One year on from Blackpool and Fukushima....

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Not to all your points, but:
when the PV subsidy was at 43p/kWh a 4 kW installation cost about £13-16 k. When the subsidy tumbled to 16 p/kWh (in less than a year), lo: £6k buys you 4 kW.

Paul are those getting the PV subsidy, Peter are the poor who can't afford the installations; it's a regressive subsidy.

The answer may be storage (it usually is) but after over 100 years research into storage the cheapest form remains pumped storage (by a long mile) followed by the good-old lead acid battery. As a sidenote, Dinorwig cost £425 m (1984) for 10 GWh storage.

You may be referring to small individual PV installations, but they add up. In Germany they now have 33 GW of 'em. How do you managed something like that on an island grid (answer: you can't).

[ahinton]

Not to all your points, but:
when the PV subsidy was at 43p/kWh a 4 kW installation cost about £13-16 k. When the subsidy tumbled to 16 p/kWh (in less than a year), lo: £6k buys you 4 kW.

But you are assuming that the fall in subsidy resulted solely and directly in the reduction in purchase cost of a 4Kw system without proof; can you therefore provide evidence that the cost of such a system skyrocketed when the subsidy was initially introduced?

Paul are those getting the PV subsidy, Peter are the poor who can't afford the installations; it's a regressive subsidy.

I don't agree; it could be a temporary one if the price of an installation were to plummet far further because of increased uptake (which is likely) and, after all, something has to happen, because the only other viable option, nuclear fusion, is inevitably going to be a very long term one to resolve a vast immediate problem.

The answer may be storage (it usually is) but after over 100 years research into storage the cheapest form remains pumped storage (by a long mile) followed by the good-old lead acid battery. As a sidenote, Dinorwig cost £425 m (1984) for 10 GWh storage.

Again, I'm not talking about commercial systems but small individual ones and lead-acid battery technology has, I understand, now been superseded by more modern and less environmentally damaging (in terms of disposal) battery storage solutions, although I don't have more specific detail to hand at present; these are used mainly in installations where there is no grid access (which hardly applies anywhere in UK).

You may be referring to small individual PV installations, but they add up. In Germany they now have 33 GW of 'em. How do you managed something like that on an island grid (answer: you can't).

I don't understand your reference to an "island grid"; could you explain? Solar PV can be installed for off-grid use, but that's not a particularly viable way to do it other than for those without grid access.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

The first question you ask is proved by the fact that the price could fall by a factor of nearly three in under a year.

Your second point is wrong. The FIT tariffs have lifetime guarantees (albeit, government guarantees) and so are insensitive to any future purchase price changes.

To my knowledge, lead acid batteries are still cheaper than the modern batteries fitted to cars. They might not be as small/light, but they are cheaper.

The UK is an island grid. It's frequency decoupled from Europe. The European grid is far more stable than the UK grid because large disturbances, such as a whole power station tripping represents a very small change in overall capacity and thus has negligible impact on grid frequency. That's not the case in the UK. And the inter-connectors we do have are all DC links - so the two sides of the connection cannot 'see' frequency disturbances on opposite sides of the link. Eire is an even smaller island grid than the UK, consequently they have much poorer frequency control than the UK. And while gas, coal and hydro generators can provide frequency control/stabilisation, windmills and PV can't; PV doesn't even have any rotational inertia which can be exchanged for electrical power.

Iberia, Italy, and Greece are examples of peninsula grids; they do have AC interconnectors back to the stable European grid, but these are weaker links capable of carrying smaller loads than the European mesh.

[teamsaint]

Phew. Panic over. Boris says its ok.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/9733518/Ignore-the-doom-merchants-Britain-should-get-fracking.html

couple of odd facts in there . The Shard statistic? Is he talking about running it?

And the cost of dealing with spent fuel rods.....not clear on time scales or anything.

[handsomefortune]

Phew. Panic over. Boris says its ok.

symptomatic of routine normalising apparently, also the name of a project, known as 'the normalcy bias': http://www.normalcybias.co.uk/concept

A typical symptom of normalcy bias is the assumption that because a catastrophe has never occurred, it will never occur.

People in favour of building nuclear plants, for example, are displaying clear signs of normalcy bias – i.e., the optimistic dismissal of danger and inadequate preparation for disaster. This is exactly what led to the nuclear reactor catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986 and consequently to the 2011 disaster in Fukushima Dai-Ichi.

The point is that everyone experiences examples of normalcy bias on a daily basis, some hardly recognizable, others of monstrous proportions.

