Most liked posts in thread: UK Energy Needs

The heat pump is probably the one item that the figures don't stack up for today.

However, as you say, things are changing very quickly. Have a look at the one that Octopus Energy is developing, which promises to be quiet and very efficient (far cheaper to run than a gas boiler). The price, on launch (scheduled for next month) is likely to bring it down to a level that, with the new government subsidy, will be little different to that of a new gas boiler, and within a couple more years it will be competitive with a gas boiler even without the subsidy.

When I started developing my plan, I initially ruled out heat pumps. Then, as the energy market changed and heat pump development acccelerated, it came back into my plans. Even so, the heat pump is/was the final part of my 5 year plan. However, that final piece may yet be brought forward by a couple of years.

Oh, and the heat pump I am looking at would be, more or less, a straight swap for my existing gas combi boiler, supplying existing (or maybe one or two upgraded) radiators and providing hot water.

 

When COVID hit, along with the lockdowns, I started a number of projects/hobbies to keep myself busy. One of those was to completely review my energy/fuel usage.

As a result, I've just started implementing my own personal 5 year energy plan, aimed at eliminating my ongoing monthly energy/fuel costs.

Done

1. Purchased an EV.
2. Purchased a share in a wind farm, to meet my current annual usage. This will come online next year.

Outstanding

1. Purchase sufficient domestic energy storage (batteries) to run off cheap overnight electricity.
2. Move from gas central heating to a heat pump.
3. Increase my wind farm share (or add a share in a solar farm), to cover my heat pump usage.

There will, no doubt, be tweaks to the plan, as it is implemented, due to the fluid nature of the energy market, as well as a number of smaller improvements to implement but, at the end of the plan, I expect to be 100% electric, with the wind/solar farm 'income' at least covering, if not exceeding, my demand.

When I initially put my outline plan together, I was looking at around 10 years to recover my up front investment but, the way things are going, it could now well be 5 years.

 

If you actually believe the 1% a year drop you clearly don’t understand how batteries work. They decline on a curve, the average year 1 drop might be 1% but it will be more in year 2. And there is a point where it suddenly drops off. And a battery under about 80% health be it in a phone or a car will warn you it needs to be replaced when it drops under 80% as that’s where the drop off is going to really start kicking in. Tesla's warranty for example only protects you for 150,000 miles which sounds a lot but with a 450mile range on the model s that’s under 350 total charges. In your case your Zoe is guaranteed for 100,000miles so that's about 400 full charges. And how you look after the battery has a big impact as well. Heat is the biggest enemy to batteries and while using them the airflow helps cool them but charging itself produces heat and you are charging while stationary so the only cooling is the ambient temperature. And if you are fast charging all the time that’s more heat and more degradation. Also if you let the battery get below 20% charge it damages the battery more, same if you charge it over 80% (which is why phones have started using smart charging, they now learn your schedule and will charge to 80%, stop charging and then an hour before you normally unplug it will top up to 100%. But that itself is bad for batteries, batteries can’t just hold a charge, they either have a charge going into it or are discharging so when it reaches the set amount be it 80% if the software and charge circuit supports smart charging or 100% if it doesn’t it will stop charging, the charge amount will then drop a little and it will then charge it back up, this is called trickle charging and that’s actually bad for the battery, especially if the charge is over 80%. The cold also isn’t great for it either, if it’s too cold a battery both struggle to take a full charge and also deploy the full power, a lot of the time in the U.K. that’s not a major issue but we have both the situation where the ambient temp can be too low to charge and deploy power correctly but also in the summer it’s too high for the heat produced to good for the battery. Phones are starting to combat some of the heat issues with the use of heatsinks over all the heat-generating parts including the battery and then using vapour chambers or as is starting to be used water cooling systems but scaling those kinds of things up for cars is much more complex and can add a fair bit of weight which is obviously not good for a car (the heavier the beefier motor it needs to achieve required speeds which means more energy consumption which means either more batteries needed and more weight or reduced ranges)

