Thumper Club Forum
Club House => Chatter => Topic started by: Propellor on January 15, 2016, 07:21:39 AM
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Street lamps. How many are actually needed at any given time?
Separately, but linked, do vehicles need street lamps? Or maybe to look at it another way, if they do, then why do they need headlights?
Strikes me there's a lot of wasted energy going on here.
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remember there are road users other than motorised ones.......
Many many years ago HGV drivers (as they weren't known) used to drive around on sidelights all the time. Mind you there were a lot of crashes.....
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There could even be a huge saving if they were turned off during non peak times, such as the wee small hours. I think some councils are already doing this. But there are all sorts of issues including people in cities and towns feeling vulnerable to crimes like burglary if they aren't kept on :-\
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They go off at around 1 am in the suburban part of Brum I live in.
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remember there are road users other than motorised ones.......
Many many years ago HGV drivers (as they weren't known) used to drive around on sidelights all the time. Mind you there were a lot of crashes.....
I suppose LED headlights consume considerably less power than the halogens.
What I was initially thinking was why the need for both vehicle lights and roadside lights. Why not have one or the other. You can tell I didn't give this too much thinking time but, hey, where's the harm.
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If we don't have our headlights on and have good street lighting then how are numpties going to see us to pull out in front of us? Bitter, me? Never.
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I would not trust the local commissar for public works and urban diversity ( or whatever the job title is this week) to change a lamp in his own living room never mind maintain the only source of light in a city of a million people and tens of thousands of vehicles. They turn them off here at 1 am, its something to do with collectivisation of the tools of power production and possibly being green ( but not discriminating against other colours)
I'm keeping my H5 and LEDs.
Andy
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I would not trust the local commissar for public works and urban diversity ( or whatever the job title is this week) to change a lamp in his own living room never mind maintain the only source of light in a city of a million people and tens of thousands of vehicles. They turn them off here at 1 am, its something to do with collectivisation of the tools of power production and possibly being green ( but not discriminating against other colours)
I'm keeping my H5 and LEDs.
Andy
;D ;D ;D
That might qualify for "the most polite rant (cue Clarkson overdub) in the world". ;)
Ok, how about this. Let's suppose we were forced to have only vehicle headlights OR only streetlights. On balance of safety/energy used/number of vehicles vs number of people out n about, which way should we channel our efforts?
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I would go with vehicle headlights :) But the whole debate is missing the point, as street lights are there for pedestrians. Aren't they :-\
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I would go with vehicle headlights :) But the whole debate is missing the point, as street lights are there for pedestrians. Aren't they :-\
But there aren't many pedestrians. Put it this way, there are way more lit streetlights than there are pedestrians out and about. Wa a a ay more.
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but streetlights arent just burning up electricity needlessly, remember that whilst we are still tied to thermal electricity generation , theres still going to need to be a baseload of electicity generation required just to keep the power plants running. unlike solar or wind you cant turn a gas coal oil or nuke plant on and off like a light, so even when theres no demand for electricity, they will still need to be running at operationg pressure and the turbines will still need to be spinning. even if you turned off all the streetlights in the uk, you wouldnt be saving much because all them power plants will still need to be kept running.
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but streetlights arent just burning up electricity needlessly, remember that whilst we are still tied to thermal electricity generation , theres still going to need to be a baseload of electicity generation required just to keep the power plants running. unlike solar or wind you cant turn a gas coal oil or nuke plant on and off like a light, so even when theres no demand for electricity, they will still need to be running at operationg pressure and the turbines will still need to be spinning. even if you turned off all the streetlights in the uk, you wouldnt be saving much because all them power plants will still need to be kept running.
Could the power be redirected? One day maybe everyone will be re charging their EV's overnight.
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Round my way street lights off the main roads get turned off at about midnight as there just isn't anybody about.
The sort of crime they help reassure against is very rare here.
Not sure I'd want to walk around some places without lighting though.
