Green energy discussion

Ozukus said:

You may be interested in looking up the Hyperion Nuclear Battery, it's the next generation of nuclear power.

I also read a while back an article about a 16 year old in America who had designed something similar that was based on nuclear waste, however can't find the article.

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I'm not quite sure that would fit under the bonnet of an Outlander...

If it did, be interesting what your 3rd party liability insurance premium would be :shock:

jaapv said:

Ozukus said:

You may be interested in looking up the Hyperion Nuclear Battery, it's the next generation of nuclear power.

I also read a while back an article about a 16 year old in America who had designed something similar that was based on nuclear waste, however can't find the article.

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I'm not quite sure that would fit under the bonnet of an Outlander...

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I'm just reading on the BBC News web site that the Lockheed Skunk Works team have come up with a new idea for fusion and are hoping to have a working 100MW reactor that will fit into the back of a truck within 10 years. Fingers crossed that it's the real thing this time and not another Cold Fusion.

Haven't we had such news flashes every other year over the last half century?

jaapv said:

Haven't we had such news flashes every other year over the last half century?

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We certainly have, but not often from a team with the credentials of the Skunk Works. They are not academics - they are hard-nosed engineers.

Fusion power has been 10 years away for the past 50 years. Seems a bit like my retirement age......

I know this thread has been quiet a couple of weeks but here goes for the following reasons:

1. I just got my Phev last week.
2. I own a 5kW wind turbine hooked up to my house.

First of all I'm not an eco nut but if I can cut down on fossil fuels at not a huge cost to myself the I'll give it a go. I live in Shetland where it never gets very cold (average winter temperatures of 3°C) and it never gets very hot (average summer temperature 13°C) but it is very wendy.

My first step with enviromentally friendly technology was to decide on how to heat the house when we built and extension and refurbished the rest of the house 3 years ago. Up here we basically have two choices - oil or electricity as there is no mains gas available up here. Before the works on the house we used oil - it was an old system and very expensive in oil so I decided to go for a ground source heat pump. This took a lot of thinking about because it came to a total of £17k installed which is a lot for a central heating system. However, it was cheaper to run than the oil -£2.5k a year in oil down to £2k a year in electricity - which doesn't sound a lot but we did double the size of the house with the extension.

Then came the wind turbine (which seemed an obvious choice since our electricity usage had shot up) which cost £35k installed. After monitoring this for 2 years we now generate more electricity than we use it's just that we get plenty of days with no wind so we still buy £1k of electicity from the grid each year.

The last step was the Phev - we live in a remote area and require a 4 wheel drive vehicle for a significant number of days a year (untreated hilly narrow country roads etc.) so decided to get rid of our L200 gas guzzler and buy a Phev at a cost of £35k.

The reason I bring all this up is there is no way we could have afforded all this eco energy saving without all the subsidy provided with this stuff i.e. £5k government grant for the Phev, 5% benifit in kind tax rate on the Phev being a company car (I run my own small business), £6k a year for 20 years earnings from the wind turbine feed in tariffs and £1.2k a year for 7 years earnings from the heat pump feed in tariffs. In an ideal world we could go off grid completely if I could work out some way of storing the electricity on the windy days for use on the none windy days but having looked into this the cost is prohibitive.

The point I'm trying to make is it's all very well being green but it's not really affordable to most people (and they probably lack the space - I'm lucky I have no neighbours to upset) and the technology is just too expensive. For example the wind turbine is just a 5kW motor with some blades, a big stick and some electronics stuck on the end and not £35k worth of stuff. It's certainly not affordable without the feed in tariffs and that is just no sustainable if everyone went down the same route. I also have the advantage of living in the windiest part of the UK but my wind turbine is less than 50% efficient (it's 2 years old so if running at maximum capacity it should have generated 5kWh x 24hrs x 365days x 2years = 87.6MWh but it has generated about 40.0MWh in total) - elsewhere in the county it will be down to the low figures like 17% already quoted.

Therefore in my opinion green energy is only part of the solution just now until it can be economically stored and the technology is just not there yet. Also everything needs to be joined up. For example I cannot charge my Phev on just wind power - the car will not accept a fluctuating power input that wind power produces. It would be nice if I could use the Phev batteries for storage for the none windy days but there is no way of getting the stored power back out of the car and into the house (I'm sure it would be possible but the cost would probably be prohibitive).

