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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 26 2017, @12:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-power-to-the-people dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:02PM (1 child)

    by RedBear (1734) on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:02PM (#573460)

    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.

    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
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:45PM (#573488)

    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.