Pylons

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

fyp

City dwellers need not apply.

The vast majority of people living within 200m of 200KV pylons are in the cities. I've linked to google maps showing pylons running over housing estates.

I don't live too far from the 220kv line that runs just south of Lucan in towards Inchicore. There's houses within spitting distance of the lines and people couldn't care less.
Most of the citizens of Tyrrellstown also live within a stone's throw of HV pylons and they don't object either.
Funnily enough, we're not all suffering with depression or riddled with cancer either.

Heroditas wrote: »

A standard domestic hot water cylinder is 120L and you reckon one just over twice that size will suffice for 150-200 people? That is utterly ridiculous.
You would need multiples of a tank that size.

So what are you trying to say ?

4 or 5 solar panels, let's go wild, 6, and 2 300ml tanks is a major apparratus, costing too much ?

Again, I have experience of my own equipment, it was very reasonable, the biggest expense was the tank, and even with that included, not a major expense.

I think there are 4 90l tanks in my workplace, one exclusively used for cleaning, all the others for handwashing (which is often done with just cold water). That's not too far off the 300l mark.

But hey, go inflate, as I said, that's what's being done in Ireland all the time.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

fyp

City dwellers need not apply.

The vast majority of people living within 200m of 200KV pylons are in the cities. I've linked to google maps showing pylons running over housing estates.

No.
The pylons ran over one section of a housing estate.
I looked closely (although it was pretty obvious), the rest of the pylons ran over grassy house free areas, then they joined to the roadside (again house free) some miles down the road.

One estate.

I even suggested at the time it would be interesting to know what came first, this branch of the estate, or the power line ?

There are numerous houses within the same distance of 220kv pylons in rural areas. I was just looking at such a line today. A lot of houses around the 60 m mark of pylons, some seem to be just just 50 m.

Maybe pay attention next time you get out of the town, and stop acting all victimized.

A lot of rural citizens have accepted pylons just the same as city dwellers up until now.

What makes the difference now is the scale of the project. (not to repeat myself )

Mountainsandh wrote: »

So what are you trying to say ?

4 or 5 solar panels, let's go wild, 6, and 2 300ml tanks is a major apparratus, costing too much ?

Again, I have experience of my own equipment, it was very reasonable, the biggest expense was the tank, and even with that included, not a major expense.

I think there are 4 90l tanks in my workplace, one exclusively used for cleaning, all the others for handwashing (which is often done with just cold water). That's not too far off the 300l mark.

But hey, go inflate, as I said, that's what's being done in Ireland all the time.

With all due respect, you really don't seemto know what you're talking about here.
Do you have a firm figure for the hourly demand of water for the wash hand basins?
You need to know exactly how much water is used by each wash hand basin per hour. You then need to assign a demand factor to that.
From that, you can work out the hourly stored volume.
The required heating input is then calculated:
l/s * specific heat of water * dT

The water needs to be kept at 60C all day, there is a constant demand for the hot water. It's completely different to a home where demand is in the morning and then in the evening.

I'm an engineer and have done site visits of numerous office blocks in Dublin and have broached the subject with the tenants concerning solar for their hot water while at the same time discussing other measures. They don't do it because costs are still very high and they don't have the roof space to install enoug hpanels to provide enough water for 200+ staff.


To state that a couple of panels similar to what you'd stick on the roof of a house would be enough to cater for a reasonably large office is preposterous.
It's nothing to do with "inflating". It's to do with providing enough energy to keep the bloody water hot enough to eliminate Legionella and providing enough to meet a potentially large instantaneous demand.

In the UK, you have ROCs - renewable obligation certificates.
A most ridiculous scheme where the electricity company pays the consumer money for the consumer generating their own electricity.
It's comparable to a publican allowing me to come into their pub and then pay me to drink my own homebrew on their premises!

Again, it's subsidies dressed up slightly differently.

Greensleeves wrote: »

Maybe. But at least the subsidies get spread around more evenly and it possibly makes people think a bit more about their energy use/ecological footprint. An industrial wind farm concentrates the subsidies in the bank accounts of venture capitalists etc.

It's the whole subsidy culture that needs to be looked at.
We seem to be hooked on the bloody things.

EDIT: I agree that in this instance they get spread out more evenly but eventually you reach a tipping point where everyone's bill increases by quite a bit to pay all these subsidies to a certain % of the consumers while those who can't afford these schemes get lumped disproportionately with the costs.

