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Britain Set For First Coal-Free Day Since Industrial Revolution (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK is set to have its first ever working day without coal power generation since the Industrial Revolution, according to the National Grid. The control room tweeted the predicted milestone on Friday, adding that it is also set to be the first 24-hour coal-free period in Britain. The UK has had shorter coal-free periods in 2016, as gas and renewables such as wind and solar play an increasing role in the power mix. The longest continuous period until now was 19 hours -- first achieved on a weekend last May, and matched on Thursday. Hannah Martin, head of energy at Greenpeace UK, said: "The first day without coal in Britain since the Industrial Revolution marks a watershed in the energy transition. A decade ago, a day without coal would have been unimaginable, and in 10 years' time our energy system will have radically transformed again." Britain became the first country to use coal for electricity when Thomas Edison opened the Holborn Viaduct power station in London in 1882. It was reported in the Observer at the time that "a hundred weight of coal properly used will yield 50 horse power for an hour." And that each horse power "will supply at least a light equivalent to 150 candles."
Britain's rise in the mid-19th century was due to coal. And major cities in the UK are still present around strategic coal fields. Moving away from coal is inevitable, but the British economy benefited greatly from this dirty energy source. And the West is currently denying those benefits to the third world, isn't it convenient that coal is bad now that the first world has exhausted theirs and no longer needs it. But the natural resource is plentiful in Africa, India and China and every step is being taken to prevent them from using it. Maybe Britain would be less full of shit if they started contributing to building of the infrastructure of Africa, if they are so keen on denying them the use of coal power. Solar panels have a very large capital expense, they are cheap in the long run, but they are not feasible for running industry in poor countries.
I've seen this story posted on environmental sites touting this as a success. But it's really just no coal on the island... when electricity imports should also be considered (there are interconnections between continental Europe, and also Ireland). And then there's the other big coal user: steel. A lot of British steel has left the island; it's just produced elsewhere and imported.
So good for British air-breathers, but it's not exactly green energy transformation as some may believe.
The UK is still using LNG for electricity.
I really don't understand why people bought the idea that LNG is a good thing.
It's still fossile!
On top of this, nuclear power is in the cross hairs despite having close to the lowest CO2 emission of all types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions_of_energy_sources#2014_IPCC.2C_Global_warming_potential_of_selected_electricity_sources/
It's also the only thing we can run 24/7 without sending wast amount of CO2 into the air.
In short scrap all "renewable" hippie-power and go all nuclear with hydro as regulating power (or buy from your neighbors)
(That said, hydro isn't the best thing either for local ecosystems)
I see you didn't bother to read your own link before posting an extremely obvious too-good-to-be-true claim.
Let me copy-paste from our own link:
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the average electricity consumption mix of a Norwegian household was 36% renewable.[4]
As per the European Union's 2009 Renewables Directive (later added in the EEA Agreement), Norway has established a national goal for renewable energy - 67.5% of gross final consumption
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So 36% of what they *use* is renewable. What they *produce* is hydro and wind. Where do they get the electricity the use? They buy nuclear-generated electricity from Sweden.
Does that mean they don't use fossil fuels? Well no, transportation and everything is still fossil fuels, but their *electricity* doesn't come from fossil fuels. It comes from Sweden's nuclear plants amd Norway's mountains by way of hydro.
Hydro IS great in places with lots of mountains far from people. When you put your hydro upstream from populations, you eventually get Banqiao (200,000 dead, 11 million displaced). So don't do that. But where you've got lots of mountains and no towns downstream, hydro is great. It's not powering 99% of Norway, though. 36%, according to your link.
The link to the source for your 36% on the wikipedia page is dead, but anyway, Norway is producing more clean electricity than they consume (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/statistikker/energiregn/aar-forelopige/2015-05-06?fane=tabell&sort=nummer&tabell=226241). Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
If you include transport, heating, etc, the picture is as you point out, a bit different. But even then, the majority comes from renewables.
OP was clearly talking about electricity.
The 36% number comes from the Guarantees of Origin scam. It's an economic system which disconnects the production and consumption of energy from the buying and selling of it. It basically allows renewable energy to produce double the amount of clean conscience, for the same amount of clean energy:
Also, I suspect that the "67.5% of gross final consumption" includes stuff like gas for vehicles, wood for heating, etc, not just electricity, which makes it meaningless in this discussion.
