Millions of pounds of our tax waisted!

[Ash]

It is not about net zero anymore, its about freeing up grid capacity for EV charging and now AI farms

[Alex]

My Gut tells me --> Installing them is an investment that can be deducted somehow or be subsidised by the government higher up. This money needs to be used in the term or there is less in the next term. Then it is notice that the running cost is not subsidised and it becomes to expensive....

[FrontSideBus]

Net zero is complete madness! In the recent heat waves, the UK grid almost collapsed on a couple of occasions due to the demands from all the AC being used. Only importing emergency power from the continent saved us and that cost a fortune!
The thing is, the net zero zealots want us all to rip out our gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps..... which is the exact same technology and is basically AC working in reverse!
So were are in the depths of winter, there is hardly any solar and it might not be that windy, and we have closed all of our gas and coal power stations... how are we going to power all of these heat pumps installed in every house???* When we could barely cope with a little AC?
Conspiracy mode on: all heat pumps require an internet connection....so they can turn them off when the demand becomes too high? So they can cap the temperature at which you heat your home? They claim it can be kept up to date with the latest firmware? Very sinister IMO!

*If they actually work at all. I had a split AC system and while it did chuck out plenty of heat, when the temperature dropped bellow a certain level, the air was barely warm and kept cutting out completely as the outside unit pretty much spent all day at night freezing up and going through defrost cycles!

[Ash]

Heat pumps do make lot of sense from efficiency standpoint because they can and do put out several times the amount of heat, compared to any form of resistive heating. It is objectively better than if the same heat demand would be provided by resistors

Some exception might be due for IR SPACE heating because when used purposefully, it may fake the feel of warmth to people (which is what matters) with much less actual heat output. Of course you can't fake hot water with IR...

Comparing that to gas - Assuming the power grid is powered by coal for base load + combined cycle gas turbines for peaks. The efficiency of generating electricity from coal to low voltage at home is about 25%, from gas 50%. Efficiency of all resistive heaters 100%. I won't get into how coal compares to gas because i dont know. But if we compare gas to gas, this means that heating the house air or water with gas at home is 2x more efficient than heating it with a resistor at home while the electricity is supplied from a gas turbine. However any heat pump including a >50 year old one has a COP higher than 2. So yep it is more efficient to burn the gas at the power plant to power a heat pump at home, than to burn the gas at home

So far the facts are very much in favor of the heat pump

The problems are :

1. Its all good but it does not imply that you, from a position of power, can shove a heat pump down people's throat who consciously choose to heat with anything else, for whatever reasons they have which are none of your business

2. Its all good as long as the heat pump works. If it doesn't because....
- It is purposefully built to be sabotaged (the internet connection)
- Even the dumb ones are too unreliable (result of energy efficiency regulations made everything on the market POS - You can't buy anymore ones that are straight 230V to the compressor through a contactor - They are all inverters now)
- Ambient temp is too low (i live in Israel and we have a few days a year when outdoor temp is too low and ACs are continuously cycling in and out of defrost, i can imagine them being useless for a couple months straight in UK)
- People can't afford the upfront cost of a heat pump so it won;t even be purchased in the first place
....
....
Then who cares that it can save so much energy

Also, don't UK get their gas from Russia ? This might be a wholly different reason to push away from gas. But still, if people are just buying gas to burn it at home and it becomes unobtanium because of relations with Russia, the natural way how this would be resolved is just by the price of gas skyrocketing and people will find something else to use on their own

[FrontSideBus]

We have plenty of oil and gas right on our doorstep in the North Sea but these utter zealots in government refuse to use it!
Wells were not only shut down, but were filled with concrete so they cannot be re-started! It is totally economic vandalism for the sake of some ridiculous ideal!
And for what? If the UK became net zero tomorrow... whoop-de-fucking-do! The UK accounts for less that one percent of global C02 emissions... what effect is that going to make apart from ruining our economy!

The point about heat pumps though, if our grid could barely cope with the short demand from all the air conditioning load in the few short heat waves we had recently, how bad it is going to be when we have all those heat pumps, which is the same thing running in the winter... and without the solar capacity!

[Ash]

You may have all this oil and gas now but even if you could keep using it, one day it will just end on its own. You dont have to be net zero to understand that you will have to move away from it

Well, you could keep using it at its current rate and one day wake up like oh shit no oil, or gradually phase it out (while stretching the "tail" of how long it will remain available for the ever fewer users that still need it). Or just seal it with concrete now and be done with it, nevermind that you dont have any infrastructure to actually make use of renewables in those conditions. No amount of net zero alola can make infrastructure appear out of thin air....

Would the grid cope any better if the same amount of heat demand is provided by resistors ? Was heating by burning gas at home significant enough to take significant enough load off the grid ?

[HIDLamp]

I’ve touched on this in Dannys sign post post, but am I the only one seeing more and more street lighting switched off now?
I first saw this in Stafford, where newly installed Thorn Isaro had a yellow sign at the bottom saying ‘Street Lighting not in use’, a few years ago.
Now they have done it to the huge bypass that comes up from Chester to junction 19 of the M6!

