By Will Jones
Labour has launched a Net Zero scheme to transport hot water on barges on the River Thames to heat London homes instead of each home having a gas boiler. The Telegraph has the story.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has earmarked £41 million for a project to launch electric boats that will travel upriver from a power plant in Belvedere, south east London, before pumping water into storage tanks on riverside pontoons.
From here, the water, heated to almost 100 degrees Celsius, would flow through pipes into nearby heat networks, which are systems that supply hot water to multiple buildings from a centralised heat source, rather than each property having its own boiler. The Government has claimed the project could eventually supply up to 650,000 homes.
The scheme, believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, could also serve London landmarks, including the National Theatre, when it launches in 2028.
The Telegraph understands that most of the £41 million funding will go towards extracting waste heat from the Belvedere power plant to warm the water, as well as building four barges. Each barge could hold two million litres of water, equivalent to 80% of the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
It comes as part of the Government’s plan to roll out heat networks to as many as five million households in Britain by 2050. Under plans drawn up by Ed Miliband, the former energy secretary, Labour is expected to spend £1.1 billion on heat networks by the end of this Parliament.
The Government has said the rollout of heat networks is an important part of its Net Zero drive because the systems often rely on waste heat to warm homes. This power can be drawn from excess heat produced by data centres and energy facilities that would have otherwise been wasted.
Shimeon Lee, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will be baffled that £41 million is backing a scheme to ship hot water down the Thames.
“Net Zero projects cannot be handed blank cheques simply because they sound innovative. Ministers need to prove this delivers real value for money before taxpayers are asked to bankroll it.”
The barges will act as a temporary hot water supply while construction of a ‘mega’ heat distribution system underneath central London takes place.
Worth reading in full.
They should compress the hot air coming out of Parliament.
What? And ship CO2 to all those millions of homes?
HOW DARE YOU!
LOL
I hadn’t even finished reading the title when I knew the word Miliband was going to be in there somewhere. It’s OK though, he’s been moved to a less important position. Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, the USA, immigration, what could possibly go wrong?
Did your country run out of straitjackets?
No, we just allowed the inmates to take over the asylum.
I think they may have been encouraged to do so.
Sigh. All the smart people work in the city. Well you have AOC…
Speaking of AOC, it’s easy enough to do a sanity test on this crazy concept.
From Google’s AI bot:
“An average UK household uses roughly 30 to 45 kWh of energy per day for total heating and hot water during winter, which translates to about 9,000 to 11,500 kWh of space heating annually, heavily concentrated in the colder winter months.”
First, let’s optimistically assume we can achieve 90 C (195 deg-F) water going into a home—there will be heat losses in piping the water from the riverside barge to those homes even using new insulated pipes—and 25 C (77 deg-F) water coming out of a home (after all, we are trying the heat the home during winter!), yielding a net energy transfer of about 0.287 kWh (980 BTU) per gallon of hot water.
So, for the asserted 650,000 homes to be heated this way each requiring, say, 37 kWh of energy per day, the amount of hot water needed dockside each day would be (650,000 * 37)/0.287 = 8.4*10^7 gallons.
Also from Google’s AI bot:
“Modern cargo barges operating on the River Thames typically carry 1,000 to 1,500 tonnes of cargo per vessel, with a volumetric holding capacity averaging 1,000 to 1,800 cubic meters (m³) depending on the specific cargo density and barge design.”
Let’s go with the optimistic 1,800 cubic meters all being tank volume, which is equivalent to 475,000 gallons per barge load.
We then arrive at (8.4*10^7)/(4.75*10^5) = 176 barge loads of hot water per day being needed for this wild ass heating plan. It’s going to be a very busy Thames river!
This plan does reveal Net Zero at work . . . net zero basic engineering sanity.
Physics & maths win every time !! (:-))
A lot of these ideas come from back of the envelope calculations by ignorantly young engineers, or even people with no training, other than they can multiply and divide, numbers, that is.