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Could the power be redirected? One day maybe everyone will be re charging their EV's overnight.
in an ideal world, yes, but the reality of power generation is that charging EV's with fossil fuels is still comparatively dirty, and we are a long stretch from the EV tipping point where that might happen. the reality is that from a cold start, to get a thermal power plant upto generating level can take 24 hours or more, so they are kept at almost operating power constantly, 24/7, so that if needs be, they can be brought on stream quickly. this, coincidentally, gives rise to one of the energy industries biggest myths. the old nay sayers claim that wind farms are useless because they arent ever seen to be turning. in reality, to turn on a wind turbine is merely a mater of flicking a switch, and away they go, clean green power. however, this instant switchability means that they are also the easiest to switch off when there is low demand, simply because its nigh on impossible to turn off a coal oil gas or nuke plant without major problems following. so, wind turbine owners are paid by central govt to turn their turbines off because they are more flexible than thermal plants. then folks(and it has to be said the madder bits of the media) see them not spinning and just assume that they are broken or the wind isnt blowing or they just dont work. the absolute reality in fact is that the uk has amongst the best resources in the world for wind power, certainly better than anywhere else in europe, and if they were fully harnessed with offshore wind, the uk could actually generate four times its own requirements for electricity from wind power alone. its just a matter of political will, and at the moment, there isnt any!
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I totally agree with every word just said. The UK could and should have been world leaders in wind power generation, but the political will and leadership just isn't there :(
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Absolutely agree with both.
Do away with trident and use all those skills to build our own wind, wave and tidal generation then we won't be so much at the mercy of mad middle eastern or Russian dictators......
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I'm "a fan" (pun) of wind and wave power. We're surrounded by both, so it should figure highly on our skills list.
I didn't realise that our present wind capability was as high as it is though. I do understand the problem with thermal generation. So common sense (which can easily be wrong!) would seem to say-right, fix the thermal input at a certain level of percent requirement, say 50%? Then use wind and wave and whatever else to constantly "trim" input to meet the constantly fluctuating demand. The problem, I guess, is that the pesky wind, can't be relied upon to be there, even though, once it is, the means of accurately moderating output is possible.
Here's a bit of a science fiction thought. We catch a certain amount of energy from the sun, whether we like it or not. But how much more of the energy kicked out by the sun escapes us? Kin huge amount. So, build craft which orbit the sun, harvesting the energy. Tether a docking port to the earth, into which these craft plug in and download their stored energy.
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You don't need to. Enough actually hits the earth to meet our needs many times over. I keep hearing people say we should develop fusion reactors - well there's a great big one hanging over our heads giving us all the energy we could ever want for free.
Wind is as you say unpredictable but tides certainly aren't. There's a tidal barrage at Rance in Brittany that's been pumping out power for decades - opened in 1966!
We could also make much better use of pumped storage such as at Ffestiniog and Dinorwic. Built by the publicly owned CEGB - can't see any of the privatised mob doing anything like that.
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There's a tidal barrage at Rance in Brittany that's been pumping out power for decades - opened in 1966!
You mean the one at dinard? I only knew that was there because my father in law told me whilst we were on a boat trip from dinan.
I don't know that much about these things but I'm guessing that the power produced depends on the head? If I'm right about that then the power produced will reach a peak at max head and dwindle as the head drops? But, if the turbines are designed accordingly, you'll catch it both ways, will you? All twice a day. The head will vary according to the lunar cycle?
How come we're not utilising it here?
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You don't need to. Enough actually hits the earth to meet our needs many times over. I keep hearing people say we should develop fusion reactors - well there's a great big one hanging over our heads giving us all the energy we could ever want for free.
I didn't realise that. So where is all the energy going then? Clearly we're not taking advantage of it, not on the scale you suggest is possible. Are we talking about the energy locked up in photons? Light.
