The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Because it's utterly endless arguments saying the same thing over and again.
No, I think some people learn and discussion gets us beyond soundbites like “TWAW” when people think through what a literal interpretation of that would mean.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
My guess is it’s because Centrists thought they’d found the magic formula by saying ‘Bit of both’ to every issue, and now don’t like to remember they were giving maniacs who mess kids minds & bodies up equal billing
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
16.9% in perfect conditions in one seat, 5.9% capital wide on the list, almost no recognisable names, no local organisation, reliant on loans and donations from Tice. They'll do well to break 5% nationwide at a GE with or without the spiv
I think that Reform are very unlikely to do well at the GE. In Bootle, a huge number of people hate the Labour party, and say they're going to vote for someone else, except on GE day itself when they mysteriously vote Labour after all.
I view Reform as a successor to UKIP.
In 2015, I would view that as the high water mark for UKIP. They had: 1) A unique USP in leaving the EU. 2) Excepting the Conservative party, no other party would even talk about it. 3) They'd won two decent by-elections and had two MPs (one decent in Carswell). 4) Farage was at the top of his game. 5) Crucially, the party wasn't just seen as a one man party. Farage sure, but you had Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Diane James and both Carswell and Reckless.
They managed 13% and 1 MP.
I don't think Reform will get much more than half that. None of the ideal circumstances that hit UKIP in 2015 are likely to be present for Reform, and absent Farage and Tice I can't think of a single other politician in Reform (I've even forgotten about 30p Lee, as should we all).
There are two different criteria when talking about Reform.
Will Reform do well in terms of their own electoral success? The answer to this tends towards no. They're not going to get many MPs elected, if any.
Will people voting for Reform have an impact on the election results? The answer to this tends towards yes. 6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories will not elect a Reform UK MP, but it will elect a whole bunch of Labour and LibDem MPs by depressing the Tory vote.
Not all 6% voting reform will vote for the Tories if reform isn’t on the ballot, I think you are taking 2019 (get Brexit done logic) to a very different situation.
It’s perfectly plausible that only half that vote votes Tory (so adding 3% to their share) while Labour get 1.5% and the rest simply disappears to other candidates.
So reality is Reform are only going to make an impact on the tightest of tight races and I don’t see many of those
I phrased it as "6% voting Reform UK instead of the Tories", not Reform UK get 6% in total. Now, I don't know what will happen. If it's Reform 6% in total, then, sure, that will have less impact.
So that makes even less sense - you are assuming that the voters are Tory voters who have decided to vote Reform. I suspect they were Reform or none voters who were willing to vote for Bozo in 2019.
And I go back to my story from the Referendum where a lot of people who never voted, voted in the referendum and also came out in 2019 to ensure what they asked for in 2016 was implemented.
I see those voters as Reform voters the Tories borrowed not disillusioned Tory voters making a protest vote
You are applying a level of analysis I never intended. There is clearly a chunk of people who might vote Tory or Reform UK. How many, I don't know. If more plump for RefUK, the Tories lose seats. That's all I meant.
Are these people really Reform voters the Tories borrowed or disillusioned Tory voters... I don't know what evidence we have there. Polling tends to focus on how you voted at 2019, and it tells us that a chunk of people who voted Tory in 2019 are now saying they will vote Reform. I'm not aware of any polling that can tell us about these people's partisan voting patterns prior to 2019.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
He tripped because of the reasons I state. It is indicative of several other issues. None of which will prevent him being PM.
But this "singest biggle... biggest cause" stumble was nothing to do with tech or 'modern speak'.
Today was notably more high-energy than Rishi's much-hyped lectern speech at Policy Exchange on Monday, and all of the political correspondents are specifically mentioning the quality of the presentation. This is from Jack Elsom of the The Sun, for example:
"Aside from the massive land grab on traditional Tory turf, it’s really notable how much Starmer has developed as a public speaker in the past few years. I went to the initial missions launch early last year and it’s just another level." https://twitter.com/JackElsom/status/1791048308837732520
The Sleepy Keith attack is stupid because Sunak is worse at this stuff than SKS, and the gap is growing all the time.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Because it's utterly endless arguments saying the same thing over and again.
No, I think some people learn and discussion gets us beyond soundbites like “TWAW” when people think through what a literal interpretation of that would mean.
If you don’t want to discuss it, don’t engage.
See also “Women won’t Wheesht”.
Go ahead and discuss it. I shouldn't have tried to stop you. I probably (mostly) agree with you FWIW, I just find the whole discussion dreary and repetitive.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
It related to a claim about Gordon Brown.
Yes, I know. But what? It made no sense and as far as I know was never explained.
Didn't expect a bust-up between Anabobazina and TSE.
What bust up? Seems a rather hyperbolic framing.
All good from my end. I took his point. I will not moan about trans again, if that's what people want to discuss, fair enough.
I have no desire to discuss it, however since we're getting into it AGAIN, frankly I find the transphobia expressed by some posters utterly disgusting, shameful and bigoted.
I deliberately didn't reply to the latest spam link because I didn't want to see yet another thread derailed. Suffice to say I think it's a modern day section 28, and the couching of a deliberate political agenda behind "muh biological facts". Should we ban the teaching of Descartes and the mind/body problem too? Ultimately "gender" is as much a philosophical question as sex is a biological one. But I didn't want to derail ANOTHER thread. AGAIN.
Unlike other topics that people spam repeatedly, AI, holiday photos, yes, even the cash vs cashless thing, constant posting of stuff that is negative about trans and gender non conforming people has, as 148grss pointed out the other day, real world consequences. It creates a hostile environment that enables discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, verbal abuse, even assault. Words in this particular theatre have very real world consequences.
I will not engage in the debate further, suffice to say if there are any trans or gender nonconforming people reading this thread, there are those of us who support you - you are valid.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
It related to a claim about Gordon Brown.
Yes, I know. But what? It made no sense and as far as I know was never explained.
Think of the stuff that the @SeanT's bangs on about Truss doing. It's more down the sewer than that.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
I'm convinced that there is a Labour mole. Not just the farcical quality - how many tech savvy PR people are the right demographic to be a Conservative supporter at the moment?
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
My guess is because Centrists thought they’d found the magic formula by saying ‘Bit of both’ to every issue, and now don’t like to remember they were giving maniacs who mess kids minds & bodies up equal billing
I don't believe it is centrists at fault here, it is a combination of of "right- on" lefties and anti- woke populists fighting for the same strip of ground.
Don't paint me into that faulty stereotype.
As a centrist I have no interest in either promoting or denying transgender rights. I don't know enough about the subject and I am not minded to learn.