Unfortunately, some of those “young engineers” haven’t yet learned that the backsides of envelopes, classic or “self-sealing”, have areas of adhesive that can gum up the works.
ermmmm… we have communal heating in the ex-USSR pretty much everywhere, so what’s new about the idea APART FROM >
Homes in the UK are unique in being absolute waste buckets of bad heating and inefficiency
And, what possible incentive if it worked would there ever be, to be energy efficient quite apart from…
if we get proper severe winters once again, (as happened in 1983-4) in Normandie the Seine froze solid for 2 months.
In Russia we always said you can have electricity, heating and cold and hot water but never all 4 at once.
At least we know.
Whatever could go wrong with such a stupid idea when the UK is incapable of running trains on time, and when they import wood chips from the USA to fuel a coal fired power station?
Before the parliamentary reshuffle there was talk of Mad Ed becoming the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would really have been able to ruin the country if that had happened!
“The scheme, believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world”
Really? New York and other major US cities have long supplied premises with piped steam or hot water.
What’s wrong with using barges?
What’s wrong with barges? Well handling cost, complexity and inefficiency for starters. We might include cost/benefit but Net Zero does not concern itself with cost.
Barges are used for may other bulk commodities where a wterway is available. They can carry a lot.
Just not as much as a pipe would connected directly to the heat needing to be trnsported.
That’s the same as using trains to transport oil instead of pipelines like keystone XL.
The irrational trippling in outlay(pump&empty waggons and use a vehicle- pipeline)benefits railroad-owners.
I wonder who really benefits in this case?
But it is likely that there is less heat lost in transit with a well insulated barge. Engineers have put some thought into this.
No Nick, engineers have not.
Nick, you are talking to real, professionally registered engineers.
Got any sources for that? If you do, and they had no list of drawbacks, they’re pretty crappy unreliable sources.
Do not disparage engineers like that.
You have no proof “Engineers have put some thought into this.”
And, apparently you likewise have not.
This is a political concept.
In reality engineers would have addressed multiple means of getting the hot water transported, then optimized the cost for each before downselecting.
The transit time in a well insulated pipe is orders of magnitude less than the transit time with barges. On top of that, the earth is a much better insulator than flowing water, which apparently was not taken into consideration.
Someone had a brain fart and now they are spending millions on it without thinking it through, including unintended consequences.
Question: What do you think would happen to the Thames ecosystem in the event a barge sank or collided releasing vast quantities of scalding hot water or a massive battery fire?
Politicians have put thought into this. Not engineers.
Mark, please do not disparage the word thought like that. 🙂
No, it was the politicians who generated this absurdity.
But of course . . . even graduates with just a BSME know that making those barges vacuum insulated would reduce heat lost in transit.
As to the cost and practicality of doing such, they leave those considerations to others that felt education in economics or materials science might have been useful, for some strange reason.
/sarc
Have you ever travelled in a boat GOING UP against the falling tide of the Thames, never mind a huge BARGE, which no doubt will get easily marooned or run into a bridge on the way…
These are to be new electric powered barges moving water up river to carry less than a swimming pool of hot water to be off loaded apparently to another reservoir and pumping station. This does not seem to be a bit nutty to you?
All part of a crazy dream to run the UK without reliable energy.
Sails. Wind power.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Jones. No wind today. How about a little cologne?”
Yeah to support a city of only 9.5 million who use over a one MILLION gallons of water daily, from them website:
LINK
Hot water is not a “bulk commodity” to be transported by barge. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the energy required to charge the batteries on the barges (for the full and empty trips) and pump the water on and off the barges would exceed the energy transported.
This is a truly idiotic scheme.
If one is going to provide heated water from river level directly to, say, the 30th floor in an apartment building (~300 feet altitude) one is going to need piping rated to at least 130 psia working pressure.
