HS2

[KingEdwardII]

6 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

2. Halving emissions from steel and concrete by 2030,

And just how do they think they are going to do that? Use fairy dust??

 

Yours, Mike.

[kryten65]

9 hours ago, melmerby said:

I thought the Curzon Street build was already using electrically powered machinery.

Well... The electric crawler crane that was all over the Curzon street photo was taken there just for that, it is the same one that's all over the press at Old Oak Common in the last few weeks and is actually working (in between breakdowns) with another of the the three in the fleet, at OOC

[corneliuslundie]

Agreed about steel. It is something those campaigning to close British anthracite mines don't understand. They say use low carbon steel but that has different properties - and still needs carbon from anthracite or another source.

And I am pretty sure that there is also a lot of carbon emission during the manufacture of cement, though I can't remember the details.

So you can't win.

But good on HS2 for trying.

Jonathan

[melmerby]

6 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

Agreed about steel. It is something those campaigning to close British anthracite mines don't understand.

9 hours ago, billbedford said:

Yer,yer,  But we still need coal to make the steel and concrete gives off CO2 as it hardens. 

If anybody watched the Michael Portillo Coastal Journey the other night, they would have seen that research is well on the way to make Steel without releasing carbon into the atmosphere and you don't need coal/anthracite to make steel, just a source of carbon which gets locked into the steel.

They were talking about being a net capturer of carbon in the future.

 

Concrete is a poor building material as regarding CO2 releases

[Ron Ron Ron]

There are a number of articles on how HS2's contractors are going to be using new concrete techniques that make a worthwhile reduction in carbon emissions.

It can't be eliminated completely, but they're planning to use a lot of new materials tech in the construction of some of the viaducts and other structures.

How effective all this will be? I have no idea.

[corneliuslundie]

I was aware that research is under way to produce steel without anthracite, but have no idea how near it is to commercial use. But from what I have read it uses a great deal of electricity, and as there seems to be little effort to increase generating/transmission capacity but lots of promises that everything will be going electric, that raises questions in my mind. The other thing about the anthracite mining is that we need it until the research comes to fruition, and there was a campaign not even to renew the current South Wales licence for a few years. Apparently though it was Ok to import anthracite from Germany!

I am no expert but I try to be a realist.

And I am not happy about "offsetting", ie carrying on with your bad habits while someone else bales you out.

Jonathan

BTW After the last three storms we need to plant tens of thousands of trees just to get back to where we were on 1 January.

 

[RJS1977]

And "3. Sourcing zero-carbon energy for traction supply when services start running." is really just smoke and mirrors.

 

Nobody has any control over where the electricity they take out of the grid actually comes from - you just get whatever mix of electricity happens to be in the grid at that particular time. 

 

The only way HS2 would be able to guarantee that their TS came from zero-carbon sources would be if they went off-grid and produced it themselves using wind, solar (and hydro).

 

Are they implying that there will be no trains after dark if it isn't windy?

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are often occasions when there is more energy being taken from the grid by businesses who "only use zero-carbon energy" than there is being supplied to the grid from zero-carbon sources!

[icn]

7 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

And just how do they think they are going to do that? Use fairy dust??

 

Yours, Mike.

No - for steel you just buy from producers using low-carbon energy sources (hello Iceland). I'm less familiar with concrete though.

[melmerby]

3 minutes ago, RJS1977 said:

.

 

Nobody has any control over where the electricity they take out of the grid actually comes from - you just get whatever mix of electricity happens to be in the grid at that particular time. 

 

 

Not quite true

Although all electricity goes into a pool, the actual mix is known and suppliers can buy their 'share' from the various sources.

In that way some can claim they are supplying zero carbon electricity, others may be supplying electricity that was made with gas.

We can ignore coal these days as it hardly features in today's mix.

[martin_wynne]

13 minutes ago, RJS1977 said:

The only way HS2 would be able to guarantee that their TS came from zero-carbon sources would be if they went off-grid and produced it themselves using wind, solar (and hydro).

 

It depends which comes first? HS2 or:

 

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60312633

 

Martin.

[RJS1977]

6 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Not quite true

Although all electricity goes into a pool, the actual mix is known and suppliers can buy their 'share' from the various sources.

In that way some can claim they are supplying zero carbon electricity, others may be supplying electricity that was made with gas.

We can ignore coal these days as it hardly features in today's mix.

