Climate change. | Page 4 | Vital Football

Climate change.

Some leadership at last.

It's a bugger when a girl of 15 has to show us the way forward. And over here it is the same generation of kids who are the most articulate and down to earth. And our political leaders haven't a clue.
In the Northwest of Sydney where we live we've just endured 5 days of over 40 degrees, night temps dropping to 30 something and it's not funny. Plays hell with the female temperament. And several records have been broken in NSW. The river system in NSW has also coughed up several million dead fish in the last couple of weeks due to the rivers starting to dry out, no rain and none forecast. And of course we now have bush fires to go with it.
And we have a PM who still says that we'll achieve the Paris figures "in a canter". If it wasn't so serious I'd die laughing.

It's all going to end in tears, unfortunately there will be no consolation in that.
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...dow-new-zealanders-poke-fun-at-tepid-heatwave

As Britain grinds to a halt (what half an inch of snow does over here!), I thought ORF might appreciate how they cope with a heatwave in New Zealand.

"It became so hot, I had to open a window" - Wellington, 21 degrees!

Although the temperatures would seem fairly unremarkable in many countries during summer, health officials have advised New Zealanders to stay inside during the heatwave, avoid alcohol and check on elderly neighbours and children. Taking a cold bath or shower could also help, experts said.

Fire and Emergency told New Zealanders to clear their gutters of leaves and debris, and refrain from mowing the lawn.

Some people said they slept with ice-packs to keep cool, or chewed on ice cubes throughout the day, and described the weather as “like an oven” or “being blasted with a hair dryer”.
 
I still remember what a half inch of snow does with you lot LK and from memory it was never funny. Mind you we can get the same effect within an hours drive to the Blue Mountains but the enthusiasm waned years ago and I'm happy to watch it on TV instead. N.Z. is generally known to be temperate here but there's always snow in the South Island. And they're welcome.

On a more serious note here in NSW we've just experienced our hottest January on record and it's not been nice. Temperatures here where we live still in the Sydney Metropolitan area up in the 40s on a regular basis. Up in QLD they're in the middle of a very wet spell and that's much wetter than anything you in the UK would know, yet down in Victoria and Tasmania they have serious bush fires.
Here in NSW I've just watched a TV programme on a town and area in the West of NSW suffering badly from the drought, the river has almost dried up and their drinking water is almost unpalatable, temperatures regularly in the 40s. And that's an area bigger than Germany. Also on TV (don't know what I'd do without it) just watched a massive free load of hay delivered by road from W.A. farmers to NSW to help with the drought over here which is now very serious. That's nearly 3000 kilometres away. That's one thing about this country which I find unbeatable.
Our politicians still have their heads in the clouds and are sure that we'll get a good result even though we do nothing.

Help.
 
LK, as an elderly person I'm waiting for someone to check on my welfare.


It doesn't appear to be happening.


So I'm just going to refill my glass.

:thumbup:
 
And time goes by.
The Great Barrier Reef lies just off the coast of North Queensland. Quite near the Reef is an island where a particular type of turtle breeds, I forget the name of the turtle. The sex of the eggs which are buried in the sand on the island is determined by the amount of heat generated by the sun and usually results in a fairly equal balance between the sexes.
But it's changing and all of a sudden we're finding out that because it's been hotter than normal over here this year we're appearing to get mainly female turtles and next to no males. Obviously this particular type of turtle has a very limited life span in the near future. Perhaps just as well it's not human beings. Although who knows, perhaps we've had the best of it. But I've got 6 great grand children and it's starting to get to me.

On the good side I've just heard that our Govt has turned down an application for yet another open cut coal mine in the Hunter Valley. This would be for export, as usual. You fellows possibly don't have much experience of open cut but please take my word for it, it's horrible and we have more than our fair share. And what's more this is one of our very popular wine growing areas too.
I'm also seeing on TV a lot of adds for "clean coal" which we seem to be exporting to Japan, no explanation as to what constitutes clean, maybe Feco knows.