However, city water mains typically deliver water at 50 to 80 psi, so boost pumps are used to directly supply the needed water pressure to floors above the 18th or so, or to pump water to tanks near the top floor which then develops feed pressure by that height being above lower floors in the same building.
Wondering what the cost will be to have such boost pumps rated to handle 90+ C water, as well as to have building rooftop water reservoirs insulated to minimize heat losses under this crazy scheme.
Forgive me for my career experience in mechanical/aerospace engineering showing through in my comments.
That is why the Erie Canal is transporting so much cargo today. /s
Can carry a lot.
Jumbo Barges: Larger inland barges can hold up to 2,000 tons (or about 1.26 million gallons of liquid cargo)
Water weighs 8.4 lb/gal. The liquid cargo mentioned above does state what kind of liquid.
Depending on which ton is used, the amount of water ranges from ~ 450K to ~ 530K gallons.
4 barges. Assuming 2 round trips per day. 4 x 2 x 530,000 = 4.2 M gallons per day.
According to Google AI, a typical UK household uses ~ 20 gallons of hot water per day.
So, this scheme could possibly supply 210K households. The UK government projects this could service 650K households. Oops. Not with 4 barges.
According to Statists, there are about 3.7M households (2.5 average occupancy) in London.
The hot water is also going to be used for heating. In the winter, the average house is going to need a lot more than 20 gallons.
Correct.
Google AI gave me the average.
Use of averages is perfectly acceptable in climate science, right?
So why not here?
/sarcasm on steroids
10 lbs per imperial gallon…only 8.4 when the Queen Anne gallon is used
Two standards. You are correct.
US
Imperial
Use metric
“Jumbo Barges: Larger inland barges can hold up to 2,000 tons (or about 1.26 million gallons of liquid cargo)”
2,000 tons (not tonnes) would be the equivalent of 482,000 gallons of liquid water, NOT 1.26 million gallons.
For once Nick, use your brain for something other than a device to prevent your skull from imploding.
Think about all the issues involved.
There’s the cost of barges vs. the cost of pipelines.
There’s the energy needed to move the barges upstream vs the energy needed to move the water through pipes.
The biggest idiocy of all is how much heat is going to be lost from that hot water while it is being transported and stored.
Yes, there are places that use hot water for heat. The vast majority of them are for single buildings. A few are used for a single complex of buildings. Most of the places that try to heat a block or two, use steam, not hot water.
Actually nothing new. In the soviet union they piped communal heating to everyone whole areas of the town being fed by the waste heat from a coal fired power station or occasionally nuclear.
I have campaigned in vain to have my flat in Eastern Europe converted back from this system to be able to turn the radiators off. IMPOSSIBLE, they insist on me paying thru the nose every winter for a place I rarely use…
Then, to make it worse the EU told them all no longer allowed to burn shale oil or something local, so they had to charge everyone to convert to GAS, coming from guess where?
RUSSIA.
Bulk hot water is nit a commodity – it’s a folly.
True commodities have a value. They will be sold for an amount greater than their cost of production and transportation. If not they would not be shipped.
This insane scheme does not involve a market price system for the water being shipped. Therefore it is impossible to measure whether it is destroying wealth or not.
Given that it requires taxpayer funding, this means private investors wouldn’t invest. Therefore it is not economically viable, not a business and destroys wealth – but then that is the case for wind/solar too.
Bulk commodities don’t degrade much at all, but water loses hot water to the outside at variable rates thus increases inefficiency.
I’m always on the lookout for that scientific/mathematical phrase: “a lot”.
It alerts me as to what level of dialog I might have to drop down to.
Except when the water level is too low, too high or frozen solid like it was 150 or so years ago.
An extreme cold winter is not an unlikely scenario (1963 + 1983 and later too….)
– and just remember the whole of the UK comes to a standstill with just 2 flakes of snow!
Nick, they are electric barges. I trust this answers your last question.