 

Agreed as far as the mix is known, but whatever comes out of the socket reflects that mix and can never be said to be "100% zero carbon" as long as there are carbon sources feeding into the grid.

 

Whilst a supplier may claim that they only purchase electricity from zero carbon sources, that supplier's customers don't cease to get electricity when the "zero carbon" sources are unable to meet demand.

 

Smoke and mirrors.

[martin_wynne]

7 minutes ago, RJS1977 said:

but whatever comes out of the socket reflects that mix and can never be said to be "100% zero carbon"

 

I thought that was what the green and yellow "Earth" wire was for? 

 

[icn]

11 minutes ago, RJS1977 said:

Smoke and mirrors.

That's overly harsh. Within the limits of the current system, it's the closest you can get: you pay for X kwh of green electricity to be fed into the system, and you get X kwh of electricity out (give or take transmission losses and all that). The next step would of course be to ensure that you're paying for the generation to happen at the precisely correct time, but that's an order of magnitude harder to implement - and probably not worth the costs of doing so relative to just working on making all generation greener overall. Ensuring that there's at least equivalent green power generation is perfectly reasonable at this time.

 

Then again, one can compare with the SBB also claim their network is green... and it very likely is since they own their own hydro plants.

[KingEdwardII]

57 minutes ago, icn said:

for steel you just buy from producers using low-carbon energy sources (hello Iceland)

Hmm, you really do believe in fairy dust! As far as I know, Iceland does not produce steel. They do produce Aluminium, which is a better use for their hydroelectricity.

 

The Swedes have produced steel from ore using a Hydrogen reduction process rather than Coke, but they have been very quiet on how much it costs. The prediction is that it will be unaffordably expensive.

 

Yours, Mike.

[RJS1977]

34 minutes ago, icn said:

That's overly harsh. Within the limits of the current system, it's the closest you can get: you pay for X kwh of green electricity to be fed into the system, and you get X kwh of electricity out (give or take transmission losses and all that). The next step would of course be to ensure that you're paying for the generation to happen at the precisely correct time, but that's an order of magnitude harder to implement -

 

Not that difficult - just disconnect everyone on 'renewable only' tariffs whenever there isn't enough renewable in the grid to supply them all!

 

My point is though that irrespective of who the users who claim to be using "green" electricity are paying for it, they're still in reality receiving the same electricity as anyone else (which at the present moment - on a sunny day - includes 13% gas and 3% coal).

[APOLLO]

Real time UK electricity generation

 

https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?&_k=v32jl4

 

Brit15

[corneliuslundie]

Ah, nuclear fusion. I remember that when I was a teenager it would be coming any day. . . . .

I may live long enough to see it.

Jonathan

[RJS1977]

On 22/02/2022 at 17:32, boxbrownie said:

We didn’t have many school trips, but we did go to Stonehenge once, back then all us kids could climb all over the stones…..we even tried to push one over, oddly we couldn’t get it to move 

 

You need a Leyland Maxi to do that....

 

 

[The Stationmaster]

4 hours ago, melmerby said:

Not quite true

Although all electricity goes into a pool, the actual mix is known and suppliers can buy their 'share' from the various sources.

In that way some can claim they are supplying zero carbon electricity, others may be supplying electricity that was made with gas.

We can ignore coal these days as it hardly features in today's mix.

Not so.  Everyone gets the electricity the grid supplies to them unless they generate their own - you get only what comes down the power lines and you. can't decide whether you want it or not depending on how it was generated.  Even generating some of my own with solar panels doesn't make any difference to what comes through the mains - just that I use a bit less of it.

 

What some suppliers do is claim in tv adverts to supply only renewable energy and I do wonder if they will be accused of 'green washing' (those ads don't seem so common now incidently).  But if you look deeper into these companies they make it absolutely clear that what you get is just the same as anybody else is getting depending entirely on what is being fed into the national grid.  But what they actually do is pay a special charge which is effectively a 'green energy' premium to purchase REGO certificates (REGO = Renewable Energy Guarantees Origin), each certificate equates to 1 megawatt of power.  If an energy supplier buys, or trades-in, enough REGOs to cover the amount of electricity their customers are consuming off the national grid they can then claim that they supplying only green/renewable energy - even if they aren't

 

Going on 2019 prices of REGOs it would have cost an electricity supplier the grand sum of £1.30 per domestic customer to claim that they are supplying the average domestic customer with green electricity for an entire year.  And that electricity could be generated by anything from a wind farm to a coal fired power station or even imrted from a French nuclear power station.  However some suppliers do actually also have generator contracts and reallybuy in enough real green energy to match what they supply - it's just that the end customer doesn't receive  

[woodenhead]

There was quite a stink last year about this from some of the smaller companies who were doing deals because the bigger companies were in effect just buying green credentials, but even the smaller companies weren't really being completely honest either - if the wind don't blow, the sun don't shine you've only really a little bit of water before it's gas, nuclear or coal.

