The Knightsbridge Desert
On Saturday, I visited an event between Knightsbridge and Sloane Square stations. I was thirty minutes early and the person, I was meeting was running a few minutes late, so I decided to have a coffee.
I remember Sloane Street from the 1960s, when we would take the kids to the area to area to perhaps do a bit of specialist shopping, have a browse and have lunch in one of the many nice cafes. Or in the 1990s, when C and myself, would stay overnight in the area, see a show and buy a few clothes we needed. I still wear the Gieves and Hawkes jacket C bought me in Harrods over thirty years ago, on such a trip.
But now it is a desert of expensive shops, with nothing else in sight. I could afford to shop there, but I have two problems. I can get better value for myself in local shops or markets and I don’t have a lady of my own age to indulge.
I eventually found a pub and had a very good coffee.
The only thing I found interesting in the area, was the rebuilding of Knightsbridge station.
The Lady In High Heels
As I walked along the travelator to the Jubilee Line, I was passed by a lady walking fast in the space between the two moving walkways.
She was striking from behind in a short leather skirt and very high heels. Almost as if to show herself off, she was carrying her lightweight coat over her arm.
It got me thinking about C; my late wife.
In the 1960s, she wore skirts, as short as any girl does today, but she never ever wore heels higher than four or five centimetres or so!
She even got married to me in flat shoes!
But she did show herself off and would deliberately click her heels as perhaps she walked between tables in a high class restaurant. I remember her doing this in a Michelin-starred restaurant in London and when I told her how all the mainly-male diners had followed her with their eyes, she was obviously pleased.
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!”
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.
South Australia Launches AU$50 Million Fund For Grid-Scale Energy Storage
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Energy Storage News.
This is the first paragraph.
In order to address intermittency in its grid, the South Australian Government has introduced a AU$50 million (US$36 million) Grid Scale Storage Fund (GSSF) to help accelerate the deployment of new large energy storage projects, including pumped hydro, hydrogen, gas storage, solar thermal, bioenergy and battery storage.
It is a must-read article, which shows the way progressive governments are thinking.
Contactless Payments For Food In Marks And Spencer
I have been using contactless bank cards to buy my food in Marks and Spencer for about sixteen months now.
I started making a note of my spending this way, as I wanted to check that this method of payment was secure.
It is!
What has dropped out of my research is that the average price of an item over those sixteen months, has been a couple of pence over two pounds.
So now, I usually only buy fifteen items, so that I’m just below the contactless payment limit.
- If it’s a couple of pounds over, I just drop a couple of pound coins in from my pocket, before using the card.
- As it happens fifteen items always fit in my reusable bag, which I stow in my manbag.
- I haven’t bought a new bag for a year and rarely pay 5p. for a plastic one.
The self-imposed fifteen item limit has certainly speeded up my shopping.
I wonder if other chains have the same item cost!
Environmentally-Friendly Dry Cleaning
In the late-1960s, when I worked for ICI, the company was very worried about the effect of dry-cleaning chemicals on the health of workers and was constantly looking for better chemicals.
I suspect as that was fifty years ago, that the dry-cleaning process itself is very much more envionmentally friendly.
But look at these trousers, that I have just brought back from the dry cleaners.
There are two things wrong with the packaging.
The awful wire coat hangers, which are a nuisance to deal with and go straight in the bin.
The plastic wrapping over the top, which I assume is not recyclable.
Years ago in Suffolk, we had a man who collected and returned our bed linen from the laundry, once a week. I can’t remember the company, but I hope they’re still going, as they did an excellent service.
They then started doing dry cleaning and they gave you the choice of having it on hangers or neatly folded in tissue paper.
I remember we chose the latter, as it was so much more convenient.
C would then put things that needed a hanger on proper wooden ones.
With the worries around plastic getting into the oceans, surely we should stop this needless wrapping of dry cleaning with plastic and fold things neatly in tissue paper!
I look forward to seeing a dry-cleaners, that says that we don’t use plastic!
I’ve Finally Found A Small Wooden Spoon
I have finally found the answer to the question I asked in Where Are The Small Cooking Spoons?.
In that post I said this.
My mother had a very small wooden cooking spoon about twelve or so centimetres long. It was ideal for warming baked beans or making scrambled eggs in a non-stick milk saucepan.
Her’s had suffered an accident and I can remember that one side was slightly burned, but it was still usable. And absolutely the eight size!
I’ve been looking for over fifty years since I left home and not found one yet!
Yesterday, I found one in the Borough Kitchen in Borough Market.
They also had a smaller one.
The Anonymous Widower 