence/KWH if I buy it from the grid.
I don't have water flowing through my property, I have planning regulations, neighbours and limited availability making wind power complicated and expensive and if you think solar power's a viable option then you're a fucking lunatic.
So yes, cheap reliable energy available to me right now is carbon based. The fact that some other people in other places with different infrastructures, different
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Pence. So you're in the UK. In a decade, you may be buying cheap, reliable carbon-free electricity from us en masse ;) (hint: you'd be paying in krónur)
I honestly can't blame them (Score:4, Interesting)
As a tree-hugger myself I don't see how a modern economy can just dump a major source of power like coal and gas in less than one generation so I can't blame them for this. However, I would've liked to have seem them at least set a goal with some teeth behind it. My feeling though is that people hate to sacrifice even to save themselves and we'll just have to have a real climate hell before anything changes. Sort of like the guy who ignores his health until he has a heart attack despite all the warnings.
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The guy who pays attention to his health can avoid a heart attack.
Alas, nothing the UK government can do will have any impact on Global Warming.
EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE has to do something about AGW, or it won't matter at all.
Face it, if every country that had an obli
I kind of like the idea of UK being a test (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, as an American, I wouldn't mind seeing the UK turned into a test platform for green energy (and some social engineering to push it). If it succeeds, they could show the rest of the English speaking world how to do it. And if it turns out to be a hippie pipe dream and fails--well, then we learn a valuable lesson without having to suffer for it in the U.S.
You're on point, Britain! Watch out for mines, and good luck.
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Scotland will be "100% renewable" in a few years time. That doesn't mean they will only have renewables, but rather they produce 200% of what they themselves use and half of it is renewable. The spare capacity is sold to the rest of the UK. For them clean energy is looking like the new oil wealth, and they are proving how reliable and scalable it is.
You might also be interested in Japan, which was forced to ditch almost all its nuclear power at once (25-30% of total capacity) and somehow wasn't thrown back
Greenpeace guy misses the point (Score:2)
Small NUkes (Score:5, Insightful)
The nuclear industry needs to give up on the large, one off plants and come up with smaller, factory built nukes that can be installed in series, much like batteries.
These are being worked on and some already designed and in prototype stage, but taking them commercial is a regulatory hell.
People are always trying to get the federal government to "do something" that they are better off doing themselves or being done by local governments. But clearing the regulatory hurdles and standardizing these products is a perfect example of what the federal government should be doing.
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Honestly, nuke batteries just have bad idea written all over them.
Here's the problem with nuclear in a nutshell:
A battery of nukes? Again, in theory it could be even safer and more efficient...in practice however, it's just massively compounding the dan
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In practice it is nothing but a ticking time bomb easily capable of effectively wiping a large cities right off the map with additional affects world wide. And it's the poster child for inefficient.
We're to the point that we've had 2 disasters with major nuclear material contamination. One was a reactor that wouldn't have been certified in the rest of the world and lacked a containment dome, the other was basically one of the oldest operational plants in the world, hit by a huge natural disaster that killed far more people than what the nuclear relases are going to.
If I was Evil Overlord over an area(POTUS doesn't have enough power), I'd be embarking on a campaign of nuclear plant production - Step 1
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uclear plant built would be built to modern safety standards which prevent such disasters from being possible
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These are being worked on and some already designed and in prototype stage, but taking them commercial is a regulatory hell.
What do you expect? Any new technology needs to be safe. Proving a nuclear reactor is safe is technically difficult and takes a long time, and involves the destructive testing of expensive gear. Hardly unique or unusual, things like jet engines and aircraft have the same problem.
Another major problem will be insurance. Currently the entire US nuclear industry is only insured for $10bn. To give you an idea of scale Fukushima is going to cost hundreds of billions to sort out, and Japan isn't as lawsuit happy
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I'm a proponent of nuclear power and wouldn't have a problem with a plant "in my back yard."
However, having mini-nukes on the road sounds like a terrible idea!
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How much energy flow is needed to drive an EV? Let's see... the battery pack has a 13kw/h or so capacity, and drives for 80 miles or so... approx what, .53kw/h per mile? (530v@1a?)
Let's say instead of a mr. Fusion, we build a large carbon 14 betaelectric power core, about the size of a gastank. It weighs about 200lbs let's say. Inside is a honeycomb of thin carbon 14 rods surrounded in a cheap polymer semiconductor, and which produce about 1v @100ma of juice each. (Totally fictional numbers, btw, but othe
Pointless. (Score:2, Interesting)
reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning ... gas powered plants.
Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.
The fastest and cheapest way to bring down ... carbon emissions is by
is by burning up all the gas? Can't emit carbon if there's none to burn.