I have reservations around c*cks in frocks entering women only spaces and I am very queasy when it comes to childhood gender reassignment. On the other hand denying any kind of meaningful sexual awareness and contraception instruction to anyone under 14 is nuts.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Yes. Which was nine years ago, and was only a minor part of the ridicule Ed "Hell yeah, I'm hard enough" Milliband suffered at the time.
It's very much a niche joke for a niche group of political obsessives - i.e. PB.com is peak audience for it, plus right-wing twitter. It's a very inward-looking, joke among friends, sort of thing.
These kind of stories polarise opinion. Some would expect a lot of this kind of thing goes on. Some would say its rare, and we get selection bias (we are aware of these cases BECAUSE they get caught). Id be interested to see how this opinion split between left and right and Labour vs Tory.
Isn’t it reckoned that there’s £5.5bn of benefits fraud annually. That suggests that there’s a fair amount of it occurring.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure overpaid in FYE 2023 was 3.6% (£8.3bn), compared with 4.0% (£8.7bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level of overpayments.
"The total rate of benefit expenditure underpaid in FYE 2023 was 1.4% (£3.3bn), the highest recorded level, compared with 1.2% (£2.6bn) in FYE 2022."
However, that is fraud and error (either claimant or official error). If we go further down that document:
"Overpayments due to Fraud were 2.7% (£6.4bn) in FYE 2023, compared with 3.0% (£6.5bn) in FYE 2022 which was the highest recorded level."
However, some of that overpayment will be successfully recovered.
Estimating fraud levels is obviously an uncertain business, which provides quite a bit of scope for people to suspect that the estimates are being underdone.
What I would say is that, with so much of the application process now moved online, there's the potential that more fraud is now perpetrated by a smaller number of people.
In the past you might have had more fraud of the type where people were claiming benefits while doing cash in hand work, or lying about one eligibility criterion or another. Nowadays it's more likely to involve a group who have harvested personal data, and making a large number of fraudulent claims.
I would imagine that there is quite a bit of people working "legit" up to the limits, then going "on the black" to top up earnings further.
The insane effective marginal rates.....
Not difficult to imagine people working for small or family businesses, working 16h a week on the books, and 16 more for a tenner an hour cash, accounted for as some random expense like taxis or parking. Not only saves the NI for the employer, but saves the employee a fortune in avoiding benefits withdrawal at 65%. Very difficult to detect unless you’re watching the business very closely. The other one is the three-brothers-with-a-taxi scam, which was discussed under the topic of immigration but can apply equally to benefit fraud.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Because it's utterly endless arguments saying the same thing over and again.
No, I think some people learn and discussion gets us beyond soundbites like “TWAW” when people think through what a literal interpretation of that would mean.
If you don’t want to discuss it, don’t engage.
See also “Women won’t Wheesht”.
Go ahead and discuss it. I shouldn't have tried to stop you. I probably (mostly) agree with you FWIW, I just find the whole discussion dreary and repetitive.
There's a lot of dreary and repetitive right now. We are stuck. We need and want the election. It will fire up PB with betting opportunities and probably give the Tories the boot, with a chance of a 1997 new dawn. For a while, at least. Some of the problems with repetitive posts are that there are a few on PB with hobby horses and very, very fixed opinions. There is little point trying to debate trans with @148grss, AI with @Leon, anything about Scottish politics with several posters and so on. Around that there is much to enjoy, including the endless travelogues (with or without pictures of dogs for scale), digressions for cricket, trains, the weather. I could go on.
PB serves many functions. I don't doubt that for some it is company (the online boozer). Certainly during covid. For others its the politics (whether or not betting is involved). But you can always find something interesting and hopefully learn something too.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
I'm convinced that there is a Labour mole. Not just the farcical quality - how many tech savvy PR people are the right demographic to be a Conservative supporter at the moment?
I assume they're fairly young, so are doing this as a way to amuse themselves and to distract from their real job of whipping up outrage on Facebook...
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification. They usually stick with Kerosene (Jet A-1, similar to diesel) because it’s a dense fuel in an environment where weight and volume are critical, and because it’s easy to manufacture in the massive amounts necessary.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
One excellent policy was, in London, of granting planning permission more easily, subject to adding a piece of riverside pathway. In times past, many building were built right up to the edge of the river (warehouses). So this meant that if the property was being redeveloped, adding a piece of riverside public path was in the interests of the developer.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
Tokyo has a similar trick where you're allowed a bigger floor-area-to-land-area ratio (which is the measurement that constrains how high you can build) if you put some public green space in front of the building.
Re Amnesty and what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs, I am going to respond to this comment from @Roger
"The Amnesty stuff is horrific. PB's self proclaimed 'champion of the downtrodden' cyclefree could only find HORRIFIC the story of the Jewish Chaplain at Leeds University who was hounded because he chose to post photographs of himself in his IDF uniform having moonlighted for them when he should have been doing pastoral work at the university."
FUCK OFF Roger, really just fuck off.
I wrote about the Uighurs in December 2019 and the genocide within the meaning of the relevant Convention being perpetrated on them and about how so many Muslim states and leaders, so quick to throw out accusations of Israeli genocide, sided with the Chinese state which was - and is - carrying out these horrific acts on fellow Muslims.
Fuck off and find some other woman to bully. Because one thing being an investigator for the best part of 40 years has taught me to do is to keep the receipts.
You may have some difficulty finding a woman to bully on here, of course, because the way the site is going (@148's incoherent rubbish it would take several threads to correct is a particular lowlight) why stick around to endure misogyny on here. We have enough of it in real life.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
My guess is because Centrists thought they’d found the magic formula by saying ‘Bit of both’ to every issue, and now don’t like to remember they were giving maniacs who mess kids minds & bodies up equal billing
I don't believe it is centrists at fault here, it is a combination of of "right- on" lefties and anti- woke populists fighting for the same strip of ground.
Don't paint me into that faulty stereotype.
As a centrist I have no interest in either promoting or denying transgender rights. I don't know enough about the subject and I am not minded to learn.
I have reservations around c*cks in frocks entering women only spaces and I am very queasy when it comes to childhood gender reassignment. On the other hand denying any kind of meaningful sexual awareness and contraception instruction to anyone under 14 is nuts.
There's also the media management game being played here.
Leaks of a government crackdown on woke in school sex ed two days ago, this morning's media round, leading to a consultation that might have an outcome before the election. Or not.
See also the Plan for Drivers and Bus Passengers but not cyclists.
Someone is playing a game, someone is being played. And I think the hope is that the people being strung along will be too notice.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
One excellent policy was, in London, of granting planning permission more easily, subject to adding a piece of riverside pathway. In times past, many building were built right up to the edge of the river (warehouses). So this meant that if the property was being redeveloped, adding a piece of riverside public path was in the interests of the developer.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
Tokyo has a similar trick where you're allowed a bigger floor-area-to-land-area ratio (which is the measurement that constrains how high you can build) if you put some public green space in front of the building.
