Posts by David Haywood
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Southerly: How I Became a Grumpy Old…, in reply to ,
I am curious to know why you want to actually finish the house.
Yes, well, I accept that there will be ongoing minor work, but I'd just like to get the big jobs properly finished so that I can fit other activities into my life. It'd be nice if my fingers stopped hurting long enough to play my banjo again, for example.
Have I remembered correctly that you've cleverly built some big boats? It's similar to that feeling you get when you'd like to stop building (for a bit) and start sailing.
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Thanks for all the kind comments, everyone!
Yes, I do plan to slow down fairly soon. I just need to reinstall the coal* range (for heat, cooking, and hot-water emergency back-up) plus get an emergency water tank hooked up before I can relax (I’ve already installed an emergency generator to power the house).
Then, of course, it’s pretty critical to finish painting the house, do the essential fences, plant the rest of the hedges and several hundred trees, etc.
Should be finished any moment now.
*Footnote: I’ll be burning wood, of course.
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Southerly: How I Became a Grumpy Old…, in reply to David Haywood,
Brought to you via the wonders of modern phone technology…
And, crikey, I can even do close-ups...
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Southerly: How I Became a Grumpy Old…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Where’s the blue bar David?
Brought to you via the wonders of modern phone technology…
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Southerly: How I Became a Grumpy Old…, in reply to Judi Lapsley Miller,
The house is looking beautiful!
You’re very kind, Judy. For comparison purposes, here is (nearly) that same view of the sitting room just prior to starting the relocation. The big hole is the fireplace.
not quite sure which, is best, your writing or your beautiful joinery skills
You’re also very kind, Raymond. It’s my joinery skills at the moment, alas…
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Apologies to Russell for going the way of The Listener in terms of subject matter. The good news is that my house hasn’t made me fat.
I should also point out that I could have chosen any one of about 700 annoying jobs to complain about in this piece. These just happened to be the ones that I’ve snapped with my phone for various reasons.
By the way, the jobs that have really made me tear out (the remainder of) my hair have involved fixing the work done in 1998 by a proper registered builder (prior to our ownership of the house). The Lovely Ian Dalziel TM dubbed this chap “the Millennialist Builder” on account of the fact that he (the builder) clearly believed the world would end in the year 2000 – and performed his carpentry with this very much in mind.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Rich Lock,
Current engines and aircraft run about as efficiently as they ever can, without some real eureka breakthrough that would allow a step change.
God knows I don’t have time to write this – but I guess it’s my field…
Aircraft engines are indeed very efficient for Brayton Cycle (gas turbine) engines — but the Brayton Cycle itself is pretty inefficient compared to other thermodynamic cycles.
As a fairly obvious example, you could have pretty significant efficiency improvements in aircraft engines (in a device essentially similar to current Brayton technology) by using isochoric combustion, (i.e. detonation rather than deflagration) in the combustion chamber. This is currently being worked on by the USAF.
Of course, vast efficiency improvements could be realized by the use of fuel cells (using methanol + onboard reformer) + electric motors – for which aircraft are actually a pretty good candidate (rather better than cars). You could even manufacture liquid hydrogen for the fuel cells – and if the hydrogen was produced using hydro, wind, or nuclear then it would be essentially zero CO2. (All the above would be for aircraft travelling just subsonic using – probably – ducted electric fans.)
It sounds like a big step (and I realize that this is what you meant by “step change”), but it’s technically quite doable. And consider that we’ve already made a big step in aeronautical engineering from piston engines to turbines.
Key point: there’s nothing inherently high CO2 about rapid air travel. If you wanted to tax it then it would be smart to direct the taxes into alternative high-efficiency (and, ultimately, lower fuel cost) technology such as aeronautical fuel cells, etc. While it's an expensive technological leap, significantly reducing aircraft CO2 emissions is probably less costly (to the world as a whole) than abandonment of rapid air travel.
Extra info: Boeing and NASA did a prototype fuel cell plane a few years back.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to BenWilson,
What about BECCS? It struck me as a reasonably good idea.
All the technical problems of CCS + all the (claimed) problems of biofuels!
You're right that in theory it's a good idea -- but the details are awfully tricky...
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to David Haywood,
There may be a clever way of doing it, but no-one’s discovered it yet.
Bart, if you could use your GE toolkit to rustle up a something like a very fast-growing coral (the kind that do the zooxanthellae symbiosis trick) that would thrive in a high CO2 environment then it should get you a whole bunch of CCS money. One could imagine giant coral tanks outside fossil-fuel power plants that use solar energy to sequester the CO2 as calcium carbonate.
I don’t imagine it would be very difficult at all.</irony>
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Russell Brown,
David!
Tell me, is carbon sequestration any more real that it was five or 10 years ago? Because people sure do talk about it a lot.
No, CCS is still as problematic as it was 9 years ago (!) when you interviewed me about it -- and when it was supposed to be so straightforward that it would be in widespread use within 5 years.
It's super-hard to do without using lots of energy. In fact, it's super-easy to use more energy for CCS than you got from the coal/oil/gas in the first place.
There may be a clever way of doing it, but no-one's discovered it yet.
