SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 16 submissions in the queue.
SoylentNews
Britain will need to boost its generation of electricity by about a quarter, Scottish Power has estimated.
The energy firm said electric cars and a shift to electric heating could send demand for power soaring.
Its chief executive also said there would have to be a major investment in the wiring necessary to handle rapid charging of car batteries.
Is the net demand for energy really spiking, or is it merely shifting from one source to another?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Scottish Power Says UK Will Need to Boost Capacity
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 24 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There is a secret person undamaged within every individual.
-- Paul Shepard
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:17PM (16 children)
The question in the summary is specious because it changes terms. The article quote itself says "SHIFT to electric heating", presumably from burning either fossil fuels or wood/peat/etc. at the home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:24PM (13 children)
Electric heating is unbelievably wasteful of resources.
All you need is HEAT, not a carefully controlled source of electric power that WAS OBTAINED FROM HEAT at a very high loss factor as an inescapable part of the process!
Unless the UK is going to heat using heat pumps... very efficient technology, but also only usable in a mild climate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:07PM (7 children)
Not quite - what you want is easily turn-on-and-offable heat which is easy to deliver, and which has no toxic byproducts.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:23PM (6 children)
Electric resistance heating is not the only way to do this, and you know it.
There is natural gas and steam heat as well. Natural gas will heat your house better than any competing technology, but it's not the only way to go.
Heat pumps are great if it never gets very cold.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:35PM (5 children)
Heat pumps have consequences as well.
Imagine an entire urban area heated by heat pumps, ground source, air source, water source.
No sooner would the systems be installed area wide than the heat source would be depleted to such a degree you would have to re-install a different, better solution, a deeper loop of tubing, or using more water, or what ever.
Oil was once thought to be inexhaustible.
Coal was thought to be inexhaustible.
Lets not make that mistake again.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
Your reply sounds like a joke.
For the record, I meant the common heat pump that uses ambient outside air: basically, an air conditioner you can run in reverse.
The heat source for the outside air is the sun. That makes it inexhaustible. Furthermore, you are only *moving* the heat from outside the house to inside the house. The heat isn't being "used up." It will, as a matter of fact, very slowly leak back outside over time. Plus the *new* heat being created by the heat pump compressor will be vented outside. There is no permanent loss of outside heat, just a temporary moving of it to inside your house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:41PM
I'll only add that a heat pump depends on a well-insulated house so that once the heat is moved inside it stays there a long time.
At least in residential settings, I have never heard of heat pumps wringing the outside air clean of heat.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:39PM
Ground source heat pumps are able to handle temperature extremes better, because the carrying solution coming out of the ground is always 55F. In the winter you spend a little energy to boost that to 72F, in the summer you blow air across the coils and there's your cooling. A lot of GSHP systems also tie in the water heater to handle that as well.
The real limiting factor is what kind of soil your house/building is sitting on. If you're on a solid slab of rock, with not enough top soil to get down the requisite 6 feet where that 55F is, then you're out of luck. Drilling into solid rock to drop enough coil to heat/cool your house will never pay for itself. If you have at least 6ft then you can at least use a trench formation to lay your coil out horizontally.
It's worth checking that out. If you have the subsoil to do it you'll save yourself tens of thousands of dollars (here in the Northeast oil heat for a normal 1-family home can run $5K/yr) in heating costs and cooling costs, plus the heat pump will run forever.
Air source heat pumps you're talking about are limited. Water source ones have problems with fouling, though close-loop ones are OK; the city of Toronto in fact uses one of those to pull up frigid water from Lake Ontario to cool buildings downtown in the summer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:02PM (1 child)
I'm sorry? I honestly don't even know where to begin here. If you manage to "deplete" the ability of your source to dispense or absorb the necessary amount of heat energy to be useful, you have ROYALLY screwed up your initial engineering calculations. If you do it right, it doesn't matter whether you're the only one within ten miles or if you're in the middle of a city where every building uses the same technology.
... First of all... heat pumps transfer heat in either direction. In the winter they are used for heating, in the summer they are used for cooling. Whether air, water, or ground, the overall heat balance comes from either the sun or the heat of the Earth's molten core which maintains the average temperature of the crust around 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit. We aren't capable of depleting either of those things within the next billion years no matter how hard we try. A properly installed and sized ground-loop heat interchange system will literally work "forever" (as far as our civilization is concerned), pumping heat into the ground during the summer and pumping it out during the winter. Even if we put a 100-story skyscraper on every square inch of land on our planet, each with a huge heat sink reaching hundreds of feet down, we could never turn the Earth into either a ball of ice or a molten rock by "depleting" the heat balance of the planet. That just isn't how this works. It's more like a battery that gets charged during one season and discharged during the opposing season. It's an endless cycle of heat transfer in both directions.
No matter how much solar energy we use, we will never "deplete" the sun until it burns itself out billions of years from now. And as long as the Earth turns on its axis and has an atmosphere that gets heated on only one side by the sun, we will have wind available for wind energy production. We could theoretically reach a point where adding new wind turbines would be pointless after reducing the total atmospheric kinetic energy to an equilibrium point, but that will take millions of huge wind turbines installed all over the world. We could power our entire civilization from wind energy several times over before we could reach that equilibrium point.
You are comparing these things which in any rational sense are non-depletable during the time period when life will be capable of existing on this planet, with a fuel source that with the most conservative usage possible will simply cease to exist within a thousand years, and won't be replaced for hundreds of millions of years. Even if we somehow managed to reach those theoretical equilibrium points with these other forms of energy, they would still be producing energy for us for as long as we have the raw materials available to keep replacing the related hardware that makes them work. They'll never just "stop" the way fossil fuels soon will.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:45PM
If only RedBear would read all the posts at 0 or higher, he wouldn't answer questions that have already been fully answered.
It's a problem with this site. No, I will not log in because I value my privacy. I am not interested in Facebook style tracking of my posts by other users.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:53PM (4 children)
And heat pumps are powered by.....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:00PM (3 children)
Please read my above post where I explain how a heat pump works.
Yes, it takes electricity to run the compressor (plus fans, but the majority is used by the compressor), but the heat pump electricity is used only to move OUTSIDE HEAT into your house.
This uses little electricity compared to the other option which is inexplicably popular in some countries of ELECTRIC RESISTANCE HEATING which is basically running a big toaster inside your house and blowing that hot air around.
Heat pumps use electricity to help *move existing heat*, while so-called "electric heat" (electric resistance heating) *generates* 100% of the heat from electricity.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)
Duh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
What a waste of forum space your posts are--just filler.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 26 2017, @11:21PM
And you assumed that all electric heating is resistive.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:59PM
Of course, I'm not pretending there's a noble motive behind what he's saying - he wants to be in control of an even bigger slice of the UK wind farm industry than he already is, and presumably wants to get the goverment to subsidise, i.e. the taxpayer to partly pay for, the equipment whose output will then be sold back to the taxpayers. I'm completely convinced he doesn't want any other company fulfilling this projected demand.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:02PM
The vast majority of homes in the UK use mains gas for heating.