Preparing For A No-Deal Brexit
I am doing a few things to make sure, that I survive a no-deal Brexit, as unscathed as possible.
Savings
I keep all of my spare cash in Zopa, moving it in and out as required. Effectively for about seven or eight years now, I have used the first peer-to-peer lender as a high-interest, thirty-day access deposit account.
It has probably paid around five percent before tax in that time and it has safely ridden the peaks and troughs of governments and financial instability.
Today, I calculated how much cash, I need in my current account to see me through to end of the year, and the spare money was tranferred to Zopa. It was a fast painless transaction and now it is available to lend to Zopa’s customers.
Warfarin
Warfarin stops me having another stroke.
As it only comes from Eastbourne, I suspect supply of this comment drug.
But I have enough to last me to until Summer 2019.
INR Testing
I test my own INR, which determines the Warfarin dose.
Today, I ordered enough test strips to get me through to Summer 2019.
Beer
Every time, I go walking around London, I take a large bag, that can hold up to eight bottles of my favourite beer from Marks and Spencer.
Supplies from Adnams in Suffolk seem good at the present and I usually liberate a few from a boring life on the shelves on every trip.
As with other products, I aim to have enough to last me through to Summer 2019, at a rate of three a day.
EDF Energy Targets Solar Homes With Discounted Battery Offer
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Solar Power Portal.
The title shows the way things are going. Although, I doubt, I would use EDF, as they are one of the companies who have ripped us off for a long time.
I have said that I will fit a battery in this house to go with the solar panels on my roof. I will also fit an electric car charging point in the garage, so that when I sell the house in a few years, the house will have more buyer appeal.
At around seven thousand pounds, the 8.2 kWh battery mentioned in the article, would be within my price range, but I suspect that price will decrease.
A Tailpiece To An Obituary
Yesterday, The Times finished their obituary of Baroness Trumpington, with this sentence.
On another occasion she was invited by a magazine editor to a lunch where Nicholas Soames praised Viginia Bottomley as “one of the chaps”. The editor found this offensive and said that a woman cannot be a chap. Trumpington took the cigarette out of her mouth, put down her gin and simply said “Balls”
As her son said in announcing her death on Twitter – “She had a bloody good innings!”
Big Names Chase £50m Crossrail Office Job At Bond Street
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Building.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Scheme is one of a dozen planned for central London link of rail route
Three firms are in the race to build a new £50m office block above the Crossrail station at Bond Street.
It just shows how much is being pumped into London to develop office and housing complexes.
Bank Station Walbrook Entrance – 28th November 2018
I took these pictures this morning.
Note.
- Judging by the dates on the poster, which says that there will be a closure of the Waterloo & City Line on the weekend of December 1/2, so that work can be done on the passageway, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the entrance opened in early December
- I also had a good look at the white board and it looks like a TV screen. Rather upmarket for the London Underground!
- Looking through the open door, I could see that the lights on the ticket machines were on!
On a second visit, I was told that the entrance opens at 10:00 on Friday.
Crossrail – Northern – Northern City Interchange At Moorgate Station
In New Bank Tube Station Entrance In Final Stages Ahead Of Opening, Mrlvyn said this in a comment.
I visited Moorgate Station recently and noticed the new lift of the Northern Line behind the hoarding. I then used escalator to go up to the Northern City Line which is directly above the Northern Line but there is no sign of work for the lift to stop at this level !
I have discovered from another site that Line will not be going step free due to arguments between DFT and TFL when Boris Johnson was Mayor and who should fund a hole in the wall for lift to stop!
Plus ca change! My company provided the planning computer and software for the Jubilee Line Extension. We heard stories of bad planning all the time and it certainly wasn’t a happy project.
But look at this image, I’ve clipped from this large visualisation of the massive Liverpool Street-Moorgate Crossrail Station.
The image shows the Northern City Line coming into Moorgate station.
Colours are as follows.
- Blue – Northern City Line
- Yellow – Circle and Hammersmith & City Lines
- Black – Northern
- Turquoise – Crossrail
Details to note.
Existing Northern City Escalators
The escalator shaft to the existing ticket hall is shown in white by the letter M of Moorgate.
Existing Northern Line Escalators
The double tunnels from the stairs leading to the platforms to the escalators are shown in white underneath the Northern City Line.
The escalators to the existing ticket hall are clearly shown.
Circle And Hammersmith & City Lines
When Crossrail opens, passengers would seem to still do, as they do now to interchange between Norther/Northern City and the Sub-Surface Lines.
The only problem now, is if you need a lift, there is none to the deep lines or in the subway under the Sub-Surface Lines.
I am sure that the Crossrail reconstruction will address these problems.
The New Crossrail Station
The big turquoise block is the new Crossrail station and Ticket Hall.
This image shows a cross-section through it.
