Airborne_Again wrote:
Why is it less feasible than natural gas-driven vehicles?
Hydrogen is awful for transportation. It has tragically low volumetric energy density which can only be achieved by compressing it to immense pressures.
By contrast, natural gas can be liquified at room temperature. Propane is liquid at about 22 bar. You can make a liquid propane tank that is not too heavy, and liquid propane has reasonable volumetric (and by mass) energy density.
To get any useful volumetric energy density out of hydrogen, you either do it like NASA (cryogenically) which is out of the question for a car or plane since the general public aren’t going to be able to keep their fuel tanks at 33 kelvin (which is the highest possible temperature for liquid hydrogen, regardless of how much you try to compress it), or you have to store it as compressed gas at something above 350 bar. This requires very strong very heavy tanks. Worse still, the small molecule size of hydrogen means it leaks through any container you try to store it in, embrittling it in the process – and embrittlmenet and 350 bar pressures tend not to make good bedfellows.
Peter wrote:
They are using panels which form a joined-up surface. Apparently they are made by Tesla and cost a lot more than normal ones, but this approach avoids the bodges of retrofit panels, with birds nesting between them, etc.
When we bought our new house we looked into getting a Tesla roof. It’s an integrated system that looks like an ordinary roof with dark grey tiles. A friend of a friend here has one and looking at it you wouldn’t know the roof is entirely made of solar panels. Cost here (SoCal) is around $ 30-40k for a standard-sized house (locally that means around 200 sqm of living area). This is without the battery, which runs to another $ 12k or so. The exact amount of solar tiles depends on the roof orientation and slope angle. We decided to wait and see what our electricity bills would be like and decide then. Btw, the way the way this works (with or without battery) is that the house feeds the electricity into the grid and you get paid for that. You are NOT off-grid with this system at all, unless you switch to battery, but this only lasts a day or so.
The high use of gas to generate electricity in the UK is a direct result of privatisation and had little or nothing.to do with balancing the system
Well, that can be said about many things in lots of circumstances. In the mid 90s, the Nordic grid went from USSR style planning to stock market purchase and sale of electric power and relevant system services.
It went from strict control and planning to wild west if you want. Immediately the power companies started to increase max power in their power plants by refurbishing old turbines and installing additional turbines. The total production of energy didn’t change much, but the way it was produced changed drastically. Everyone wanted to produce when the prices were high, and hold back when the prices was low. The other thing that happened was large scale increase in high voltage transmission lines. The marked operates in 15 min chunks. The bids and purchases are made for the next day.
Was the installation of additional capacity a result of “privatisation” ? Of course it was. But it also has made the whole system much more flexible. The 5 GW of DC cables to Denmark/Germany and the UK to balance wind, would not be possible without this change of focus and upgrading.
One thing follows the other. All the wind power the UK has today would not be possible with coal fueled power plants. All private ventures know this, and they knew the only alternative to make money was to install gas power plants. The installation of wind power itself is purely political, fuelled by subsidies.
This is curious
A neighbour tried to install a “Tesla roof” and initially it seemed possible but after a few months (while the house was being built) had to give up due to no comms from the supplier.
Another “funny” story:
Yesterday I had a talk with the CEO of a big producer of packaging material with close to 50.000 employees worldwide.
He said that their biggest austrian plants are wonderfully energy-efficient and he wished it was like this everywhere in the world, but different people just have different perspectives and the tech-transfer wasn’t possible even within their own company.
However their best plant in the world is in Sweden.
There they are 100% carbon neutral because of the best reason EVER!!!
New packaging material ismade from recycled paper/packaging-material mixed with freshly produced material. The higher the humididy (frozen good, etc.) and the higher the specific load on the material the more “fresh” paper,etc. they have to use to make it stronger.
When cooking the material to make paper they need a lot of heat which they make by natural gas and also by burning lignite (i.e. wood) that is a waste-product in their process of making the fresh paper/etc..
So the solution to be carbon neutral was to not use recycled paper anymore at all, but only “fresh” paper so there would be more lignite (i.e. waste consiting of wood in the broad sense) to burn per fresh ton of paper and now they don’t need natural gas anymore.
The result is that they produce more CO2 than ever before (there is nothing that has so few kWh of energy per ton of CO2 as wood – even coal is way way better), but that CO2 doesn’t exist on paper because it comes from burning trees and the EU decided that this special kind of CO2 doesn’t count and therefore they get a a ton of subsidies on top of saving money on energy.
So no more recycling of paper and way more burning of wood that sets of CO2 that doesn’t count and all our troubles are gone. Absolutely perfect!!
I truly see a lot of stupidity with CO2-certificates, but this is one of the funniest to date. Only surpassed by that huge carbon capture-machine (1bn €) that gets free certificates for capturing CO2 thas has to be produced in the first place just to capture it. They put wood from Canada on a boat, drive it to europe (because there the CO2 has a price), burn it and make electricty with the heat and then capture the CO2 from the burned wood to get the money for the certificates because that CO2 never existed due to beeing from wood, so you get all the money for the negative CO2 you just created without neccessity on a different continent it originated.
If it wasn’t so absurdly sad it would be hilarious.
Some people can always turn a crisis into a money making opportunity.
Its up to regulators/politicians to close the loopholes.
C’est toujours la vie.
ASW22 wrote:
So no more recycling of paper and way more burning of wood that sets of CO2 that doesn’t count and all our troubles are gone. Absolutely perfect!!
Well, the burned trees are replaced by replanted new trees that absorb CO2 as they grow. That doesn’t happen with natural gas.
It actually does, it only takes longer, haha.
The tree is burned in a couple of seconds and takes decades to grow and the CO2 is set free to the athmosphere (with the least amount of energy in regards to tonnes of CO2 – in comparison to all other major energy sources). If we had that sort of timeframe we wouldn’t have a problem.
The only tree that saves CO2 is the tree that stays in the forest.
The problem is that we have no solutions other than telling ourselfes that burning wood doesn’t produce CO2 (which is simply wrong!).
We need to man up and work towards solutions and stop producing ever more CO2 because somebody says that the athmosphere knows which kind of CO2 is good and which one is bad.
Some people can always turn a crisis into a money making opportunity. Its up to regulators/politicians to close the loopholes.
Unfortunately for all of us, it is the regulators themselves who are doing exactly that.
ASW22 wrote:
If we had that sort of timeframe we wouldn’t have a problem.
Have you seen all the trees in Sweden ? There are lots and lots and lots and lots 
This is more a question of volume. If we burn more wood than grows back on average, then of course this creates more CO2 in the atmosphere. The problem in Norway, and I guess also Sweden is too much vegetation. Large areas that before used to be pastures and similar, are today grown over by trees. There is no way for us to burn more wood than grows back. Then every house would be extremely hot
Yesterday I stacked 1/2 “favn” of wood at the cottage 1/2 “favn” is approximately 1.2 m3. We use wood there for heating, summer and winter and 1/2 favn will last for a year or two, depending on how much we are there. To heat my house I would need at least 1 “favn” per year, probably more like 1 1/2, but this heat pump works incredible well, so why bother (still got 1 favn in the shed )
