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The future of energy generation and storage

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Tisme said:
Adiabatic cooling
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Oh my goodness, tried to get my head around that but I seem to be getting too old to learn new things.

I imagined it was just the cold water in the lines sucking heat out of the roof tiles ie the water warms from the heat in the tiles then the heat energy is transferred into the pool leaving less heat energy on the roof.

On a hot day with our cool nights if I am naughty and leave the cover off our pool it will be 23deg in the morning and 30deg in the afternoon.

In 40k litres of water 7deg is a fair whack of energy. Understand much is not straight from the house.

That said if you pumped it around the walls of your house before it went up on your roof it wouldn't cost that much more to pump and give you a more direct benifit as it would be inside your insulated house. Is this an option pool heating companies offer? I don't think it is because as I said I tried googling whether I was imagining the difference the pool heater was making the house and found nothing.
 
qldfrog said:
In your case, I would protect it with a wire mesh, you would still get a lot of output.Agree about solar pool heating, does indeed cool down the house, when you actually need it so double gain!!!
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Did think about this, though a secondary consideration is we live the normal life of using power in the morning and night.

Solar hot water is spot on because the hot water is made through the day and we use it at night.

When they make batteries cost effective I might look again. That said we are tragic power users and I would need a massive array I imagine to get anywhere near enough power for my family so def never work off the grid. I used to think my old man was a tight a**** for complaining about lights left on etc but I am starting to feel his pain with the way power costs have risen in the last 3-4 years in wa.
 
This is only the beginning of home energy storage and like all new devices the better is yet to come. Tesla Powerwall's battery life, efficiency, storage capacity and cost are questions the Tesla marketing machine will tell you is what you need right now.


we have some of the world's highest electricity prices.
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Not me. Australia has a high household energy waste habit.
 
SirRumpole said:
How governments and electricity companies are ripping off the consumer


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-10/hill-the-great-energy-con-that-is-costing-us-billions/6924272
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That is a great read. Spells out so clearly how we are being ripped off by big business and government over power costs.

Makes the arguments re a Carbon Tax laughable.

In a sense it sharpens the discussion about going to renewable energy ASAP. The final cost to citizens and corporations is only partially dependent on the direct generating costs of electricity. The big bickies/costs are in the various rent gougers in the middle and the poles and wires scam is a big part of the deal.

Anyone for some serious reform of the industry ?
 
1947, that's 68 years ago, there was serious concern in Tasmania that electricity prices needed to be kept as low as possible. That concern came not from consumers or even government, but from the monopoly electricity supplier itself, fearful that industry would locate elsewhere and consumers would use gas if prices weren't kept to the minimum.

That approach was the same in most states and lasted until the "microeconomic reform" political types came along and decided that Australia having the third cheapest electricity in the OECD was "inefficient" and needed to be "reformed". And hey presto! The financial types worked their "reform" magic, and now we've got among the highest electricity prices anywhere on earth.

The problem is not on the generation side, costs there are basically unchanged in nominal terms since the early 1980's and have outright crashed in real terms after adjusting for inflation. There might be some gold plating somewhere but it sure isn't in the power stations.

Anyway, that's the way it is so you may as well parody their marketing efforts and make some money selling electricity. A blatant promotion, but I'll post it anyway.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_jkwyRDpUo
 
Smurf1976 said:
Tour time again!

And after a lot of requests over many years, Poatina Power Station tour will be on Saturday 14th November, 10am - 2pm.
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Well I think that counts as a success! Ended up with a 2 hour long queue outside as rather a lot of people turned up...

Good to see parents bringing the kids along to see how things work too.
 
Smurf1976 said:
Well I think that counts as a success! Ended up with a 2 hour long queue outside as rather a lot of people turned up...

Good to see parents bringing the kids along to see how things work too.
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More than turned up to see Charles and Camilla by the sound of it...

 
An end to coal-fired electricity in the UK within a decade according to various news reports.

