"Just stop oil"

I never shy from an opportunity to take the mick out of stupid people, and I honestly didn't think those extinction rebellion pancakes would ever be trumped in the stupid stakes, yet here we are :D

"Just stop oil"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-60951403

In what must be the most spectacular way of telling the world that you're probably the best poster child for the Dunning Kruger effect, these idiots are now protesting oil. No reasoning apart from "oil bad" as usual, the force with which these idiots shove their stupidity down our throats is truly a thing to behold.

To be clear before the usuals jump all over me, I do agree that oil is a disgusting business which puts profits over everything else and our dependency on it is unsustainable but the fact is that we're completely and utterly dependent on it as a society and are in no position to just "stop oil".

Also, I just like taking the mick out of idiots who deliberately put themselves in the limelight not knowing how completely and utterly stupid they are presenting themselves to anyone with half a brain.

Who also have a habit of putting their beliefs aside when the weather's a bit chilly.

We'll call them "fair weather, mild, occasional protesters" :D

As is always, the answer lies somewhere between the extremists. In this case, that's somewhere between Extinction Rebellion and the government! Yes, we should stop using oil. No, we can't stop tomorrow. Yes, this is the fault of the politicians who haven't prepared for stopping.
 
Is it? Interesting, my 20 years of experience in the HVAC industry must've been for nothing then.

I happen to completely agree with you about heat pumps. Their performance is disappointing - considering how much they cost, their maintenance costs and the energy they produce.
A heat pump is one of those things that seems great until you try to actually implement it in real life.

Oddly enough, I spent a long time working in BEMS and HVAC too.
 
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As is always, the answer lies somewhere between the extremists. In this case, that's somewhere between Extinction Rebellion and the government! Yes, we should stop using oil. No, we can't stop tomorrow. Yes, this is the fault of the politicians who haven't prepared for stopping.

Its funny because most of the type of person that says we shouldnt burden our future generation with high taxes to pay for us now yet dont give that much of a care about climate change that will do more damage than any high taxes will do to the planet that our future generations will have to live through.

The less we do now the more it will cost in the future. Just like now with energy prices through the roof, water shortages and food rotting in fields.
 
Is it? Interesting, my 20 years of experience in the HVAC industry must've been for nothing then.
You claimed they can't produce heat below 3C which is nonsense. They work fine and can create heat when it is below 3C, not to mention they are deployed regularly in far colder places than the UK without issue.

They are also not 'poor at generating heat', even in a far from ideal deployment they should achieve an average coefficient of performance of 3 and well above that in a more ideal deployment in the real world and not a lab. A coefficient of performance of 3 puts their running costs below a modern gas boiler with it's fabled 94% lab tested but never seen in real life efficiency.

To be clear, I didn't say they were the be all and end all and will not be suitable for some properties, but for many, they are a viable option if you have the £££ to spend upfront and yes it is a lot of £££ upfront. The whole premise of my post is that there is existing (expensive and probably not going to get any cheaper) technology out there that can be deployed that uses considerably less energy than their fossil fuelled equivalent so not all energy currently used as fossil fuels needs to be replicated as electricity.
 
You claimed they can't produce heat below 3C which is nonsense. They work fine and can create heat when it is below 3C, not to mention they are deployed regularly in far colder places than the UK without issue.

They are also not 'poor at generating heat', even in a far from ideal deployment they should achieve an average coefficient of performance of 3 and well above that in a more ideal deployment in the real world and not a lab. A coefficient of performance of 3 puts their running costs below a modern gas boiler with it's fabled 94% lab tested but never seen in real life efficiency.

To be clear, I didn't say they were the be all and end all and will not be suitable for some properties, but for many, they are a viable option if you have the £££ to spend upfront and yes it is a lot of £££ upfront. The whole premise of my post is that there is existing (expensive and probably not going to get any cheaper) technology out there that can be deployed that uses considerably less energy than their fossil fuelled equivalent so not all energy currently used as fossil fuels needs to be replicated as electricity.

One of my clients just spent millions on heat pumps for their flagship office, a 377k sq ft office block in London. These heat pumps stop producing heat at 3°c ambient and will need to be supported by a gas fired system.

It's all well and good you reading bits of sales blurb and parroting it on here, but you've now got two people with experience in the HVAC industry telling you you're wrong.