We have an awful long way to go and I'm pretty sure that we're never going to get there.

And I don't like it.
 
ORF, we are undoubtedly in a period of warming, and humans have definitely had an impact on that. Clearly something needs to be done, but, and I can only really speak about the UK here, I think so much emphasis is put on coal burning that focus has been lost on the greater picture. Compared to other fuels, particularly petroleum based ones, controlling coal emissions is very doable, and not prohibitively expensive.

The UK only has seven operational coal stations left, one of those Cottam, had its closure announced last week.
Of those left, One is only partly open, Fiddlers Ferry, and Drax only has 2 of its units burning coal.

With the exception of Drax and Aberthaw which are about 10 years younger, all the rest are pushing on for being 50 years old, and operating cleaner than they have ever done.
In fact, the air quality around all our coal stations is significantly better than that in the towns and cities, my local plants all have the cleanest air level that can be recorded in the UK.

When they were first built, that wasn’t the case, and it’s only in the last 20 years, very real efforts to clean up the emmisions has happened.

All the operating units in the UK now have Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD} equipment fitted, which reduce sulphur dioxide levels down by at least 96% from the what was originally considered the norm.
The byproduct of an FGD plant is gypsum, used either in building materials or as fertilizer, so no waste from that process.

Between the boilers and the chimney stacks are fitted electro static precipitators which take out all the particulate that has passed through the combustion process, so in theory there should be very little solid material left once the exhaust gases pass out of the precips.
I used to do walkdowns (inside doing fan inspections.....it was turned off!!) of the Flue ducts between the precips and the FGD plants, and the ducts where actually clean of any residue. If any dust did get through it would be removed from the gas steam by the FGD process, so no dust gets from the boilers to the environment via the chimney.

To reduce/remove Nitrogen oxide, you have a number of methods, Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) is one such method, generally using urea as the catalyst.
There are a number of ways of doing it in a power station, and the results are typically a reduction by about 90% compared to a similar unit without SCR.
The improvement in control of the combustion process also has a huge effect. This is the bit I deal with most.
On one 660MW unit introducing our equipment, and improving the control protocols reduced the Nox emmisions from around 550mg/cubic meter to around 150mg/cubic meter. All that by controlling airflow, nothing else.

And this is all on decades old equipment. New coal boilers like fluidized beds, or gasification are even cleaner in emmision output and thermal performance. Where required they all have precips, FGD and SCR fitted.
So that’s what is typically referred to as clean coal technology......but.....

Then you get to the real problem......Carbon Dioxide.

Coal produces about double the amount of CO2 that gas does for the same power output.
Gas generation is also about about 60% more efficient at full capacity than coal is, so the obvious attraction of burning gas to coal is clear. For this post we will ignore the fact that running at full capacity cannot always happen, particularly if you have a significant wind and solar generating capacity.
The gas efficiency argument deflects from the obvious though, gas still produces CO2, and there is very little that can be done to modify the process such that the CO2 can be captured.
A modem gas plant is essentially a giant jet engine.....sticking a whole new process on the exhaust is not going to be very practical. Even if it was it hurts efficiency, which then makes the operation of a gas station prohibitively expensive.

With coal, that’s not such a major problem.
Drax again......have just installed and are operating a carbon capture device.
The device is currently in a shipping container and is only taking a very small amount of the flue gas. The idea is to prove the concept is viable first.
If it is, then the next task is to dispose of the CO2, and the thought is at the moment to pump it back out into the old oil fields and store it deep underground where it came from originally. That part of the process is relatively simple.
It’s going to be an Energy sapping process, in Drax’s case taking about 18% of its current power output just to dispose of the CO2.......but even then, the price of coal would still make it a comparable electricity generator when compared to gas, and certainly nuclear. It would also be a close to carbon neutral as is possible.