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A few years ago I read up about a Danish company called Vesta, the biggest producer of wind turbines in the world. It started off as a family run agri engineering business. Now multi million pound business, employing thousands all over the world. This should have, and could have been a UK company such as a shipyard struggling for new contracts, but yet again our short sighted government never gave it the push or incentives needed for this to happen >:(
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vesta have a plant in the uk building turbines, but its relatively small and the uk govt has set its course out against renewables because when you look at the companies who support the tory party and who sponsor and support individual mps, there are a hell of a lot of oil coal and gas companies paying the bills. wind has never made more sense, and we have lost the chance to lead in this field. and its not correct to say that the wind sometimes doesnt blow. what is more accurate is that the wind sometimes doesnt blow where you are, or where i am, but the reality is that the wind is blowing all the time somewhere round the uk, there isnt ever a stop in it, when the tide ebbs and flows, the wind blows, when the sun shines or it rains, the wind blows, its simple physics. on the occasion that i walk into the garden and its flat calm, then all i can say for sure is that its not windy in my garden at ground level. 50 or 150 feet up in the air it may be blowing, 10 miles up the road it might be blowing. but its never ever not blowing everywhere, thats just misinformation that the anti wind lobby like to put out there to help keep the gas oil and coal plants burning.
tidal power is a great resource because of the nature of tides. ok the power available tails off towards the slack at either end of the tide. but tidal limits vary with location, so high tide where i am on the fylde will come perhaps an hour before high tide off the cumbrian coast, and perhaps an hour after high tide on the welsh coast, etc etc, so the high and low tides will provide a constant variation arround the coast, meaning that there will always be peak tidal flow somewhere round the coast, 24 hours a day.
as for where all the solar energy goes, every living thing on the surface of this planet is where it goes to.
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You don't need to. Enough actually hits the earth to meet our needs many times over. I keep hearing people say we should develop fusion reactors - well there's a great big one hanging over our heads giving us all the energy we could ever want for free.
So my other idea of floating helium vessels above the clouds to catch more of the radiation is no use either. >:( ;D
I say vessels rather than balloons because the "balloon" would be made of the solar panels themselves.
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You don't need to. Enough actually hits the earth to meet our needs many times over. I keep hearing people say we should develop fusion reactors - well there's a great big one hanging over our heads giving us all the energy we could ever want for free.
So my other idea of floating helium vessels above the clouds to catch more of the radiation is no use either. >:( ;D
I say vessels rather than balloons because the "balloon" would be made of the solar panels themselves.
Damn, this has already been done.
Going back to tidal power though, I'm struggling to see why we aren't making use of the free head generated by the moon twice a day? Seems daft not to take advantage.
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There has been talk of a barrage in Swansea Bay.Free tidal power,but the company that wants to build it is asking for a HUGE subsidy.It wants to be paid at FOUR times the normal rate for each Megawatt,or whatever unit the power is measured in.Free tidal power,but four times the money.And the job of building it has been arranged with a Chinese company.Free power is a joke.
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There has been talk of a barrage in Swansea Bay.Free tidal power,but the company that wants to build it is asking for a HUGE subsidy.It wants to be paid at FOUR times the normal rate for each Megawatt,or whatever unit the power is measured in.Free tidal power,but four times the money.And the job of building it has been arranged with a Chinese company.Free power is a joke.
I take your point. I hate the corruption that goes with capitalism. Really mucks up a good idea.
But to be fair, I did say the head of water created by the moon is the free bit of the deal. It's regular and predictable and it will happen regardless of whether we take advantage of it or not. The difference between tidal energy and fossil fuel is that the moon is doing all the hard work for us! Well thats one way to look at it anyway?
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Heard about this on the news today.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/morocco-unveils-a-massive-solar-power-plant-in-the-sahara
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Yes, I was aware of similar set ups in the US. Unfortunately any bird that fly's within the area gets fried :(
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Yes, I was aware of similar set ups in the US. Unfortunately any bird that fly's within the area gets fried :(
Yes I recall a piece on tv about that problem. Wonder if they've solved it?
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It was on Worlds Weirdest Events, a very good series, and excellently presented by Chris Packham :)