Driving Too Slow (2023 Update)

It's a joke. Opening was cancelled yet again. No electricity!

I'm sorry, you are just being silly about all this. "Tariffs" and the rest of the contracts were signed before any construction was begun. Why do you make up such things?

Why don't you read the articles I linked to.

This one from an earlier cancellation of opening last September spells it out in the first paragraph!

First three sentences quoted verbatim below in case it is paywalled from outside the UK:

"A FLAGSHIP charging centre for electric vehicles - originally due to open on York’s outskirts in July - is still fenced off and closed following delays in connecting it to the electricity grid.

Council officials said yesterday that they were still finalising commercial and contractual arrangements before the York HyperHub at Monks Cross could open later this year.

The complex, situated at the entrance to the Monks Cross Park&Ride car park, will be one of the largest charging hubs in Northern England and will aim to act as a demonstration of best practice for the design of EV charging facilities."

I find the last paragraph particularly ironic. It still *isn't* open and had another high profile *not*opening date pass very recently.

It has everything to do with EVs. If there isn't enough electricity to go around then there is no prospect of running all these EVs.

It is commonplace in most of the larger cities with terraced housing. Suburban streets with wider pavements (sidewalks) have been converted to carparking. Remember that a lot of UK housing was built long before owning a car was something the ordinary person could ever hope to do.

Many smaller houses come with nowhere to park a car. Mid size houses don't come with enough space to park the number of cars a family might own. Paving over the entire front garden for parking is common. This causes interesting problems of flash flooding from runoff. We don't have separate fresh water storm drains so it makes sewage plants overflow.

I hesitate to put a figure on it but perhaps as high as 25% terraced housing in many inner cities. Where I live there is a lot of space.

Have you ever been to the UK? It is quite a crowded little island.

UK electricity distribution is so backwards and now becoming unreliable due to them cutting back on maintenance and overheads (ie staff who actually know what they are doing). How else do you explain the recent nearly two week outage in parts of Northern England after storm Arwen (which really wasn't all that extreme). The network infrastructure has been allowed to decay by penny pinching bean counters in London.

After our local 2 day outage we have been around and found several electricity poles on the edge of failing. They are either visibly loose in the ground, rotten or thinned down at shoulder height by beast rubbing against them so that a once 10" diameter pole is under 4".

They are relatively limited. More so at the moment one is down! But they are essential to UK supply integrity now.

It is low carbon electricity if you can make it work.

That leaves UK electricity generation after the dash for gas incredibly

There is a pumped storage plant in Wales - one of the biggest in the world but it is still miniscule compared to total UK power usage.

Australia has a battery farm somewhere that buffers peak load and is profitable. The only one I know of in the UK is a toy near Oxford.

UK has chloralkaline and aluminium (not sure if it is still there) as the consumers of last resort. The former can absorb vast amounts of power and isn't too upset if they get none at all. Makes them very favourable as a load balancing tool for the national grid. I think they get exceptionally good rates for accepting a very intermittent supply.

We used to have a steel industry but there is almost nothing left.

Shouldn't they have been scrubbing their exhaust gasses through lime? CaF2 is about the most insoluble thing known.

Natural gas prices have gone through the roof! Nearly an order of magnitude higher prices on the spot market. That is what is driving all the UK energy box shifters into bankruptcy.

This graph from a US source says otherwise:

Natural gas prices have spiked this winter at between 7-10x what they were earlier last year and show every sign of going higher as users compete for the relatively small amounts available to buy for import.

It could get a hell of a lot worse if Russia invades Ukraine and the West imposes trade sanctions. Then in a tit-for-tat measure Russia cuts off supply to the European gas pipeline(s). Mid-winter is not a good time to be without gas. So far the price is just incredibly high.

So high in fact that some major UK industries shut down production completely which then caused a nationwide shortage of CO2. They had to be bribed by the government to restart fertiliser production and have been charging a massive premium off their customers ever since.

UK electricity production would fail within a week under that scenario. Most other European countries have larger natural gas buffer stocks. (a month or more)

on electric prices (it's done by electrolysis, so some electron per atom of aluminum). Some years later the company was looking at a rate hike when the power company ended their price break. The company left for Canada I believe, much better energy costs there. I say good riddance. They used to emit fluorine which would kill dairy cows when they ate the grass.

In my county in NC there was an aluminum plant that generated its own power. After about 30 years they shut down the smelting operation and started selling the power to the grid.

On some days, California pays Arizona to take our excess solar power. On other days, we buy their coal-generated power.

I had to reming some folks that were excited about electric only homes that have no gas (some sort of commiefornia and NYC movement) that their electric probably comes from gas and and mayber 18% coal, but with needing least 20% more than they'd need for on-site heating need due to transmission losses.

It was crickets after that.