I follow the energy business and the UK is in serious danger of disaster in the next decade or so. They don't have the technical equipment or the economic strength or the installed capital (like insulated buildings) to survive the transition from a fossil fuel exporter to pretty much having to import everything. The lig
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Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.
Considering that Britain appears to have enough shale gas to power it for centuries, that doesn't seem to be a problem.
Re:Pointless. (Score:4, Informative)
shale gas is primarily a way to turn two barrels of crude into one barrel equivalent of natgas. Sometimes its described as a way to turn millions of dollars of capital investment into thousands of dollars of gas.
It is very similar to ethanol as a primary energy source, in that in rare and unusual geography and situations it is occasionally net positive, but by in large its not gonna work.
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Guaranteed Profits (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it was just a matter of time.
1: Government builds the infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.
2: Make the government pay private companies to build infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.
3: Steal..err...privatize the infrastructure.
Problem: You still have to pay those damn progressive taxes, and what happens when you have to build new infrastructure?
4: Guarantee profits on new infrastructure and not via taxes. Instead just force the citizens to buy it so that it works like a regressive tax.
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Actually this is just no. 2 on the sly. EU rules don't allow governments to subsidize building new nuclear plants, but the government thinks it can get around that by forcing the consumer to pay the subsidy directly instead of via taxation.
Even so there seems to be little interest from energy companies. All but one have dropped out and it looks unlikely that all the plants the government wants will get built now. Probably because the companies know that as soon as a different government gets in they will tr
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So in your reality power storage has not been invented yet?
Solar thermal can run for days without sunlight, wind power can be used to pump water up hill, all things that are done right now.
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So in your reality power storage has not been invented yet?
Efficient, large-scale power storage? Nope, doesn't exist. Small-scale, inefficient systems? Sure, thats easy. But thermodynamics states that every time you switch energy format, you lose some energy. The only proposed moderately efficient scalable system I've ever seen for energy storage is flywheels, and those pose a range of PR problems (namely, multi-ton objects spinning at hundreds or thousands of RPMs).
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So you bury them. PR problem solved.
Large scale storage exists, pump water up hill. Efficiency matters not when you had no other use for that power.
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This is the UK, what sunlight? During the day, they have indirect, mist scattered sun from a mostly cloudy sky. No good for solar heating.
Best solution is large scale deployment of tidal powered hydro plants.
Here's the basic idea behind how they could be deployed:
You build what looks like a shipping lock. At high tide, you open the lock, and let the tide in. The at max tide, you close the lock. The tide passes, but the raised water stays in. Nature fills the tank for you. Now you release the trapped high pr
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So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.
Bonus points if you don't have to destroy Ireland too.
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So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.
Random choice of the second biggest city in the UK, huh? About 10 miles of coastline is the answer.
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It will never be not windy over the whole country at once. The poor will not freeze, they get subsidized heating. Personally I would use Nuclear for base load, but coal needs to die.
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coal needs to die
Ah no. Coal needs to continue evacuating to Asia [bloomberg.com] where it can be burned safely outside the environment to make low cost solar panels and composite windmills we can then deploy throughout our happy shiny la-la land. You know, where coal is outlawed.
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That would be one way to end coal dependence. In fact almost exactly what I meant. We need to use coal power to end the use of coal power by building its alternatives.
I am so glad we agree.
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Personally I would use Nuclear for base load,...
The problem with that is that current projections say that production of fissionable material will drop below current demand by sometime in 2013.
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Watch when the poor freeze and starve because energy becomes too expensive for them to buy any.
They'll be doing that soon enough because the natgas is basically gone. And they burned the coal in the industrial revolution.
Possibly some pie in the sky stuff will help lessen the impact. It will not eliminate the impact. Therefore we should not try to lessen the impact?
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How much sewerage does the UK make? (I'm being serious here!)
If a sufficient amount is produced, then syngas plants running on gassified biomatter from the sewerage system could be dropped on top of existing nat gas infrastructures, and would have the benefit of plausibly getting labled "carbon neutral". (If it weren't for fossil fuel fertilizers in the food chain.)
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Yeah but anerobic digestion generates less energy than aerobic digestion, so most of the calories end up in peoples guts not toilets. There is energy there.
As a crude engineering estimate, figure out what uses more oil per day, my deep fat fryer or a fuel oil furnace.
Its a brave idea but the scaling factors don't work out.
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Not biogas. Syngas. You don't use microbes at all. You just need a carbon rich feedstock. Turds and toilet paper would work great.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas [wikipedia.org]
It is catalytically created with heat from a mixture of organic feedstock and water. (Essentially sewer mud.)