So both sides of the arguement are right - we need the old ways in conjunction with the new ways of energy generation until the storage issue is resolved and the technologies get cheaper.

Oh - but the storage problems are being solved - not only could one use batteries - which still can pose problems of size, nasty chemistry and unwieldiness, nowadays there are already several power-to-gas projects running, which provide a similar efficiency as batteries but solve storage and conversion issues.
For instance one of our major electricity companies is running a pilot with a wind-turbine, a power-to-gas unit and regular CV heaters in 50 flats.

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

jaapv said:

Oh - but the storage problems are being solved - not only could one use batteries - which still can pose problems of size, nasty chemistry and unwieldiness, nowadays there are already several power-to-gas projects running, which provide a similar efficiency as batteries but solve storage and conversion issues.
For instance one of our major electricity companies is running a pilot with a wind-turbine, a power-to-gas unit and regular CV heaters in 50 flats.

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

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Or store it as potential energy by pumping water up hill and then releasing it to drive a water turbine

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: Slightly difficult to do indoors, I should think... Especially in a flat country...

It is very interesting that Germany is so far ahead, reading this article. The “Energiewende” may well turn out to have as significant an economic impact as the “Wirtschaftswunder”.

Interesting reading with the P2G but as I say it is not yet ready on a small scale and until governments invest in this stuff on a large scale we'll still need the fossil fuels. And if UK general infratructure and government deficit is anything to go by thats just not going to happen.

For pumping the water uphill - it works on a large scale in other parts of Scotland but on a small scale no chance. I have a hill next to my house but by the time I got the best part of a km of pipework in, water storage at the top of the hill, pumps and a generator in the cost would be astronomical - it's better to just continue buying the electricity for when the wind doesn't blow (and the majority of that comes from an oil fired power station up here).

Hunda67 said:

Interesting reading with the P2G but as I say it is not yet ready on a small scale and until governments invest in this stuff on a large scale we'll still need the fossil fuels. And if UK general infratructure and government deficit is anything to go by thats just not going to happen.

For pumping the water uphill - it works on a large scale in other parts of Scotland but on a small scale no chance. I have a hill next to my house but by the time I got the best part of a km of pipework in, water storage at the top of the hill, pumps and a generator in the cost would be astronomical - it's better to just continue buying the electricity for when the wind doesn't blow (and the majority of that comes from an oil fired power station up here).

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I'd assumed you'd be using the surplus electricity from the wind turbine to power the pump :mrgreen:

jaapv said:

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: Slightly difficult to do indoors, I should think... Especially in a flat country...

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Flat :?: - what about the Dutch Alps around Valkenburg :lol:

Yes - they even installed a ski-lift in one meadow - slight problem - last year we had zero snow....

I'd assumed you'd be using the surplus electricity from the wind turbine to power the pump :mrgreen:

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I would if I did but I couldn't afford the rest

This is a PHEV forum, right ?

What about V2H ?

Well it is in the "Non Outlander PHEV Discussions >> Off Topic" section

I don't see a V2H unit being sold as an optional extra at my Mitsubishi dealer.

The ideas are all good but the technology just isn't there yet or far too expensive. Even the Outlander Phev is a gamble at the moment as I see it - I normally keep a car around 4-5 years - what's it going to be worth then, are the batteries going to be knackered, how much will the batteries cost to replace - nobody knows. Also how much CO2 savings will there be over the lifetime of the car if the batteries do need replacing and then you take in manufacture of them into account?

I certainly would not feel too virtuous about saving the environment - it still burns fuels either in the petrol engine or in the power station that generated the electricity. Taking into account the relatively short range on electricity, I would think that the additional energy consumed in the more complex manufacture plus all that fuel oil that the ship burned bringing it here probably negates the CO2 savings from operation over its lifetime.

I remember watching a Grands Design episode here in the UK about a couple building a house that when complete would be CO2 neutral. Interestingly enough though the show did comment on the fact that the amount of cement used in the concrete slab for the property was the equivalent CO2 output of a normal family home of about 300 years.

Ozukus said:

I remember watching a Grands Design episode here in the UK about a couple building a house that when complete would be CO2 neutral. Interestingly enough though the show did comment on the fact that the amount of cement used in the concrete slab for the property was the equivalent CO2 output of a normal family home of about 300 years.

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The Outlander is a very nice car, but let's not deceive ourselves - if we are trying to save the planet, buying a small Nissan manufactured in Sunderland is a far more effective way to do it!