Yeah, great business intellects run this state!

Resistive electric heating would be terrible. A heat pump is better.

Thermodynamically, a 1000c or whatever gas flame is inefficiently coupled to heat house air to 25c. An ideal steam generator and an ideal heat pump would be far more efficient use of gas.

I don't know about the real life numbers.

Instead of solar panels, we could have gas fired steam engines, where the discharge heat warms our domestic air and hot water, and we get free electricity from the otherwise wasted delta-t. That works when the sun is down.

I considered adding a heat exchanger from our heater flue gas to the water heater inlet, but the payoff is small for the effort. In our climate, we don't run the heater a lot.

Where does that say anything about "tariffs"???

Do you read what you write???

They don't actually "spell out" anything. "were still finalizing commercial and contractual arrangements" is as close as they come. That could mean anything.

In the US local utility rates are regulated by local boards, usually at the state level. Generation is a competitive matter with the freedom to buy from whom you want. I don't know exactly how they do things in the UK, but if they didn't have electrical supply lined up prior to constructing the facility, that is simply incompetent program management.

If you read back though this discussion you have made unsupported statements several times and never followed through on demonstrating they are true. Now you cite an article that says what I said it said, they are finalizing "legal agreements", which you somehow interpret is setting tariffs, otherwise known as rates. This started with you claiming chargers were "unable to get supply". That's not the same thing as they were too incompetent to line up the electrical source before they started construction.

LOL!!! All this time and you have learned NOTHING about EVs. Or maybe you are just a troll. Here, one more time I will explain it to you like you are a 10 year old.

You can charge an EV from the same outlet you run your kettle on. Yup, I believe that is 3 kW which would allow you to add 120 miles in a 10 hour overnight charge which would come from excess capacity. I believe it would be no problem at all to add a higher current outlet if this doesn't suit you, but the average daily drive is only 30 miles. I expect a 120 mile overnight charge would suit the 99.9th percentile with no added generation, transmission or distribution.

Ok, then no EVs for you. You can be the last customer of OPEC.

Yeah, I heard no shortage of stories about degrading cables with aluminum sheathing and many other problems.

Yeah, it's pretty clear that the UK would totally fail if they had to fight the Battle of Brittan again.

The UK seems hell bent on nuclear even though the current project is years late and billions over budget. I guess that's what you get when you turn to the French for technology. Maybe you should check in with the Chinese? Maybe they can help you?

Hmmm... Yes, but that's the sticky wicket, innit? Can you tell I watch too much British TV? Doc Martin lately.

It doesn't have to compare to the total generation or usage, just the amount you are saving by shutting down factories. Do you not understand what I'm saying? If you don't have enough, you need to build more. If you can add storage at a cost that is less than paying people to shut down, that saves money. Isn't that a very simple concept?

The one in Australia has worked very well and I believe it was enlarged. I think other companies have also built them, but it's been a while, I maybe confusing this with other countries or even other continents.

We have an expression the US, "stuff happens".

The reason you see steam rising from manholes, and sometimes cracks in the sidewalk, in Manhattan, is the island's central steam heat. Manhattan uses so much electricity that it needs several power plants around the perimeter of the island, which used to be oil fired but I think they're all gas now. The steam exits the turbines and is piped through the streets to heat buildings, clean dishes in retaurants, and I hear cheese makers use it somehow. I have no idea what they bill for it.

I guess you are not familiar with pricing. "Spot" prices are always the highest prices you can find. If you look at electrical prices you will find the utilities pay *huge* prices at peak times. This means nothing on my bill because it is already factored into the price of electricity. I think you don't pay spot market prices either. Your claim about a ten fold increase in spot market prices means nothing other than what is reflected in your energy rates. You know better, but you do tend to be a Henny Penny alarmist at times.

I guess this is another way the UK is a third world country, not able to foresee their future and manage their way around problems. I thought Brittan had a tonne of wells in the North Sea pumping natural gas through the island? I guess the North sea isn't big enough.

Ah, yes. The spot market responds severely to such issues. Temporary though until the issues are resolved.

Can't get past the pay wall. But I think this is a joke, right? CO2 production???

The very idea of a government "bribing" a company to produce material, when they can gouge on price, is insane. What sort of asylum is the UK again? Try that over here and we can use a law to require a company to operate. Why is there only one company? Why can't CO2 be imported? How about getting it from the air? It's presently 400 ppm and rising.

I think it is time for everyone to leave the UK and have the last person turn out the lights.

Do they burn coal? Just curious.

that's what the green retards all want. Resistive heating, or the fantasy of heat pumps working anywhere in the US.

It's perfectly coupled to transfer massive amounts of heat. You sure won't be running any perfect steam boiler off 220F degree "flames".

