Heres some Solutions for the UK Energy Crisis and our dependancy on other countries

15 comments

1. More nuclear power surely needs to be part of the solution. But remember whatever the technology, bringing on new energy sources is never going to be a short term fix to energy prices.

   Also as someone who has worked with companies using anaerobic biogas generators. They are not perfect, they were subsidised by the government years ago and lots of farms took the govt up on the offer. Turns out they aren’t very profitable, require an awful lot of maintanence and they also need a huge amount of supervision.

2. And how long does this take to set up? What’s the time line, tell us, from construction to output?

3. [deleted]

4. >Wave Power

   It’s an absolute pain in the arse to maintain, and isn’t really worth it for the energy produced. Metal components _do not_ like salt water.

5. Nuclear has to be our global bridge, for sure (esp. Thorium for NextGen). Solar isn’t practical for the UK…for obvious reasons. And it’s going to all really rely on native sourcing depending on location and climate — wind, solar, geothermal etc. (And NextGen geothermal is likely the best long term solution for everyone.)

   You’re right about fracking though. Look at the USGS earthquake map for places like Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, if you want to see how badly it screws up the land.

   https://earthquaketrack.com/p/united-states/oklahoma/recent

6. Is there enough food waste to enable the Anaerobic Digesters to generate sufficient and reliable volumes of gas to make any significant amount of gas?

7. hmm, yes every house having solar panels on the roof is a good idea in theory. The problem that people forget or ignore is when you want to export that power onto the grid. One or two houses on a string is fine but if you get large numbers exporting on one string can result in unbalancing off load on the dno transformers. That along with how messed up the frequency and power factor will be…

   The UK needs a massive overhaul of its power grid.

   We need to invest in nuclear or green gas i.e. hydrogen ( generated using renewables during low demand)

   We should have been building nuclear power stations twenty years ago so we need to invest and ignore the nimby’s.

   The problem with renewables is they are not switchable, so we waste alot of potential energy when winds peak during periods of low demands, so we need to figure out away of storing that energy for use during high demand periods.
   The possibilities for this are:
   * Green hydrogen to mix with current natural gas from the north sea (national grid are currently exploring hydrogen/methane mixtures in current infrastructure)
   * Large batterys ( not really cost effective and limited lifespan)
   * Compressed air storage in old gas pipelines.

   My biggest issue is at the moment we have a large amount of human waste that we ironically waste, why there are no biodigesters at our sewage plants creating methane? They could burn it on site and power all the pumps on sites.

8. You forgot about building tidal lagoons.

   Dig a hole next to the sea, when the tide comes in it drives a turbine, when it goes out it drives it back the other way. When you want to use it as a massive battery, you let it fill up and then don’t let the water back out till you need the power.

   It also works environmentally as you are creating small pockets of artificial wetlands which will help balance what we have already removed around the coast

9. How about insulation and a National house building effort to create a million low carbon homes.

10. Mass transit and walk/cycle friendly cities. A bus full of people saves a massive amount of emissions (assuming they’d have driven instead).

11. Those aren’t solutions to the current crisis, they’re potential options for long-term power production. Wind is, clearly, key for us. We have hundreds of thousands of square miles available, it’s already producing a quarter of our energy, doesn’t produce waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years, and so on.

12. Nuclear power is prohibitively expensive. Even assuming current projects meet their budgets (lol) it will cost 4 to 10 times the CURRENT price of gas. And it will take at least 15 years to build those new plants. Again, assuming we can somehow approve and deliver big infrastructure projects on time (lol).

    And that’s just electricity.

    There is no pragmatic way to replace gas use. You might be able to do it with nuclear, if you’re willing to pay 50 times the current amount you do. That would get my house up to about 50k a year in energy prices.

    This is why we use gas.

    We need new gas sources. We never should have gotten so reliant on such limited suppliers.

    We need to use less. But people adamantly refuse to insulate their houses or take other measures so…

13. The fact that the only sources I can see here are youtube videos tells me a lot about where you lot got your “engineering degrees”

14. Progressive energy pricing – force suppliers to charge higher prices for higher use households, e.g. first kwh/day can take the old price cap, second kwh/day can take the fucked up new one, third kwh/day can take the even more fucked up one coming in october. The current system with standing charges is actually not even flat but regressive, meaning youre effectively punished with a higher average price per kilowatt-hour for lower use, next month itll be 40p a day just to stay connected, before youve even used any electricity. This incentivises the households that can afford to eat up the higher cost of using more electricity to use more since it actually reduces their average cost/kwh to do so. I would propose scrapping standing charges (yes this would mean unit rate goes up to compensate) and implementing progressive energy pricing as laid out earlier. Ive yet to see an argument that convinces me this is a bad idea besides “ahh why should I, a heavy electricity user be subsidising you, a paltry fridge-lights-vacuum-and-phone-only user”, which is unconvincing to me. This doesnt solve the problem of how our power is generated but it does soften up the “crisis” bit for those that need it most – its a lot easier to reduce usage by 2kwh from 20kwh a day than by 100wh from 1kwh a day

15. What about all the condensing boilers in the UK that don’t actually condense because their flow temperatures are set too high? 10% gas saving per house right there.

    If your return water temperatures to the boiler are above 54 degrees you will not be taking advantage of the heat recovery in the condensate one bit.

    General rules of thumb are hard to do but:
    55degC for domestic hot water flow setting (need to avoid legionella risk)
    45degC or as low as you can go and still keep the house warm & heating up in a reasonable time for the central heating flow temperature.

    There is more to this subject – good articles here: [https://www.heatgeek.com/](https://www.heatgeek.com/)