Con Ed has five steam plants in NYC. Many of the buildings in lower Manhattan are heated with steam.The steam plants use fossil fuels.
Buildings in London used to be heated by Battersea power station. The pipes still exist. But Battersea power stations was COAL and the urban woke were not having that so they turned it into a heritage site instead of a power station.
In fact if small modular reactors ever end up being built close to towns they could do the same thing, and keep the streets clear of ice and snow as well.
My personal hope is a glasshouse next door to a reactor growing pineapples and mangoes. Or bell peppers and chillies.
OH? Please enlighten us just how and where this system in “New York and other major US cities” operates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
No mention of barges, which is the whole point of the article.
Nick excels at changing the subject.
He loves herring, red herring.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/red-herring-fallacy-in-philosophy.html
And don’t forget the carp, which he’s so full of.
District heating from a central plant is used all over the world and is a highly efficient system. NYC uses steam, which carries much more heat per unit weight than hot water. And all of systems pipe the steam or hot water to the load.
In this case Nick is correct, steam heat (power plant waste heat and purpose built boilers) is common in major cities. My college dorm was heated by steam from the campus power plant – resulting in us opening windows in January during local grid outages when the plant was running at full capacity. However, nobody was ever stupid enough to attempt to transport this in bulk to remote sites. I find it hard to believe a credible cost/benefit analysis was done in this case.
Steam, not hot water.
Steam carries a lot more energy, it also is not used to carry heat long distances.
Steam, not hot water.
Swing and a miss.
I would hope the electricity comes solely from onboard solar panels. 😉
Just think! Charging those batteries will require the power plant to produce more electricity and hence more hot water. Definitely an optimized solution. 🙂
The ‘first of its kind’ refers to transporting by barge, isn’t that obvious? District heating itself is nothing new, it’s pretty common in eastern Europe for example.
If it is first of its kind, one has to wonder why after decades (or longer) no one ever tried it before.
Good way to cool data centers, but what about summer.
The question should not be, “Why not?” when governments propose novel uses for taxpayer money, but “Is it worthwhile? Does it do something useful, and is its cost worth its benefit?”
Your default position seems to be “Let’s spend money ob every hare-brained idea possible” without even planning to come back a year later to see if it was effective or worth the cost.
You are a tried and true statist who loves to spend other people’s money.
You left off the obvious questions of what else could be considered? and what are possible unintended consequences?
Nothing wrong with using barges if it makes economic sense, but this scheme says the barges are only a temporary system so is a waste of money. Just get on with building the underground system of pipes, so long as that is economic. (If it is a Government scheme I doubt if it will be, though.)
Shipping water on water does not sound like something that makes the most economic sense
but it makes sense in a progressive scenario where middle age windmills are the solution for energy problems.
I have a great IDEA.
I’m going to ship Welsh coal to Newcastle and Newcastle coal to Wales.
The real key to this is when the coal arrives in Newcastle it becomes Newcastle coal, and when the Newcastle coal arrives in Wales it becomes Welsh coal.
It’s the perfect system, a closed, never ending cycle that prevents the coal from being used to generate electricity, heat housing, etc.
You should be the minister for energy
What’s wrong?
Cost. Including labor costs for the crews.
Flow rate inefficiency.
Then there is the risk of water transported disease.
Then there is the risk of water transported chemicals.
Keeping the water hot.
I am sure if a few more brain cells are dedicated to this the list would grow longer.
Between buildings, they use steam, not hot water. There are buildings that use hot water for heat, but those heat the water on the premisis.
What’s wrong with using barges? Both cost and transit time. Even with insulation, a lot of heat is going to be lost between the power plants and the homes.
Which they installed before they built the city.
What’s wrong with using barges – they will heat the River Thames.
Nick: you forgot the /sarc tag.
Next we can put solar panels on it and a big battery and then EV cars can pull up and charge from it at same time. It’s a great idea right Nick 🙂
You are as insane is Miliband.