That’s a good idea, so you can build a taller building if you build slightly back and leave some of the plot as green space.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
I'm convinced that there is a Labour mole. Not just the farcical quality - how many tech savvy PR people are the right demographic to be a Conservative supporter at the moment?
I assume they're fairly young, so are doing this as a way to amuse themselves and to distract from their real job of whipping up outrage on Facebook...
It does seem like the work of quite a young, but slightly Tory-boy nerdy, group of people.
But the real fight as you say is in the targeted ads and astroturf campaigns. Can they succeed in whipping up outrage on Facebook? Yes, absolutely.
Can they turn that outrage into Tory votes? Not so sure.
Once in opposition they’ll be better placed, because their whole approach is opposition-like already.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
This is a prompt for me to repeat one of my long-term predictions. I expect that, once Labour are in government, and assuming they do nothing radical to tax pensioner wealth, the age gap will narrow drastically. Old, cautious, pensioners will vote for the government that pays their pension, instead of the opposition who might take them away.
"If Royal Mail directors are happy to wave through the takeover of what is a vital national asset, a full national security review is the minimum that is required. There is after all a reason why other countries have not allowed their postal services to fall into foreign ownership."
Telegraph
They also own a nationally important dataset (postcode address file) which should be removed from the royal mail as part of any deal
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
The CCHQ media interns don’t seem to have realised they’re not working for Boris Johnson any more, and that Sunak has a totally different personality.
I wonder what a more authentic Sunak comms strategy would be like. They could maybe have tried to sell him as the ultimate management consultant. A boffin-cum-troubleshooter wandering around Whitehall diagnosing all the problems.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
You might be surprised.
The country is STUFFED with urban opportunities for such - starting with former railways everyone, and bridleways everywhere (England / Wales) and paths created everywhere that have been forgotten about (ask your local dog walkers), and roads/streets that can be rescued.
Just in my own town I have several, including a 2 mile called the Skegby Track one from a decently sized suburb right to the town centre (site of former gasworks).
Flat and nice quality, but totally unmaintained and barriered off illegally by Notts CC because of "Gypsies" and "ASBO Moto-cyclists".
Quite so. I should have been clearer - I was thinking more of the bits on roads in between - it's the safety equivalent of having a nice level railway and then a whacking gradient for a mile or two in the middle. Not much scope for varying the off road bits. And one has to accept that or try and persuade the council to do something about *their* property.
One excellent policy was, in London, of granting planning permission more easily, subject to adding a piece of riverside pathway. In times past, many building were built right up to the edge of the river (warehouses). So this meant that if the property was being redeveloped, adding a piece of riverside public path was in the interests of the developer.
The planning change resulted in putting together quite a bit of the Thames Pathway.
Nowhere near complete, but it creates a rachet in the right direction.
Tokyo has a similar trick where you're allowed a bigger floor-area-to-land-area ratio (which is the measurement that constrains how high you can build) if you put some public green space in front of the building.
That’s a good idea, so you can build a taller building if you build slightly back and leave some of the plot as green space.
That's been within the compass of UK Planning Policy for many years (many decades for all I know), since the concept of mitigation "to make a development acceptable in planning terms" has been in the system since I've been following planning issues - which is at least since the 1980s.
Those tend to be hard cases, where judgements are made on Appeal by Planning Inspectors who are required to follow Law rather than Politics. In general imo, it works.
Politicians get flappy about it, either local NIMBY-pols, or national nobbled-or-kneejerking-pols.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
The CCHQ media interns don’t seem to have realised they’re not working for Boris Johnson any more, and that Sunak has a totally different personality.
I wonder what a more authentic Sunak comms strategy would be like. They could maybe have tried to sell him as the ultimate management consultant. A boffin-cum-troubleshooter wandering around Whitehall diagnosing all the problems.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
I suggested applying NICs to pensions so that pensioners could enjoy the cut too.
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
The CCHQ media interns don’t seem to have realised they’re not working for Boris Johnson any more, and that Sunak has a totally different personality.
I wonder what a more authentic Sunak comms strategy would be like. They could maybe have tried to sell him as the ultimate management consultant. A boffin-cum-troubleshooter wandering around Whitehall diagnosing all the problems.
I thought that was the whole point of the Cameron appointment. Sensible, boring Conservatism for a respectable number of seats at the next GE. Good election to lose and all that.
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
It related to a claim about Gordon Brown.
Yes, I know. But what? It made no sense and as far as I know was never explained.
Think of the stuff that the @SeanT's bangs on about Truss doing. It's more down the sewer than that.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
I suggested applying NICs to pensions so that pensioners could enjoy the cut too.
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
What's driving the pensioner opposition to the NICs cut? It's so absurd, it surely can't be spontaneous...
Is there some sort of pressure group out-competing the Tories on their targetted ad spend?
What is this? He tripped over a word. People do that all the time.
Doesn't really matter as long as you keep going.
Look, he's going to be PM so calm the farm.
However, this misspeak is interesting because it showed he had been handed the script so no personal touch and no ability to think on his feet; that modern speak is wholly alien to him and he worries too much that he will sound like a dick; and that the idea of a tech bro is unknown to him.
Those are not the qualities of a good PM albeit he will be our next one.
The farm is calm. I do lots of unscripted public presenting at work, and I reckon I trip up on a word most times. It really doesn't matter as long as you keep going. Seems a very trivial thing to point out TBH.
Is the farm the Farmy Farm?
Prize for those who remember what that was...
I heard of it years ago but never understood what it was in the first place!!
It related to a claim about Gordon Brown.
Yes, I know. But what? It made no sense and as far as I know was never explained.
Think of the stuff that the @SeanT's bangs on about Truss doing. It's more down the sewer than that.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
The CCHQ media interns don’t seem to have realised they’re not working for Boris Johnson any more, and that Sunak has a totally different personality.
I wonder what a more authentic Sunak comms strategy would be like. They could maybe have tried to sell him as the ultimate management consultant. A boffin-cum-troubleshooter wandering around Whitehall diagnosing all the problems.
they should release his colourfully formatted spreadsheets to the public
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
I suggested applying NICs to pensions so that pensioners could enjoy the cut too.
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
What's driving the pensioner opposition to the NICs cut? It's so absurd, it surely can't be spontaneous...
Is there some sort of pressure group out-competing the Tories on their targetted ad spend?
That’s exactly the sort of thing that foreign agents would run.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
I suggested applying NICs to pensions so that pensioners could enjoy the cut too.
