Rising fuel costs
- Thread starter Paul Norman
- Start date
- Original Poster
- #42
Gosh, The question of insulation deserves a whole page to itself!
If we insulated our housing, as a nation, we could massively help people right across the piste. But the cost of taking a creaking 1930's house and making it really energy efficient is beyond many families. Of course, those in the know will confirm that the cost of taking a 2022 house and making it energy efficient would not be much less. The level of insulation is laughable. But retro fitting it is not always straight forward. And never cheap.
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A National home insulation scheme would give many years savings, and is cheaper than the alternatives of doing nothing and paying for more fuel forever.
Such common sense however, tends to not go down well compared to grandiose schemes such as huge wind farms, solar energy etc.
Such common sense however, tends to not go down well compared to grandiose schemes such as huge wind farms, solar energy etc.
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T
The Byre
Never mind fuel - that's just for starters! Fuel was the opening act, the overture if you like. We start with fuel, but then comes everything else - get ready for food shortages. It won't be a choice of heat or food, both will be in short supply, along with everything else as well.
And when people go hungry, they start throwing things!
I've been warning about this since 1999 - debts were mounting and robust supply systems were being replaced with fragile global supplies that were all just-in-time deals. Companies everywhere stopped doing sensitivity analysis on their supply lines. If they had done so, they would have realised that the tiniest little thing could bring their factories to a shuddering halt.
That's how the movie opened.
Debt - the 2007 CDO crisis was the opening act. It set the scene. Deregulation of the banks meant that investment and speculation could be done by you friendly High Street bank - and they did. By the bucket load! But when the CDOs started to fail, the great liquidity crisis of 2008 came. And idiotic and economically illiterate politicians were conned into allowing central banks to print money by the trillions to bale their greedy arses out.
That was just the first half of act two. Enter the Bad Guys - Putin, et al. Agents for chaos. Unwittingly aided and abetted by the criminal gangs that have taken over Wall Street, The City and the tower blocks in the South of Frankfurt. Criminals that have loaded the whole world with mountains of debt that arithmetically can never be repaid. Ever!
The problem with an efficient but fragile global supply chain is that it stops working at the smallest of disruptions. It could be a virus. It could be a war. Or both. Our fragile supply systems are not designed for such shocks.
The food shortages will hit North Africa hardest - but Western inner cities will see grinding shortages as well. And governments everywhere have long since run out of options. Including the Russian government.
And cheap commodity prices deter new investment in new commodity sources, resulting in stagnant supply and eventually scarcity and higher prices. The commodity markets are notoriously boom-and-bust in nature every couple of decades as a result.
The global economy, in a blank-sheet-of-paper naïve design that disregards the complicating factors of geopolitics, basically says this: we’ll take Chinese labour, Russian and Brazilian commodities and combine them into finished products and services across the world.
We don’t need to build manufacturing and shipping facilities, because the ones we have in China will always be available. We don’t need to dig new nickel mines for the batteries for those silly milk-floats, because the mines in Russia will supply the world. Chile can supply our copper, Brazil can supply our beans, Ukraine can supply our wheat, Taiwan can supply our semiconductors, China can supply our labour - it's all good!
Until it’s not.
Russia is one of the biggest oil and gas exporters in the world. They’re also one of the biggest exporters of wheat, nickel, fertilizer, platinum, uranium, coal, aluminum, timber, iron - the list is long. And it takes several years to discover and build a new mine.
Russia invaded Ukraine for purely economic reasons - their big problem is that they got the economics of going to war completely wrong. That's what happens in a top-down system that allows for no feedback from the lower orders.
The only hope for returning to the old order is for someone to take Putin out of the back of the Kremlin and have him vanish - one way or the other. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that one! By the time the Russian people realise what is happening and what has happened already, the old world order will be gone.
And when people go hungry, they start throwing things!
I've been warning about this since 1999 - debts were mounting and robust supply systems were being replaced with fragile global supplies that were all just-in-time deals. Companies everywhere stopped doing sensitivity analysis on their supply lines. If they had done so, they would have realised that the tiniest little thing could bring their factories to a shuddering halt.
That's how the movie opened.
Debt - the 2007 CDO crisis was the opening act. It set the scene. Deregulation of the banks meant that investment and speculation could be done by you friendly High Street bank - and they did. By the bucket load! But when the CDOs started to fail, the great liquidity crisis of 2008 came. And idiotic and economically illiterate politicians were conned into allowing central banks to print money by the trillions to bale their greedy arses out.