The thing is, this is a very doable process. The technology pretty much exists, and other than the scaling up issues that will inevitably arise, it could possibly be viable and operating in less than 5 years, and all at a cost significantly less than building one nuclear plant, or a couple of gas plants.
It’s a cheaper, quicker and cleaner option to bridge the gap between our current generating capabilities and the future renewable smart grids that will inevitably become the norm.

So coal can be clean, it can be Carbon neutral if the will is there......so it will never happen. Sadly it’s to much of a political hand grenade.
In the meantime we will keep burning gas in horrendous amounts and pretending that it’s clean.

Sorry to drag on.....I bet you wish you hadn’t asked now!!
 
Feco, thanks for that explanation and I am glad I asked, as usual there seems to be a bit more to it than meets the eye. Won't pretend that I fully understand it all but the gist of it has sunk in and I'll go through it again a bit later.
One thing is obvious and that is that there's no quick fix to climate control, we can only help, not fix. And the signs over here are becoming increasingly obvious as the oceans start to warm up, even though its only a little. Fish that were common only off our North East shores a few years ago are now being seen in numbers up to 1,500 kilometres further South. Cane toads which are a poisonous pest in our tropical North are now as far South as NSW and are starting to flourish. I could go on but that's the gist of it, the message is easy to see.
I think that our politicians are starting to get the message at last, we're beginning to get some of them elected on a climate change ticket and there's more talk about the subject at long last.
We'll never be able to fix it but every little helps, as the old lady said.

Thanks again Feco.
 
Not directly related to climate change, but does Feco know if Hornsea One will produce much electricity for us? Have mixed feelings about Wind Farms, but at least they can be replaced with something else in the future, whereas nuclear obviously leaves thousands of years of waste.
 
Hornsea One will definitely produce some power, but like all wind farms, how much and how efficiently is open to question.
There are around 9800 wind turbines in the UK, with a potential generating capacity of around 20.1GW.
If you look at the live tracker Gridwatch https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ then you can see that rarely does wind generate more than around 10GW.
Wind also has a nasty habit of not being around when it’s needed. When we had that really cold spell a few weeks ago then wind and solar together produced 0.170GW combined.....not enough to run the pumps in a conventional power station. It got even worse at night.
Accepted that was relatively extreme, but it does happen more often than you would think, and always at a bad time. Our weather gets cold when high pressure dominates, which means no wind, so little generation, at the point of highest electrical demand.

The other problem with wind and solar is that they are both intermittent in nature, obviously reacting to gusts of wind, clouds passing over the sun etc.
That can be negated somewhat by having lots of them around, but spread over the country rather than in one place. Even so, there still needs to be what I call ‘hard generation’ on the grid capable of responding to both load fluctuations and the variable output of the wind and solar generators.
This has to be done to keep the frequency within very tight tolerances around the nominal 50hz mark.

The hard generation comes from traditional power stations, either nuclear, coal or gas. Those sources create issues too.

Nuclear is basically a base load provider. The generating equipment is typically exactly the same on a nuclear as it is in a coal or oil station. The only bit that is different is the kettle making the steam.
Nuclear reactors are just not capable of varying output to meet grid demands, they can’t react quick enough, so we can’t use those to support wind and solar.
Gas could very easily do the balancing, but, away from their design peak loading, their efficiency falls away alarmingly making them expensive to operate (gas is expensive). They also suffer a bit thermally too, so many operators don’t like to be use them like that because of the maintenance issues they create.
Which brings us back to coal. Providing the support to allow wind and solar to operate effectively is relatively easy for these stations. They respond quickly and accurately to load changes without necessarily suffering a huge drop off in efficiency. Coal is also cheap.

Personally I would like to see the ‘German’ model be used regarding wind generation. Instead of having huge farms in out of way places, they stick up smaller single units close to towns and villages, and set them up to provide local power. This maximizes the potential output from the turbines, and also minimizes transmission losses.

