How many light bulbs does it need to change a man ?

[Paulh_Boats]

As you may have guessed from my username I'm into boating. Having read the scary stats about aircraft kWh in www.withouthotair.com I think my childhood fantasy of sailing around the world like Sir Francis Chichester its not so crazy after all!

Sailing from Dover to Calais, then down the French canals to the Med sounds like a lovely holiday, as wind-powered as possible. The Vikings travelled all over Europe and as far as Canada using zero fossilised fuels.

-Paul

[martin]

Lived aboard a boat when we first married - exactly that trip was on the agenda (the tax man and pregnancy put paid to that!), but have had boats on and off since then, and once helped crew a "tall ship" down the channel - that convinced me that it is a seriously good way to get about - and totally eco-friendly to boot. People will fight for a place crewing a tall ship, so that's long-distance transport sorted!

We don't NEED out of season fruit and veg, and as they proved a long time ago, tea clippers will do fine for one of the few of the only really "essential" goods for civilised life that needs to come from overseas - as for holidays, take longer, see more, appreciate the size and scale of where you're going, and enjoy the trip as much as the destination!

[KenB]

Martin,

Tea clippers were fine when the UK only had 20 million population and most of them couldn't afford tea anyway.

We now have an unknown UK population of somewhere between 60 and 70 million, and we couldn't even feed ourselves in the 40's when we were 2/3rd of the current population.

How many tea clippers would we need to meet the demand for goods these days.   "The Great Tea Race"  of 1866 showed that it took over 90 days to get 504 tonnes of tea back from China to the UK. A container vessel can do that journey in 21 days  with over 200,000 tonnes of goods on board with a crew of about 20.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Tea_Race_of_1866  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships

How many million tonnes of goods and produce imported into the UK - it all needs to be shipped, and the modern  container vessel is one of the most energy efficient available.

However it burns very low grade oil and this comes with a large amount of emissions.  A 68,500kW engine can be a bit juicy. Natural gas might be cleaner and this is what the new LNG bulk carriers do.  Basically a CCGT powerstation in the bowels of the vessel and an electric propulsion system.

My own experience of sailing is one of boredom punctuated by seasickness and sleep deprivation - not a good mix.



Ken

[KenB]

Martin,

Interesting pdf about the rise in tonnage of fruit imported from African nations to the UK.

https://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/Final%20Africa%20trade.pdf

187,000 tonnes of bananas alone.  That's 3kg for every "official"  UK citizen.

Add to this all the other imported fruit, veg, cut flowers, bottled water, dairy products, meat products, wheat and other cereals, timber, building materials, clothing, textiles, wide screen TVs, mobile phones, laptops, steel, cement, aggregate, cars, Chinese plastic junk, Ipods, Iphones, Illegals, solar panels, wind turbines, Listeroids, petroleum, gas and coal and you are looking at a serious tonnage. 

No wonder our balance of trades is a standing joke.

Is there anything left that we still actually produce ourselves?



Ken

[martin]

Well...... if we first of all remove from the equation an awful lot of things that we can either do without, or can quite satisfactorily make here, what are we left with? - in all honesty, not a lot - tea, spices, and a very few bananas as a "treat" once in a while.. Which would in the grand scheme of things, not require an enormous fleet of sailing vessels to supply........ although "tall ships" fulfill a romantic view, I'm quite sure more modern and larger vessels are quite feasible - as long as the goods aren't incredibly perishable, it matters not a lot how long the journey takes.......
I live in the original "iron country" down here in Sussex, where our cannons were forged - I'm sure that we could soon start making the odd Listeroid..........
I really do think that we have to "go right back to basics", and question absolutely everything - those of us who grew up shortly after the war have had a "small taste" of what may be to come - are bananas or ipods absolutely indispensible to life? - if the answer is "no", then it goes under the "luxuries" column, and should be equated with polar bear cubs sliding off ice floes, islands disappearing underwater, or whatever other measure we have of the damage our profligacy is doing our planet!
I  would contend that a roof and food are pretty essential - virtually everything else (particularly if we consider the privations endured by hundred of millions of people) is a luxury - will our conscience allow us to continue wallowing in that luxury, to the detriment of so much else.............?
Having probably got a lot of people shaking their heads in gloom and amazement, I'm quite hopeful that a more frugal, eco-friendly lifestyle could in fact be a far more fulfilling, happy and healthy one than our frankly ghastly modern society - the revival of communities, power (of all sorts) to be local, a slower way of life with far more people working from home, and on the land - a major holiday being a sailing trip to Bordeaux, and a couple of weeks in France, rather than intercontinental "jetting" - a nicer life, better food, and a clear conscience..............