It will be two escalators down from street level to Crossrail. But then rhen Crossrail is deep.
A New Tunnel
In the visualisation, there is a new tunnel from around the centre of the Northern and Northern City Lines to the new Crossrail station.
I am not sure of where it joins the new construction over Crossrail, but assuming that the visualisation is to scale, the tunnel is larger than a typical Underground tunnel.
This size will mean that it will attract a lot of passengers.
At the Crossrail end, if would probably connect by a level route to an interchange floor, where the following would be possible.
- Take an escalator or lift to and from Crossrail.
- Take a level connection to the Westbound platforms of the Sub-Surface Lines.
- Take an escalator or lift to street level.
I suspect that would handle all connections except for step-free access to the Eastbound Sub-Surface Lines.
At the other end of this tunnel, it would need to have large capacity and step-free access to the Northern and Northern City Lines.
Conclusion
It looks like the Northern and Northern City Lines are being given a second route to both the surface and other lines through Moorgate.
I shall go and have a look this morning.
I took these pictures.
A few observations.
- The two escalators connecting the Northern and the Northern City Lines are in good condition with refurbished walls and tiling.
- There are no tell-tale blue walls on the platforms for the Northern City Line, which still retains its Network South East livery.
- There are two blue walls on the opposite side of the cross passages to both escalators on the Northern Line platforms
- The blue wall, facing the up connecting escalator is wider than that facing the down escalator.
- There doesn’t seem to be any works for a lift to take passengers to and from the existing tickey hall.
It looks like it will be a tight squeeze fitting in all the access stairs, escalators and lifts between the Northern Line platforms and the new tunnel, that is shown connecting the Northern Line platforms to Crossrail.
I come to one or more of these conclusions.
- There will be other passages dug in the future.
- Passengers will continue to use the existing escalators.
- I’m missing something obvious.
As Moorgate station is one of the busiest and will get even more so, there must be a sensible plan.
The only thing I can find on the internet is this page on the Acanthus Architects web site.
The New Entrance To Bank Station Underneath The Bloomberg Building
It looks like everything is now ready on Walbrook for the new entrance to Bank station to be opened, with all the barriers cleared away.
I couldn’t work out, whether the white screen was a video display or just a picture frame for a tube map. It was certainly quality and not one of the the usual.
There is still nothing on the Internet about when it opens.
Bollard Advertising
I took these pictures at London Bridge station.
The adverts wrapped around the steel security bollards are for Thameslink.
World’s Largest Wind Farm Attracts Huge Backing From Insurance Giant
The title of this post, is the same as that of an article in the Business pages of yesterday’s copy of The Times.
It is not often that three words implying something big appear in the same sentence, let alone a headline! Such repetition would more likely appear in a tabloid to describe something sleazy.
Until recently, wind power was just something used by those in remote places. I remember a lady in Suffolk, who had her own turbine in the 1980s. She certainly lived well, although her deep freeze was in the next door farmer’s barn.
Now, with the building of the world’s largest wind farm; Hornsea, which is sixty miles off the coast of East Yorkshire, wind farms are talked of as creating enough energy for millions of homes.
Hornsea Project 1 is the first phase and Wikipedia says this about the turbines.
In mid 2015 DONG selected Siemens Wind Power 7 MW turbines with 154 metres (505 ft) rotor turbines for the project – around 171 turbines would be used for the wind farm.
Note that the iconic Bankside power station, that is now the Tate Modern had a capacity of 300 MW, so when the wind is blowing Hornsea Project 1 is almost four times as large.
When fully developed around 2025, the nameplate capacity will be around 6,000 MW or 6 GW.
The Times article says this about the funding of wind farms.
Wind farms throw off “long-term boring, stable cashflows”, Mr. Murphy said, which was perfect to match Aviva policyholders and annuitants, the ultimate backers of the project. Aviva has bought fixed-rate and inflation-linked bonds, issued by the project. While the coupon paid on the 15-year bonds, has not been disclosed, similar risk projects typically pay an interest rate of about 3 per cent pm their bonds. Projects typically are structured at about 30 per cent equity and 70 per cent debt.
Darryl Murphy is Aviva’s head of infrastructure debt. The article also says, that Aviva will have a billion pounds invested in wind farms by the end of the year.
Call me naive, but I can’t see a loser in all this!
- Certainly, the UK gets a lot of zero-carbon renewable energy.
- Aviva’s pensioners get good, safe pensions.
- Turbines and foundations are built at places like Hull and Billingham, which sustains jobs.
- The need for onshore wind turbines is reduced.
- Coal power stations can be closed.
The North Sea just keeps on giving.
- For centuries it has been fish.
- Since the 1960s, it has been gas.
- And then there was oil.
- Now, we’re reaping the wind.
In the future, there could be even more wind farms like Hornsea.
