My thinking is every suitable roof on houses,buildings should have solar panels on them as should suitable brownfield sites that cant be used for housing etc. Its a pity there arent any domestic wind turbines because id have made a fortune this weekend
I agree @WeeTam about solar panels. I would love to cover my roof with them but unfortunately it is too much money. I run my little greenhouses with solar power but that is as far as I can afford to run with alternate power. I don't think solar, in my winters, would ever be able to replace our natural gas heat unless one had a full field of panels next to their house. Geothermal looks interesting too but another thing I cannot do, living in a suburb.
I enquired about roof panels and was told I'd never get my money back as I dont use enough electricity, the bloke spent more time looking around my garden and allotment than bothering about the solar panels when he saw my electric bills.
Aha, @pete, but this is my thinking. If I had my own power generated, I wouldn't have to be so stingy about using it. Life would be a lot simpler not having to shift usage to nights and weekends or worrying about the bill coming in after spring cleanings or other active times.
I have my doubts as well. Problem is storing renewable electricity for the still dark nights. Charging all those electric vehicles every night causes problems, who wants to switch the television off at 10:00pm to allow the car to charge for the school run.
I've seen road signs over a number of years with their own solar panels, why can't this be done with road lights? I realise cost is a major part (as always) but with more and more new housing estates being created, solar lights could be placed as the roads are constructed. LED's can and should be used to replace all the older lighting.
To produce hydrogen by electrolysis would require vast amounts of energy - more energy than you would get out at the other end, I would bet. As @pete rightly points out, the amounts of electricity that we are going to need to do all of these things is simply stupid, and way above the amount we could produce by renewables unless we covered every green inch of the land with solar panels or windmills. Think about it - your average home boiler is about 20kw; your average electric car on charge would be 8 or 9kw. So your average Joe gets home around 6pm, sticks his 3kw oven on, plugs his 8kw car in, goes for a 12kw shower and has the 20kw heating on. Even being on the conservative side, that is 40kw per household on average in the evening peak. There are 27.6 million households in the UK. Assuming that as an average consumption on a cold winters night, that would require 1080MW, which coincidentally is exactly the same as ten times the total UK grid capacity in 2019. Who is going to pay for ten times the generating capacity, where will it be sited, and where will the conductors be routed? Bearing in mind that 10x the amount of electricity will need to be supplied to every street in every city, town and village. All of that copper, all of those raw materials to make the insulation, all of the energy to dig the streets and build the power generation and all in 15 years.
The difficulty there is that the LED required to illuminate the sign is not all that high powered as it only has to reflect off of a reflective surface. Then there is the batter technology that is used for those signs - mostly Lithium ion nowadays, and reasonably good at storing energy quite densely, but they are also known to be quite volatile when they go wrong. The battery required to operate an LED suitable of lighting the road would almost certainly take up most of the inside of the pole that the light sits on - charging that size of battery in the winter would require a really (really) big solar panel that would be a liability in the wind. Then there is the volatility - if a vehicle was to hit one, it would essentially be like a bomb looking for a place to go. Roads would be shut for hours or more, with nearby properties likely to be evacuated. Not good. And if you think I am exaggerating - take a look at what California fire departments have had to do for electric cars like Teslas; they have had to build 'dunk tanks' so that if one catches fire, or is in a serious wreck, the car can be submerged in water for a few days until they are sure that things are sufficiently cool and stable so as not to spontaneously reignite.
I take your point FC. With that idea abandoned, we know that many roads are over-lit and many roads are un-lit which doesn't seem to cause problems. Perhaps we should cut down or remove lighting from many roads. All vehicles have lights and apart from safety issues like major junctions many lights could be removed.
Definitely the case, no process can be a 100% efficient , if they were we wouldn't have this problem.
Just saw on the news here that Greta is to get her own TV series....and its being produced by the BBC....is there anyone that still thinks she is not doing this for money? Or is it fake news?
Hang on, we'll need lots of that solar power to grow stuff under LED lights because so many of our green fields will have been built on. Or to power battery powered trucks to import more of our food. What, like removing indicators as they've already done with BMWs ?
After deep deliberation over a glass of Jamaicas finest, I've come to the rather "rum" conclusion that electricity should be banned...just think, that would solve all pollution problems at one fell swoop! With no cars, we would be forced to travel round on horses...just think of all that lovely manure for our gardens! I'd like to bet Greta couldnt come up with such a simple solution!