Really before batteries with their massive ecological impact are fit for use in EV's and also in battery stores for renewable energy we need brand new types of batteries that are less susceptible to the issues of the current ones and certainly have a much longer life. It shouldn't be the case that you are looking at under 400 full charges in a car before they hit 80% and then have a steep life dropoff (and for that matter batteries right now will often fail to hold a charge by the time their health reaches 50% which is why they recommend replacing batteries when they reach 80% as you can quickly get to the point where suddenly you get stranded as it wont take a charge) for something people might need to charge every single day.

And I noticed you totally ignored everything about the ecological impact. What good is it in reducing emissions if that means having to mine more rare earth elements where the deposits are often in areas of ecological importance? We might help the wildlife by reducing the human impact on global warming but if doing so means having more toxins enter the food chain to produce the batteries and other things we need to reduce our carbon footprint which can then have a negative impact on the ecosystem is that really helping or just swapping one issue for another? Same thing with Wind and Tidal farms. If a tidal farm means destroying an ecosystem and perhaps disrupting the breeding of fish thus reducing fish stock, which then impacts the wildlife that feeds on these fish does this actually help. Or if you look at things like Golden Eagles and White-Tailed Eagles. Alot of money has been spent on increasing numbers in the Scottish Highlands but we currently have no Golden Eagles in England (we had a pair at Haweswater in the lake district for decades and there were rumours of a pair in Yorkshire but the Haweswater female died and wasn't replaced and then after a few years the male also died and the rumour of the Yorkshire pair hasn't been doing the rounds since the early 2000s) because unfortunately too many of the Lowland scots are sub-human pieces of shit* who shoot and poison any that make it down there which limits their ability to move south. It's because of this they stopped trying to reintroduce White-tailed eagles to southern Scotland and instead are entering the 3rd year of releasing them on the Isle of Wight with tentative plans to release them in Norfolk, Wales, The Lake District, Northumberland and the Peak district being talked about. Now if we throw up too many wind farms which seem to both largely discourage large birds of prey and both here and in Europe kill a decent number that do approach then what is the point in spending all this money to try and reintroduce species we hunted either close to or into extinction in the UK in an attempt to rebalance the eco-system that we damaged.

It's ultimately a balancing act, we need to reduce our carbon footprint and find cleaner energy but we can't just rush into things with a very narrow viewpoint, we need to understand and consider the bigger picture so again we aren't just swapping one problem for another. TBH that's the whole problem with the whole save the planet movement, every different grouping of people latch onto just a small subsection of the issue without considering the bigger picture and the consequences if they got what they are wanting. Sure it's not helped by so much of the world have spent the last few decades sleepwalking into the issue where things are more critical which helps push people into being desperate to feel like they were helping (Although the UK is certainly one of the more progressive in this area. There are things people can dislike Thatcher for but certainly not the environment. She was the first world leader to really start pushing Green issues including speeches to the UK which helped spearhead the green movement and under her rule, we started down a greener route before most nations which is the reason that despite Greta wanting to constantly single us out see's us right at the front of the queue of countries when it comes to making changes) BUT but it needs a thoughtful joined-up approach, especially when the tech isn't yet anywhere near where it needs to be and is often just robbing Peter to pay Paul


* Not that there aren't any English who are just as bad. Some of the IOW released White-tailed eagles have been killed. The Forest of Bowland has a major issue with GameKeepers killing (or just intentionally disturbing) the nesting hen harriers which are a species of Bird of Prey that's on a knife-edge. There have also been pairs of Eagle Owls there that have been disturbed from their nests there and the young then going missing (and sometimes the adults going missing) and they don't even get legal protection aren't considered native as the origin of these is disputed, they are in both mainland Europe such as Holland or over in Scandinavia but people argue they don't like crossing water even though there are reports of them landing on Oil rigs in the middle of the ocean so they say the English ones can only be from captive birds that escaped. Or you have the Ospreys up in the Lake District on Bassenthwaite where last year someone in the middle of the night took a chainsaw to the nesting platform while they were on the nest

 

I do not understand why you want us to invest in expensive sources of energy, when we have an almost limitless supply of much cheaper, home produced energy that we can invest in.