Ease Of Funding
Large insurance companies and investment funds will continue to fund wind farms, to give their investors and pensioners a return.
Would Aviva be so happy to fund a large nuclear power station?
Large Scale Energy Storage
The one missing piece of the jigsaw is large scale energy storage.
I suspect that spare power could be used to do something useful, that could later be turned into energy.
- Hydrogen could be created by electrolysis for use in transport or gas grids.
- Aluminium could be smelted, for either use as a metal or burnt in a power station to produce zero-carbon electricity.
- Twenty-four hour processes, that use a lot of electricity, could be built to use wind power and perhaps a small modular nuclear reactor.
- Ice could be created, which can be used to increase the efficiency of large gas-turbine power plants.
- Unfortunately, we’re not a country blessed with mountains, where more Electric Mountains can be built.
- Electricity will be increasingly exchanged with countries like Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway and The Netherlands.
There will be other wacky ideas, that will be able to store GWhs of electricity.
These are not wacky.
Storage In Electric Vehicles
Consider that there are three million vehicles in the UK. Suppose half of these were electric or plug-in hybrid and had an average battery size of 50 kWh.
This would be a total energy storage of 75,000 MWh or 75 GWh. It would take the fully developed 6GW Hornsea wind far over twelve hours to charge them all working at full power.
Storage In Electric And Hybrid Buses
London has around 8,500 buses, many of which are hybrid and some of electric.
If each has a 50 kWh batttery, then that is 425 MWh or .0.425 GWH. If all buses in the UK were electric or plug-in hybrid, how much overnight electricity could they consume.
Scaling up from London to the whole country, would certainly be a number of GWhs.
Storage In Electric Trains
I also believe that the average electric train in a decade or so could have a sizeable battery in each coach.
If we take Bombardier they have an order book of over four hundred Aventra trains, which is a total of nearly 2,500 coaches.
If each coach has an average battery size of 50 kWh, then that is 125 MWh or 0.125 GWh.
When you consider than Vivarail’s two-car Class 230 train has a battery capacity of 400 kWh, if the UK train fleet contains a high-proportion of battery-electric trains, they will be a valuable energy storage resource.
Storage in Housing, Offices and Other Buildings
For a start there are twenty-five million housing units in the UK.
If just half of these had a 10 kWh battery storage system like a Tesla Powerwall, this would be a storage capacity of 125 GWh.
I suspect, just as we are seeing vehicles and trains getting more efficient in their use of electricity, we will see buildings constructed to use less grid electricity and gas.
- Roofs will have solar panels.
- Insulation levels will be high.
- Heating may use devices like ground source heat pumps.
- Battery and capacitors will be used to store electricity and provide emergency back up.
- Electric vehicles will be connected into the network.
- The system will sell electricity back to the grid, as required.
Will anybody want to live in a traditional house, that can’t be updated to take part in the energy revolution?
Will The Electricity Grid Be Able To Cope?
National Grid have been reported as looking into the problems that will happen in the future.
- Intermittent power from increasing numbers of wind and solar farms.
- Charging all those electric vehicles.
- Controlling all of that distributed storage in buildings and vehicles.
- Maintaining uninterrupted power to high energy users.
- Managing power flows into and out of the UK on the various interconnectors.
It will be just like an Internet of electricity.
And it will be Europe-wide! and possibly further afield.
Conclusion
The UK will have an interesting future as far as electricity is concerned.
Those that join it like Aviva and people who live in modern, energy efficient houses will do well.
Will Trains Run Bi-Directionally On The New Third-Track Through Tottenham Hale?
I ask this question, as a station-man at Tottenham Hale station, said this is what will happen, when the third track is commissioned and there are four trains per hour (tph) between Stratford and Meridian Water stations.
As there is no passing loop between Lea Bridge and Meridian Water stations, only one train can run on the third track at any one time.
Currently timings on the route are as follows.
- Lea Bridge to Angel Road – 10 minutes
- Stratford to Angel Road – 16-18 minutes
- Angel Road to Stratford – 16-18 minutes
- Angel Road to Lea Bridge – 9 minutes
If I assume that it takes six minutes to change ends at Meridian Water and that journey times are a minute shorter due to the shorter distance, this means the following.
- A train would take twenty-three minutes to do a round trip between Lea Bridge and Meridian Water.
- A train would take thirty-eight minutes to do a round trip between Stratford and Meridian Water.
I am led to the following conclusions.
- A twenty-three minute round trip from Lea Bridge means that four tph isn’t possible using the third track bi-directionally.
- Thirty-eight minutes for the round trip from Stratford would probably mean only one extra trip in an hour is possible.
I am very certain that running a four tph service between Stratford and Meridian Water, using the third track in a bi-directional manner would be very difficult, if not impossible.
The Anonymous Widower 
