Of course it will Tiny, that's what engineers do.

Grin.

So I'd better not ask him how he thinks manufacturing businesses deal with power hiccups? I suppose it involves them saying 'hey, ho, pip and dandy' and wishing they'd built a really big UPS?

TinyCO2, it doesn't matter. I would keep the coal plant available for emergencies such as war in the Middle East, no oil or gas tanker supplies and the Russian bombing the North Sea gas platforms. In such circumstances, even if we have to send in the SAS to extract Mike Jackson and Martin A from occupied France to come and get the coal stations on-line, the cost and delays are immaterial.

It doesn't matter? It doesn't matter that a mothballed coal plant takes months to recommission? It doesn't matter where you get staff to run it? I'm sure that there are plenty of media studies students but I'm not sure they're ideal recruitment material. What about shortages of a few weeks at a time when the wind isn't blowing? Do we just wait for power to come back?

serious question Tiny:

I used to hear about French bakers' ovens - they have to be fired every day or else the oven will crack and become unusable. Given the temperature that a coal furnace will reach, is that not a serious issue with moth-balling a power station? Have furnace materials evolved to such a state that they can survive prolonged periods without being fired?

AFAIK the problem is not so much the boiler but unless a station is kept moving, parts of it seize up, block, bend and generally stop working. The turbines in particular need to turn or the bearings flatten and (trying to think back to my student days) the central shaft bends. So you either have to keep turning stuff over or you have to take it apart. There will be stuff like rust or doors stuck shut that increase while the plant is cold and unused and while it doesn't necessarily stop the plant restarting it does slow things down. Water has to be drained from pipes and special care needs to be taken over legionella when restarting kit that hasn't been regularly flushed with biocide. To start up you have to do many of the same things you have to if it was a new station (but made of old kit). Pressure tests etc.

In the meantime do you keep the staff? Even with the station mothballed, the plant needs some maintenance, security, admin etc. Also, the older the plant, the more specialised the running operations can be. If you lose staff before new people are trained how hard is it to recover the knowledge? How much coal do you keep? How many spares do you keep for a station that may never be used again?

Who's paying you to keep this station but not operate it? You're certainly not going to build a new station for such a purpose unless the government provides all the money and a hefty maintenance fee on top.

Too many people like BB see industry as a scaled up version of their own lives and don't realise that the problems change as the thing gets bigger.

Whatever happened to E17? Like Zorro he made a first brief appearence on this thread, then another tantalising intervention, now nothing.

Does anyone want to bet he's some sort of nutjob phsycologist who's tried an experiment on a denier blog with the hope that he'll get the sort of nutjob responses he's imagined he would get and been sorely disappointed.

Tiny your making great practical points, but as I said to Martin A you're talking in a dimension alien to our bitty, the practical engineering dimension. He hasn't got a clue what's involved in keeping huge energy generation plants on stand-by and believes they can be left dormant then switched on as and when in the bling of an eye, with only a minor cost penalty. But he's not alone there so do 400+ MPs who voted for the CCA.

diogenes,

A company I worked for supplied computers to a major steelworks for real time control of the furnaces. One of the problems of supporting them was that once the furnaces were fired up, they had to be kept running for six months, which was when a rebuild was necessary. There was no question of turning a furnace off for a few days after a couple of months to fix a problem, and then turning it back on for the remaining four months, because the costly rebuild would be necessary by dint of closing it down.

Years before I worked with people doing documentation for the CEGB. One of the things they spoke about and which surprised them was how long it took to fire up a coal-fired station after a refit and get it contributing to the grid, it was at least several days. It was days of running up and continuous testing and there were a couple of horror stories about what had gone wrong when the process was speeded up. That's with staff who do this regularly and are in practice.

Now there is plant designed to be little used and fired up on demand, but it's designed to another set of engineering considerations and it's more costly to run. It still has to be maintained and kept ready.

Even with a petrol backup generator for say, a chicken farm with power outages every year or so, it has to be fired up regularly, it has problems with the petrol going stale, and when you need it, it can take a mechanic to start it.

The notion of having capital coal fired power stations, costing nothing and 'in mothballs', ready to go at a couple of days notice, with the staff magically appearing, is utterly ridiculous.

thanks to Tiny and cosmic for the very detailed answers.

geronimo, I agree about BB but engineers have a habit of never explaining what we think is bleedin' obvious and BB is not the only person who could read this. There's a huge gap in public and governmental knowledge on how the grimier side of life works. One of the key reasons engineers are so sceptical of climate science is because it was potrayed as being a simple issue and we know that NOTHING is ever simple.

There was a funny programme a few years back where the BBC set up a house and powered it by people on bicycles. They had at least 50 at a time going flat out and they only just kept up with the needs of a modern house. At the end they showed the equivalent energy in coal or oil and the amounts were tiny. It brought it home to me just how much energy comes out of the black stuff, though I'm sure that wasn't the intention of the show.

If you don't understand the scope of the problem cutting CO2, it's easy to agree to it. If you don't appreciate how your country will suffer under renewables, it's simpler to give the science the benefit of the doubt. The CAGW question is not catastrophe versus safety, it's a choice between two catastrophes.