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
What's driving the pensioner opposition to the NICs cut? It's so absurd, it surely can't be spontaneous...
Is there some sort of pressure group out-competing the Tories on their targetted ad spend?
Keep a close eye on the Sunderland Conservatives (they were behind the Welsh 20mph petition). Possibly gone rogue.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I explained these new proposals to my 10 year old daughter (they were on the radio shortly before she switched to watch junior bake-off) and asked her what they learn and when.
Apparently “we don’t learn about sex until year 6”, which is quite an amusingly meta thing to say.
They’ve already learned about relationships, and how some children have two dads or two mums (but they know that anyway), but nothing on trans. Most of the teaching is about personal privacy and guarding against dirty old men.
In any case they all watch Rupaul’s drag race and several of her friends have trans or non-binary older siblings (more F-M than M-F it seems). So it’s hardly revelatory.
A reminder of Ed Miliband’s Edstone pledges I suppose
Ah. CCHQ need to sharpen up their social media game. I didn't make the connection - the Edstone was nearly a decade ago. This is terrible overall.
The CCHQ media interns don’t seem to have realised they’re not working for Boris Johnson any more, and that Sunak has a totally different personality.
I wonder what a more authentic Sunak comms strategy would be like. They could maybe have tried to sell him as the ultimate management consultant. A boffin-cum-troubleshooter wandering around Whitehall diagnosing all the problems.
they should release his colourfully formatted spreadsheets to the public
If he open-sourced them at the beginning of the election campaign it would certainly be disruptive. He'd be able to spend six weeks telling Starmer that he hasn't understood it.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
That and the fact people's bill increases have covered up any increase, so people are still worse off overall.
Re Amnesty and what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs, I am going to respond to this comment from @Roger
"The Amnesty stuff is horrific. PB's self proclaimed 'champion of the downtrodden' cyclefree could only find HORRIFIC the story of the Jewish Chaplain at Leeds University who was hounded because he chose to post photographs of himself in his IDF uniform having moonlighted for them when he should have been doing pastoral work at the university."
FUCK OFF Roger, really just fuck off.
I wrote about the Uighurs in December 2019 and the genocide within the meaning of the relevant Convention being perpetrated on them and about how so many Muslim states and leaders, so quick to throw out accusations of Israeli genocide, sided with the Chinese state which was - and is - carrying out these horrific acts on fellow Muslims.
Fuck off and find some other woman to bully. Because one thing being an investigator for the best part of 40 years has taught me to do is to keep the receipts.
You may have some difficulty finding a woman to bully on here, of course, because the way the site is going (@148's incoherent rubbish it would take several threads to correct is a particular lowlight) why stick around to endure misogyny on here. We have enough of it in real life.
Who mentioned the Uighurs? Roger seemed to be contesting your defence of Leeds university's Jewish Chaplin not your previous work.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
Edit: I see this question's already been answered, thanks.
The track is still there, at least on Google air. I'm in two minds about its conversion. It used ot be a very useful branch line taking rubbish out to the cement works at Dunbar for incineration. Still potential for industrial purposes as it runs through a very mixed area with quite a bit of industry though admittedly not as much as there used to be.
That's actually an important and difficult question - and raises tough balances, especially in certain 'not car' travel groups which have historic biases (eg the one that used to be called Transport 2000 which was set up by iirc bus companies back in the 1990s) .
For example there was a proposal to turn the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire, which is walking / cycling multiuser path which has 300k+ users every year, into a railway.
Similarly the Roseburn Path in Edinburgh is a railway repurposed as a walking / cycling route, which is now well enough established that Edinburgh has designed its active travel provision around its existence.
Yet there were recent proposals by the Council to turn it into a tram line extension, which would degrade the quality of service of what is now a key link in the Edinburgh active travel network.
Neither strategic nor joined-up. These need to be protected from politicians thinking short-term.
One of the things I want is for these all to be dedicated as Public Rights of Way, by statute - at least in England / Wales. Afaics it is never done, and when it is something like a Planning Condition (eg Summerleaze Bridge, Windsor) it is forgotten about.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
I was not given a warning of Incoming Janet Street-Porter.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I explained these new proposals to my 10 year old daughter (they were on the radio shortly before she switched to watch junior bake-off) and asked her what they learn and when.
Apparently “we don’t learn about sex until year 6”, which is quite an amusingly meta thing to say.
They’ve already learned about relationships, and how some children have two dads or two mums (but they know that anyway), but nothing on trans. Most of the teaching is about personal privacy and guarding against dirty old men.
In any case they all watch Rupaul’s drag race and several of her friends have trans or non-binary older siblings (more F-M than M-F it seems). So it’s hardly revelatory.
So the new guidelines, as presented, will require your daughter's teacher to tell her that the people she sees on TV and knows in real life either don't actually exist or are (at best) mentally ill?
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
My concern with this as with all aspects of sex education is that if kids get radio silence from school they're going to look on the Internet themselves and be bombarded with nonsense from all sides. A lot of the debate seems predicated on the idea that if kids hear nothing from school then they will live in blissful ignorance, which seems incredibly naive. Also as a parent the last thing I want is for schools to start involving us in what they're teaching, since (a) I don't have the bandwidth, (b) I trust them to be sensible and (c) they will get sucked into endless debates with assorted wackos and extremists among the parent cohort, and they are not well funded enough to waste time on that kind of crap.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
I was not given a warning of Incoming Janet Street-Porter.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
I was not given a warning of Incoming Janet Street-Porter.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
Civvie jets have done a number of test flights on various ‘new’ fuels over the years. Mil of course is totally different, and will optimise the hell out of their chosen fuel with stuff like fueldraulics.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
I was not given a warning of Incoming Janet Street-Porter.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
It was over thirty years since I left school, and things will have changed a lot but I’m amazed anyone gets their sex education from teachers or textbooks.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
The tankage for enough ammonia to run an airport of planes flying from Heathrow, say, would be a fairly serious risk to West London, if breached.
An airliner running on ammonia would make a fairly serious chemical weapon.
Sunak just gave the first unambiguous statement that there will not be a general election till October at the earliest. He told ITV’s Loose Women “book your holiday”, so it can’t be July or September (given there’ll be circa six week campaign). As I’ve mentioned, Downing St is working on a 14 November target date
Damn. I was getting so confident that my 14th November forecast was going to come good but Peston has gone and blighted it.
November is evens, December 6, January 20. Won't be earlier. A lot on Nov and a flutter on the other two looks like a winning strategy. I am warming to December, last one was Dec 12th and felt ok. People tend to start Christmas drinking from the beginning of the month which may be associated with a feelgood factor.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
Isn't there an issue with incomplete combustion leading to NOx production? Not a major worry for industry where it can be scrubbed, but perhaps more of a problem in aircraft?