I hope you do realize modern gas fired furnaces are something like 95% efficient. There is no "waste" heat to gather, and if you do gather it's going to be of little use. The exhaust is so cool they run it though PVC pipes which are too flimbsy to even handle drinking water.

Bad idea, unless you want corrosion and CO in your living space.

Granted this site is suspiciously professional and vague, but it's from the real emerson electric, so trusty as far as mega conglomerates with little interest in consumers goes.

so is why we don't use heatpumps in the midwest. They're useless is the short story. Nothing produces massive amounts of cheap heat like burning gas in a furnace. Even if you could partially augment your heating with a heatpump, I doubt it would be cheaper than gas. Plus, furnaces are cheaper to replace than central air systems, and a heatpump is basically central air with some reversing valves to fail. Yeah, there are minisplit systems, but those are janky to start with, even as a pure AC unit.

If you have the bucks, geothermal heatpumps are fine. I've seen a completely decked out system of the sort, but it was built by retired engineer, clearly as a "project" more than anything else. The up front costs must have been immense with something like a mile of buried tubing outside, somewhere.

It's 22F outside here right now, so even if I had a heatpump, it would be frozen over ouside and the gas furnace would still be needed. They just don't make any sense here. Your geography and energy costs will vary. Energy here is cheap. We have all the electric and all the pipelines.

A gas flame is 100% efficient in heating applications. WTF are you talking about "coupling"?

Ideal things tend to be... ideal! Using a gas flame to power a generator which is used to run a heat pump has many inefficiencies. The question is if the heat pump can compensate. I think it is close to a break even, but only at relatively mild temperatures. As the temperature differential increases a heat pump requires more energy to move energy running up the electric bill.

Exactly.

I believe that is called cogeneration and is rather expensive. It is likely also less efficient than the utility. When done at the utility level it is called district heating, but requires some ugly piping to be installed. If not done when the community is built, it is above ground. Very ugly. The University of Maryland used that for many of their buildings. When something broke in the facility they would be down for a week or two. Yeah, 30°F outside and no heat in the dorms!

It might work at night, but only when you the furnace runs or you turn on the hot water tap. I guess if you want to read by a lamp you can run the hot water in the shower. Or maybe you could install a few days worth of batteries to get you through a warm spell? Yeah, big batteries, that's much better than being on the grid!

The only restriction on how much heat you can extract from a flame is the temperature required to make the flue gasses flow through the flue and the cost of the enhanced equipment to extract more of the heat. In power plants I've read they use as many as three sets of turbines to get as much energy as possible from the heat source. Each one optimized for a different temperature.

The North Anna nuclear facility has a 1 MW generator on the dam that creates Lake Anna, the cooling pond for the nuclear reactors. Apparently it was required to justify the construction of the dam on that river, I was told. Go figure.

I might be in that picture. I can't tell for sure, but I might be in the blue kayak behind two other kayaks in front of the dam.

They built a dam and used water power. Found out they could sell electricity for more than the aluminum profit.

A codensing furnace is nearly 100% efficient, so coupling fossil-fuel heat directly to home air is a solved problem, with off-the-shelf solutions.

Coefficient of performance for a typical heat pump is 2 to 4.5 thermal power stations are about 30-60% efficient

So it should be possiible to get more heat by burning fuel in a power station and using a heat pump.

This is already a thing called "district heat".

Solar molten salt thermal generation also works when the sun is down and produces waste heat. but unlike photovoltaic, it doesnt collect energy at all when it's cloudy (or when it's night obviously)

It would probably only a be a win when you're running the heat at the same time as the water. I guess you could use a thermal siphon (or a more bulky heat exchanger) and pre-heat a tank of water.

'

The retard here is Cydrome Leader, who seems to think that here is only one kind of heat pump.

With the right working fluid, and the right design, heat pumps can work anywhere or at least anywhere where anybody lives.

If they are working a across a large temperature difference, you don't as many watts of heat per watt of electrical input as you do with a smaller difference, and they aren't as attractive, but they still work.

The heat exchanger won't leak carbon monoxide. If you condense out water onto the flue gas side of you heat exchanger you do have to pick construction materials that won't corrode. With Cydrome Leader's design skills that might not happen, but it should,

Or to put it more briefly, Cydrome Leader doesnm't know what he is talking about.

Why wound it be "frozen over"? If it's cooler than the outside air it might pick up a layer of frost, but reversing the heat flow briefly to melt the frost for long enough for it to drip off is trivial to implement. As usual Cydrome Leader doesn't know enough about what he is talking about.

If you haven't got much sense to start with

But not all that many super-insulated houses. Cydrome Leader isn't the only local who hasn't got much sense.

That would mean the electricity is so expensive if they had to buy it to make the aluminum they would lose money! Does no one in the UK make aluminum now?