My concept for an exhibition with artists from very different places addresses this idea and creates a space for the viewer to reflect (maybe for the first time) on this particular extreme mental state. – ilka Leukefeld (edit: my emboldened & italic bits btw)

boris may say that 'it's ok', and also deny the existence of any bias whilst having all eight stubby fingers in several pies each? handy that blonde boris is 'a dizzy madcap' mayor then! yet, no one ever suggests that his behavior is 'abnormal' - how odd, especially as his statement/s might well contribute to 'monstrous' future results!

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Doesn't normalcy bias apply to stress events at the time of occurence of a disaster? Like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Other times people are, by-and-large, quite good at planning to avoid disasters. The normal state of affairs is that where I lve it isn't raining - the normal bias - (except recently), but hey, my house has a roof on! We don't live on flood planes . . . except when the planners lose their marbles. In the engineering world, one of the main activities of each of the engineering disciplines is risk analysis, quite the opposite of any normalcy bias.

On Boris's comment re the cost oif nuclear decommissioning I see he's playing the old sore that this is all down to nuclear power generation (as well as taking the headline cost as if if it all had to shelled out this year when it's actually over 120 years). Well actually, I think we should put that £100 b down to our contribution to the cold war, not civil nuclear power.

But his comments re fracking seem about right.

[MrGongGong]

But his comments re fracking seem about right.

I guess you don't mind contaminating our water supplies then ?
Boris couldn't give a toss anyway as he probably drinks Bollinger and is happy with Perrier for when he is slumming it

[An_Inspector_Calls]

I guess you don't mind contaminating our water supplies then ?

No, that's a silly remark to make. Can yopu give me any convincing evidence that fracking contaminates water other than accidental spillages into surface water? For that evidence you can only go to the States where it appears the EPA have investigated case after case of alleged contamination and rejected them all - unless I'm mistaken? The EPA you might remember are the organization that are so green they've declared CO2 a pollutant.

http://www.nature.com/news/is-fracking-behind-contamination-in-wyoming-groundwater-1.11543

Personally I wouldn't touch Perrier, isn't it contaminated with benzene?

[MrGongGong]

No, that's a silly remark to make. Can yopu give me any convincing evidence that fracking contaminates water other than accidental spillages into surface water? For that evidence you can only go to the States where it appears the EPA have investigated case after case of alleged contamination and rejected them all - unless I'm mistaken? The EPA you might remember are the organization that are so green they've declared CO2 a pollutant.

I was only going on what I read in National Geographic .........

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/energy/2010/10/101022-energy-marcellus-shale-gas-rush/

I have no knowledge of the EPA
commercial interests are very powerful though

[An_Inspector_Calls]

The EPA isn't a commercial organization, it's the US government's Evironmental Protection Agency. If you're only going on one article, then why not read a little more before arriving at a position on the subject?

Here, for example, is an assessment of the one site in the US where the EPA had found possible evidence of fracking contamination:

http://marcellusdrilling.com/2012/09/3-things-to-know-about-pavillion-fracking-water-contamination/

wherein:

There have been well over 1 million oil and gas wells fracked since the 1940s in the U.S. There have been over 50,000 oil and gas wells horizontally fracked since the early 2000s. If Pavillion is proven to be a case where water has been contaminated by fracking, it would be the only known case—statistically zero. Name any other industrial process with that kind of record.

[MrGongGong]

I'm puzzled why you are such an enthusiast ?
and really don't have time to delve deeply into that as well as the finer points of Spectral Morphology

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Because I don't waste my time on spectral morphology I find I have time to read the occasional engineering paper - is all. But I avoid making comments such as 'the study of spectral morphology should be banned' - I'll leave that to the better informed.

[MrGongGong]

Because I don't waste my time on spectral morphology I find I have time to read the occasional engineering paper - is all. But I avoid making comments such as 'the study of spectral morphology should be banned' - I'll leave that to the better informed.

I never suggested that anything should be "banned" at all
so i guess if you think that learning about music is a waste of time what are you doing on a music based messageboard ?

[An_Inspector_Calls]

No I didn't say learning about music in general is a waste of time, simply that I didn't waste my time on a study of spectral morphology in particular. And there's no implication from me that you've said anything particular about banning, but rather that since you confess to having read very little about fracking (as I have about spectral morphology) that perhaps it ill behoves you to wade in with ad hominem comments against Boris who clearly does know something about the subject.

[MrGongGong]

Saucer of milk for the inspector