Other than it’s entirely stupid? What’s the matter with pipes that don’t have to be dry docked to clean their hulls regularly, that don’t sink or run into things, that don’t have to be hooked up and unhooked each time they deliver, that use the existing pressure to push to their destination, that last, if properly installed,for 50-60 years, that don’t clutter the river with additional traffic… Should I go on?
“Should I go on?”
No need to, but I would appreciate your explanation of how “use the existing pressure to push to their destination” works with regards to piping water over distances and to upper elevations . . . as in the case of moving water from river level to businesses and residences that may be 1-10 km distant and up to 20 or more stories above river level.
The pipe pressure in cooling water outlets from power plants or data centers is typically low, around 10 to 30 psig (0.7 to 2.0 bar), just enough to overcome the frictional losses of the piping network and lift the water back to the top of a cooling tower or discharge basin.
In comparison, municipal water supply system pressure for residences is typically in the range of 45–80 psig. Big difference!
I am submitting my entry for the ‘Naming of the Four Barges’ competition . . . .
“Hairbrained”
“Dickhead”
“Shear Stupidity”
and
“Madness”.
Let’s hope there’s a general election ASAP.
The naming ceremony will be eagerly attended. The actual names which correspond perfectly with your suggestion are.
Abbot
Lammy
and
Milliband
[“Let’s hope there’s a general election ASAP.“]
NO !! Not another costly charade.
General elections are now just a revolving door, allowing the next section of the uni-party to take their turn of feeling important while lining their pockets.
The
plebsvoters think they are able to change things by changing the MP, but while they are distracted with petty squabbles or the latest scare, the main scam goes on in the background; it’s a bit like a drunken gambler convinced they can beat the casino.Correct – elections are just temporaryrelieves for the deep state,
as it takes a few months for the peoples benefit of doubt to wear of and realise that
that nothing has changed except for the name of the parrty and minister – and that the hidden empire is still in charge.
As I have said before. Changing from one party to another doesn’t change much. Same cart new driver. The change needs to be away from parties. The harm they do is self evident.
Don’t get me wrong. I think democracy is working perfectly. A perfect reflection of the venal habits of the voters. When they eschew bribes and embrace integrity things will change for the better.
I would have chosen to include Greta. 🙂
What about Boaty McBoatFace?
Argy-bargy.
Rube Goldberg
Name each one “44 Round-trips a Day – YOU’RE DREAMING”
(see my optimistic calculation posted above).
Oh, like in medieval times when the public baths were heated 3 times a week.
Use otherwise wasted heat from burning municipal waste to heat homes? Brilliant! What could go wrong? In the hands of Miliband and Labour, everything. These are not engineers or entrepreneurs. They’re idiot politicians who have never created anything useful or productive in their lives. First of all the numbers don’t add up. Heat 650,000 homes from the waste heat of a minuscule 66 MW “Energy from Waste” power plant? I don’t think so. And why not pipe hot water to homes near the Belvedere plant? That’s much more practical than barging it upriver. In the hands of a proven, successful innovator like Elon Musk this could be great. Directed by Ed Miliband? It’s a waste of money. Leftists’ only great accomplishments are…um…nothing. But they’re really good at wasting taxpayers’ money and making their lives more miserable.
Well, Elon’s big dream is that Rockets will replace airliners taking people from one city to another across the globe.* Also moving people on a lifetime adventure of living on Mars! Take an exciting 9 month journey to a new uninhabitable world with opportunity to remake it into a new home for other people in the distant future.
Perhaps he could also bring “waste heated” boiling water to London in the future as well….
* nextbigfuture.com/2019/07/spacex-starship-will-carry-1000-people-anywhere-on-earth-cost-500-2000.html
SpaceX’s (basically Elon Musk’s) Starship HLS is far from “proven” or “successful”. NASA awarded SpaceX approximately $4.04 billion in total current contract value (with over $2.6 billion paid out to date) to develop/mature the Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to the point of being able to successfully land humans on the Moon by end-2024 . . . that was, yeah, nearly two years ago and even today the basic Starship Heavy booster and space vehicle (not even close to Starship HLS in complexity or necessary “man-rating”) has not even achieved one orbital flight around Earth.