That was just the first half of act two. Enter the Bad Guys - Putin, et al. Agents for chaos. Unwittingly aided and abetted by the criminal gangs that have taken over Wall Street, The City and the tower blocks in the South of Frankfurt. Criminals that have loaded the whole world with mountains of debt that arithmetically can never be repaid. Ever!
The problem with an efficient but fragile global supply chain is that it stops working at the smallest of disruptions. It could be a virus. It could be a war. Or both. Our fragile supply systems are not designed for such shocks.
The food shortages will hit North Africa hardest - but Western inner cities will see grinding shortages as well. And governments everywhere have long since run out of options. Including the Russian government.
And cheap commodity prices deter new investment in new commodity sources, resulting in stagnant supply and eventually scarcity and higher prices. The commodity markets are notoriously boom-and-bust in nature every couple of decades as a result.
The global economy, in a blank-sheet-of-paper naïve design that disregards the complicating factors of geopolitics, basically says this: we’ll take Chinese labour, Russian and Brazilian commodities and combine them into finished products and services across the world.
We don’t need to build manufacturing and shipping facilities, because the ones we have in China will always be available. We don’t need to dig new nickel mines for the batteries for those silly milk-floats, because the mines in Russia will supply the world. Chile can supply our copper, Brazil can supply our beans, Ukraine can supply our wheat, Taiwan can supply our semiconductors, China can supply our labour - it's all good!
Until it’s not.
Russia is one of the biggest oil and gas exporters in the world. They’re also one of the biggest exporters of wheat, nickel, fertilizer, platinum, uranium, coal, aluminum, timber, iron - the list is long. And it takes several years to discover and build a new mine.
Russia invaded Ukraine for purely economic reasons - their big problem is that they got the economics of going to war completely wrong. That's what happens in a top-down system that allows for no feedback from the lower orders.
The only hope for returning to the old order is for someone to take Putin out of the back of the Kremlin and have him vanish - one way or the other. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that one! By the time the Russian people realise what is happening and what has happened already, the old world order will be gone.
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I never put heating over 17.5 but i grew up in a farm workers cottage that only had cavity walls to 4 foot above ground, an aga in the kitchen and a single open fire in the lounge. (my wife grew up in a dartmoor farmhouse with 4 foot thick solid walls half buried in a hillside with an aga and a wood burning stove).
Both of us had parents who dabbled with solar water heating in the late 70's (her more successfully than mine) and I remember half my childhood being about energy saving.
We had an electricity meter on a plate of wood with double socket and a trailing lead - guess it was the analogue version of a smart meter, my dad would move it aorund the house seeing what used what. For a while we had a tray of glycol sat in our fridge under the freezer compartment (something to do with thermal mass and losing less energy when door opened). We had a mk2 cortina with a home diesel conversion (65mpg in 1981), my uncle had a HA Viva Beagle van that at various times ran from a calor gas cylinder in the back then another diesel conversion. we later retro fitted the house with hot air heating when people were paying us to remove their big electric heater blocks upon gas coming to the local area (we used some of the spare cast iron thermal mass as weight son farm machinery and the heating had powered flaps between zones controlled by a ZX81 with an rs232 interface)
So I can cope with it - but I am not sure about the young of today brought up with central heating.
As for new cars on the road - remember a lot of people are on lease deal where they are tied into a 3 yr deal and when it finishes need to either start another or find a big wedge of cash to keep their "old" car. A new car in the drive is no longer the same indicator of wealth it was. Which is easier to find £20k in a lump or £300 pcm (i have a 15yo Skoda octavia estate diesel that will do 60mpg for family/distance travel and cheap £1k value motorcycles for single travel/ fun)
Both of us had parents who dabbled with solar water heating in the late 70's (her more successfully than mine) and I remember half my childhood being about energy saving.
We had an electricity meter on a plate of wood with double socket and a trailing lead - guess it was the analogue version of a smart meter, my dad would move it aorund the house seeing what used what. For a while we had a tray of glycol sat in our fridge under the freezer compartment (something to do with thermal mass and losing less energy when door opened). We had a mk2 cortina with a home diesel conversion (65mpg in 1981), my uncle had a HA Viva Beagle van that at various times ran from a calor gas cylinder in the back then another diesel conversion. we later retro fitted the house with hot air heating when people were paying us to remove their big electric heater blocks upon gas coming to the local area (we used some of the spare cast iron thermal mass as weight son farm machinery and the heating had powered flaps between zones controlled by a ZX81 with an rs232 interface)
So I can cope with it - but I am not sure about the young of today brought up with central heating.
