I am surprised that you wonder at their honesty Leigh, they are presenting paperts full of scientific evidence. If you put in a bit of effort you can verify the material yourself, all the datasets are available on the net. There is a huge amount of dishonesty going on (climate emergency, Britain must shut down at once, Plant a Billion trees) and one needs to understand the facts.


I will discuss the electricity system now, as none of the election claims are in any way deliverable. Truth has gone out of the window completely.

The important first detail to understand is that wind and solar are both expensive and have a very low availability. Solar only works during daylight, and in the winter and particularly when it is cloudy does not provide much power and must be backed up by an immediately available fosil fueled backup, usually CC Gas Turbines. Wind only works during suitable weather, and on average produces a fraction of the rating plate output (less than 25%). This is unavoidable and can only be overcome for constant supplies by backup from the Gas turbines, and in the case of wind often less efficient immediate availability ones. Our safe grid generation capacity is probably about 45 GW maximum, assuming there are no faults anywhere in the generators. Building more capacity is expensive and takes a long time. We have now shut down all our coal plants and nearly all the nuclear, so base load generation is much less stable and reliable.


Looking at the ideas being presentd by politicians everywhere, the answer is more electricity. This is probably because they cannot see where it comes from, so it is magic as in magic electricity tree (ref magic money trree!). Ideas to change gas boilers for heat pumps are technically possible but heating water from a heat pump is not very efficient (COE about 2) compared to air heating (COE maybe 4) so the entirity of the heating system must be changed for air conditioning, which in a home is not easy and uses more electricity for fans although this produces heat the efficiency is exactly 1 or less. Typical houses have 20kW gas boilers and there are about 20 million of them so around 400GW installed capacity. These could probably be replaced with a 5kW heat pump in most houses, or perhaps 3kW if the insulation and ventilation is improved considerably at a cost of £5-10k per house in total. Say £200 Billion and a long time to install, probably 20 years with great effort applied. Hot water heating would then need to be electric, probably another 1kW on average per house.


This means that the grid needs to supply 3kW more than at present per house continuously, an extra 75GW! Therefore we need to add nearly 3 times as many generating stations as at present and the distribution infrastructure to go with them, including digging up every cable in towns and fitting 4 times as many. What a bonanza for contractors and a disaster for the economy. Remember that the maximum difference that this could possibly make is 0.03 degrees over the next 100 years.


I have not even examined electric transport (another 40GW) or the ultra fast internet (another GW) or anything else. Who is crazy, or do you wish to dispute the facts which I have presented as accurately as I can. You may wish to dispute the average figures but remember there is a huge and ancient housing stock which simply cannot all be replaced, even if we had the money and time.


David Stone CEng MIET.

I am surprised that you wonder at their honesty Leigh, they are presenting paperts full of scientific evidence. If you put in a bit of effort you can verify the material yourself, all the datasets are available on the net. There is a huge amount of dishonesty going on (climate emergency, Britain must shut down at once, Plant a Billion trees) and one needs to understand the facts.


I will discuss the electricity system now, as none of the election claims are in any way deliverable. Truth has gone out of the window completely.

The important first detail to understand is that wind and solar are both expensive and have a very low availability. Solar only works during daylight, and in the winter and particularly when it is cloudy does not provide much power and must be backed up by an immediately available fosil fueled backup, usually CC Gas Turbines. Wind only works during suitable weather, and on average produces a fraction of the rating plate output (less than 25%). This is unavoidable and can only be overcome for constant supplies by backup from the Gas turbines, and in the case of wind often less efficient immediate availability ones. Our safe grid generation capacity is probably about 45 GW maximum, assuming there are no faults anywhere in the generators. Building more capacity is expensive and takes a long time. We have now shut down all our coal plants and nearly all the nuclear, so base load generation is much less stable and reliable.


Looking at the ideas being presentd by politicians everywhere, the answer is more electricity. This is probably because they cannot see where it comes from, so it is magic as in magic electricity tree (ref magic money trree!). Ideas to change gas boilers for heat pumps are technically possible but heating water from a heat pump is not very efficient (COE about 2) compared to air heating (COE maybe 4) so the entirity of the heating system must be changed for air conditioning, which in a home is not easy and uses more electricity for fans although this produces heat the efficiency is exactly 1 or less. Typical houses have 20kW gas boilers and there are about 20 million of them so around 400GW installed capacity. These could probably be replaced with a 5kW heat pump in most houses, or perhaps 3kW if the insulation and ventilation is improved considerably at a cost of £5-10k per house in total. Say £200 Billion and a long time to install, probably 20 years with great effort applied. Hot water heating would then need to be electric, probably another 1kW on average per house.


This means that the grid needs to supply 3kW more than at present per house continuously, an extra 75GW! Therefore we need to add nearly 3 times as many generating stations as at present and the distribution infrastructure to go with them, including digging up every cable in towns and fitting 4 times as many. What a bonanza for contractors and a disaster for the economy. Remember that the maximum difference that this could possibly make is 0.03 degrees over the next 100 years.


I have not even examined electric transport (another 40GW) or the ultra fast internet (another GW) or anything else. Who is crazy, or do you wish to dispute the facts which I have presented as accurately as I can. You may wish to dispute the average figures but remember there is a huge and ancient housing stock which simply cannot all be replaced, even if we had the money and time.


David Stone CEng MIET.