Wood Burners

When it comes to not decimating healthy existing woodland, we're in perfect accord. Worth noting, there are plenty of commercially managed forests right here, with scope a-plenty for developing a sustainable and successful industry and all the rural jobs that go with it. They don't have to be monoculture plantations on land better used to feed people and ..... don't whisper it too loudly.... I've heard rumours that there are even several species of tree which grow on slopes and boulder strewn hillsides unsuited to ploughing.

 

Where it is going to be interesting (?) will be the situation for those with EVs, but only have on-street parking. What happens when someone else dumps their car just where you need to put yours to charge it up? And if charging cables have to go over the pavement to charge them there will be plenty of scope for people to 'accidentally' trip over them. No doubt a potential field day for the injury claiming legal types.

 

That's the sort of thing they try not to mention. The elephant in the room.

On a good day I can park on the street on the other side of a busy road from my house. No parking on my side and no vehicular access to the rear. On a bad, or often not-so-bad day, particularly when the tourists arrive at weekends and in the good weather I'm lucky if I can park within one or two hundreds yards of my house. Everyone else on my street is is the same position and we live in a conservation area, which (a) attracts visitors who want to park their cars and (b) means the authorities are very choosy about what residents can and can't do. What they would make of a few dozen quarter-mile lengths of charging cables tangled like a giant plate of spaghetti along pavements and across the A Class road would be anyone's guess.

The people who advocate these thing don't do engineering practicalities such as where the power stations are going to come from, how the power stations will be fuelled, how the additional supplies are to be transmitted, how domestic supplies could be upgraded to cope with the extra load, how people who have only on-street parking (if that) will get the supply to their car, etc, etc. They only do 'best case' scenarios, where the wind always blows, the sun shines at night and any power stations needed can be sustainably fuelled by unicorn farts.

 

The firework display was done fairly recently at a Chinese coal mine by a Video company .Is a coal burning loco with someone lobbing small bales of straw into the firebox to give the effect.
The 0-6-0 is FCGU 26 (Argentinean Railways) built Neilson 1890 . Preserved by the Fero Club Argentina. I couldn't see this needing several men to fire this. Where did you see this.?

 

Not to mention the jokers who will no doubt find it funny to go around unplugging cars. . . .

 

I read an article last year how there is a company that collects coffee grounds from the many coffee shops and then processing it to produce a bio diesel (for London buses) that is blended with crude oil diesel to produce an EU bio-diesel blend (I believe most bio-diesel that meets the EU regs is actually a blend). Also the waste solids is compressed into logs for wood burners. It got me thinking, could a preserved railway just empty the coffee grounds from the station cafe into the tender of a steam loco once a day and burn is blended with the coal? Saves on all the transport costs and processing costs. Just a thought.

Was there a case many many years ago when a country subsidised the excess coffee crop and had to dispose of the extra beans, so ended up burning it on the national network steam locos? Kenyan? Brazil? Urban myth?

 

Oddly enough, there's been quite a bit of thought going into these and other issues. I can assure detractors that we're way past the wishful thinking stage, Dionysius Lardner tendancies from whatever quarters notwithstanding.

Not gonna pretend there are no issues .... however .... the switch to EVs will involve (actually, is involving) rethinking a fair bit. There's precious little off-street parking where I live, but (in common with most) the local authority have a grant to install charging facilities, over and above what's in the pipeline commercially (current year, £300K for Brighton & Hove ... roughly a quid per inhabitant). In the past week, a major contract to install many thousands of 'Fast Charging Points' nationwide has been signed.

Despite not everyone enjoying their own car-port, I know of precisely no-one with the capacity to refine their own petrol or diesel. There's going to be a step change away from the petrol station paradigm, as EVs will be readily chargeable at an increasing number of points, be that on-street, at the office carpark or supermarket. This is happening now.

Beyond simply considering cars in complete isolation, it needs to be pointed out that development is occurring in parallel with rolling out the 'smart grid' .... which is far more than a small white box and phone app. EV charging systems can readily identify varying tarrifs and take advantage of cheaper (or even cleaner) supplies. They can also be utilised to feed juice into the home or grid. Unsurprisingly, peak electrical demand tends to follow the hours after most cars return home, with the capability of discharging to offset peak demand and recharging at lower overnight rates. Can an ICE car do that?

