Guest post by Steven Goddard
The UK has been experiencing the coldest winter in several decades, and hopefully policymakers have learned a few basic lessons from this. Here is my wish list, which seem painfully obvious.
- Britain can’t rely on global warming to stay warm in the winter.
- Britain can’t rely on solar power to stay warm in the winter. There just isn’t enough sun (which is why it is cold in the winter.)
- Britain can’t rely on wind power to stay warm in the winter. During the coldest weather the winds were calm (which is one reason why the air temperatures were so low.)
- Britain can’t rely on Russian natural gas to stay warm. The gas supply was cut off for weeks due to politics.
The only large scale energy supplies the UK can rely on in the near future are coal, oil and a small amount of nuclear. So next time you see a “coal train of life” remember to wave at the driver. And I hate those ugly, motionless windmills popping up all over the countryside.
John Galt (06:48:41) : I think home backup power generators are a great investment opportunity for the coming years. As the USA blunders away from cheap, reliable sources of power to expensive, unreliable and experimental sources, people are going to want to have some way to keep the lights on.
All ready lived through it here in California under Governor Gray(out) Davis. We had regular rolling blackouts. For some reason Democrats really seem to like messing about with electrical supply (and messing it up…) They just didn’t seem to ‘get it’ about how markets work. Best description I heard was Dennis Miller saying their spot price mandate was “Like buying our electricity at mini-bar prices”. That’s technically accurate. They mandated no long term contracts and only spot purchases. Shear insanity or idiocy.
I now own 2 generators. A really nice Honda 1kw that runs all the essentials – TV, Satellite Dish, Lights, Fridge (what’s telly without cool beer?!), computer and communications; and a big noisy one (Briggs & Stratton something or other 4kW with 5kW surge) used for occasionally running the dishwasher, AC, clothes washer/dryer and one or two neighbors houses if needed 😉 It no longer gets used much…
Honda makes the best, quietest, most fuel efficient out there. I expect them to sell a lot in coming years… I get about 8 hours / litre off the 1kW job. At 56 db you can’t hardly hear it.
othercoast (09:11:31) : …unless of course the livestock growers, which are necessarily separate entities from the corn growers due to a stupid law (a subsisdy requirement?), can get subsidized regular corn for their livestock cheaper than the ethanol leftovers.
Never heard of that one before. DDG (not ‘leftovers’, a nutrient enhanced feed additive) is widely blended into feed stocks. It commands a premium price because of the premium nutrition in it (more protein, less starch, plus vitamins).
There is also a combined closed cycle plant (Arizona IIRC?) where corn from the farm has oil extracted (for the farm equipment), the grain fermented, the wet DG is fed to cattle on premises AND the cow poo is fermented to make methane for the process heat. Very high efficiency since several of the transport steps are cut out and the whole place is powered via corn. There are many folks with corn fields and cows on the same farm.
More importantly, it still drives up (Diesel and thus transported goods) prices when you take a gallon of Diesel fuel out of the general supply and use a pile of corn and subsidies to turn it into little more than a gallon’s worth of gasoline substitute.
This makes no sense at all. No Diesel is ‘taken out of the general supply’ anywhere. Corn uses nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas most of the time and presently selling near multi decade lows) and has about a 1.3 :1 or 1.6 : 1 net energy gain. (Much more than that in the combined operations). This, BTW, ignores a lot of the energy value in the DDG and cow poo so the total available to the society is even higher. (Higher still if you capture the leaves and stalks as ‘silage’ fed to the same cows.)
The only Diesel used is in the tractors, harvesters, and 18 wheelers hauling the corn and that is very small compared to the tonnage of corn produced (and even that can be covered with bioDiesel from the corn oil if you mill and press the corn prior to fermentation…)
I’m sorry, but you are just spouting someone’s slogans and have no clue about the energetics of farms or biofuel production.
(FWIW, I think the better thing to do is cellulosic rather than grain based ethanol; but that does not change the fact that the ‘corn ethanol loses energy’ line is a crock cooked up by ‘researchers’ with a political agenda who have never worked a farm.)
Sidebar: The rice shortage had nothing to do with biofuel and everything to do with Bayer contaminating the foundation seed stocks for midwest rice with a GM experimental grain. This blocked our exports to many rice consuming nations who did not want frankenseeds polluting their stocks. Knock a major exporter out of the world market and “PRESTO!” instant rice shortage (but not here in the USA where we were up to our eyeballs in the stuff).
http://www.gmcontaminationregister.org/index.php?content=nw_detail2
or just pick one:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Bayer+rice+GM+suit+contamination&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
E.M.Smith (03:21:33) :
Paul Green (05:20:04) :
Another one worth looking at is Wavebob (this is probably the one you mean that isn’t publicly traded). Good etechnology though..
http://www.wavebob.com/
gary gulrud (11:26:55) : Ethanol is burnable filler in our Otto engines. Mileage decreases in direct proportion to ethanol content. I’ve proven this with multiple vehicles and fuel grades for myself.
Highly dependent on specific engines. See your local dragstrip or NASCAR for counter examples. I’ve run engines on straight ethanol via a simple fuel mix change, and the E85 cars are not getting 15% of their gasoline milage… Also, my old Ford F350 Crew Cab 4×4 got about the same (terrible!) milage on gasoline or E10 (though it didn’t start worth a damn cold on E10… and in cold weather was about 5% less milage on 10% ethanol) My Honda positively loved the stuff but it has a funny lean burn 3 valve design anyway.
Yes, dedicated ethanol engines are much more efficient with ethanol, but the idea that it’s just ‘filler’ is not accurate (though some individual vehicles can ‘have issues’ especially if not E85 designed.)
Moreover, the corn belt will see decreased degree days over the coming 30 years with PDO and soon AMO negative. It was a short-lived farm subsidy scam.
This I agree with completely. If you wanted to make fuel, you would be using a crop like Poplar with a 30 to 40 ton/acre yield and cellulosic ethanol processes; not bushels / acre feed corn.
Aldehyde pollution in areas prone to thermal inversion, like LA, will blow even this putative benefit away.
The cat converter eats the aldehydes (once hot..). It’s the azeotrope vapors at fuel fillup time that cause problems in the LA basin… Ethanol makes the vapor pressure higher so you get more VOC in the air so more smog. That’s why CARB wanted MTBE (and we all saw how well that worked out…)
While I’d really rather they just let oil companies make gasoline (lawyers generally do not make good fuel engineers… and government lawyers even worse ones…) I’d also be happy if they had straight ethanol cars like in Brazil. Give the vehicle the fuel it was designed for, but sell me a car that takes ethanol if I want one. Let engineers do the engineering!
E.M. Smith:
Let engineers do the engineering!
hear hear! It’s similar to LPG converted cars. They do less mileage and accelerate slower. However, LPG is a higher octane fuel, and if you advance the ignition timing and up the compression, you can actually get around 10% more horsepower out of the engine. I planed the head on a volvo estate and used to cruise from Leeds to Edinburgh (200miles) on 26 litres of LPG at less than half the cost of gasoline.
Saab used to have a nice little PCB in their turbo cars before GM took them over which would measure the ionisation in the upper cylinder and set the ignition advance just below pinking value. A simple LPG conversion on this engine done by SAAB yielded a 10% gain in horsepower with no further mods.