Tax cut for shale gas extraction.

[Workingman]

Instead of paying 62% on income it will only be 30%.

What an incentive to trash the environment and throw more CO2 into the atmosphere, but never mind, there is money to be made! Fracking stupid if you ask me.

Apparently there is 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas under the north of England, mainly Bowland, Cheshire and the Vale of York, though the VoY might be safe for a while - at least until the potash mines run out. If we can only get at 10% of the gas it will be enough for 40 years or so.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, they are looking at things differently.
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2013/05/ ... ekVDKw9LDc

If they can make this work, and it is feasible, they might have found a way of making useless windmills useful.

[Suff]

Fracking idiots I say.....

The problem always is that if it's small enough to do in a small scale pilot, then they'll try it. If it is massive infrastructure spend, everyone has a reason why it won't work

Let's take tidal power. No not Severn barrier. Simply the rise and fall of the tide. There is a simple way of using that rise and fall to generate power. OK it's a TRULY massive engineering project. But get this. The tidal range from the top to the bottom of the UK is 5 hours. On a six hour cycle that means that power is being generated up and down the UK all day and all night.

So, bring this idea up, throw it into consideration and the answer is? WE can do wind farms for less and they'll be cheaper and easier to put in.

But they're not baseload power
No problem we'll work that out some day
But you can't get enough power out of them to truly transition the existing power
Something will come along, it always does.

We will spend 14 billion on two Nuclear power plants. If we wanted to replace all our baseload power with Nuclear it would cost osme £0.5tn, even if you could get everyone to agree to it. Then it needs Fuel. Lots of it and it's expensive. You need to transport it and you need to process it. Oh and cool it too (Fukushima anyone?).

On the other hand, for the same £0.5tn you could produce a tidal (rise fall) generation network around the UK which would work so long as the moon revolves around the earth. Free power. Only infrastructure maintenance to keep up. No real pollution and no decommissioning costs as such. Just switch them off and turn them into islands.... Very clean, very PC, very nice, you could even go and have holidays on them....

Is anyone interested? Even the guys who think we're going to kill ourselves off?

Not really. They are all interested in telling you why wind farms are better.....

What a world.

[Workingman]

Where does the figure of £0.5tn come from?

Each new nuclear plant should come in at about £7 - 10 billion. Hinkley is £14 bn, but provides power for 5 million homes. With each producing enough power to cover 2.5 million homes we would only need ten. For industry as well, maybe 18 - £126 to £180 billion, tops. Sellafield reprocesses nuclear fuels from all over the world and can't get rid of them.... they could be used by us or free.

Salter's ducks were shown to produce between 90% to 50% efficiency in converting wave power to electricity.... they were abandoned when fossil fuel prices dropped post the 1973 fuel crisis. They were innocuous and used off-the-shelf components = cheap. As an island we could have ringed the UK with them for peanuts, but the experts knew better.

They would never, ever, cover baseload, but they would be there 24/7 and could be used to provide power to gas, (P2G) constantly.

Windmills anyone?

[Suff]

Where does the figure of £0.5tn come from?

It comes from the GW to GW conversion to provide end to end nuclear power. Also I don't believe that the £14bn would drop. In my experience, in the UK, nothing ever goes to cost in the Government sector and I would expect that £14bn to be seriously overrun. Making £10bn a joke.

Also, remember, to go EV and Hydrogen, we'd need at least 3* the baseload we have today.

Oh and when we do that, new Uranium fuel becomes a very scarce resource indeed. AND, these are not generation3 reactors either. More like 2.5 on steroids... Let alone Generation 4 which is nothing more than a pipe dream today....

Windmills anyone?

Apparently every time.... Someone important must own the shares in the manufacturing....

[Workingman]

OK, put the 0.5tn away for a while.

What bugs me, really bugs me, is that these islands are in the most perfect place on the planet to utilise alternative energy resources.

We get enough waves that if we only got 1 Watt from each of them we would be energy secure forever. We have winds enough, especially offshore, to power the country. We get enough sun for solar panels to work, and have thousands of acres of industrial roof space to install them, to power the country. The land is criss-crossed with rivers with enough energy to power the country. We are ideally situated to take advantage of geothermal resources, to power the country.

We have the ideal mix of renewable resources available yet we are only interested in a few of them. Worst of all, we appear to only want to go the old fossil fuel route until they run out.

[Suff]

fossil fuels lock the income up in a few utilities. They pay a lot of tax and employ a lot of people.

However what the Government appears to be unable to understand is that localised renewable utilities will be more able to pay taxes (input costs =0), will need to employ more people and will reduce the work and money that must be spent to fix the fossil fuel mess.

Go figure....