[DK123GWR]

51 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Not so.  Everyone gets the electricity the grid supplies to them unless they generate their own - you get only what comes down the power lines and you. can't decide whether you want it or not depending on how it was generated.  Even generating some of my own with solar panels doesn't make any difference to what comes through the mains - just that I use a bit less of it.

 

What some suppliers do is claim in tv adverts to supply only renewable energy and I do wonder if they will be accused of 'green washing' (those ads don't seem so common now incidently).  But if you look deeper into these companies they make it absolutely clear that what you get is just the same as anybody else is getting depending entirely on what is being fed into the national grid.  But what they actually do is pay a special charge which is effectively a 'green energy' premium to purchase REGO certificates (REGO = Renewable Energy Guarantees Origin), each certificate equates to 1 megawatt of power.  If an energy supplier buys, or trades-in, enough REGOs to cover the amount of electricity their customers are consuming off the national grid they can then claim that they supplying only green/renewable energy - even if they aren't

 

Going on 2019 prices of REGOs it would have cost an electricity supplier the grand sum of £1.30 per domestic customer to claim that they are supplying the average domestic customer with green electricity for an entire year.  And that electricity could be generated by anything from a wind farm to a coal fired power station or even imrted from a French nuclear power station.  However some suppliers do actually also have generator contracts and reallybuy in enough real green energy to match what they supply - it's just that the end customer doesn't receive  

Assuming that the system has some integrity, there shouldn't be any more certificates issued than megawatts of low-carbon energy generated. I don't know exactly how the system works, but one would assume that firms generating low-carbon energy receive the revenue from these certificates, in which case an increase in the price of these certificates would create an incentive for companies to invest in low-carbon generation capacity (if it doesn't, then the people who designed it should be sacked and replaced with first-year economics students). If that is the case, there is some merit in companies promising (and people choosing) '100% renewable energy' deals. If there is an increase in demand for such deals, there will be an increase in demand for certificates, which should increase their price which should create lead to additional investment in low-carbon energy generation.

 

That's roughly how I would expect a free-market mechanism to encourage investment in low-carbon energy to work. Alternative methods of encouraging such investment are available, but many require a very large number of people to engage in long-term thinking, or a smaller number of very rich people with the relevant experience and connections to engage in thinking about others. Alas, neither happens very often, so this is the sort of mechanism we're stuck with.*

 

*Of course, if you are a person and decide to engage in long-term thinking, or are a very rich person with the relevant experience/connections and decide to engage in thinking about others, you can help to change this.

[Mike Storey]

I think that, if the agnostic choose to read the actual HS2 document, they will see a heavy emphasis on cooperating in research with "green" companies, to improve their green output, not just by improving their green input, but also in significantly reducing their carbon output.

 

They are not claiming they will become 100% carbon-free, just a lot less than doing nothing would achieve.

 

How far they will get is open to question, but simply, these days, not open to accusations of "fairy dust". The science is there, the economics are questionable but the ambition is clearly stated now.

[Mark Saunders]

2 minutes ago, Mike Storey said:

The science is there, the economics are questionable but the ambition is clearly stated now.

Economics of buying a house are equally questionable but it’s the norm…

[Matt C]

On 21/02/2022 at 11:36, Mark Saunders said:

Going back to costs, there was an interesting item on BBC Radio 4 news about the costs and options for refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster. The committee to oversee the plans has been abolished and there was an interview with someone who was saying that no one was prepared to make a decision as they would get the blame!

 

Too many people frightened by big numbers again!

 

 

Did you not hear ? The contract has been awarded. . . Some Guy called Fawks apparently 

[Trog]

16 minutes ago, Matt C said:

Did you not hear ? The contract has been awarded. . . Some Guy called Fawkes apparently 

 

He has a good reputation, is supposed to be the only one working there with honest intentions.