Can’t see this happening (gas boilers)

[Dustydazzler]

Climate change: Ban new gas boilers from 2025 to reach net-zero

A ban on new gas boilers from 2025 is one step to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, say energy experts.

www.bbc.co.uk

thoughts ...?

 

[Zerax]

If the 'greens' have their way there will be no nuclear.

I read somewhere that Rolls Royce are experts at micro nuclear plants... and that we'll probably have several of these... regardless of what the 'Greens' say.

 

[Zerax]

so is the UK domestic gas network capable of flowing the vastly increased amount required without major upgrades?

I heard somewhere that they are already looking into all that... the biggest problem with hydrogen in plastic pipes is that the molecules are so small... you get alot of leakage ! Anyway... that's all being looked at and is already a workable solution I think... just needs to be 'scaled'.

 

[Zerax]

The more astute may sense that I don't think much of modern house builders

The issue is less to do with modern house builders and more to do with the woefully low standard of building regulations. As soon as the Regs are increased to the level that you or I would build to, if we were building a house for ourselves... the sooner we'll start to build decent housing !

 

[static zap]

Any insulation with trapped air has its own oxidiser.
( Just need a foam that loves CO2)
(It's ok I'm not Google and will share that for free )

 

[Simon47]

The issue is less to do with modern house builders and more to do with the woefully low standard of building regulations. As soon as the Regs are increased to the level that you or I would build to, if we were building a house for ourselves... the sooner we'll start to build decent housing !

They have improved massively - but there's still room for improvement.
But there's only so fast you can change stuff like that - you need the industry to be able to keep up and have the skills and products/services available.

I recall looking at a newbuild a few years ago - not for me. In this case it was a small development, and the owner (not the builder) was showing us around. It was ... really hard ... not to keep pointing out that all these "selling points" he was pointing out were nothing more than the minimum his architect thought they could get away with. And some of them were positive disincentives to buy the place - like the upper floors, large T&G sheets, glued together and glued to the joists, just to make the place unmaintainable (no "just lift a floorboard" for access).

 

[dodger421]

I read somewhere that Rolls Royce are experts at micro nuclear plants... and that we'll probably have several of these... regardless of what the 'Greens' say.

The are, Small Modular Reactor technology based on the reactors powering nuclear submarines with a few more innovations.

It’s not just electricity either, they can provide heating and hot water for a local area in a distributed fashion as a by product of the electricity generating reaction. If you put one of them in the middle of every new build housing estate you could remove those homes from both the gas and electricity grids, making them almost entirely carbon free (ignoring the issue of needing some sort of backup for the inevitable maintenance periods and breakdowns).

The main problem is convincing Dave down the pub to live next to a nuclear reactor.

 

[Simon47]

There's actually a few outfits working on them around the world. As Dodger says, the aim is to get something small enough that it can be delivered in one piece by road, and sited where there's demand - though industrial estaet rather than housing estate is more likely. Everything would still be grid connected, but the power flows would be considerably lower.
Safety wise, the idea is to make them inherently safe or intrinsically safe. The safety case basically relies on being able to take a running reactor and "just remove" all the support systems - no shutdown procedure, just remove all the support systems - and there won't be a big bang or meltdown. I could never remember which way round inherent and intrinsic are used in this context - one means the reactor will remain safe, but is likely to be damaged such that further use isn't practical; the other means it'll both remain safe and undamaged. Being small and (relatively) low power density is one part of it, then there's passive design things like putting coolant connections at the top of the container so that if the pipes are ripped off, the coolant stays in the reactor by gravity, and using fuel configured as (e.g.) ceramic pellets that don't melt until you get to the sort of temperature that wouldn't be possible.
So by this sort of passive safety, you can cover things like <insert terrorist group du jour> trying to blow it up. They might take out the support systems, but the reactor will just shut down and not do a Fukushima. It won't be a concern about someone stealing it - road transportable doesn't mean you can turn up with a flat bed and a forklift, it'll be specialist heavy lifting and transport of the sort you won't get far without the armed response units being able to see you.
As as refuelling will be a case of lifting the reactor out and dropping a replacement unit in - sending the old one back to the factory for refurb and refuelling.

But as said, the big problem will be persuading people who've swallowed all the "nukular is bad" stories that it's safe. Unfortunately, too many people are (apparently) incapable of accepting that the likes of Chernobyl never even came close to meeting western safety standards, and I've conversed with people who genuinely believe that Fukushima "proves" that nuclear cannot ever be safe (because nothing can improve in the 40 years since it was built) - while at the same time rejecting as absurd any suggestions that "well if you argue that something built now can't be built to better standards than they were 40 years ago, windmills can't be efficient because they weren't in the 80s". That's the level of intellectual capacity, or more likely, "deliberate selective incapacity" you are up against.