[desperate]

If I can just peep above the parapet, who is going to anounce to the general public that this is how life is going to be? and what would their life expectancy be? BTW I am pretty sure we are the fifth largest manufacturing economy.

Desperate

[martin]

Well........... if we assume the alternative is that we all wake up one morning, and realise it's too late, I'd suggest the only way is through education - to encourage people to choose to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.......... I don't like the idea of "forcing" anybody to do anything, but if you  could actually sell them the idea of a better, kinder, gentler, slower life, there may be some hope........
As for life expectancy - higher than now! I'm not advocating a total abandonment of things medical at all - and with a gentler, better fed (better not more), less stressful, and less chemical riddled life, I see no reason why  people shouldn't live to extremely good ages

[desperate]

Martin, sorry I meant life expectancy of the person making the announcement.

Desp

[dhaslam]

It makes a lot of sense to import fruit and certain vegetables from warm countries rather than grow them in the British Isles using fossil fuels.   There used to be a lot of tomatoes grown using oil or gas for early season heating but I think that is less usual now.    There is also a strong case for locating industries that need very high energy inputs in North Africa using solar energy.     Transport by water is something like fifty times more energy efficient than land transport so traveling a few thousand miles is not that significant.    

Moving the manufacture of small items abroad in China and such places never made  any sense. The situation is  different for products that originated in the far east because in that case there isn't a waste of resources that  occurs when a there is a move.   In recent year in the UK some of the old industries that were displaced have been restarted on a smaller scale in the original locations.   There is  company close to here that restarted an old factory some years ago.  The owners are all former employees of  the old business.   They initially avoided using the offices and other buildings to save on rates and associated standing charges.  They have grown  to be one of the biggest employers in the midlands over about thirty years, even though the business was supposedly not viable.        

[martin]

Seasonality is a pleasure that is now largely sadly forgotten, thanks to imports, and the sad eco-frauds such as Planet Thanet, we shouldn't be indulging in such a stupid waste of energy.......... we don't actually NEED most of what is imported, or grown out of season,and I'm firmly of the opinion that overall we lose by constant availability of fruit and veg.........
I remember the utter delight of tasting the first strawberries of each season, having not had any (except for jam) during the intervening 10 months - the heady joys of the first of the "new" potatoes, so full of flavour that you could eat them as a dish on their own - tomatoes that you hadn't eaten fresh for months........ we don't NEED green beans to be flown in from Kenya, or grown in eco-disasters of hydroponics and high energy inputs - we'd be far better off waiting for the new season's crop 
I've been announcing it for yonks - I'm still here!

[martin]

for anyone following this thread - there's the third part of an excellent series called "Coal house at war" on at 7pm on BBC2 tonight (last week's is probably on iplayer) which is a programme taking modern families to live in WW2 conditions for a month in a Welsh terrace - men going down the pit, the wives at the armaments factories, and features things like their diet, clothes, heating (or lack of it), and general way of life - it's quite an eye-opener!

[peter999]

 Martin I firmly agree with the need to educate Joy Public, but in to days society (or lack of society) we only seem to take on board what we want too!