Complete and utter fucking bullshit kid. Go ask your dad instead of making shit up. The plastic bags were a shitload cheaper, around an order of magnitude, than paper ones and that was the reason.
Reusable bags are great. I buy a new one every time I go to the store. I have a bunch of them at home in a drawer. My carbon sink I call it.
He's going to bring back the whale oil industry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> Whether they sell their clean electricity abroad for others to use or they use the clean electricity themselves doesn't make a shitload of difference. The net effect is the same. Are you splitting hairs or am I missing a valid point here?
You may be "missing a valid point" because I didn't explicitly say it. That is, there IS a difference, an important difference, but I didn't say what the difference is.
On a small scale, perhaps an individual, the net effect would indeed be the same. On a broad scale, for national policy and international agreements, there is a HUGE difference. I should start by saying wind power is great. It can produce a lot of cheap clean power when the wind is right. The power available from wind is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. So there is a LOT of power there during a medium-strong wind, and virtually no usable power in a light breeze. That cube power law becomes even more important at higher speeds, when the extreme forces on the turbines are trying to destroy them. So within a fairly narrow range of wind speeds, wind power is great. Roughly 30% of the time, it provides a significant portion of Norway's electricity needs. The other 70% of the time, the wind isn't right - and building more turbines doesn't change that. If the world, or Europe, produced 500% of the energy they need on Saturday, and 10% of their needs on Wednesday, that doesn't work. The net effect is *not* the same. The net effect is blackouts on Wednesday.
This is why we'd love to have a practical method of storing enough energy to run a country. We don't have that yet. There are some ideas, ideas which are 10-20 years out - and have been since the 1960s. Maybe one day some very clever people will come up with a practical way to store the immense amount of energy needed to power a whole country.
Norway DOES have clean electricity (not to be confused with energy). That's awesome. Let's look at how they achieved that. Was it by spending hundreds of billions on subsidising solar-electric, handing out taxpayer dollars to "companies" who haven't actually produced any solar panels, but are run by friends of the politicians? Nope. They achieved clean energy by taking advantage of their particular geography that's especially well-suited to hydro (and taking the risk of a Banqiao) and buying clean nuclear energy (despite the risk, and mostly fear, of a catastrophic nuclear event, which is theoretically possible although nuclear has in fact been the safest energy).
Nice milestone, but see https://www.gov.uk/government/... for a far more informative overview. It looks like coal usage in the UK is falling off a cliff.
Given the land mass of Africa, most of it being empty desert, they have infinite potential for solar power (aside from being underneath migratory routes for birds).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I think there is some truth to both of those versions of events, in that plastic bags were considered both more environmentally friendly and they cheaper when they were introduced. The problems of plastic bags not decomposing wasn't yet a known issue when they were first being introduced in the 70s, and at the time, it took about 1/4 of the energy to produce a plastic bag as a paper one, so it seemed like an environmental win at the time. But while the adoption of plastic bags may have been supported by environmentalists at the time, it's pretty clear the reason stores started offering the choice of plastic or paper was because they could buy 4 plastic bags for every paper bag. That's a clear cost saving and the fact that some customers found the plastic bags more convenient that paper (because they had handles) made it also a goodwill win. Blaming environmentalists for the change, however, is so one-sided as to be beyond the point of self-delusion.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Chernobyl killed far more than 38 people.
I suggest to read a bit up on it.
They used recruits to clean up, directly after the fire. Hundreds of thousands of them died over the next years, ten thousands a few weeks later already.
The total death toll is estimated good above one million poeple.
So says greenpeace, the WHO, 'Doctors without frontiers' (not sure how they are called in english) and plenty of others of oranizations involved in that matter.
I witnessed thousands of dead during the weeks when they still put them on the red place for vigil, before they stopped that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually we don't know how many cases of what ever cancer there has been.
The numbers are locked down and not public.
However about 20,000 children where treated in Germany for Thyroid Cancer ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Too bad the colonies across the pond are now run by a muppet.
Yeah, and Carthage must be destroyed, too.
Your side lost. Five and a half months ago. Isn't it time you got over it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way