 

[Welchyboy1]

this Is crazy, my house was built in the 1920,s with solid walls and draughty floors, a heat pump is never gonna work?
surely hydrogen boilers have got to be the solution

 

[Simon47]

Except that we don't have a supply of green hydrogen and it'll be a massive program to change. And that's uf you ignore "minor" issues like the fact that hydrogen leaks through most materials and turns steel brittle.
I don't know if the hydrogen capable boilers need adjustment when switching (I'd expect them to), but think of the issues of switching the supply over and getting round all the appliances before sonething blows up !

 

[nicebutdim]

this Is crazy, my house was built in the 1920,s with solid walls and draughty floors, a heat pump is never gonna work?
surely hydrogen boilers have got to be the solution

It's not that crazy just yet.

Boilers can still be capable of running on gas and no plans have been drawn up to restrict the sale of gas. Perhaps we'll be encouraged to look at alternatives as increasing taxes are placed on gas.


Future generations are going to be exceedingly disappointed to discover that the earth will heat or cool as it pleases, despite the best effort of King Cnut and his cohorts.

 

[Zerax]

And that's uf you ignore "minor" issues like the fact that hydrogen leaks through most materials and turns steel brittle.

Didn't we used to use hydrogen years ago ? Wasn't "town gas" mostly hydrogen ?

 

[telectrix]

Didn't we used to use hydrogen years ago ? Wasn't "town gas" mostly hydrogen ?

Coal gas contains a mixture of calorific gases including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, ethylene and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

 

[Simon47]

And was oriduced from coal in coking ovens. Basic process is to stick a pile of coal in a closed space with a limited amount of air - and heat it. Some of the carbon will react with the oxygen to form carbon monoxide - the main component of town gas, and why sticking your head in the oven worked as a method of suicide.
As coal isn't pure carbon, other compounds get driven off as mentioned above.

Then at the end of the batch, the coke is pushed out, cooled, and sold as solid fuel - at whitch point the rest of the carbon is converted to CO2.

One of the nethids of making hydrogen is from coal. Add steam to hot coal, the carbon bond with the oxygen from the steam, leaving the hydrogen free. I've no idea how this compares with burning the coal in terms of energy out per amount if CO2 - but it's absolutely not zero CO2.

If you have massive amounts of "spare" CO2 free lecky - which no-one in the world does - then you can electrolyse water into hydrogen & oxygen. If (and that's still a very big if) we build a shed load of new nuclear then we might get to that point.

As an aside, as a road fuel hydrogen is really rubbish. There are existing processes that can combine it with atmospheric CO2 to make methanol. And methanol has the advantage that few modifications are needed to allow it to use the existing infrastucture to fuel existing vehicles. Somethibg that is so sensible that our politicians seem to be ignoring it in favour of somethibg expebsive and impractical !

 

[Zerax]

If you have massive amounts of "spare" CO2 free lecky - which no-one in the world does - then you can electrolyse water into hydrogen & oxygen.

I caught a bit last night on the news... apparently... Orkney is in such a situation and they do exactly that... using surplus 'green' electricity to make hydrogen.

My 'ideal' little home solution would be to have the entire roof covered with PV panels, then make hydrogen with the surplus. This could then fuel the Toyota Mirai hydrogen car. Just need a hydrogen powered van too. Using grid power from the cheapest hours would supplement the system in the winter etc.

All heating/hot water would be via ground source heat pump into a thermal store.

 

[Simon47]

I caught a bit last night on the news... apparently... Orkney is in such a situation and they do exactly that... using surplus 'green' electricity to make hydrogen.

And do they have enough surplus that they never need the backup (I'm guessing, diesel) generators ?

Using grid power from the cheapest hours would supplement the system in the winter etc.

And there's the point where most of these claims fail.
When it's a cold mid winter, and there's a static high pressure system covering the whole of northern Europe - so demand (especially heating) is very high, and there's "not a lot" of renewables (short days of sunlight, little wind). One that sticks in the mind is Dec 2010 - about a fortnight of those conditions - and AIUI we came very close to running out of generation capacity.

Since then we've shutdown both coal and nuclear capacity, because we've all (well some have) been enthralled by how much wind capacity we've got now and no-one likes paying for something to be sat around "just in case".

Right now, we're producing more from nuclear (5.3GW) than wind (4.5GW), and 3 times as much (15GW) from gas as from wind. Demand isn't all that high either (35GW). Source: G. B. National Grid status - http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
We're also importing 3GW from France - but if the brown stuff hits the fan, they won't have the spare lecky to sell us.

Some years ago now, I was at a talk about what was then the upcoming smart meter program. The guy was really knowledgable, and he had this anecdote from when he was at some meeting and asked a French guy how they balanced the grid. The answer was something like "when it's half time in Paris, the lights go out in Milan" ?
And it simply isn't true that "the wind is always blowing somewhere" unless we extend the grid and energy transmission capacities to be "worldwide". I've seen a paper (it was in one of the IEE journals, long time ago) where they examined records and found many cases where nulls in wind production in the UK corresponded with nulls in France, Spain, and some Scandinavian countries.