Re: Solar Panels
"I don't understand why the government isn't pushing more for micro-generation"
Because the VAST majority of installations don't pay off their installation costs before they finally break, even WITH any subsidies that might be paid to put them there.
Roof-mounted wind is a particularly nasty scam. If bearing and sail noise coupled into the building doesn't result in the things being removed quickly, you'll be lucky to get a few kWh/year on anything mounted that close to the ground. That's why the companies which were pushing them have virtually all quietly folded their tents and disappeared in the night. VAWTs were a particularly heavily pushed scam and none of the companies pushing them in the UK exist anymore, after taking large government grants and glowing media endorsements from journalists who can't be bothered doing simple math (or were paid schills)
Even for the larger windmills, government subsidies are usually far higher than direct income received (and don't forget: windmills/solar are paid at ridiculously feed-in rates with networks required to give them preference and idle their thermal stations, etc) - the 350 foot one by the M4 at reading produces less than £100k of energy but in 2011 was getting £130k of grants.
What's actually being farmed is subsidies - to the tune of 40% of the average annual domestic electricity bill being attributable to renewable subsidies, the cost of running backing capacity and the cost of overbuilding the grid and provision of peaking plant to handle wildly unpredictable sources switching in and out of the grid without warning or the ability to stop them - whilst only generating 4-6% of the annual energy production.
If you had to pay the full cost of your solar installation AND a battery bank to keep things balanced and weren't allowed to backfeed into the grid (ie, keep your overproduction in batteries and then draw on it later) you wouldn't do it, because it would cost twice as much as grid power - and that's despite the real cost of solar panels dropping by 80% in the last 2 decades and off-the-shelf efficiency going from 2%
to 10% - unfortunately their halflife point has also dropped from 12 years to 7-8 years, so you need to factor that into your caluculations.
Because of this, the same chickens are starting to come home to roost in the solar industry. All those outfits promising free electricker or lease income from panels on your roof are going titsup, but you still don't get to own the panels and if you put any of your own money into them, tough - you lost it and they belong to someone else anyway.
The amount of money that's been put into subsidising "renwables" in the UK over the last decade would have built more than a dozen Hinkley Points - each one cranking out more _reliable_ power than 1800-2200 windmills (the best capacity factor of the land-based ones installed around the UK is 24% of nameplate rating. The marine ones are slightly better - but all the big ones struggle to pay their way even with subsidies because they have a nasty habit of shredding their gearboxes - and sometimes those gearboxes catch fire. Byebye nacelle+tower and you'd better hope you're not downwind as the blades have been known to go up to 2 miles when they snap off.)
Why does _that_ matter? 2 reasons:
1: Solar and wind don't work very well in the UK's many still, cold winter nights.
2: Because carbon emissions need to be not only capped but obliterated(*), you can expect gas-boiler heating to be banned within 15 years and transportation to be pushed hard to a more-electric model.
If you comply with safety requirements and carpet the entire country in windmills and make all rooftops SolarPV, you can _just_ match existing carbon-thermal (ie, coal/oil/gas) electricity generation capacity. If you ignore the safety requirements then you might get 25% more.
The problem is that because of #2 above, demand for electrical energy in this country is going to go up by a factor of _at least_ 6, if not 8, even if it was made mandatory for all housing to have high-quality insulation and bugger the planning regulations on appearances.
So in other words, we've fucked our long-term abliity to provide power for ourselves (the interconnectors to france/netherlands/ireland only account for 5% of existing generation capacity and they cost even more to build/maintain than a nuclear power plant). As many have pointed out, the main reason for pushing "smart" meters with built-in cutoffs is most likely to have the ability be able to have rolling blackouts without cutting off "privileged" consumers.
(*) Yes, that one I put in above - the reason why carbon emissions are going to need to be stomped on.
It has nothing to do with rising sea levels, but a lot to do with the oceans.