What an embarrassment!
And despite NASA’s latest, schedule-slipped-once-again, plans for landing humans on the Moon before end-2028, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that this will happen.
Look for NASA to publicly announce yet another slip in the Artemis IV human moon landing to 2030, maybe later, with some of the usual pablum excuses being fronted (not even ruling out them citing “climate change” as contributing to the delay, HAH!), following the mid-term elections in November.
This morning, September 28, SpaceX finally put a Starship flight vehicle into Earth orbit. The process was basically “amateur hour” with the launch control team first declaring they would NOT perform an orbital insertion due to concerns over losing one of the flight vehicle’s six Raptor engines, but then only some 10 or so minutes later reversing that range safety announcement to fire another Raptor engine to perform the orbital insertion.
BTW, three separate Raptor 3 engines out of the total of 39 allocated to this mission failed . . . that’s a single mission engine reliability rate of 92%. Anybody here believe that is sufficient reliability to have the Raptor 3 man-rated for a manned lunar landing mission?
Hmmm….
66 MW power plant.
Just numbers, not reality.
Assume half of that is recoverable waste heat. 33 MW.
Assume starting temperature is 20 C.
1,187,862 Joules to raise 1 US gallon of water to 100 C starting at 20 C.
1 J = 1 W-s.
The power plant could warm 27 gallons water, per second.
2M L = 528K US gal.
5.4 hours to heat a barge worth per hour.
4 barges per day is the maximum supported by the assumptions in this analysis.
No, assuming no boiling, 1,266,455 joules (= 0.352 kWh) are required to heat 1 gallon (8.34 pounds) of water from 20 C (68 deg-F) to 100 C (212 deg-F).
Therefore, 33 MW of waste heat could theoretically warm (33*10^6/0.352*10^3) = 26 gallons of water per second (close to what you stated under your assumptions) from 20 C to 100 C.
So yes, it would take approximately 5.6 hours to obtain that amount of water at 100 C, based on the assumed “waste heat” output from TBD source.
That’s hardly compatible with the calculated 44 round trips per day per barge required for transporting the required quantity of hot water under this really idiotic scheme of using just four barges on the Thames River.
Leftists, they have the WORST ideas, they never work, because they are idiots.
I dislike the use of left and right sobriquets.
They have origin in the seating arrangements of the Roman Senate.
My preferred flavor of the day:
“Activists, have the idiotic ideas that never work, because they are idiots.”
This has to be the stupidest idea ever. The UK has lost it
[“This has to be the stupidest idea ever.“]
No !! The stupidest idea ever was allowing self-serving & or zealous politicians to run/control countries.
Well it is certainly up there with the Labour idea of leaving our own oil and gas in the ground while championing paying premium world prices to import the same gas and oil from the same ground via Norway.
Brilliant!
Perhaps remodel the UK’s oil platforms into “affordable” homes and then create round trip electric barge transportation to haul residents, their shopping and boiling water out and “recycling ready fuel” back along with the “compost”…..
Ya ain’t seen Nuttin, yet.
Not sure it is the top of the list, but certainly it is a contender for that spot.
Net Zero WHAT?
IIRC
Shades of the potential Labour Minister for Transport in “How to win an election or at least lose by very much”
Head meet Desk,
Desk meet Head.
I prefer drywall. Leaves better impressions. 😉
I don’t think these idiots have got a clue what installing a district heat network retrospectively in a city means.
The cost, the disruption, the bankrupting of local affected businesses when customers can’t park or even get to their premises for weeks on end. All using diesel powered construction equipment of course.
The reason that this is the first scheme of its sort is that previously, no one has ever proposed anything as stupid in living memory.