As for new cars on the road - remember a lot of people are on lease deal where they are tied into a 3 yr deal and when it finishes need to either start another or find a big wedge of cash to keep their "old" car. A new car in the drive is no longer the same indicator of wealth it was. Which is easier to find £20k in a lump or £300 pcm (i have a 15yo Skoda octavia estate diesel that will do 60mpg for family/distance travel and cheap £1k value motorcycles for single travel/ fun)
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I've probably got enough pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes, tinned veg, soups, etc. in my cupboards to last 3 years
I've really got in to the habit of having everything in the cupboards and freezers really well sorted and ordered by use by dates.
I now only buy things when they are on offer (genuine offers not fake offers), ie. if a pasta is on genuine offer I'll buy 2 or 3 and put to the back of the cupboards.
I started doing this right at the start of the pandemic and not thrown a single thing away by being organised and using things in order
Probably saved a fortune, plus have plenty of the necessities in if we do have shortages.
Bread, milk and eggs are only real problems but I buy those from local farms (even though more expensive) so they treat me as a regular if things do get bad (they stopped supplying new people before).
I've really got in to the habit of having everything in the cupboards and freezers really well sorted and ordered by use by dates.
I now only buy things when they are on offer (genuine offers not fake offers), ie. if a pasta is on genuine offer I'll buy 2 or 3 and put to the back of the cupboards.
I started doing this right at the start of the pandemic and not thrown a single thing away by being organised and using things in order
Probably saved a fortune, plus have plenty of the necessities in if we do have shortages.
Bread, milk and eggs are only real problems but I buy those from local farms (even though more expensive) so they treat me as a regular if things do get bad (they stopped supplying new people before).
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Look at you with your rooms and coal fires. Such luxury.
Try growing up in a touring caravan at the end of the driveway. Walls about 2cm thick, no insulation to speak of, single glazing, so ice on the inside of the glass most winter mornings.
I remember waking up with ice in my hair a few times.
I had a fan heater in the day, but to plug it in I'd have to run an extension lead through the window - which meant the window wouldn't close.
No heating at night, too dangerous, touring caravans burn in seconds.
Having said that my heating is now on 27C and rarely turned off.
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Which country are you in? Not the UK.
36M cars need 75TWh annually. This is about a 20% increase in demand.
At peak times the grid has nowhere near 20% spare capacity. In 2015 it was down to 1.2% and a lot of that is diesel generators that come on when needed. Hardly Green.
Peak times are winter evenings, the time that people want to come home and charge their car. Spreading it out helps a bit. Not much.
The next issue is chargers. There are not enough. Not even close and no plans for there to be enough. The BBC has an article that talks about 3 million chargers needed for 36 million cars. So you're sharing your charger with 11 other people. Good luck getting charged up for Monday morning. Fast chargers don't solve this. The grid needs slow and steady charging through the night.
Even if you get everyone to charge their cars at funny hours, and you get people to share 1 charger between 11 people and the wind blows at the right time, and you manage to not run out of power, which is a lot of assumptions, you still have a very big problem.
Substations.
You've got to get the power from the power station or turbine to my house. That means that it has got to go through several substations. Most of the substations are already running near full capacity already - this is one of the things holding back green generation - in many places, you can't connect to the grid.
Increasing the load isn't possible without upgrading the substation. There are a lot of them, they are very expensive and replacing is difficult. When you upgrade the customer substation, this increases the load on the substation that supplies it and so on.
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they just upgraded the big one near me (pylon down to local) as they needed to run an extra 33kva link to a local industrial estate (several big datacentres there) for redundancy purposes. That was going to require boring under a motorway but as that is now owned by the council (not HA) they wanted a £10m surety for 25 years in case of subsidence.
So instead they decided to cut and cover trench down the residential rode paralleling the motorway until there was a handy bridge. I went to the public exhibition when they announced this and the conversation went like this
what about the culvert in my road, how are you going past that ?
What culvert ?
The one that morrisons had to dig down 12 foot to go under when they redid the gas mains locally
There isn't anything on our map
No that is because it is a culverted stream and your map only shows drains.
they had to use a horizontal boring machine going down from 100m back under and then back up (you can't bend big cables) and apparently that machine hire alone cost £250k for the fortnight it was needed.
Those are the kind of infrastructure costs associated with beefing up local distribution to deal with car charging
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Imagine that for every industrial estate and every housing estate.
Imagine doing it in the centre of any big city.
www.energylivenews.com
£16M to upgrade 30 year old transformers under Leicester Square.
Imagine doing it in the centre of any big city.
Leicester Square secures new electric feel by UKPN - Energy Live News
UKPN will install a new transformer under Leicester Square
www.energylivenews.com
£16M to upgrade 30 year old transformers under Leicester Square.