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
Isn't there an issue with incomplete combustion leading to NOx production? Not a major worry for industry where it can be scrubbed, but perhaps more of a problem in aircraft?
Yes, I believe you are more likely to need SNCR or SCR on the back end of the GT to meet NOx limits. Of course, ammonia injection is used for SNCR anyway.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification. They usually stick with Kerosene (Jet A-1, similar to diesel) because it’s a dense fuel in an environment where weight and volume are critical, and because it’s easy to manufacture in the massive amounts necessary.
Of course. But as hydrogen production by electrolysis from renewables becomes cheaper (it's going to take quite a long time for anything close to cost competitive production, but it will happen), then green NH3 might become viable for at least part of aviation. But fairly low energy density compared with kerosene.
Has some limited advantage though - which is why they used it the X15.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
The tankage for enough ammonia to run an airport of planes flying from Heathrow, say, would be a fairly serious risk to West London, if breached.
An airliner running on ammonia would make a fairly serious chemical weapon.
I think aviation is more likely to go with "SAF", essentially Jet-A1 made from biomass, and pretend that the CO2 is not coming out of their engines. Proponents of SAF like to use terms like "ultra-clean drop-in fuel".
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I explained these new proposals to my 10 year old daughter (they were on the radio shortly before she switched to watch junior bake-off) and asked her what they learn and when.
Apparently “we don’t learn about sex until year 6”, which is quite an amusingly meta thing to say.
They’ve already learned about relationships, and how some children have two dads or two mums (but they know that anyway), but nothing on trans. Most of the teaching is about personal privacy and guarding against dirty old men.
In any case they all watch Rupaul’s drag race and several of her friends have trans or non-binary older siblings (more F-M than M-F it seems). So it’s hardly revelatory.
There is something of a generational disconnect between kids in school and the individuals that populate the Tory benches in the Commons. A project which seeks a return to the mores of forty years ago is pretty well doomed to failure - especially starting out in the terminal year of a government.
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
The cut to NIs has spectacularly backfired. It's still being portrayed as an attack on pensioners.
Which is troubling, because in principle it’s a much better policy than cutting income tax. Maybe they could ensure pensioners get the benefit of the cut by bringing them into the scope of NI.
I suggested applying NICs to pensions so that pensioners could enjoy the cut too.
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
TBF, to the independent observer it's not a surprising response to being told for at least 4 decades - and maybe 7 or 8 - that NI is an entitlement to state pension. As indeed our village Tory keeps saying. (Unless he's had an email from HQ?)
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
The tankage for enough ammonia to run an airport of planes flying from Heathrow, say, would be a fairly serious risk to West London, if breached.
An airliner running on ammonia would make a fairly serious chemical weapon.
I think aviation is more likely to go with "SAF", essentially Jet-A1 made from biomass, and pretend that the CO2 is not coming out of their engines. Proponents of SAF like to use terms like "ultra-clean drop-in fuel".
All the studies, going back decades, for alternatives to jet fuel have concluded that synthetic jet fuel is the best answer.
It was over thirty years since I left school, and things will have changed a lot but I’m amazed anyone gets their sex education from teachers or textbooks.
The trick is to understand that the guidance does not govern the children. It governs the teachers.
O/T but interesting piece on how it's possible to build cycle paths cheaply if one knows how to use the planning system and has lots of free labour (especially for @MattW ):
Obvious issues about it really only working out in the sticks rather than the urban jungle, but Shepton M is not that small a place.
And the emphasis of the article is on cycling (despite the notice in onw photo!).
Interesting. There is an awful lot of difficulty with landowners, including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes (and indeed trams), even when there is plenty of funding available.
There is also a tension with the provision of off-road cycle networks in lieu of ones alongside roads. Women, in particular, do not like cycling along them in the dark, and the one factor that has a discernible effect on cycling rates is hours of daylight (often wrongly ascribed to the weather). Thus, adding good lighting is essential but massively increases costs and maintenance.
"including Network Rail who sit on land that would be perfect for cycle lanes"
Do you have examples? I can understand BRB (Residuals) / HA Historical Railways Estate having such land, but what are the NR examples?
Tracks alongside exiting railway lines are frequently used for access by workers, and probably would not be either safe or accessible to the public.
My personal example is a closed freight line in Edinburgh. It's been in the council's plan for cycling for at least 6 years but apparently Network Rail are yet to provide a price for the purchase (and they have form for these kind of delays elsewhere, I'm told).
If it takes that long to provide a quote for a disused stretch of land for a cycle lane in the middle of the capital, you start to understand why nuclear energy takes such a long time!
Thanks. Do you know its name, and if it is actually officially closed, as opposed to mothballed?
If the latter; we are now in a slow trend of mothballed lines being reopened - especially in Scotland. If a mothballed line becomes a cycle path, there's f;all chance of it being turned back into a railway.
Edit: I see this question's already been answered, thanks.
The track is still there, at least on Google air. I'm in two minds about its conversion. It used ot be a very useful branch line taking rubbish out to the cement works at Dunbar for incineration. Still potential for industrial purposes as it runs through a very mixed area with quite a bit of industry though admittedly not as much as there used to be.
That's actually an important and difficult question - and raises tough balances, especially in certain 'not car' travel groups which have historic biases (eg the one that used to be called Transport 2000 which was set up by iirc bus companies back in the 1990s) .
For example there was a proposal to turn the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire, which is walking / cycling multiuser path which has 300k+ users every year, into a railway.
Similarly the Roseburn Path in Edinburgh is a railway repurposed as a walking / cycling route, which is now well enough established that Edinburgh has designed its active travel provision around its existence.
Yet there were recent proposals by the Council to turn it into a tram line extension, which would degrade the quality of service of what is now a key link in the Edinburgh active travel network.
Neither strategic nor joined-up. These need to be protected from politicians thinking short-term.
One of the things I want is for these all to be dedicated as Public Rights of Way, by statute - at least in England / Wales. Afaics it is never done, and when it is something like a Planning Condition (eg Summerleaze Bridge, Windsor) it is forgotten about.
I'd instinctively give the tramway priority - but insist on a pathway next to it.
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification.
They will, just not for very long unless specifically designed for an alternate fuel. Jet A-1 is blended to have excellent lubricating properties as it's otherwise very difficult to lubricate the HP fuel pumps at the very high fuel pressures that jet engines run. It was 2,200psi in the Sea Harrier! So you could run it on turps but the fuel pumps and other ancillaries would wear quickly in the best case or melt in the worse.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
The gas turbine OEMs are developing machines to run on hydrogen and/or ammonia.