I'm new to this thread.

E17 made a very interesting post. Then BitBucket turned it into a discussion of her/his views. 18,000 posts later it's still all about BitBucket. Can anyone tell me if there's been an interesting discussion of E17's post in the meantime? I don't don't want to have to wade through 12 pages of bickering about who's been receiving Koch money.

Not really, but then I'm not sure where the discussion could go. BB is a good example of the system sceptics face. He has an endless fund of loosely connected environmental issues. If one avenue becomes difficult he shifts to another. He sees modern society as greed made tangible. He won't even define where need stops and greed starts. What can PR do against a culture of antipathy towards everything we surround ourselves with? It's all tied up with white, western guilt that thinks mankind is inherently bad and anyone successful, doubly so.

Personally I'd love to see a new documentary done in the old BBC style that could sum up the most pressing sceptic concerns but I'm not sure that it can all be condensed into something coherent and under 24hrs long. However such a documentary would only make an impact if it a) had celebs b) was shown on Sky, ITV, C4 or C5. The alternative is just chipping away at the system.

Tiny

my earlier question was based on a practical point...if you told the French that they had to keep firing the bread ovens or they would have no bread, there would be action! sadly, in the UK, there seems no common spur...intermittent power equals soggy KFC is not quite so compelling.

Intermittent power equals job losses in manufacturing.
Intermittent power equals buglaries.
Intermittent power equals premature deaths.
Intermittent power equals we become an international joke.
Intermittent power equals loads of extra work.
Intermittent power equals your child might be sent home from school or nursery.
Intermittent power equals you might be stuck in lift in the Shard, trying to make the deal of a lifetime and your 4G phone doesn't work.
Intermittent power equals a dead beat country with no future.
There would not be a part of your life that wouldn't be touched by power cuts.

James Evans,

I think the question was answered. When the tide turns as it has to and is beginning to, because climate alarmism flies in the face of reality, the PR will follow. PR can't sustain something which is rubbish and everyone laughs at, any more than marketing can sell a product which doesn't have a place on the market. I certainly don't see 'skeptics' planning a PR campaign.

As for this thread, we've had the benefit of BB's penetrating insights into pumped storage, coal fired power stations, lung disease, solar power, digging stuff up and burning it, and many other fascinating things. I don't recall him mentioning the Koch brothers.

James Evans, here's a summary. E17 suggested a PR campaign in which 'sceptics' are whiter-than-white. I have argued that such a colourless position is impossible because 'sceptics' are unable to accept or even to discuss honestly what to any normal observer are obvious: that oil company money and scepticism are at some level entwined**; and that the use of fossil fuels has (and has always had) external costs that are not paid directly by the consumer and hence the 'cost' of such fuels is artificially cheap. In the whole thread not one 'sceptic' has been able to admit these fundamental truths. Without honesty, whiter-than-white is simply not possible.

** no I didn't mention the Kochs. Neither do I mention payments to sceptic bloggers.- it is much too sophisticated for that.

Tiny: "The CAGW question is not catastrophe versus safety, it's a choice between two catastrophes.!

Just for once Tiny I'll take issue, CAGW is the choice between having the catastrophe now, by taking the medicine to avoid it, and MAYBE having a catastrophe in the future IF all the predictions come true. See those two conditionals, the future catastrophe is predicated on someone being able to foretell the future. As an example of how difficult that is, using Slingo's analogy, a horse race is simpler to model than the future state of the climate, we aren't even close to making such a model because the horse race is too complex.

BitBucket,

"oil company money and scepticism are at some level entwined"

"Neither do I mention payments to sceptic bloggers.- it is much too sophisticated for that"

Could you summarize your views on this for me? As a sceptic, I don't see how my views are "at some level entwined" with oil company money. (Unless it's at a trivial level - I mean at some level I am entwined with Jennifer Aniston.) Can you show me how my views are entwined with oil company money?

James Evans, sceptics and oil companies seem to have a common objective, namely the continuation of an energy model that involves burning things dug from the ground. †

Oil companies exercise their freedom to protect their interests around the world in various ways, for example by buying politicians who spout anti-climate-science and anti-climate-scientist bile and by supporting organisations that do the same. All of this activity is intended to raise doubt and to encourage scepticism in the minds of the public. Hence scepticism and oil are entwined. Ah, you might say, you personally concluded against climate science independently, free of any such influence; and all on the Hill say likewise. This could of course be true ‡.

† Quite why this should be so puzzles me. Maybe it applies only to sceptics on the Hill - I don't often visit other sceptic sites, so I wouldn't know. Perhaps there are other sceptic groups who (like the Big Yin James) are purely sceptical of climate-related science but have no such devotion to fossils.

‡ ...but my best guess says that it is not.

BB, now you're resorting to blatent lies. We've told you we're not wedded to fossil fuels, we're wedded to reliable energy. You are yet to explain how the current crop of renewables would give us that. You talk about technologies that do not yet exist and judge our opinion. We can't have an opinion on fictional solutions to a potentially non existant problem, other than to wait and see.

Ironically, one of the few reliable forms of renewable energy is geothermal which comes out of the ground. However we are yet to see this working in the UK in anything other than small scale.