British Gas raise prices by 12.5%

Tories announce banning of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 to be replaced by electric vehicles. A few days later BG raise prices by 12%. You really couldn't make it up. Idiocracy.

The energy required for transportation as in land transportation currently amounts to around a third of all of our energy use, i.e. one third of all the joules of energy we produce come from pretty much fossil fuels being burned purely to run our vehicles.

Four percent of the worlds power comes from Nuclear, seven percent from Hydro, and two percent from other renewables.

Electric vehicles will catch on yes, but where will the power come from, we would need to multiply our solar, wind and tidal generation by a factor of 15, hydro has its problems and the best sites are probably all already taken, we've stopped building Nuclear power stations.

So where will the power come from, the answer is gas and coal because there is next to no chance that there will be enough investment in renewables to meet the demand.

So personally I think you might see electric vehicles gain some foothold in the first world but we have nothing like the generation capacity to manage a complete transition, the chances are that we just shift the problem from oil to coal and gas, although we will gain a bit from raising the base-load floor of the current power generation system i.e. we will make better use of the power generated in low demand periods.

Fair point about Hinkley Point but I was using the Global "We" rather than the parochial UK version.

There is plenty of sun for solar here in the UK and there is plenty of demand for it even in the summer months as many more offices use air conditioning, I am sitting here looking at the monitoring pages for 4 sites two of which have 8KWp capacity one of which generated 1.1 million watt hours (MWh) last month the other 850 kilo watt hours. The older site generated 7 MWh last year and the newer one has already produced 5MWh this year so far, all four sites feed back into the grid.

Regards wind the main reason older turbines have to be shut down in high wind is because of the gearbox the gear train that steps up the rotor to get sufficient speed for generation, that applies to the older generation the newer generation of turbines are simpler to build because they don't need a gearbox and they drive the rotor directly, they use extremely powerful neodymium magnets which allow generation of power even at slow rotational speed instead of requiring a complex gearbox which is can be prone to wear and tear.

It's ultimately the people, the conversion would be painful regards living standards in the developed world and that is the real reason it won't happen until far too late.

Storage is a solvable problem and ironically the move to electric transport would smooth out the need for storage as the vehicles themselves would become a significant part of the storage system recharging at times when generation has to occur but industrial and domestic usage is otherwise low.

While there are very large reserves of Lithium particularly in seawater, in crustal form in minable concentrations it is relatively rare, that makes serious exploitation for lithium batteries a problem in the long term, also Lithium is an interesting element in that it falls apart very easily, some of it was manufactured during the big bang but in stars it tends to fall apart at what is considered fairly low temperatures.

Anyway net result is that the primary material needed for electric transport batteries is considered fairly rare even although it is present everywhere on Earth at low concentrations.

I seriously hope that we find solutions but the obstacles in our way are huge, much bigger than most people imagine, it is all very well being an optimist but somebody has to provide the actual solutions and that requires investment, whether that investment is happening is another matter.

I'm not averse to Nuclear stations but you would need 30 of them the size of Hinkley C to just replace the current amount of electricity we generate, now remember that vehicles represent almost as much again so you are looking at 50 or 60 Nuclear stations just for Britain alone, and coal at best is pretty polluting even if you forget about C02.

I mean anyone looking at the numbers should be scared very scared, because basically the numbers are saying the party is over chums.

And all the while we keep burning a precious very limited irreplaceable resource that is one of the basic raw materials of the materials industry that underlies the modern world, just to keep our toys moving.

Interesting I will revise my numbers later as I have been working from peak generation capacity and the site I am looking at suggests the loading tends to be a good bit lower.

It would be good to find some info on transmission losses as well.

They are not at risk from power cycling as far as I know so there is no harm in switching them on and off, but you aren't going to save much now by turning them off in comparison to the savings you would have made switching off incandescent or fluorescent lights.

Slightly off topic, but relevant, why is it some electronic devices no longer have a power off button? Our LG TV has no power off, just stand-by. Of course, I could turn the power off at the plug, but its hassle when the plugs are located at the back of a big cabinet. Probably doesn't consume much power on standby, but still, maybe I'm old school, I feel safer knowing something is switched off. Honestly, when its dark in the lounge, all these devices on standby light up the room like a Christmas tree.