Thousands and thousands of 2 year old LED lanterns now having their fuses removed in a bid to fall in line with the net zero bollocks!
What a monumental waist of tax money and I don’t know safety wise, how plunging a very busy bypass into darkness will go down?
I read a story recently about thousands of street lights in Devon now being considered for turn off!
As if this country wasn’t at risk enough with millions of illegals walking about, they’re now going to give them better cover at night for whatever purpose!

How many of you are seeing this in your county’s, where “energy saving” LEDs are being turned off to save energy?

They've done the same on the M6 south of Junction 29, hundereds of Holophane V-Max 2s with CMS installed then switched off a few months later, then further south at Thelwall it appears the 2x 250W ZX4s were repaired and the dayburning section sorted before they were also switched off, meanwhile up at Preston all the lighting on the M6 has been removed completly on the fairly short stretch where the existing M6 thorugh traffic is joined by the M65, M61, M55 & A59. The lighting has also been removed on the M61 where it meets the M6, the M65 where it meets the M61 and the M55 Junction 1 where you have to do double and even triple lane changes in a short space to go the right way, even the lighting on the new Junction 2 of the M55 is switched off and I'm not sure it was ever switched on.

[AngryHorse]

It's as if they know they're pressing ahead with net zero in full knowledge that renewable energy isn't going to keep the lights on!
I first experienced this in the mid 90s, when a stretch of probably 60 columns, carrying 135 watt SOX lamps in GR150s, were removed completely from the road going from our town to Sandbach!, I thought at first they were being replaced with steel columns and 150 watt SON-T like most of our town was having done at that time?
However after a year it was obvious that they were a planned permanent removal!

[Ash]

Renewable can keep the lights on quantity-of-energy wise (SOX/SON/LED lights that is, not saying much of anything else). There are other reasons why renewables will be powering other stuff but not lighting



Solar :

For one, i acknowledge that there is much less of it in UK than over here over large parts of the year, but lets put it aside. Lets say that the required capacity can be achieved, at least for part of the year

Solar is available during the day, when the lighting is not needed. But it is the time when it can power some other demand on the grid during the day when demand is in fact high , so is good stuff actually

Solar is not available at the time when lighting is needed. To power lighting from solar some energy storage is needed. Some self contained systems (all on the pole, with batteries) that have been around for 40 years, but nobody kept up replacing the batteries

If not the self contained ones, there is need for some storage in the grid to power lighting

It can be pumped storage but that has only this much capacity, and is more important & useful to use for handling abrupt changes of actually varying loads (morning hours of businesses opening virtually in sync) and not the very slow and smooth load curve of lighting

It can be battery storage. Now plain battery units (think a cabinet filled with sea-mine-equivalent quantity of lithium batteries, with inverter that can charge it from grid or backfeed to grid at preset times) are becoming a thing both the utility company and you (if you have the area to put it outside the house/farm/...) can commercially buy and install

With present day coal based electricity production, It charges at night during excess capacity time and dumps to the grid at peak demand time. If you install one of privately, you make $$ from it via the difference in price/kWh between the time of charging and discharging. I imagine that if (someday) the electricity production economy will be mostly solar, the charge and discharge times of those units will be reversed

But there are very few of them, and they are not free from the initial pollution footprint of making all those lithium batteries & scrapping them every few years. Tech companies and especially everyone into "smart grid" have been looking for years at EV's connected at people's homes as a battery that can do the same thing, but then it opens a question of whether you are willing to participate : The spending of charge cycles on the car without it even being on the road, the ability of the grid to pump out of the car at will (though i assume you'd be able to specify some limits), and why does any of the software managing all this (which receives the grid demand commands over the internet) deserves any trust. (Not saying modern cars deserve any trust whatsoever anyway, regardless of being EVs or not)

In short there is currently no infrastructure to take energy from solar in the day and provide it for lighting at night



Wind :

Wind is in fact solar too, just converted to air movements. From my observations, in the night there is much less wind than in the day. So mostly the same applies



Sea tidal waves :

This is available at predetermined times, including at night, but not through the entire night


Coal and Nuclear - The big non renewable stuff :

Those are all "base load" plants. They currently provide the most of the grid's demand. Their reaction to load change is slow, and they need lot of time to ramp up/down. So the way how they are used is that they are set to provide the exact capacity during minimum demand, and everything above it during peak is done with other energy sources - Some of which are more expensive and less efficient

The minimum demand hours is when the lighting is on. Save energy with the lighting, and you reduce the capacity to which you can run those not only at night, but also in the early hours of the day, making the grid require more energy to be generated with something else which is still not renewable

Using peak and minimum demand time rates/kWh is how this was sorted out in the 1st place years ago. The loads which time of operation can be shifted - Pumped storage, heating with energy storage, industrial processes of the few biggest loads (foundries etc), desalination, other water treatment, etc etc were all timed to work at night to try to equalize more the load differences between day and night

[AngryHorse]

well it's spread to the M56 now, just passed all the original existing Philips Traffic Visions and Urbis ZXs around Manchester Airport, same thing, little yellow sign, "street lighting not in use"!
That's 4 different locations in 2 years I've seen now!