As for the Nuclear......well we all know that two of the proposed new stations have been cancelled, and Hinkley C is not currently moving forward. That design has never been successfully built in Europe anyway, and even if we did do it, it’s a least a decade away at least It will only replace decommissioned nuclear plants anyway.
Nuclear died in the UK when the government abandoned the British AGR (Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor) design in the 1980’s and sucked up to the Americans Westinghouse PWR (Pressureised Water Reactor) system. As always we had Concorde but settled for a Cessna.

The way forward for me is to develop a smart grid system, with wind and solar at its heart, supported by proper energy storage systems systems and smaller more localised ‘hard generation’. The current ‘batteries’ like ORF’s Australian Tesla, can provide full power for 15 minutes........
The hard generation can be from multiple sources, but trash burners like those provided by Nexterra and Outotec are ideal, extremely clean burning and dispose of waste that would normally end up in landfill. (Landfill is a huge source of one of the more potent greenhouse gases methane). They are also relatively small units no bigger than a large supermarket, but capable of providing enough power for a sizable town.

Where trash is not available, then make the most of our natural resources. We have an abundance of coal, gasify it in the seams, extract the gas, a pump the waste straight back down where it came from. It’s a 100 year old process, we are not learning anything new.
It can be combined with the Allam Cycle Power Stations too, a very efficient carbon neutral process that is now commercially ready.

Replace the nuclear with tidal barrages, natural, clean and entirely predictable. Done correctly they will have minimal effect on the environment.

To achieve this would probably take 15 years, so in the meantime, maintain what we have, convert the coal to Biomass burning, or at least co fired with coal, and carbon capture. That could all be completed in 2-3 years, (CC about 5 years) and would give us the breathing space to get the smart grid in place.

And stop bloody fracking.....it’s never going to provide enough gas to meet demand. Use what we have more wisely.

It’s never going to happen of course.......the Government is involved!!
 
It’s nice to see the school kids protesting about climate change today.

I appreciate they don’t know much about the process now, but they will be the ones dealiñg with the problem in the future. It’s vital they are engaged now.
 
The UK has broken the record for its warmest winter day for the second consecutive day, with a temperature of 21.2°C in Kew Gardens, London.

Monday was the first time temperatures of over 20C had been reported in winter, breaking a record that had stood since 1998.
 
I'm sure there's a lot more to it, but global warming has been quite nice here this week !
Agreed.
But the planet is dying, so that takes a bit of the shine off it.

Even the 100 Acre Wood has burnt! Hope Christopher Robin and Eeyore got out safely!
Forest fires in the UK in Feb. What the hell??
 
Australia has just had its hottest Summer on record. And our Govt has devised a plan to help combat climate change. It's quite simple, we pay big land owners not to clear some areas of vegetation on their holdings, so they just clear somewhere else instead. Magic.
And it was reported this week that many of our politicians have a background in either the Law or politics only. That explains a thing or two. Also our Govt is now playing about with the Paris figures in order to make them appear to fit our pathetic attempts to help.
What a shambles.
 
Interesting article yesterday, tucked away nicely in the back pages.
What it essentially said is that the Government has committed the UK to having 30GW of its daily electricity generation from wind and solar by 2030.

Ignoring solar for the moment, the UK currently has 20GW of installed wind turbine generation.
On average that produces about 7GW of deliverable power to the grid.
So to meet the Governments target of 2030, that will require around 4 times the number of wind turbines to be installed and commissioned as there are now.
We need 80GW of installed wind turbines just to be sure of being able to meet 30GW of deliverable power.
That doesn't take into account those wind turbines coming to the end of their operating lives over the next decade.