They're expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, are full of nasty gases, extremely complicated with tons of failure points and are unreliable, and whilst I'm sure they are great in a perfect testing environment, but out in the real world they are a LOT more energy intensive than you're being told, and their efficiency falls off a cliff as soon as they face real cold.

Of course none of this matters because "green" so just like electric cars, the entire herd of elephants in the room get ignored because green.

Heat pumps can help for sure, but don't tell people that they're the solution, because they're not. They're a part of a solution, which still requires other elements to work.
 
One of my clients just spent millions on heat pumps for their flagship office, a 377k sq ft office block in London. These heat pumps stop producing heat at 3°c ambient and will need to be supported by a gas fired system.

Ah right, so one specific model of heat pump doesn't go below 3C so all heat pumps don't have that capability. Got ya ;)

They're expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, are full of nasty gases, extremely complicated with tons of failure points and are unreliable, and whilst I'm sure they are great in a perfect testing environment, but out in the real world they are a LOT more energy intensive than you're being told, and their efficiency falls off a cliff as soon as they face real cold.

Full of nasty gasses, complicated and unreliable, unlike a gas boiler right? I never said they were cheap but the numbers I used above are real world in a less than ideal domestic deployment. We also don't get 'real cold' in this country.

Heat pumps can help for sure, but don't tell people that they're the solution, because they're not. They're a part of a solution, which still requires other elements to work.

Please tell me where I said they were THE solution?
 
Ah right, so one specific model of heat pump doesn't go below 3C so all heat pumps don't have that capability. Got ya ;)

Well, not really. Part of the issue is that the external radiators get cold and water condenses out of the atmosphere on to them. In freezing temperatures this means they get covered in ice. To stop that happening they have to reverse the pump to warm up the external radiator to melt the ice. So as the weather gets colder they become less efficient - less able to provide heat. This is not how good the unit is, rather it is just a weakness of using heat pumps in the UK. So while the sales blurb may tell you the unit works down to a certain temperature the sad part is that you have probably lost most of your ability to actually save money at the one time when you most need it.
 
Ah right, so one specific model of heat pump doesn't go below 3C so all heat pumps don't have that capability. Got ya ;)



Full of nasty gasses, complicated and unreliable, unlike a gas boiler right? I never said they were cheap but the numbers I used above are real world in a less than ideal domestic deployment. We also don't get 'real cold' in this country.



Please tell me where I said they were THE solution?


Dunno if you're deliberately missing the point or genuinely too stupid to get it but you crack on, I've got nothing to prove here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
You still haven't provided any evidence to support this.

Another lie.

I asked you specifically about number of children (members of the public) that have died as a consequence of wind/solar energy generation and you haven't given an answer or provided any relevant links (your links were only about nuclear which we all knew about already).

Another lie.

Sorry, but can't make it more clear.

It is very clear indeed that you're so devoid of ethics that you don't care how much you lie or many people die. It's also very clear indeed that you're so devoid of ethics that you see nothing wrong in trying to use children as political tools.

If you're trolling, you've gone too far. If you're not trolling, you're a deeply unpleasant person. Either way, you're not worth my time.
 
if those numbers are even close to accurate that really does shine a light on how far we still have to go.

I think they're a reasonable ballpark estimate. If anyone comes up with a reasonable challenge to them, I'm fine with that. But even if they're out by an entire order of magnitude the result is still the same - it's nowhere near possible to go 100% renewables. (EDIT: At the moment, of course. Future technology might make it possible and I hope it will).

Forcing EV owners to use their vehicles as grid storage has been mentioned as a solution. The numbers for that don't look much better.

Taking 7KWh from each EV was the number suggested. I'll be very generous to the idea and pretend that 10,000,000 EVs will be connected to the grid at any given time and that 7KWh can be taken from each of them. That's 70GWh of energy. A lot. But the peak UK usage of energy is ~300GW so 70GWh is under 15 minutes worth. It's routine for solar output to drop to zero for hours and it's not uncommon for wind output to drop to 10% or less for hours, even a day or two. 15 minutes of storage is nowhere near enough. And that's assuming 10,000,000 EVs can be used and that the technological problems of having 10,000,000 tiny inputs to the grid can be solved and that the rate of transfer is high enough and that the efficiency is 100%.