An historic feature of traditional grid systems, there's been little, beyond pumped hydro schemes like Trawsfynydd, to quickly add in capacity at need. A few thousand EVs feeding in sure ain't gonna change that .... but a few million sure as hell will. Add in other developments in battery and capacitor tech and you start to get a clearer picture of how the variability of renewables like wind, solar and tidal will be evened out. A recent tidal generator design tested in the Scottish Isles has demonstrated it's capable of delivering vastly more in a year (we're dealing in Megawatts here) than the sum total of all output by all previous designs since testing began 17 years ago. Levels of generation from renewables on Orkney now mean that the islands have a constant power surplus. The technology failed former PM Cameron dismissed as 'green crap' is now delivering, from among others the offshore Rampion Array (visible from my home and for which there was overwhelming public support), Megawatts of clean energy into the grid.

Is any of this is happening without serious investment*? Clearly not but, then again, what does?

*which it's getting ..... from the industry.

 

I think that all ties in with the fact that for electric cars to become viable, range and charging time still aren't quite there. There are a combination of 2 solutions to the charging cables issue I'd have thought; a) batteries that can be swapped round, so you have one set at home charging whilst you're using the other, and b) decreased charging times so you wouldn't have to have it plugged into your house all day, but all charging was done for, say, the half hour you're doing your shopping and that will keep you going for several hundred miles.

 

There still needs to be consideration of the recyling of batteries and the massive increase in electrical generation that will be required. This generation will not only be required for EVs but also for home heating for new homes that will not be allowed to use gas and for further extensions of our electric railway system. I cannot see the technology being ready by 2023. I also do not trust the ability of any govenment to be able to deliver their aspirations.

When I was referring to the elephant in the room I was thinking of the number of people on the planet. The greater theincrease in population, the greater the difficulty in solving the problem. I am not advocating a return to coal burning generation but our so called leaders need to "get real" and work out realistic targets. They have been unable to deliver on so many of their plans. One example is the electification of the railways. This does not use innovative technology but is miles behind what was was originally planned.

 

I think plenty of countries used wood. Thai Railways for instance used wood up to the end of steam in the 1970s, image of "wooding" in progress on one of the ex-JNR C56s (good to see the chap sits down while the ladies work!). ISTR "Elf" on the Leighton Buzzard was wood fired (and I guess most railways still light up with wood).

 

Sounds a wonderful solution to meeting peak demand and smoothing out supply problems. I'd not be a happy chappy, though, if I'd put my EV on to charge before going on a long journey, only to find it part discharged due to power smoothing.

 

Deep coal mine approved in west cumbria although greenpeace protesters are up in arms over this. Is this good news for the future of steam heritage railways after 2025 when all coal fired power stations are phased out does this mean we may have a source of british mined coal for our heritage lines, how long is the coal mining activity going to last for at this coal mine. I know it is coal thats going to be exported and it is on the site of a former deep coal mine.

 

https://www.cumbriacrack.com/2019/0...-planning-approval-for-underground-coal-mine/

Coking coal for the steel industry it seems.

 

From reports on the BBC's Look North from Tyneside. The main rail connection is in the transportation from Workington to the Steelworks of Teesside. Quite a trip these days what with the Keswick & Cockermouth and Stainmore lines being long closed. The routes being either North to Carlisle, then across to Newcastle/Tyneside then [to avoid the ECML] round the East Coast through Sunderland and Hartlepool to Teesside. Or South crossing the WCML around Carnforth, then through West Yorkshire/Leeds and onto York [I think] coming off the ECML at Thirsk/Northallerton going through Eaglescliffe to Teesside that way.

 

I think the majority of it is going to Teesside (Redcar) for export. The original business plan was something like 95% production being exported to Europe. It is good quality coking coal. Good news for the economy of both the area and the country. Whether there is any possibility of creaming off some coal for heritage use is debatable. It will generally be crushed to fines before loading onto rail transport, which is the only approved method of transport. It could be done if there is a will, though. Whether it is suitable, I can't say.

 

OK Steve, even if it's not going to be used by the Steelworks on Teesside. That still leaves the rest of my statement intact. Though I seem to recall they interviewed a Guy on/in Teesside Docks [?] saying something along the lines of they wouldn't need to import as much coal from aboard through the Port....

