Hmm, but I thought the greenwashing future was going to just feed hydrogen through the existing gas pipelines to oor hooses. Of course that in itself has issues as hydrogen is a very small molecule and more likely to leak though joints than the gas currently used.
But maybe that idea has bee dropped seeing as Robin’s recent article highlights Scots won’t really have any benefit from hydrogen as the deal struck is pretty crap. It’s hard to keep up with “so little going on”, isn’t it…
But some initial thoughts that immediately comes to mind:
Is the existing gas pipeline even insulated to a sufficient level to keep the heated water flowing though from just leaching heat out through conduction into the ground.
Gas line is a single small line to a property, so how would that even work… It won’t as you’d need an insulated flow and return pipe of significantly larger size so that still means massive amounts of careful excavation work to install connections to properties. See what I mentioned previously on difficulty of that physical work and the legal aspects and deeds.
And again the cold hard reality is that the theory is one thing, the practical reality is another. I’ve witnessed the way Scottish Water force you to use their preferred contractors such as Clancy Docwra or May Gurney, they were as we engineers say, fucking useless.
On that water main job, I worked with a very competent local contractor to lay the 70 meters of HDPE high pressure main pipe. It was all done perfectly and laid at the correct depth with identifying tape over the top of it so any future groundwork operations would observe the warning tape and not dig into the pipe below. But we were not allowed to do the completions at either end, no, that was the job of the “experts”.
So one Monday morning without notice Clancy rock up and before I spotted them some guy still reeking of drink had proceeded to cut off 4 meters of the pipe including the fusion welded flange for the terminal hydrant, thus rendering the previous pressure test void and also rendering the previous flushing to purge and clean the pipe and the sample taken which was tested to ensure there was no chemical contamination of the pipe prior to it flowing freshwater into properties.
The cutting short of the pipe also meant there was not enough length left to make the 13 fusion welded service connections without re-opening the tarmac road that we had a road opening permit in place for and re-tarred the trench once we had laid the pipe.
So when I came back from walking my dog and observed what he had done, he got told in no uncertain terms to get the fuck off the job immediately as he had completely screwed up the planned and approved layout of how the pipework was meant to be laid to adhere to their regulations. It had taken almost a year to get to the point we could start to lay the main due to endless layers of paperwork and lawyers involved with legal rights of access etc.
The saga dragged on for almost another year with Scottish Water trying to throw their weight about contrary to the signed contract I had with them. But one call from me to the waterwatch ombudsman lawyer and an email showing a few pictures of the shocking work the preferred contractors had done (which did not meet construction and use guidelines), and they backed down and ultimately came to rip out all their shoddy work and completely redo the end section and terminal hydrant as per my initially drawn and approved plans.
It’s quite funny when some twat is standing next to you saying “what do you know about water pipes anyway”, and I mention I was an engineer working with hydraulics that carried oil at up to 10,000 psi, which is a pressure that would cut you in half if a leak occurred.
So my point in stating this is that actually getting decent engineers to install anything to meet compliance standards these days is getting very hard.
The folk installing solar PV in my village didn’t have roof ladders so were walking all over and breaking slates which is a no no, they also didn’t have proper masonry drills to drill through near 3 foot thick stone walls to run the armoured cables from the panel control boxes into the leccy consumer units in the properties.
Fudging stuff and doing stuff on the cheap is not something a competent company does. But that is who is doing a great amount of this greenwashing stuff.
But again in all this chatter, the priority should be to make properties as thermally efficient as possible FIRST, because if we don’t do that then energy is just being wasted through heat loss.
]]>“You show me your source for that, and I’ll show you mine saying it was GB£29 billion.
And you forgot to mention gas and chemicals which help make up the approx £50 billion exports in these sectors.
The colonizer ‘always understates the true worth of the colony’.”
Indeed, I’d like NuEnglish to provides stats and an explanation for the ExRegio stuff.
Confused’s post touches on the subject of the obscuring of accurate statistical information.
And when I was working offshore West of Shetland, the oil from some fields and wells just flowed up the riser to an FPSO (floating production storage and offloading) vessel which was constantly moored over the wellhead for years in all weathers using dynamic positional thrusters. The oil was held on that vessel and then distributed onto other tanker vessels to be taken wherever the buyer wanted, so it never came near the Scottish mainland.
PS. If you are reading MaryB, I hope my views expressed earlier regarding the realities of district / community heating networks and the obvious green infrastructure already in place that could be utilised with a great deal less complexity and money has given you food for thought on the matter.
]]>I’m out too.
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