It *IS* more expensive than oil you get from the ground, but when that isn't an option, you can consider the benefits of eliminating septic waste while also heating homes. Charging for sewer services, as well as for fuel produced, let'
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You don't use microbes for syngas! Argh!
You could use crushed up seashells, or degraded plastic sludge for goodness sake!
You heat up the carbon bearing feedstock until it catches fire, then spray it with steam. This creates a reduction reaction powered by the prior cumbustion's heat, creating CO and hydrogen gas.
Landfill trash, sewer mud, grass clippings, tree and yard waste, lumber yard sawdust; a syngas plant wouldn't care, as long as it contains carbon, and can be burned.
Syngas can be further processed i
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Those can't be done to a scale sufficient to provide all energy needs of the country.
"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"
In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap. As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of pl
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The issue is you need lots of water and/or lots of elevation, about 1000 metre-litres per kilowatt-hour of storage.
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See my idea for tidal powered locks above.
Basically, you take a section of rocky sea coast (UK has plenty), dig out an artificial harbor like area, build what looks like a shipping lock to nowhere in it.
Then, whe the tide is high, you open the doors on the lock. Tide bulge water rushes in. Close the lock when full. Tide goes down. Boom. Reservoir of free water you didn't have to pump.
Further inland, you build another lock. This is the "battery". It is elevated a few feet above the main generator pool. Us
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I can just see, in many years, headlines decrying ancestral decisions to tap lunar orbital energy which went too far, resulting in lunar orbital decay and imminent collision.
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This is an argument I have never quite grasped.
Ocean water traveling around the earth in the tidal bulge does not move around free of losses. This means the orbital momentum of the moon is depleting weather you use it or not. Its like arguing that using wind power will make the winds stop.
Besides. The moon is moving away from the earth, not toward. Depleting orbita momentum will actually stabilize its orbit.
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"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"
Read David Mackay's book, the one on energy (the one on machine learning is worth a read, too).
In China,
TFS and TFA are about the UK.
There's a distinct lack of what people who have mountains call mountains in the UK. There's some capacity (especiall in Scotland), but not all that much, and a long way from where it's needed.
As for solar thermal storage,
The latitude of the UK is too high and the population too dense to realistically support solar.
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I've been all over the UK. Yes, the London area is flat as a pancake. The rest of the country isn't, and it's not that big of a country. Most of China's population lives in flat areas, too. But the simple fact is, it doesn't take that much land area * altitude change to store a ton of power. With a water depth of 20m and an altitude change of ~120 meters (which there are even places near *London* like that, like the oceanic cliffs near Eastborne, let alone in Wales, let alone in Scotland), after accoun
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In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap.
The problem is that while there's mostly plenty of water, there's very little in the way of suitable sites left. Large parts of the UK are chalk and limestone, which are totally the wrong geology for any kind of hydro scheme (the rock is just too permeable), and the shales that make up a lot of the rest aren't too much better (too unstable). Of the rest, it's usually either too flat or full of human habitation (or both).
As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.
Solar's the wrong tech for large scale deployment this far north (all the UK is north of
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Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started. [businessgreen.com]
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Well, for starters, it takes hundreds of years for soil to become fertile "from scratch."
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Well, for starters, it takes hundreds of years for soil to become fertile "from scratch."
Not true, it took me about 3 weeks with a tractor and several truckloads of peet to turn 50 acres of desert (silica sand) into good farming soil.
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You need to add clay to that as well. Peat is organic sponge, but it alone won't support heavy agriculture without the mineral and evaporation control that good clay adds.
After about 5 years of production the mineral stored in the peat from the peatbog it was harvested from will be depleted, and your crops will look scraggly if you don't.
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If I understand it correctly, it's not "guaranteeing profits" in a sense that the government will pay whatever it costs plus a profit margin. Instead, it's guaranteeing a fixed price for the electricity long term. So they'll have every incentive still to build the plants as cheaply as possible.
If you're going to go down this road though, it would seem to make more sense simply to have the government pay for the plants and recover the income by charging for the electricity. The government can borrow money mo
Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen (Score:5, Insightful)
One person's puppet of oil and gas is another person's guy trying not to implode the economy.
Not true (Score:3, Informative)
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I've looked at the numbers and I haven't seen any country in Europe (besides Greece by a little bit) reduce their spending year-over-year. That doesn't sound like austerity.
He did raise taxes to reduce the deficit. And that will suck money out of the private sector and slow the economy. But I'm not sure if that warrants the label austerity.
But pretty soon we'll all see real austerity if we maintain the present course.
