Climate Change.

I agree localised generation on every roof in the country that points in the right direction but even that would not be enough you would still need some solar farms as well and you would still have people complaining that the panels are ugly on the houses or that their out their window to the farm is now horrible because it has all these panels.

You need much more wind power as well many more offshore wind farms and many more onshore, but again you will be fighting the NIMBY brigade who think they are ugly and spoil their landscape, I think power lines are far more ugly than wind turbines or solar panels personally I think they are quite pretty.

In addition to both of these you need a national power storage infrastructure and I don't mean Elon Musk's Lithium batteries there simply is not enough accessible lithium, you need the storage to make use of the excess sunshine on days when you don't need it and the wind blowing in the night when you want to use that power during the day, you need things like giant molten salt batteries and hydrogen generation using electrolysis but you need them everywhere.

And you need unpopular tidal solutions like the bigger of the Severn Barrage plans, and you need other wave generation schemes which together with all of the other irregular sources need to feed into the national storage infrastructure.

And while we are at it we should be building a load of Nuclear stations as well because we are not just replacing our existing electrical capacity we need to double or treble our electricity generation in order to replace hydrocarbons used for transport.

Also decentralised power generation has the added benefit of increasing resilience, solar panels everywhere means you don't cause entire cities blackouts when a power plant fails.

I repeat again, my position is that it is already to late, it was too late 20 years ago, nothing will be done we won't avert 1.5 degrees, we won't avert 4 degrees, at some point in the next 100 years we will see the beginning of the extinction of the human race, we won't be alive to see it but it will become more and more obvious to our children.

I'm a spectator and have been a spectator for most of my life because I knew this was coming and I knew we would do nothing about it.

When it is right there in our faces in 20 years time there will still be people denying the problem exists or pretending that it is natural, at one time I imagined that people might wake up when the floods and storms and heatwaves reached the point they are at now, they haven't and they still won't when they are breathing their last breath dying of heatstroke.

Humans are very very good at procrastinating.

This is not a long range energy collection application, you could not collect heat on the motorways and usefully transport that heat for remote use in cities, it appears to be primarily related to heating application it's not appropriate for power generation.

However it is very interesting and another option to add for the future.

I dont' think that would work, thermoelectric generation is extremely inefficient and needs a substantial thermal gradient for power generation, the technology is used in long range spacecraft and the heat source there is radioisotopes.

For conventional generation you need a big enough heat gradient to superheat water to steam for use in turbines and you won't get that from a low thermal gradient on a road, I was not aware of this specific application but it does appear to be designed to replace or supplement domestic and commercial interior heating.

That's the point Malcolm there is, we've known about it for a very long time, I knew about it in the 1960s as a child Thermoelectric generator - Wikipedia

We use it spacecraft like the Voyager crafts and the rovers on mars they use direct generation from Plutonium but it is not very efficient.

Yes wind power is solar power, photovoltaic is direct use of solar power, hydroelectric is solar power (sun creates water vapour which rises and falls into reservoirs), tidal is gravitational power derived from the Moon and Earth's rotational energy, and our current energy source is concentrated fossil sunlight in the form of coal and oil, and finally nuclear power derives from radioisotopes created in death throws of two colliding neutron stars the only kind of supernova that can create elements as heavy as Uranium we are lucky there was some in our local region of the galaxy when the earth/sun system condensed out of stellar ashes.

One last one Fusion power is the exact process that makes the sun work for that we need hydrogen plasma at millions of degrees C it's incredibly hard to make and control and it might never be controllable on earth, it's not dangerous in any way just incredibly hard to make it work.

I think the next major wars or at least the climate wars when they come will be over clean water.

Isn't that what the great god Thatcher sold us on 40 odd years ago, leave it to the market the market will always price a commodity at the appropriate price.

Was that opposition back in 2012?

I found this MHI Vestas' Isle of Wight blades for offshore wind farm by 2021 | Isle of Wight County Press

So there is a manufacturer of turbine blades on the IoW interesting.

Interesting

We have page after page where climate activists are being derided, then we get a put down of the US president for what is essentially an irrelevancy then along comes me to state my position and my thinking on it, after all I mean the thread is a discussion where people state their view, I happen to think that sneering and finger pointing at international figures like Biden because of the trappings of state and the way international politics is carried out is wrong, I think it is a deflection and I make my point, but no that must mean that oss is on a power trip

I'm not JohnAsh John, I can let you have the last word I don't have my ego invested in this, other people will come along and read this thread they can read my posts and they can read yours and others and make up their own mind, you might have missed the many times in many threads where I admit I am wrong or deliberately put in an edit to clarify a point or to correct a statement that I later find out to be incorrect because basically deep down I care about technical accuracy.

It's a discussion board primarily to help British and Filipino people in their relationships and to help people overcome the hurdles and barriers raised by their governments and you happen to be very good at helping people with that as is Malcolm, it also happens to have a general discussion area where people can talk openly about lots of different subjects, I tend to respond on topics where some science is involved because I care deeply about science and technical accuracy.

I also happen to be able to type pretty fast I can do that because I type for a living although as a programmer that does result in some odd capitalisation and some strange grammar sometimes and yes my replies can be long winded, trying to find the right way to express a view on a subject is quite hard and I often don't succeed and often my posts are a bit too long but hey that's life there are people who could have replied far more succinctly than I can but sadly many of them, and one in particular, is no longer here.