Heroditas wrote: »

With all due respect, you really don't seemto know what you're talking about here.
Do you have a firm figure for the hourly demand of water for the wash hand basins?
You need to know exactly how much water is used by each wash hand basin per hour. You then need to assign a demand factor to that.
From that, you can work out the hourly stored volume.
The required heating input is then calculated:
l/s * specific heat of water * dT

The water needs to be kept at 60C all day, there is a constant demand for the hot water. It's completely different to a home where demand is in the morning and then in the evening.

I'm an engineer and have done site visits of numerous office blocks in Dublin and have broached the subject with the tenants concerning solar for their hot water while at the same time discussing other measures. They don't do it because costs are still very high and they don't have the roof space to install enoug hpanels to provide enough water for 200+ staff.


To state that a couple of panels similar to what you'd stick on the roof of a house would be enough to cater for a reasonably large office is preposterous.
It's nothing to do with "inflating". It's to do with providing enough energy to keep the bloody water hot enough to eliminate Legionella and providing enough to meet a potentially large instantaneous demand.

You are right to say that you know more than I do as regards engineering.
And yet, I still think such projects are often inflated and over estimated.

It has become such a way of life in Ireland now, that smaller projects are inconceivable to professionals like yourself.

Realistically even a larger project, would still use the original energy source as a back up, yes ?
The back up would also ensure that, like you said, temperature may be maintained at the right temperature.

So what exactly is the problem with a smaller scale project that is not going to cover all the needs, certainly, because that back up is still there, but that is a lot more affordable, feasible, and is going to save money in the long run, as well as reduce CO2 emissions ?

It's very hard to find official estimates on how much water is needed per person, not in a housing environment, but in a work environment. I know because I just tried to educate myself.

But what I have come across in the process is this article, which reviews problems encountered by Collective Thermal Solar Energy systems (in France).
http://www.actu-environnement.com/ae/dossiers/solaire-thermique/collectif-experience.php

and here is a quote, which I will Google Translate out of pure laziness :

oversizing
of facilities is a major cause of system malfunction . It
promotes premature aging of certain organs of the plant, induces greater
maintenance costs and ultimately lower the overall cost of the
installation.

"
These poor sizing - whose responsibility is both due to the design office ,
installers , to misunderstandings - are often associated with a poor estimate of
the domestic water needs," explains François Gibert, director of business
including specializes
in the construction of solar thermal system .

The
systems require in fact a match between the storage volume and the surface of
the sensors but also with the needs . "Initially,
few professionals felt precisely the consumption, peak François Gibert, they
readily provided 50 liters , eg hotel , in fact , we now know that it is rather
of the order of 30 to 35
liters per day per room "

I tend to wash hands mostly with cold water at work, simply because it's faster, how about you ?

What is suggested in the article here is that, in France anyway, projects and needs are over-estimated because then they enter a certain category for subsidies. This, as mentioned in the quote, is counter productive as it places more strain on the system, and renders it less cost-efficient overall.

My workplace has a very large flat roof with a wonderful potential for full South exposure.

Cienciano wrote: »

Funny that you think one section of line equals the whole of Dublin.
http://goo.gl/maps/xowdq
http://goo.gl/maps/og592
http://goo.gl/maps/m0HKN
http://goo.gl/maps/igB9q

Now, that's just one short section of one line in one city, I could get you another 200 google maps links. And that's just to houses, never mind businesses. If it effects health (which it doesn't), all those businesses with tens of thousands of people working there need the same compensation.

I had an answer with lots of bing maps links ready to illustrate how people in the countryside also live beside power lines, but deleted it by accident (bloody keyboard shortcuts, hate them), so will make my point without the links.

Lots of rural people also live beside powerlines, without complaint.

The issue here is with scale.
I'm sure city dwellers also have a sense of scale, of proportion, of what is acceptable for what you derive from infrastructure.

I was born in Lyon, France, and lived more than 20 years of my life there. I loved it, I loved town, everything it had to offer, the lifestyle.

It came with the smells and particles in the air from the refinery, the drunks sitting beside you in a smelly bus, the noise of mopeds, lorries, and ambulances at all hours of the day or night, the vista onto somebody's kitchen and their vista into yours, the chlorinated water, and the geometrical designs of infrastructure on slithers of blue sky between buildings. I lived with all that.