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I've looked at the numbers and I haven't seen any country in Europe (besides Greece by a little bit) reduce their spending year-over-year. That doesn't sound like austerity.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10810962 [bbc.co.uk] - it was futile and unable to reduce deficits, of course. But spending cuts were very real.
He did raise taxes to reduce the deficit. And that will suck money out of the private sector and slow the economy. But I'm not sure if that warrants the label austerity.
Not 'will' but 'has'. The UK is in the midst of the SECOND recession and falling down still. Cameron achieved quite a dubious feat - UK has now been depressed more than in the Great Depression of 30-s. With no way out in sight.
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You seem to have a short memory. New Labour under Blair and Brown were running an increased deficit during the boom, even after increasing taxes. There was no room left for the government to do something with the economy when the recession came.
Government debt stood at 29% of GDP in 2002, and had increased to 37% before the crash in 2007, despite incredibly strong economic conditions. What exactly do you think was going to happen? That's why it's spiralled so quickly to 90% of GDP.
Servicing just the int
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You seem to have a short memory. New Labour under Blair and Brown were running an increased deficit during the boom, even after increasing taxes. There was no room left for the government to do something with the economy when the recession came.
On the contrary, I have a very good memory.
Government debt stood at 29% of GDP in 2002, and had increased to 37% before the crash in 2007, despite incredibly strong economic conditions. What exactly do you think was going to happen? That's why it's spiralled so quickly to 90% of GDP.
WRONG!
UK debt end 1998 : 410,2 G£, i. e. 46,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 1999 : 405,7 G£, i. e. 43,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2000 : 400,6 G£, i. e. 41,0 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2001 : 385,5 G£, i. e. 37,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2002 : 402,9 G£, i. e. 37,5 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2003 : 441,1 G£, i. e. 38,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2004 : 487,9 G£, i. e. 40,4 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2005 : 529,4 G£,
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As far as the Tory party is concerned any service the government offers is a lost business opportunity for a private company. Libraries allowing people to read books for free? Lost book sales. NHS providing people with first rate treatment? Those people could be paying for health insurance and private hospital care. State school giving kids a good education? Then where is the incentive to pay for one?
Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pissed that he didn't ban CO2 exhalation by humans. I mean it is clear we are a threat to the planet and need to be stopped. Then again that's about what I'd expect from the Cameron government, which acts like a puppet for that outrageous corrupt evil special interest corporation known as humanity.
Tories (Score:2)
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I'm confused. Story states that viable energy sources aren't banned in favour of unproven and/or expensive energy sources, and that means Cameron's a puppet?
Kneejerk often?
(Note that I'm not challenging whether he's a marionette, just your logic in inferring it from a fairly innocuous part of a report that has far more important implications)
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Not that I am aligned to any UK political party at this moment in time, but anything that stops my taxes being spent on organisations like the UK Carbon Trust built entirely on unproven Al Gore loony theories ("I didn't massage the global temperature change figures by 60 years, honestly I didn't") is a good thing in my book.
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A bad economy and an energy bill that is *completely reversible at any later date* isn't going to topple them to the point they aren't Britain anymore.
You do realise that you can't just build new power stations overnight and no-one wants to build nuclear stations in Britain right now because the government can't decide whether they want them or hate them?
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The leaders in both America and the UK are essentially trying to mothball their own economies while transferring their wealth to Asia. They do NOT have YOUR interests at heart. They have their own legacies to financially float and it won't be in the UK. Yes, your fucked!
Wow! Someone else on /. who is capable of critical thinking, understands what's going on, and doesn't buy into the propaganda!
Bravo, Sir, bravo!
Now, all we have to do is cut through all the propaganda, disinformation, deliberate self-imposed general state of ignorance/stupidity, ideological warfare, and political partisanship to educate the drooling masses of the US/UK Idiocracies.
Yeah. We're fucked. :(
Strat
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We're mostly engineers here. Some of us are also scientists and scientists are exceedingly cautious and humble about traveling outside their extremely limited domain of expertise.
So please , tell us why you know better than the world's assembled experts on this topic. And while you're at it, tell us about eh vast left wing conspiracy that keeps the
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My argument is and will always be with scale, effect, and information reliability.
This is pathetically underspecific. You can apply this to anything you don't like for any reason at all. It is not a reasoned argument, or even an argument at all, it's an emotional tone.
Saying we have to cut all dependence on fossil fuels, coal, and the like is not a problem solution. It's economic collapse.
And therefore AGW is false? Is there an argument in there somewhere?
Furthermore , as to your non-argument, no one is saying cut all fossil fuel; your statement is therefore a red herring. The Princeton Wedges concept - which if implemented would avert climate disaster and give us time to continue to develop alternative