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Ermmm yes I am in the UK...and so is National Grid...
I suggest you update your knowledge a little further. Try here for a start:
Busting the myths and misconceptions about electric vehicles | National Grid
You must accept my apologies, I cant be bothered to correct each individual item of your post, as frankly, the entire lot is wrong! For example...not one ev charger my team ha e installed charges at peak hours.....not sure why you would suggest they do. Do people really pay for your energy advice? Average ev charger installed at home is around £700.....its hardly a barrier to enter for most houses and already we are working with councils to install on street charging for houses where this is not possible. Honestly.....chargers are the easy part!
And yes....I work for DNOs and have family members that work for some as well....so I can confirm your answers are "misguided"
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Imagine that for every industrial estate and every housing estate.
Imagine doing it in the centre of any big city.
Leicester Square secures new electric feel by UKPN - Energy Live News
UKPN will install a new transformer under Leicester Square
£16M to upgrade 30 year old transformers under Leicester Square.
Ermmmm TXs are only designed to last 30 years. This o e was due for replacement regardless of anything EV related.
Seriously......stop with the misinformation
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We do around 12 applications to connect next each month. Have done for at least 6 months.
I network with around 50 other ev installers, and so estimate that this group alone applies for around 2000 applications to connect every month.
Not ONE has been refused due to capacity issues.....not a single one.
Your information is incorrect again....I qould be embarrassed to put that post up qith a link to your energy business in the same post.
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Again.....if they were providing resilience to an industrial estate, this is not a cost associated to EVs.
It is a cost they would have considered along with risk of fines when energy is not available.
You can thank tory governments for placing these services in the private sector, where we as consumers do not have to directly fund the usual day to day upgrades....such as this
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If employers add EV chargers to the business, what will happen to the demand?
Not just one or two chargers, but enough for a significant number of employees?
If my local UPS depot goes all electric, how much extra power will they need and where will this come from?
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1) the peak demand remains the same
2) the grass moves to demand side response (that's kinda the big idea) allowing evs to feed back into the grid to support peak demands
3) I don't know how many vans your ups has nor how much energy they will need. However they will not be allowed to connect if there is insufficient energy available. We would usually measure consumption for a month or two on such an installation. We have yet to be refused connection and have installed stuff for royal mail (30 evs) on one site.
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OK, and they cost £16M to replace in Central London. There is nothing incorrect in what I said is there?
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Geese are you just messing around or are you being serious?
2000 applications is circa 2000 charge points.....since most of this group of 50 electricians do mostly domestic chargers.
I can only answer the question I know the answers to (I suggest you do the same).
Obviously there arenore than 50 electricians installing ev charger points beside the group I am associated with....so I cant answer the question as to how long it would take to get to 3million. However, you can assume it takes half a day to install, and so let's say 1.5million days if (as you have incorrectly asked) I were to install all of them.
I can confirm final that ALL ev chargers I have installed are working correctly. Out of interest, do you even know what standards they are approved too?
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Thank you, so we agree. If the supply has insufficient energy available then they cannot connect.
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'Shocking state’: One in 10 electric vehicle chargers don't work
ELECTRIC vehicle infrastructure in the UK is in a "shocking state" with one in 10 rapid chargers not working, according to new research.
Maybe speak to Channel 4 as they are spreading this information.
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I didn't infer anything, I said upgrading substations/transformers is expensive. Which is true.
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If you use that source for your own research then I feel sad for any customers that seek anything anything energy related from you'Shocking state’: One in 10 electric vehicle chargers don't work
ELECTRIC vehicle infrastructure in the UK is in a "shocking state" with one in 10 rapid chargers not working, according to new research.www.express.co.uk
Maybe speak to Channel 4 as they are spreading this information.
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OK, so 1.5 million man-days. Lets agree on that figure.
How many trained installers are there in the UK, I don't know, so I'll accept your answer.
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Its irrelevant.
Most users wouldn't use one of theose chargers except on longer journeys which are not the norm.
Seriously, it takes 7s months the to install a petrol station.
Weeks to install a fast charger u it and a half day to install anything else.
Having 10% of fast charges being unavailable is a non issue.
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Great...glad you are agreeing its a none issue.
Seriously.....you, I your line of business is supposed to know how consu.ers will use energy. You are completely wrong here. Like not even close to the mark!
Perhaps there is hope for your businesses services in the energy sector. It maybe feint...but there is hope
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No it doesn't. London doesn't have this issue....not by a long shot. No cities do. You seriously dont understand how energy is used or how ev chargers work.....it must be embarrassing given your line of work
I won't be giving you my email.
Please feel free to share the evidence here though.
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