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
The tankage for enough ammonia to run an airport of planes flying from Heathrow, say, would be a fairly serious risk to West London, if breached.
An airliner running on ammonia would make a fairly serious chemical weapon.
I think aviation is more likely to go with "SAF", essentially Jet-A1 made from biomass, and pretend that the CO2 is not coming out of their engines. Proponents of SAF like to use terms like "ultra-clean drop-in fuel".
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
That entire thing, if you read it. It takes a 'contested' thing and sets one position: and one that will be harmful to kids who are trans.
That text essentially denies the existence of trans people, if a person is trans because of their gender identity.
But I fear many people don't believe trans people exist, and don't want them to exist.
What does it mean to be trans if not to have a gender identity that conflicts with your biological sex?
Interestingly, the use of the phrase "pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes" implies that pupils will be allowed to not comply with sex sterotypes. So has this legalised childhood crossdressing?
(ducks)
[EDIT: similarly, the phrase "Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used" means that anybody with a male gender should not be prevented from wearing a dress and doing ballet and that anybody with a female gender should not be prevented from wearing trousers and joining the SAS. I'm not sure they thought that through... ]
The government will fail to meet its targets on heat pump rollout. The promised lifting of a ban on new onshore windfarms has not gone far enough. Massive investment is needed in the electricity grid. There is no proper plan for rail in the north and Midlands now that the northern leg of HS2 has been cancelled, severely inhibiting economic growth in those regions. Water bills will need to go up to fix the sewage crisis, and more reservoirs are needed to avoid drought, while water companies have done too little to staunch leaks. The UK lacks a coherent strategy on flooding, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of river or sea flooding and 910,000 at risk of surface water flooding. Good progress has been made on the rollout of gigabit broadband around the country.
Armitt called for this government, and the next, to act swiftly. “It’s not too late to catch up in many of the areas we’ve highlighted, if the goals are matched with policies of sufficient scale. But the window is closing,” he said.
“Ducking big decisions over the next 12 months will put the major goals of net zero, regional economic growth, and environmental protection in jeopardy,” he warned.
Greater investment was needed in public transport, the NIC found. Uniquely in Europe, the UK’s second and third cities showed lower economic productivity than the national average, largely because of poor transport links, the review found.
The axing of the next phases of the HS2 high-speed rail project left a “critical gap” in rail connectivity between the Midlands and the north, with northern cities likely to “remain poorly served” without further investment.
Given long-term growth in demand “a do-nothing scenario north of the proposed connection of HS2 and the west coast mainline at Handsacre is not sustainable”, the report found.
The target of rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 to reach 7m homes by 2035 was way off track, the report found, while putting off a decision on hydrogen for home heating until 2026 had created uncertainty.
The next government should end new connections to Britain’s gas network from 2025, and ban the sale of new gas boilers for homes and fossil fuel heating in large commercial buildings by 2035, according to the report. It also called on the government to rule out subsidies for hydrogen heating...
The two highlighted items in particular are just economic stupidity from the government. I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to argue about that.
Holy Moly, are they really thinking of piping hydrogen to homes? That is the stupidest fucking decision in history. Any minister stupid enough to authorise that should be shot. We need to stop being governed by morons.
The current plan is to mix 15% hydrogen in with the natural gas, isn't it? So the same partial pressure of hydrogen as in the old town gas mix...
Perfectly safe, just a slightly lower heating value.
...and a much higher hydrogen leakage value. Which then explodes.
Reasons for not using hydrogen are:
Hydrogen is just greenwashed coal: it takes more energy to produce than it releases.
It leaks like a bastard.
It is worse than all the other alternatives.
So it's expensive to make, impossible to store, dangerous to transport and pointless. It has a large red flashing sign over it saying "THIS IS A MASSIVE ERROR". It is Blackadder levels of wrong. It's not just wrong it's stupidly wrong. I could do a Baldrick impersonation whilst saying "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong..." but I think my view is clear at this point.
You need it to get to a certain concentration for it to explode, though, surely? And with it being so leaky that's going to be hard to achieve - no-one encloses their boiler that well.
But I don't disagree that domestic hydrogen's a dead end given the continuing development of heat pumps - as you say, there's still no economic source for the volume needed.
It'd be better to just set a date now for switching off gas altogether rather than stringing it out with the promise of a hydrogen transition that will probably never happen.
I would like to see the writeup for "the environment is so leaky that leaking hydrogen is no biggy". As in legally-responsible-for-the-result writeup and signature.
I mean, we used town gas for however long that lasted, and that was 50% hydrogen...
Yes, sure, there'll be some unsuitable materials used in the 80s before anyone began to think of hydrogen compatibility, and we would need a plan to replace those. But that's mainly an issue in the distribution network rather than in the home, and that can be solved by re-lining the pipes where necessary.
And since more than 95% of the deaths from gas come from CO poisoning, a pure hydrogen network would likely work out as being safer than natural gas.
But I don't see it winning out against electricity, and think the real danger is that certain sectors of industry will try to keep us throwing money at it in an effort to keep the possibility of domestic hydrogen alive. We ought to make a decision rather than dithering.
(I do agree that a 'a few more explosions but far fewer poisonings!' is hardly a great safety case. But that's an argument against all domestic gas, not just against hydrogen)
Hydrogen embrittlement was largely discovered through town gas - pipes you could collapse by rapping on them with your knuckle.
You can't reline domestic pipes - between embrittlement and leaks, you'd have to redo all the pipework between the street and boiler. Even the solder used to join metal has to be the right kind. Hydrogen can leak *through* solid materials.
Gas explosions have dropped massively since the town gas days - the question is whether this was partly due to no hydrogen in the mix. It probably was.
From a good thread on the Rotterdam hydrogen summit:
Mobility and heating definitely have a muted presence, with a lot more focus on ammonia, eSAF, P2X, and large scale industrial facilities.
Hydrogen will definitely have its place in a renewable economy - but the cost timeline on the production of green hydrogen, and the likely massive cost of upgrading national gas networks (and domestic pipework), make planning to use it to replace gas in domestic heating completely nuts.
As an industrial feedstock, from electrolysis using zero marginal cost renewables which go beyond what's needed to charge whatever battery storage demand is out there from hour to hour, bulk generation of green hydrogen will at some point make quite a lot of sense economically.
Creating hydrogen for steel production, actually makes some sense.
The cycle of electricity -> hydrogen -> compress/cool -> store -> uncompress -> electricity is so inefficient that hydrogen power storage is unlikely to make sense. Nearly every other method is cheaper and better. Remember you have significant loses per day - several percent.
Also ammonia makes more sense than hydrogen as an aviation fuel (though not without issues).