Ocean acidity has increased by 50% since the start of the industrial revolution. Oceanic mercury has doubled. Oceanic radioactivity appears to have increased by even more than that (burning coal accounts for more radioactive emissions each year than a half-dozen chernobyls) - but none of those matter.
What _really_ matters is this: Oceanic oxygen levels are decreasing slightly everywhere as the water temperature has increased, but more importantly - anoxic zones are spreading. We get 50% of our atmosphere's oxygen from the oceans and in geology, Anoxic Oceanic Events (look 'em up) go hand in hand with CO2 spikes.
It wouldn't be hard for atmospheric O2 levels drop to 15% (the equivalent of moving to 7-8000 feet altitude) and it's not impossible to drop to 11-12% (equivalent to around 12-14000 feet) during an anoxic period.
Most mammalian physiology (and that of humans) reacts to reduced oxygen levels by thickening the blood. After a while this causes congestive heart failure (that's what altitude sickness is) and there are only 2 groups of humans who've evolved alternatives which don't cause long-term physical damage - unsurprisingly both of them are around the Himalayas - nepalese and tibetans.
Now, factor in the rising temperature, destabilising methane clathrate deposits worldwide and the good possibility that the current Leptav Sea methane plumes (1-2km wide according to reports(**)) will destabilise continental margin deposits in a way that would be on par with the Storegga Slide(***), but could be much worse if the ensuing tsunami destabilises other arctic deposits.
The way things are going there's a reasonable chance that meaningful sea level rises won't have much effect on civilisation, as 1/2 to 2/3 of the population will have died out by the time it happens. Malthus is a bastard but everyone was expecting starvation, not asphyxiation.
Someone I know postulated about 20 years ago that if we don't get off the planet, our descendants in 100k years would be oxygen-deprived apes barely surviving. I bet he wasn't thinking it might happen much sooner than that.
(**) The global methane survey found there are large sources of methane getting into the atmosphere that they couldn't account for or find the sources for. They were blaming farming as a possible source (all that recent media coverage about cow burps and rice paddies).
I work with a couple of the people involved and asked them if they'd factored the Laptev Sea in. They weren't even aware of the reports, and because all the orbiting instruments they used are only designed to pick up methane over land and aren't on polar orbits they wouldn't have picked oceanic emissions up.
... So now they're frantically trying to see if they can recalibrate the existing ones to detect methane over ice (easyish) or water (virtually impossible) to see if it's the missing source - but they still may not be able to look far enough north to confirm
(This is akin to the re-reading of NOAA satellite ozone readings in the 1970s to confirm that the Ozone Hole really existed - the processing scripts were setup to dump low or high detected levels as a calibration error and when that fudge(****) was taken out, the hole leapt into existance in the reports - in this case it's a lot harder as they weren't looking in the right direction and methane over water is extremely hard to measure)
. If the reports coming out of Russia are accurate then it would easily be the missing source.
(***) Lots of geologists and historians concentrate on the tsunami but miss the important point that the Storegga slide happened early in the knee point where the last ice age gave way to rapid warming and increased CO2 levels (ie, it's likely that the slide triggered the rapid increase in warming and northern climate changes, not that other way round).
The Storegga Slide released somewhere around 2-3 gigatonnes of methane into the atmosphere. There's at least 1 gigatonnes under the Laptev Sea and might be as much as 5 gigatonns.
Am I conspiracy theorist? Perhaps.
An alarmist? Perhaps.
I'd prefer to investigate this stuff and see if it might be plausible rather than poo-poo it offhand.
And I'd DEFINIETLY prefer that we prepare, just in case - It's better to be wrong than dead.
(****) Support staff inserting fudges into software to get results akin to what the lead scientist predicted is a common occurance. I've run into 2 cases of it where I worked in the last 15 years. In both cases the unfudged observations contained the seeds of important discoveries that allowed important theory tweaks - underscoring that the best science often starts with "Hmm, that's odd, I wasn't expecting _that_"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