Just Lock at smoking!! if you told someone today that you had created this thing that you put in your mouth and set fire to it, which would make you addicted to it and kill you, BUT whilst smoking it you felt relaxed and you might loss weight!!. how many people would think it was a good idea and try it not many!1 BUT WE DID and we did get addicted and it is killing us but we still do it.

 Sometime you have to enforce compulsory measures (look at the CFCs in the 80/90s)

  I can not see ANY for the current political parties having the Balls to do it. It would be political suicide!!

 Which is why we can not afford to wait for the government to push forward the required measure with any force, they know the only way to solve the problem is to lower the perceived standard of living!!

which aint goint to be popular!!

Can you really see the likes of SIR FRED growing his own veg and riding his bke to the golf club towing his clubs behide him!!

[martin]

this about sums it up! - http://dingo.care2.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf

[David]

Thats the problem with his book. He tries to simplify it to the lowest point so that people understand it but then rather then question his assumptions people assume because he is a Professor the book can be treated as gospel. It then becomes very dangerous as rational decisions are made on the basis of this spurious information. 

I agree.

In the first version he discounted demand reduction completely. Instead he spouted the predict and provide approach, which assumes that electricity consumption always rises due to law of nature which we are powerless to do any thing about. He changed that.

I have spotted several mistakes in the current version, well the version of a few months ago. For example he took the actual annual output of wind in Ireland for a year and extrapolated this to Britain. That simply shows that he doesn't know much about the subject and so doesn't know what information is already available. Hourly wind speed information for the whole of Britain going back to the 1970s is available, plug into that whatever set of wind farms you wish to study and you have a realistic electrical output for that set. There is simply no need to extrapolate from Ireland, with all the problems extrapolation brings.

I think he is suffering from the problem which many amateurs have, a little knowledge is dangerous. He is not an engineer, he is a scientist. He should stick to science and leave large scale real world problems to those who are used to dealing with them, engineers. There are numerous examples of scientists trying to do engineering with bad results.

That is not to say that everything is bad with the book. When he sticks to something within his area of expertise, small scale, he is perfectly correct. Energy saving bulbs are an example of something he gets right.

[rt29781]

Hi David,

I am a scientist and I read "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" for the first time the other day.  I thought the author had done a great job of collating lots of facts, allowing other rational people to make judgements based on those facts.  As with anything this important there will be differences of opinion and perhaps inappropriate extrapolation of data but I believe from my reading it is a noble attempt to put down facts for a wider audience, goodness knows we need a wider audience to take global warming more seriously.

The over riding thing that struck me was that solar collectors are way more efficent than biological systems at trapping energy and as such we should use them rather than grow energy crops (including meat from wheat).  Surely we should find more efficient  (ie cheaper) ways of producing PV and ET collectors and push technology that converts low grade solar thermal into electricity (like the Matteran energy system).  I personlly think that nuclear is a dangerous technology because of the ability of terrorists to make use of the side products and its vulnerability to attack by terrorists.  As the above author is a Physicist I expect he will like nuclear technology.  I am a Chemist and well used to chemical plants failing due to human nature so nuclear plants are very dangerous in my opinion.  The apathy of the current UK government to renewables is however likely to force the UK into a major nuclear plant building programme.

I couldn't see the point of putting solar panels in deserts in Africa as security of supply is paramount.  Also concentrating solar systems appear to be redundant if Matteran can produce their low grade thermal generators at a reasonable price.  I think energy companies are very worried about losing control if a diffuse system employing cheap solar collectors is used to create a significant quantity of electricity.  This is probably the biggest threat to the future widespread use of solar collectors.

What we need now are engineers that can work with other disciplines to get the price for solar collectors down and then we can put them all over the place and the energy supply will be more secure with little downside.  Certainly our 150 ET tubes heat our house most of the year and the PV makes us virtually self sufficient for electricity.  Not bad for a scientist and an amateur eh .