A jet turbine will burn pretty much anything combustible with only minor modification. They usually stick with Kerosene (Jet A-1, similar to diesel) because it’s a dense fuel in an environment where weight and volume are critical, and because it’s easy to manufacture in the massive amounts necessary.
Of course. But as hydrogen production by electrolysis from renewables becomes cheaper (it's going to take quite a long time for anything close to cost competitive production, but it will happen), then green NH3 might become viable for at least part of aviation. But fairly low energy density compared with kerosene.
Has some limited advantage though - which is why they used it the X15.
The X15 engine was designed before most of the fun bits of Ignition! were written.
It was over thirty years since I left school, and things will have changed a lot but I’m amazed anyone gets their sex education from teachers or textbooks.
Essential backstop, though. Who else? Peers? Parents who are too embarrassed or have unusual views? that nice gentleman in ...?
The draft statutory SRE guidance has now been published. I haven’t read it all but the section on gender is *eminently* sensible. Shame you couldn’t tell this from all the people losing their minds on this in the last few days.
Children’s education and the medical scandal of the decade - why do you want to ignore it?
We have discussions on cycle paths or infrastructure - why not this too?
Having read the contents of that tweet, it does seem like the new Section 28, and one that will cause harm to trans children.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
The Observer Leader writer:
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
Let me ask you a question: what do you think kid should be taught about trans people before the age of 16?
I think the guidelines are clear and appropriate:
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment, by the end of their secondary education.
That entire thing, if you read it. It takes a 'contested' thing and sets one position: and one that will be harmful to kids who are trans.
That text essentially denies the existence of trans people, if a person is trans because of their gender identity.
But I fear many people don't believe trans people exist, and don't want them to exist.
One of the main points of the Cass review is clinicians do not know which kids are "trans' - and thats why going through puberty is a useful way for them to work it out for themselves. Meanwhile multiple other issues are ignored because "trans" is the only thing being treated.
Do you know which kids are trans?
The text explicitly says Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment,
So in what way is it "denying the existence of trans people"?
The guidance sets out the law as it is - if you wan't to campaign for lowering the age of gender reassignment from 18, feel free - but thats what the law says today.
Comments
Ammonia for civil aviation: A design and performance study for aircraft and turbofan engine
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890424002358#
If you don’t want to discuss it, don’t engage.
See also “Women won’t Wheesht”.
I know you disagree, but that's my view. It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the long-term.
Mind you I am not a fan of this particular Carlotta hobby horse.
Are these people really Reform voters the Tories borrowed or disillusioned Tory voters... I don't know what evidence we have there. Polling tends to focus on how you voted at 2019, and it tells us that a chunk of people who voted Tory in 2019 are now saying they will vote Reform. I'm not aware of any polling that can tell us about these people's partisan voting patterns prior to 2019.
All good from my end. I took his point. I will not moan about trans again, if that's what people want to discuss, fair enough.
Lowest lead in Q2 to date is 15%, twice, most recently JL Partners, 2-5th May. But we still have half of Q2 to go.
Today was notably more high-energy than Rishi's much-hyped lectern speech at Policy Exchange on Monday, and all of the political correspondents are specifically mentioning the quality of the presentation. This is from Jack Elsom of the The Sun, for example:
"Aside from the massive land grab on traditional Tory turf, it’s really notable how much Starmer has developed as a public speaker in the past few years. I went to the initial missions launch early last year and it’s just another level."
https://twitter.com/JackElsom/status/1791048308837732520
The Sleepy Keith attack is stupid because Sunak is worse at this stuff than SKS, and the gap is growing all the time.
I deliberately didn't reply to the latest spam link because I didn't want to see yet another thread derailed. Suffice to say I think it's a modern day section 28, and the couching of a deliberate political agenda behind "muh biological facts". Should we ban the teaching of Descartes and the mind/body problem too? Ultimately "gender" is as much a philosophical question as sex is a biological one. But I didn't want to derail ANOTHER thread. AGAIN.
Unlike other topics that people spam repeatedly, AI, holiday photos, yes, even the cash vs cashless thing, constant posting of stuff that is negative about trans and gender non conforming people has, as 148grss pointed out the other day, real world consequences. It creates a hostile environment that enables discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, verbal abuse, even assault. Words in this particular theatre have very real world consequences.
I will not engage in the debate further, suffice to say if there are any trans or gender nonconforming people reading this thread, there are those of us who support you - you are valid.
Don't paint me into that faulty stereotype.
As a centrist I have no interest in either promoting or denying transgender rights. I don't know enough about the subject and I am not minded to learn.
I have reservations around c*cks in frocks entering women only spaces and I am very queasy when it comes to childhood gender reassignment. On the other hand denying any kind of meaningful sexual awareness and contraception instruction to anyone under 14 is nuts.
It's very much a niche joke for a niche group of political obsessives - i.e. PB.com is peak audience for it, plus right-wing twitter. It's a very inward-looking, joke among friends, sort of thing.
Maybe it will keep spirits high at CCHQ.
The Conservatives really really really can't point and laugh at alleged relaunches by rivals.
Not after the decade they've had.
PB serves many functions. I don't doubt that for some it is company (the online boozer). Certainly during covid. For others its the politics (whether or not betting is involved). But you can always find something interesting and hopefully learn something too.
https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1791074377414365344?t=e0bxSM_DJSOLw4KzJB3_lA&s=19
This, together with polling on the country's public spending priorities (health, basically) will see UK earners milked dry to prop up an aging population. The 2030s are peak boomer, and this will absolutely critical during a Labour second term.
NEW: Rishi Sunak says he will continue as an MP for North Yorkshire after the election if the Tories lose
https://x.com/christiancalgie/status/1791073056741327093?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
https://x.com/itvnewspolitics/status/1791074377414365344
"The Amnesty stuff is horrific. PB's self proclaimed 'champion of the downtrodden' cyclefree could only find HORRIFIC the story of the Jewish Chaplain at Leeds University who was hounded because he chose to post photographs of himself in his IDF uniform having moonlighted for them when he should have been doing pastoral work at the university."
FUCK OFF Roger, really just fuck off.
I wrote about the Uighurs in December 2019 and the genocide within the meaning of the relevant Convention being perpetrated on them and about how so many Muslim states and leaders, so quick to throw out accusations of Israeli genocide, sided with the Chinese state which was - and is - carrying out these horrific acts on fellow Muslims.
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2019/12/09/lets-talk-about-islamophobia/
Where were you Roger? Let's look at the comments and see how concerned you were about them, shall we.
Or how about this header from July 2020 - https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/07/23/laundering-reputations-china-and-its-uighurs/#vanilla-comments.
Where were you then?