Another day and another loony idea from Lol Lol Labour.
I didn’t realise April 1 arrived late this year.
You seem to have missed the other 250 april fools days we had so far this year.
Bookmark this for when wee see an article that the electric barges can’t move upstream.
The BBC has a variation on the theme.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxe87mp60lg2o
And, as Paul Harvey would have said, “the rest of the story.”
“Government scheme.”
“£41 million.”
Let’s just stop and think about that for a moment. Does anybody want to place a bet on how much it will really cost the government (AKA the taxpayer)?
I give it a couple of years before the government (i.e. the taxpayer) coughs up another £41 million, then another, and another.
Because we all know the government, i.e. the taxpayer, has bottomless pockets.
So, 3 x 41M = 123M to save how much?
An investment, by traditional definitions, yields a return on investment.
Do not tell Massachusettes about this.
They would want to create a local Thames River, the duplicate the UK insanities.
Story tip. There are places in the UK with geothermal potential, but not in or around London. Ground source heat pumps are a better bet there. https://ukgeothermalplatform.org/
Reads like an article from The Onion.
Not quite. Most of the Onion articles get a laugh of a chuckle or a guffaw.
You can’t pump and store liquid water at temperatures greater than around 95C, and to heat a home, you need delivered water temperatures of at least 60C to prevent Legionella bacteria proliferation. What’s the total heat capacity of “80% of the volume of an Olympic swimming pool” with a 35C temperature change? Do competent engineers even exist in the UK?
They exist, it’s just that showing too much competence makes it hard to be employed by government.
I posted most of those number in a post up above.
On the contrary, in a typical automobile ICE, the water coolant (with or without antifreeze) exiting the engine block and entering the radiator is at its hottest, usually around 210°F to 220°F (99°C to 104°C).
These coolant systems use liquid water above its normal boiling point (212°F, 100°C) because the pump-driven operating pressure in this portion of the cooling loop is above 14.7 psia, typically 15-16 psia as controlled by the relief valve in the radiator cap, which vents into the radiator overflow tank.
It might technically work, but I doubt it will be cost effective, but Labour and other peoples money is a bit of a meme
I have to think it would be better to put those resources toward actually installing the central heating system (if you are dead set on that) rather than investing in an alternative green virtue venture.
Also, where does the energy come from to charge the barge and heat the water? (Yes, it’s waste heat, but what is the source?) And why not use it directly to heat the buildings instead?
20 years ago I went fishing in Kamchatka IN JULY. The city had central hot water instead of houses having its own hot water heaters. The city was out of budget and there was no money for hot water until next March. Always have a backup!!!
This is the first time I have seen a fraction of an Olympic swimming pool used as a measure. It is not clear to me that % division is the best system for good public understanding. We already have pints, gallons, hogsheads, and others. Indeed, it would make a kind of retro-poetry to have barges full of hogsheads of hot water moving up the Thames. Loading and unloading them will create jobs. There would be no need for batteries to move the barges – the tide will do that, on its own timetable. Earth hath not anything to show more fair…than extreme political idiocy, exercising in its own sunshine.
I had a paper published decades ago where I used file cabinets to compare sizes of various approaches.
The concept is to give the uninformed a means to conceptualize, but an Olympic swimming pool is not a common size metric.
Division is never a good approach to help people visualize things.
Especially not with Olympic Swimming Pools.
As most people have never seen one and have no clue what the actual size is(especially in countries with no metric system).
And those who have seen one know only about 2 dimensions as the depth is not really visible and irregular on top.
More the point, while Olympic pools are a set, precise length, there is variability in both width and depth.
So which Olympic pool are we talking about?
[“The concept is to give the uninformed a means to conceptualize, but an Olympic swimming pool is not a common size metric.“]
‘The size of Wales or was it whales– is often used as a size metric, but as this is about hot water (as opposed to hot air), you could use lobsters (:-))