Considering just how intertwined coal and British industry have been for centuries, it's a somewhat telling development. Less coal perhaps, but none at all? In Britain?

That's like saying that McDonald's have decided to stop selling burgers or that Woolworths are getting out of the retail business. Not just start doing something else, but scrap the historic core completely.

It was always going to happen someday but I didn't think we'd get there so soon.
 

Yes I thought the same.
Draxs Power Station has been trying to develop carbon capture, bio fuel burning and they have given up.
It will be interesting to see who is going to supply all the base load fuel, gas or nuclear.
 
First gen tech is always expensive I guess. The price will come down, much like the cost of sloar panels....


Australia, you can now pre-order the Tesla Powerwall​




Origin Energy snares deal with Tesla to sell Powerwall battery​

 
It's only about 7 years ago that Australia stopped importing incandescent light bulbs and 6 years ago that they became illegal to sell for the common GLS types.

Now I see that CFL's (compact fluorescent lamps) are rapidly disappearing from the shelves of mainstream retailers. Coles, Woolworths, Bunnings etc still sell them but the range of available products is diminishing, the more specialised and fancy ones are already gone, and there's pretty much always one or more product lines on clearance sale. What remains is the most basic commodity bulbs, the rest are gone now and give it another year or two and I doubt there will be much market for these at all.

Much the same with halogen GLS (240V which look like incandescent bulbs) lamps too - they're still available but the product range is slowly being reduced by the major retailers.

LED's are taking over and the rate of progress there is truly impressive. Not so long ago the range was limited to products of questionable quality and with limited brightness bought online. Now Bunnings are selling LED's equivalent to the old 150W incandescents and Coles have gone as far as having a home brand variery of them.

The overall effect of this is that residential lighting is virtually disappearing as an electrical load in the foreseeable future. A 90% reduction compared to what it used to be makes it pretty much irrelevant really.

To a lesser extent the same is happening with commercial lighting although that was already more efficient. But still, what used to be a 2 x 36W (make that 80 - 90 Watts once ballast losses are included) has turned into 2 x 28W T5 fluoros and is now becoming a single 30W LED light module or alternatively 2 x 15 - 18W LED tubes. So even starting from a more efficient base, it's still a 60%+ energy saving although will take some years to achieve (since it's a bit more complicated than just replacing a bulb hence there's still 36W fluoros being sold, albeit in decreasing numbers).

So lighting, and that is the most symbolic of all uses of electricity, is coming to the point where it's almost disappearing as a significant load. Amazing progress there and so quickly too.
 
As Smurf puts it the reduction in lighting load is very significant as a way to reduce our electricity use. One of the questions will be how quickly this changeover can be encouraged. If we are serious about tackling the easy parts of energy savings then a five year program to see all lights changed would be excellent.

There is a further energy saving as well in reducing the heat load of commercial buildings which then has to be dissipated by AC. I can see a very attractive set of figures on the economic returns that will accrue to companies that make these changes. Probably an ROI of 20% plus.
 
SirRumpole said:
Good news ! Turnbull puts the wind up Abbott !


Federal Government lifts Tony Abbott's wind farm investment ban


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-13/abbots-wind-farm-investment-ban-lifted/7024164
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Hooray at last!

Now: Can he possibly tell King Col to scrap Synergy's intended penalising of Solar households?
Why should the early adapters of new clean technology be singled out to pay the price for planning failures that led to overproduction and ridiculous wholesale peak charges? Ri-bluddy-diculous!
 
While there's an electricity grid going past each property on the street, there will be a need to be a contribution from each property for the maintenance of that grid. That's regardless of whether individual households have their own generation and/or storage capacity. It's no different in principal to mains water or mains sewerage.

What I object to with some of the contributions on households with solar panels is commentary about not contributing to the cost of the grid. Feed in grid connected private generators have contributed to the cost of grid generation capacity through their own investment in it. The broad question is the return these private generators should be entitled to for their investment balanced against the cost of maintaining the grid.
 
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