Fuck off and find some other woman to bully. Because one thing being an investigator for the best part of 40 years has taught me to do is to keep the receipts.
You may have some difficulty finding a woman to bully on here, of course, because the way the site is going (@148's incoherent rubbish it would take several threads to correct is a particular lowlight) why stick around to endure misogyny on here. We have enough of it in real life.
Leaks of a government crackdown on woke in school sex ed two days ago, this morning's media round, leading to a consultation that might have an outcome before the election. Or not.
See also the Plan for Drivers and Bus Passengers but not cyclists.
Someone is playing a game, someone is being played. And I think the hope is that the people being strung along will be too notice.
Of course schools shouldn’t be teaching gender ideology beliefs as fact. It’s also likely unlawful given the Education Act clauses on impartiality. There is evidence some schools have been, with risks for children. Of course this should be clarified in guidance....
Always suspected it was going to be sensible from the briefings. Of course it’s totally implausible the govt would “ban” any talk of a protected characteristic in schools. There are a lot of people who should know better who’ve been complicit in the abject conversation about this
https://x.com/soniasodha/status/1791042957270770108
But the real fight as you say is in the targeted ads and astroturf campaigns. Can they succeed in whipping up outrage on Facebook? Yes, absolutely.
Can they turn that outrage into Tory votes? Not so sure.
Once in opposition they’ll be better placed, because their whole approach is opposition-like already.
Those tend to be hard cases, where judgements are made on Appeal by Planning Inspectors who are required to follow Law rather than Politics. In general imo, it works.
Politicians get flappy about it, either local NIMBY-pols, or national nobbled-or-kneejerking-pols.
PB has a stutter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJCN8EZGEJ8
This did not go down well at all on Facebook. Even worse than when I suggested rewilding a few golf courses in East Lothian.
Is there some sort of pressure group out-competing the Tories on their targetted ad spend?
Apparently “we don’t learn about sex until year 6”, which is quite an amusingly meta thing to say.
They’ve already learned about relationships, and how some children have two dads or two mums (but they know that anyway), but nothing on trans. Most of the teaching is about personal privacy and guarding against dirty old men.
In any case they all watch Rupaul’s drag race and several of her friends have trans or non-binary older siblings (more F-M than M-F it seems). So it’s hardly revelatory.
This especially applies to aircraft with fueldraulic actuated systems (F-35, Su-30/35 and probably some civvie shit I don't know about) where pressures are 3,000+ psi.
If asked about the topic of gender identity, schools should teach the facts about
biological sex and not use any materials that present contested views as fact, including
the view that gender is a spectrum. Material suggesting that someone’s gender is
determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used as it risks leading
pupils who do not comply with sex stereotypes to question their gender when they might
not have done so otherwise. Where schools decide to use external resources, they should
avoid materials that use cartoons or diagrams that oversimplify this complex concept or
that could be interpreted as being aimed at younger children. Schools should consult
parents on the content of external resources on this topic in advance and make all
materials available to them on request.
As Cass highlighted, clinicians do not know which children will have a stable trans-identity into adulthood, so the concept of a "trans child" is dangerous as it risks diagnostic overshadowing.
Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn
about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment,
by the end of their secondary education.
https://consult.education.gov.uk/rshe-team/review-of-the-rshe-statutory-guidance/supporting_documents/Draft RSE and Health Education statutory guidance.pdf
Where's the "Section 28"?
For example there was a proposal to turn the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire, which is walking / cycling multiuser path which has 300k+ users every year, into a railway.
Similarly the Roseburn Path in Edinburgh is a railway repurposed as a walking / cycling route, which is now well enough established that Edinburgh has designed its active travel provision around its existence.
Yet there were recent proposals by the Council to turn it into a tram line extension, which would degrade the quality of service of what is now a key link in the Edinburgh active travel network.
Neither strategic nor joined-up. These need to be protected from politicians thinking short-term.
One of the things I want is for these all to be dedicated as Public Rights of Way, by statute - at least in England / Wales. Afaics it is never done, and when it is something like a Planning Condition (eg Summerleaze Bridge, Windsor) it is forgotten about.
Sunny is just playing on words
I was not given a warning of Incoming Janet Street-Porter.
That's actually a lot worse than I'd expected
Negligence from @Eabhal
The SR-71 had some weird fuel that was a nightmare to tanker and transport, needed nitrogen tanks to inert it, and a procedure that involved de-fueling back to the tanker. https://theaviationgeekclub.com/blackbird-pilot-explains-why-the-sr-71-had-to-refuel-right-after-takeoff-and-its-not-because-it-leaked-fuel/amp/
Ammonia is a handy transportation vector for hydrogen, especially if it is going a long way by ship (e.g. Australia to Japan/Korea, Middle East to Europe), and if you can burn it directly and avoid the faff of cracking it back to hydrogen, happy days.
And before people start flapping about the risks associated with ammonia (which I agree should not be underestimated), there used to be daily train loads of the stuff running between Teesside and Grangemouth, back in the day. I remember on one occasion the Class 40 on the train struggling on greasy rails through platform 8 (now 2) at Newcastle Central, and giving maximum thrash under the station roof to keep the train moving.
But I don't want the domestic gas supply converted to ammonia, before someone asks!
An airliner running on ammonia would make a fairly serious chemical weapon.
That text essentially denies the existence of trans people, if a person is trans because of their gender identity.
But I fear many people don't believe trans people exist, and don't want them to exist.
Aviation is somebody else's problem!
But as hydrogen production by electrolysis from renewables becomes cheaper (it's going to take quite a long time for anything close to cost competitive production, but it will happen), then green NH3 might become viable for at least part of aviation.
But fairly low energy density compared with kerosene.
Has some limited advantage though - which is why they used it the X15.
A project which seeks a return to the mores of forty years ago is pretty well doomed to failure - especially starting out in the terminal year of a government.
https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/
[Factory being set up at Carcroft, just north of Doncaster]
Not entirely convinced but it might work for short haul.
(ducks)
[EDIT: similarly, the phrase "Material suggesting that someone’s gender is determined by their interests or clothing choices should not be used" means that anybody with a male gender should not be prevented from wearing a dress and doing ballet and that anybody with a female gender should not be prevented from wearing trousers and joining the SAS. I'm not sure they thought that through...
https://www.cityam.com/fca-charges-finfluencers-for-promoting-unauthorised-trading-scheme/
Do you know which kids are trans?
The text explicitly says Pupils should understand the importance of equality and respect and should learn about the protected characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender reassignment,
So in what way is it "denying the existence of trans people"?
The guidance sets out the law as it is - if you wan't to campaign for lowering the age of gender reassignment from 18, feel free - but thats what the law says today.