And as for the Russians backing climate change groups that want us to move away from russian oil and gas, well that's just laughable.

 

The problem is a lot of the things you list are things that are more about making people feel superior rather than actually doing anything helpful.

Take you buying an EV. Is running it more environmentally friendly? Sure but that's only half the story. To make an EV is significantly worse on the environment than a combustion engine care, a big part of that is the batteries but there are other factors because EV cars usually have way more electronics in them which like the batteries require a lot of rare earth elements which require not only a large carbon footprint to acquire and refine but mines for these do great damage to the environment and the process of mining it can have toxicity issues. With current batteries only having a 5-10 year life span its debatable if by the end of their life that you have offset the carbon footprint to make those batteries (and that's assuming all your electricity to charge it comes from renewables). And what happens when the batteries need replacing. Batteries are expensive and make up a significant chunk of EV prices. The cost of a Tesla Model 3 in the US is $44k, the battery array alone is $14k. And Tesla's batteries are actually on the cheaper side of the EV market, some of the others the cost price is over $20k. It actually limits how cheap EV's really can get and kind of makes them disposable as replacing the battery doesn't make a great deal of financial sense. It almost makes more sense not just for you the buyer but also the manufacturer just to write it off as the resale value isn't much more than the battery cost. It's not even as if you want ti risk getting cheaper 3rd party batteries because they aren't something you mess with as lithium-ion batteries are no joke if they explode/catch fire. And dead batteries have a high environmental cost to dispose of.

I suspect that overall we would be better off moving to engines that are able to operate with fuel with an even higher ethanol content than the recently introduced E10 until we have battery tech that has a longer life, is more efficient with its energy usage, is smaller so it needs less rare earth elements and is easier to dispose of in a environmentally safe manner.

And as I've mentioned a couple of times, renewables that don't require to take up vast amount of currently used natural habitat at the expense of the ecology because what use is improving our impact on the environment if to do that has us damage our local ecology as its swapping one form of damage for another. It's why I would like to see more effort into using all that roof space we have on buildings, the building being there has already impacted the ecology and the roof is just sitting there unused when it could be exploited. Be that by better incentives for all of us to have them installed, or either by the gov or the power companies installing them and then paying homeowners 'rent' for having them on their homes

 

I take it, from your comments, you are not aware of the economics of energy production and supply in the UK.

Have a look at the costs of producing energy and then come back and explain why you want us all to pay even more for our energy.

 

The problem with the energy market, in the UK, is that the cost of producing is very different from the market price. At the moment the market price is being driven by gas, which is one of the most expensive forms of energy.

Unfortunately, like a number of other countries, we are also heavily dependent on gas for our electricity production, which means we are also one of the most expensive countries when it comes to electricity production as well.

In basic terms, we need to get out of gas as much as possible. Some industries are reliant on gas, but there is no economic sense in using gas for electricity production, nor for heating homes. We should have been moving away from gas sooner, but recent hikes in the cost of gas have dramatically brought the situation to a head.

One thing @trevor is absolutely right about is the need to become more self sufficient for our energy. If we can move the domestic market away from gas, then we should be able to become self sufficient to meet industrial gas demand.

 

That's where the storage (we haven't yet built) should come in, it holds and releases the energy when it's required. We've just been madly building the wind turbines, without the storage, so that, at times, we don't have enough and at other times we have too much (we actually have to turn off power stations).

Mind you the chaos (of not having sufficient storage) allows some individuals to take financial advantage of this situation. Did you know that there is an energy company that supplies free electricity at times, and sometimes even pays you to use their electricity?