When you live in town, you have to expect more infrastructure. Your Luas will come with infrastructure, the buses with corridors, the opportunity to live in the suburbs comes with the availability of a way into town, from all angles, with the M50 and other road infrastructure. The power for the shops, the O2, the theatres, the cinemas, the colleges, the restaurants, the museums, Temple Bar, comes with the pylons. A lot of the time undergrounding spares at least the city centre from them.

So really, if you live into town, to some reasonable extent, you should accept that you are going to have infrastructure invading your space.

When you make a choice to live in the country (or remain there rather than exode towards towns), you expect as much infrastructure as your needs imply. Just like in town.
And a bit more, because that's for the good of everyone that a motorway should cross from big town A to big town B for example, or that the odd power line should be drawn from A to B, that a train line might slice in half a neighbourhood.

But this project is bringing that tolerance to a whole new level. It's not focusing on the needs of Ireland only, it is amalgamating money making ventures of a few with genuine needs of most, to the detriment of most.

I haven't mentioned compensation at all, because to me, compensation should not be the first stop on the way to achieving what's needed. It should really not be the first thing you think of.

Rather than think of compensation, I would rather the people in the know rescale, cancel out extraneous demands that will only profit a handful, and come up with a plan that is a lot more palatable to everyone.

That's not refusing point blank all infrastructure.

Mountainsandh wrote: »

You'd pretty much want to scald your hands with boiling water to make it more hygienic than a good soapy rub with or without hot water in my opinion.:eek:

60c is the temperature you need when storing water to eliminate Legionella.
Obviously I'm going to mix that hot water with cold water to clean my hands.

Heroditas wrote: »

60c is the temperature you need when storing water to eliminate Legionella.
Obviously I'm going to mix that hot water with cold water to clean my hands.

Well I went reading to educate myself, and according to WHO, water under 20 degrees is safe, so I'll stick to my cold water .

Zen65 wrote: »

Here's some opinions from people who live near pylons. Seems mostly they don't find it a problem.

Indeed, despite the deliberately leading questions and attempts by the "journalist" to provoke a negative reaction. And of course equating small and small and inconclusive studies with the exact same weight as far larger studies. I live right beside the main Arklow line. It's not a problem unless you deliberately make it one.

Even worse - letters like this are outrageous. Given the finding was that "researchers found an “intriguing pattern”, for example, intermittent exposure to radiation at a common electrical mains frequency appeared to be toxic to DNA" to propose banning pylons (which is quite different to common electrical mains frequency) she might adapt the precautionary principle and disconnect the power from her surgery and home. But I doubt it...

I don't own a house so my interest in the pylons is as a tax-payer.

According to the EirGrid TEN YEAR TRANSMISSION FORECAST STATEMENT 2013:-

* our own energy needs are predicted to rise at 1.3% per annum to 2020.

* For Ireland it has been estimated that between 3,500 - 4,000 MW of installed wind generation will be required to meet circa 37% of electricity demand in 2020.

* Currently, there are a total of 396 applications totalling 22,922 MW in the applications queue.

Based on these figures there will be no market in Ireland for the excess wind energy. Our pylon/wind farm expansion plans are predicated on the notion that there will be a market in the UK and France for our electricity. Essentially EirGrid are using the tax-payers money to facilitate a gamble by private wind-farm investors. If there is no market for the electricity abroad then it will be wasted because there is no cost-efficient way at the moment to store electricity. It would be a terrible waste of money and the earth's resources to roll-out infrastructure that was surplus to requirements. Ghost estates all over again.

micosoft wrote: »

. . . for example, intermittent exposure to radiation at a common electrical mains frequency appeared to be toxic to DNA" to propose banning pylons (which is quite different to common electrical mains frequency) ...

I just want to clarify that the electrical frequency of power carried by pylons is exactly the same as the frequency carried in your domestic mains wiring. In Ireland all electrical power is carried at 50Hz. Studies have been conducted in countries where the frequency was higher (e.g. USA is 60Hz) but it's questionable whether the slight difference in frequency would have an impact on findings.

Zen65 wrote: »

I just want to clarify that the electrical frequency of power carried by pylons is exactly the same as the frequency carried in your domestic mains wiring. In Ireland all electrical power is carried at 50Hz. Studies have been conducted in countries where the frequency was higher (e.g. USA is 60Hz) but it's questionable whether the slight difference in frequency would have an impact on findings.

Sorry if I was unclear - I was referring to the fact the study was about domestic wiring and not about pylons. You are of course correct - the frequency is the same as any appliance will tell you. The fact she does not suggest raising the precautionary principle for domestic wiring indicates how flawed her reasoning is.