Assuming that is possible, another news story that has taken a rather more prominent position in the news this morning is that of our ageing nuclear fleet.
Hunterston Power Station in Scotland has been down for around a year after finding that the number of cracks in the graphite core had exceeded the 350 allowance, up to around 370 in Reactor 3. The number found in Reactor 4 have yet to be disclosed.
The last few months as seen significant research into the problems this may cause, in the event that an event that an emergency shutdown of the reactor is needed, the graphite core provides the support for the control rods, so is a vital safety device.

The number of cracks shouldn't be of great concern, these things are massively over engineered, however it does highlight that these magnificent machines are reaching the end of their lives.
For Hunterston, read Hinkley Point B, Heysham 1 and Hartlepool, all of very similar design and all with very similar ageing problems.
The likelihood is that all four of these stations will have been closed by 2025, along with the last 6 coal fired power stations. It could even be as early as 2023.
In total that is around 14GW of power lost to the grid by 2025. Currently there is no new build nuclear on the horizon, other than Hinkley Point C and that's unlikely to be ready for 2030.

So with this new policy of the Government, essentially they need to find sites for, install and commission 100GW of wind turbines by 2030, just to meet their target and to stand still in generating capacity, assuming that the influx of new electric cars, and our every increasing demand for electricity doesn't increase the nations need.

And also assumes that the wind blows favourable all the time, you really would be amazed at the number of occasions the current 20GW of capacity can barely meet 1GW onto the grid.

Don't you just love Government policy.......
 
Sometime in the very near future, possibly this week, the kids in our schools are all going on strike in order to promote action on climate change and everybody seems to support the move. Next week in NSW we have our state election, in March we have our Federal election and all of a sudden politicians in general have discovered that climate change exists and should be fixed, and what's more they're the blokes to do it. Honestly they couldn't fix a puncture on my bike.

And we are compelled to vote over here otherwise subject to being fined.
 
Sometime in the very near future, possibly this week, the kids in our schools are all going on strike in order to promote action on climate change and everybody seems to support the move. Next week in NSW we have our state election, in March we have our Federal election and all of a sudden politicians in general have discovered that climate change exists and should be fixed, and what's more they're the blokes to do it. Honestly they couldn't fix a puncture on my bike.

And we are compelled to vote over here otherwise subject to being fined.

ORF, more power to the children and young adults. They are key to this not politicians, who don’t have long enough ‘attention’ spans or ‘incentives’ to deal with this.

I do wish that ‘Climate Change’ wasn’t used as the tag line for all this. The issue is much greater than just Climate Change. It’s about how humans live and interact with the planet, in all aspects. I feel that getting the kids involved will open up that debate much quicker.

On my prevïous post regarding the Governments decision to have 30GW of power from wind by 2030.
Well the last 24 hours we have had a storm over the UK, bringing quite high winds. In theory the sustained wind speeds should have been right in the nice slot for a wind turbine to be in its high efficiency zone.
This is the trace for the last 24 hours.

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

The 20GW of installed wind power never generated more than 10GW throughout the storm.
Now a 50% efficency is a good return, and in my mind shows that wind can be viable.
However, these numbers also show that if the Governments plans for wind generation are to be realized then they will need the 100GW of Installed wind turbine, which is not practical.

You will also note that to support the wind turbine generation today, we had to turn on coal generation to balance the load.
Lessons need to be learned by the Government before they make knee jerk populist statements.
 
Interesting generation reports tonight.
Not a particularly cold evening, demand is not particularly high, but without coal generation, demand would outstrip supply.


20GW of wind generation is able to provide 1GW of output. There lies the problem with relying on wind.....and the Government is committing the country to generate 30GW of its power by this method in 10 years time.
 
Interesting generation reports tonight.
Not a particularly cold evening, demand is not particularly high, but without coal generation, demand would outstrip supply.


20GW of wind generation is able to provide 1GW of output. There lies the problem with relying on wind.....and the Government is committing the country to generate 30GW of its power by this method in 10 years time.
Stuffing always does the trick for me chap or anything with onions in it.Would be surprised if my wind doesn't have better than a 5% output rate.