Andy,

I agree absolutely that there are technical solutions to all sorts of insulation problems however as Chris Pearson notes there are other difficulties which affect the cost benefit balance. The last house we owned in the UK had minimal loft insulation in the original building and none in the extension when we bought it. The central heating boiler also had no time clock, it was always on, just controlled by the thermostat. To have the loft properly insulated, cavity wall insulation and a timer for the boiler were sensible and easy investments.

Clive S

Britain has a very big problem with it’s housing stock going back many decades, not helped by the desire of every Englishman to have his castle, which has resulted in a lot of cheaply/badly built little houses with a large surface area to volume ratio. My two bedroom 80m2 apartment in Switzerland has just two outside walls. All the other surfaces are insulated by other peoples apartments. Could we persuade the UK citizens to live in this way? Is the thought of an apartment block still poisoned by the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s?

At what point do we consider that certain housing stock is no longer viable and should be replaced? There are a lot of embedded resources to be considered.

Public transport sizing is a complicated one. The vehicles have to have sufficient capacity for the peaks so what do you do off peak? You can have a second fleet of smaller buses which contain resources and also require additional trips to the depot to exchange them. The most efficient passenger trains are multiple unit confections but these cannot easily have the number of carriages reduced. The typical solution is to couple two or three units together for the peak times, reducing to one off peak. Once again you need places to store the units when they are not being used and to ensure they are the right end of the line when required.

Once you start to consider using fossil fuels as a back up for intermittent renewables you are entering a difficult resource consumption problem. How much over capacity of wind, solar etc do you need to install before you end up with zero or negative payback. This paper suggests a factor of 10 overcapacity is required to deal with still air periods in winter, so an installed capacity of 600 GW of wind power. Their proposal is that using hydrogen as a storage medium (yet more embedded resources) the required capacity can be reduced to 190 GW.

https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/renewable-hydrogen-offers-best-route-out-of-future-energy-supply-crunches

This links through to the paper ‘A System For All Seasons’.

Is this sensible? Is it just a blinkered green dream? At what point do you just burn some fossil fuels?

Andy,

I agree absolutely that there are technical solutions to all sorts of insulation problems however as Chris Pearson notes there are other difficulties which affect the cost benefit balance. The last house we owned in the UK had minimal loft insulation in the original building and none in the extension when we bought it. The central heating boiler also had no time clock, it was always on, just controlled by the thermostat. To have the loft properly insulated, cavity wall insulation and a timer for the boiler were sensible and easy investments.

Clive S

Britain has a very big problem with it’s housing stock going back many decades, not helped by the desire of every Englishman to have his castle, which has resulted in a lot of cheaply/badly built little houses with a large surface area to volume ratio. My two bedroom 80m2 apartment in Switzerland has just two outside walls. All the other surfaces are insulated by other peoples apartments. Could we persuade the UK citizens to live in this way? Is the thought of an apartment block still poisoned by the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s?

At what point do we consider that certain housing stock is no longer viable and should be replaced? There are a lot of embedded resources to be considered.

Public transport sizing is a complicated one. The vehicles have to have sufficient capacity for the peaks so what do you do off peak? You can have a second fleet of smaller buses which contain resources and also require additional trips to the depot to exchange them. The most efficient passenger trains are multiple unit confections but these cannot easily have the number of carriages reduced. The typical solution is to couple two or three units together for the peak times, reducing to one off peak. Once again you need places to store the units when they are not being used and to ensure they are the right end of the line when required.

Once you start to consider using fossil fuels as a back up for intermittent renewables you are entering a difficult resource consumption problem. How much over capacity of wind, solar etc do you need to install before you end up with zero or negative payback. This paper suggests a factor of 10 overcapacity is required to deal with still air periods in winter, so an installed capacity of 600 GW of wind power. Their proposal is that using hydrogen as a storage medium (yet more embedded resources) the required capacity can be reduced to 190 GW.

https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/renewable-hydrogen-offers-best-route-out-of-future-energy-supply-crunches

This links through to the paper ‘A System For All Seasons’.

Is this sensible? Is it just a blinkered green dream? At what point do you just burn some fossil fuels?

Roger B said:

Could we persuade the UK citizens to live in this way? Is the thought of an apartment block still poisoned by the tower blocks of the 60s and 70s?

No problem if you look at the number of blocks going up on the south bank of the Thames in Battersea. It's all to do with the neighbours! The tower blocks of the 60s and 70s were publicly owned. If you put a price tag well over £0.5M for the smallest apartments, the situation is rather different.