News1 min ago
Isn't It Time We Got Fracking?
With gas prices going through roof and being held to ransom by foreign governments its absolutely ludicrous that we are not making the most of the shale gas under our feet. Ignore the idiotic eco loonies and scaremongering and just get on with it.
Answers
I live within sight of one of the biggest wind farms in the UK. For nigh on a month not one of them has turned a revolution unless it has power put into it to prevent seizing. Not an amp of electrickery has been produced from billions of pounds worth of kit. Kit that still needs thousands of pounds a day to maintain it despite it being useless because the wind is not...
08:11 Wed 22nd Sep 2021
I live within sight of one of the biggest wind farms in the UK. For nigh on a month not one of them has turned a revolution unless it has power put into it to prevent seizing. Not an amp of electrickery has been produced from billions of pounds worth of kit. Kit that still needs thousands of pounds a day to maintain it despite it being useless because the wind is not blowing. It will soon be the time of year when they are decommissioned because the wind is too great, and they are in danger of burning out. I have seen it happen. The whole rig has to be replaced a ta cost of £millions. Soon the snow will come and cover the solar panels rendering them useless as well. Meanwhile, out there in the real world a volcano is blowing and in a week reversing all the futile efforts that have cost £billions a week to implement. Naïve madness based on flawed emotional scaremongering.
//Burn them in power stations.//
Unfortunately all the power stations that could carry out the fatuous suggestion have been razed to the ground. Only last week the cooling towers at the Ferrybridge coal fired facility were blown up. The main boiler was only decommissioned last month and now the whole facility is gone. I takes about 8 years to build and test a 2Gwatt site like that. Why the hurry to make sure that the generators can never be used again? Was there really no politician that asked whether it might be a good idea to mothball the plants until we had the capacity to replace their output with the new and exciting unicorn and fairy facilities? Or is it a deliberate act of sabotage?
Unfortunately all the power stations that could carry out the fatuous suggestion have been razed to the ground. Only last week the cooling towers at the Ferrybridge coal fired facility were blown up. The main boiler was only decommissioned last month and now the whole facility is gone. I takes about 8 years to build and test a 2Gwatt site like that. Why the hurry to make sure that the generators can never be used again? Was there really no politician that asked whether it might be a good idea to mothball the plants until we had the capacity to replace their output with the new and exciting unicorn and fairy facilities? Or is it a deliberate act of sabotage?
I would guess I'm the only one on this thread who has had direct experiencing of Fracking and I can tell you its the last thing the UK needs. Fracking in the USA & Canada is done in very different environments from the UK, sparsely populated areas where there is maybe one property every mile.
We had Fracking commence around 1/4 mile away from our acreage in Alberta, Canada. We could not only hear the Fracking but feel the ground rumble underneath us. I rang a neighbour thinking we were having an earthquake and was informed of the Fracking. To cut a long story short we lost all the water in our well which provided for both the house and animals, as they accidentally fractured an underground water source. They bored another well which cost around $25,000 but never ever admitted it was them that had done it. I knew because at the time I was working for someone in the oil business and it was common knowledge. The Companies had emergency funds to compensate property owners.
I can't imagine what chaos Fracking would do in UK's densely populated areas. The government should be piling money into other forms of heating houses such as Air Source Heat Pumps. We are putting those into every house we build but they are far too expensive for the average home purchaser.
We had Fracking commence around 1/4 mile away from our acreage in Alberta, Canada. We could not only hear the Fracking but feel the ground rumble underneath us. I rang a neighbour thinking we were having an earthquake and was informed of the Fracking. To cut a long story short we lost all the water in our well which provided for both the house and animals, as they accidentally fractured an underground water source. They bored another well which cost around $25,000 but never ever admitted it was them that had done it. I knew because at the time I was working for someone in the oil business and it was common knowledge. The Companies had emergency funds to compensate property owners.
I can't imagine what chaos Fracking would do in UK's densely populated areas. The government should be piling money into other forms of heating houses such as Air Source Heat Pumps. We are putting those into every house we build but they are far too expensive for the average home purchaser.
Let’s have a little look at who is ga-ga and who is not.
This country has an energy crisis. It’s far more urgent than the so-called climate crisis and will cause far more damage and hardship and will have a far greater economic impact. It has been caused because successive governments have followed a lunatic scheme which has rid the country of its reliable energy sources which were under its control and replaced them with unreliable sources or those that are under the control of foreign governments. So let’s examine two aspects of the results of that strategy – electricity generation and cars.