 

There is an interesting bit in the recent HRA News issue 156 about 'Keeping the Coal Coming'.
https://www.hra.uk.com/hra-news-magazines

 

Perhaps we need to fit a diode to the connection cable

 

Oh .... that elephant. On the whole population issue, I'm bravely gonna dodge the whole matter as anything I might feel about socio-economic pressures to keep breeding, wrecking our environment with suicidally inept agro-economic policies, developing antibiotic resistance, etc. etc. would be ..... well ..... a tad contentious. Let's just say I've a sneaking suspicion that, human hubris notwithstanding, the planet is quite capable of zilching our species out of existence in the blink of a cosmic eye .... and will roll on regardless. The only real pity would be the number of other species we purblind modified chimps are likely to take with us .... and all our beloved money .... on the one-way trip to oblivion. Cheerful sod today, aren't I?

On battery recycling, I'm in full agreement regarding the competence (or otherwise) of governments ... more specifically, many of the unimpressive cretins we repeatedly insist on electing to positions of responsibility. Looking at the domestic recycling situation here doesn't exactly inspire much confidence, does it? On the up side, there's an EU directive on recycling, which translates as building the consideration into the initial design process. Quite how that eventually translates into practise at the end of a commodity's life though is anyone's guess ... as is how much of said directive would survive the 'don't care' which is the standard response of unicorn hunters here to pretty much everything these days. Luckily, the whole ethos of EV manufacture seems to place emphasis on doing far better than ICE vehicle production across the board. Lesson learned? Well, it's early days, but some signs are actually promising .... though the jury's still out for the time being

Certainly, Tesla's thinking is to keep as much of the manufacturing process 'in house' as possible, the practical upshot of which is that returning expired batteries for recycling is very much factored into their costings. It's worth mentioning: Tesla are planning five 'GigaFactories', the existing one plus a second in the US, the next one off the blocks is planned in China, with another planned for Europe .... which could well have come here, but for (Oh for Bob's sake ... do I really need to say it?). Can't remember where the fifth's going. VW are bigging up the green credentials of their new dedicated EV production facilities. Following the whole 'dieselgate' fiasco, they've certainly got some damage to their 'brand image' to repair. Given the monetary cost of the battery component (especially ingredients like lithium and cobalt), 'market forces' actually stand a good chance of dictating a common sense policy.

China is a fascinating place to watch. Under the current 'five year plan', the big idea (if I've understood what's reported) for EV manufacture is that 20 domestic companies have been green lit (i.e. government support) to develop EVs, with 3 most promising planned to continue into full production. Quite what the official criteria for success are, I've no idea, but at least two brands are on the verge of launching, with the US seemingly the initial prime export market. Even India are getting in on the act, with (so far) a 'commuter car' EV (i.e. small, with fairly limited range), which seems aimed at the domestic market. People who've ever experienced roads in India will doubtless anticipate the difference 'autodrive' safety features will make ... Here's to hoping they fit 'em to the omnipresent cows too.

For rail applications, the future is clearly electric (well, diesel-electrics are just electric locos which happen to carry their own gens after all), with the only issue being over where and how the juice is generated. Dual supply looks promising, but there are serious questions over the economics of hydrogen production ... and some lingering doubts over safety - about which even I have a few outstanding questions. Solvable? I certainly wouldn't bet against it, in which case it's going to be a seriously big part of getting free of our hydrocarbon dependency.

On batteries, the approach of MIT's Professor in Residence, Donald Sadoway, is refreshing. He's basically looking at the most abundant (i.e. cheapest) elements, with a red line around precious and rare-earth elements like gold, platinum, ruthenium etc.. Without going into details I only partially understand, there are some interesting (and practical) products in development. Have a butcher's on YouTube for some of his lectures. There isn't going to be any one 'magic bullet' battery design .... it's horses for courses .... but generally speaking, the higher the energy density, the lighter the battery and greater the cost. Large scale storage, where mass isn't such an issue can utilise low energy density battery tech i.e. heavier and cheaper. These last are the sort of kit applicable to grid level storage. Interesting times lie ahead.


Getting a bit OT for wood burners, all this. P'raps time for a new thread?