The idea of 100% renewables is a complete fiction with any technology that exists. Or even any that might exist in the foreseeable future. Unless almost everyone dies, right now, and the survivors revert to stone age technology. If that happens, there won't be any coming back. Regaining the metal ages won't be possible because that development was dependent on an adequate supply of easily obtainable ore. That's gone now, already used.

unless fusion actually becomes a thing ( and that seems perpetually 40 years away) I guess nuclear is here for a while.

I'm quite optimistic about fusion. There have been significant developments in recent years as well as an increase in both funding and the number of approaches. I think it might be as little as 20 years away now. I think fission should be used for a while, but I think it's a stopgap solution. Fission is vastly safer than it's so often portrayed as being, but it has significant drawbacks and we'd be better off not using it if we don't have to.

but if so imo alternatives to uranium have to be properly investigated. Thorium (spoken by smeone who hated the chemistry part of my degree so keep that in mind) seems an order of magnitude safer.
also uranium is limited in supply as well

Investigated, absolutely. But hopefully not necessary. I'm hoping that fission won't be needed for long enough for uranium supply to be a problem. Although maybe the available resources would be better assigned to something else rather than investigating using the thorium cycle for fission. Or maybe not. Some work has already been done on it. Maybe it would be worth developing further to provide another alternative.
 
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Another lie.
I asked you specifically about number of children (members of the public) that have died as a consequence of wind/solar energy generation and you haven't given an answer or provided any relevant links (your links were only about nuclear which we all knew about already).

It is very clear indeed that you're so devoid of ethics that you don't care how much you lie or many people die. It's also very clear indeed that you're so devoid of ethics that you see nothing wrong in trying to use children as political tools.
You sound very desperate in your failing attempt to support nuclear to the point where you are constantly avoiding to answer a simple question.
Childish and very immature behaviour.
 
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given we are an island with an abundance of wind that seems dreadfully unambitious to me. (iirc we are routinely above those renewable percentages already and given its the cheapest type of power, even as an outsider that smells like the kind of deflection the fossil fuel funded experts would have said in the 1980s /90s
Already few countries are completely green and with more technologies being developed the time it will take for other countries to follow will just shorten.
 
I asked you specifically about number of children (members of the public) that have died as a consequence of wind/solar energy generation and you haven't given an answer or provided any relevant links (your links were only about nuclear which we all knew about already).


You sound very desperate in your failing attempt to support nuclear to the point where you are constantly avoiding to answer a simple question.
Childish and very immature behaviour.
If you're not happy with those numbers why not do some digging yourself and come up with something?

It's not even clear why you're so desperate to find the number of children historically hurt / killed by each form of electricity generation at this point. a) most technologies / designs are safer now than they were in the 1970's, especially nuclear, by orders of magnitude, if we consider 1970s Soviet reactors to be part of the historic safety record of the sector. Including chernobyl in nuclear's safety record is already sandbagging it massively if we're using it to help inform decisions about current and future nuclear safety. b) even if there are marginal differences in safety that shouldn't be the only consideration when it comes to planning electricity generation. Eg if it turns out that wind is slightly more risky than solar that doesn't necessarily mean we should stop building wind turbines.

Talking of childish and immature behaviour, how about you take the plank out of your own eye - you've made a number of sweeping single sentence posts (a couple of them objectively wrong) without bothering to back them up in any way or explain your reasoning.

I think at this point it's fair to conclude you're trolling.
 
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Members of public (if you don't want to include children that were in one of the report links) would suffice.
You claim that nuclear is as safe as solar/wind when it comes to deaths in members of public?
 
Members of public (if you don't want to include children that were in one of the report links) would suffice.
You claim that nuclear is as safe as solar/wind when it comes to deaths in members of public?
modern nuclear power is incredibly safe - why do you think it isn't?
 
I am definitely not getting involved in the handbags.... and i know you didnt ask me...... but to stick my beak in.

Even tho i accept we need nuclear, imo the dangers are

1) the direct human element - terrorism / nutter employee doing something deliberate.
2) act of war, either deliberate or accidental damage
3) act of "god" earthquake etc

(4) then there is the waste............ yes there isnt much, but what there is will be problematic for years.

IF the odds were at a casino they would be brilliant. the chances of "losing" are incredibly small.... but the problem is IF there is a disaster, small chance as may be, it is potentially catastrophic.

So whilst i personally see the need for nuclear and think the risks are worth it, imo you have to respect the view of those who think we do not have the right to make that call.

none of the (4) points above even touch on unexpected failure.... and even the safest system CAN fail.
 
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