As I type, the demand on the National Grid is about 32Gw. Over 40% of this is produced from gas, 16% from wind, 14% from solar 15% from nuclear The remainder is mainly imported from abroad but I must not forget the 1% produced from “Biomass” (i.e. mainly recently felled mature trees, “processed” and shipped 5,000 miles). So 30% of it relies on either the wind blowing or the sun shining and over 40% relies on imported gas. The cost of gas spiked in August, on top of a steady increase throughout the year. This naturally fed through to electricity prices. This has caused a number of energy suppliers to go to the wall because, due to the “price cap”, they cannot charge retail customers as much as it costs them to buy the energy. It also caused a major industry (fertilisers) to close down because it was uneconomic to run their plants. A major by-product of that industry is CO2 and the potential loss of that product threatened the food supply chain. The government has had to bail out those two (American owned) producers. And all this is because we depend heavily on imported gas over which we have no control.
So it comes to cars (we won’t trouble ourselves with commercial vehicles). There are around 32m cars on UK’s roads. From 2030 the sale of cars with ICEs will be banned. So let’s say by 2035 half of UK’s cars are electric. Let’s also say around one in eight will need charging at the same time (which I think is conservative, but never mind). That means 2m cars needing a charge. Car charging takes minimum of 7Kw. This means an additional draw on the Grid of around 14Gw – roughly twice what is being provided at the moment. This, of course, ignores that around the same time, householders will be switching over from efficient gas boilers to inefficient so-called heat pumps, placing further demands on the grid.
So, we’ve got an energy system currently that is barely able to cope and has shown signs of breaking down (in August/September) and which has no substantial and reliable planned capacity to be added to it. We have a change to private vehicles which will add probably 50% demand to the Grid. There are no explanations as to how people without garages or drives are to plug their cars in. We have no explanation how people will afford the cost of changing their home heating systems – assuming their home is suited to such a change. Continuing down this path is utter lunacy. The country needs to produce its own gas and its own electricity and anyone looking from the outside would have, I believe, no difficulty in deciding who is crazy and who is not.
This country has an energy crisis. It’s far more urgent than the so-called climate crisis and will cause far more damage and hardship and will have a far greater economic impact. It has been caused because successive governments have followed a lunatic scheme which has rid the country of its reliable energy sources which were under its control and replaced them with unreliable sources or those that are under the control of foreign governments. So let’s examine two aspects of the results of that strategy – electricity generation and cars.
As I type, the demand on the National Grid is about 32Gw. Over 40% of this is produced from gas, 16% from wind, 14% from solar 15% from nuclear The remainder is mainly imported from abroad but I must not forget the 1% produced from “Biomass” (i.e. mainly recently felled mature trees, “processed” and shipped 5,000 miles). So 30% of it relies on either the wind blowing or the sun shining and over 40% relies on imported gas. The cost of gas spiked in August, on top of a steady increase throughout the year. This naturally fed through to electricity prices. This has caused a number of energy suppliers to go to the wall because, due to the “price cap”, they cannot charge retail customers as much as it costs them to buy the energy. It also caused a major industry (fertilisers) to close down because it was uneconomic to run their plants. A major by-product of that industry is CO2 and the potential loss of that product threatened the food supply chain. The government has had to bail out those two (American owned) producers. And all this is because we depend heavily on imported gas over which we have no control.
So it comes to cars (we won’t trouble ourselves with commercial vehicles). There are around 32m cars on UK’s roads. From 2030 the sale of cars with ICEs will be banned. So let’s say by 2035 half of UK’s cars are electric. Let’s also say around one in eight will need charging at the same time (which I think is conservative, but never mind). That means 2m cars needing a charge. Car charging takes minimum of 7Kw. This means an additional draw on the Grid of around 14Gw – roughly twice what is being provided at the moment. This, of course, ignores that around the same time, householders will be switching over from efficient gas boilers to inefficient so-called heat pumps, placing further demands on the grid.
So, we’ve got an energy system currently that is barely able to cope and has shown signs of breaking down (in August/September) and which has no substantial and reliable planned capacity to be added to it. We have a change to private vehicles which will add probably 50% demand to the Grid. There are no explanations as to how people without garages or drives are to plug their cars in. We have no explanation how people will afford the cost of changing their home heating systems – assuming their home is suited to such a change. Continuing down this path is utter lunacy. The country needs to produce its own gas and its own electricity and anyone looking from the outside would have, I believe, no difficulty in deciding who is crazy and who is not.
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