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Peter Hun

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Posts posted by Peter Hun

  1. What higher transport costs will do is to end the commute and this is a good thing in my view.

    There will come a time soon, where people will expect to pay significantly less for properties in commuter villages to offset the increase in fuel costs but conversely people will pay considerably more to live in nice parts of town where the work is and they can walk, cycle or drive a short distance to work, because they will be thinking I am saving 400 pounds a month not commuting and portentially go from two cars to one.

    The affect of higher oil prices on the USA will be interesting. Devastating to the Suburbs to be exact.

  2. The more interesting housing question though is this: Do you really want to own a house when it's a sitting duck for taxation? Just like transport and energy, you need it and you can't avoid it, so it's going to be too tempting a target for the government and the banks who own the mortgages. And once you have that same mortgage, you're trapped into being a slave to the system where 80% of your salary goes purely on existing and feeding the beast of train companies, energy companies, banks, and the government. Quality of life here is going down the toilet and owning a house gives you no escape route.

    I personally am giving up on the idea of buying a house for at least a year. I recommend you do the same. Reduce your ties to those companies. Reduce your dependency on these expensive services that we have to buy from them. Most importantly, reduce your ties to this sinking hip of a country. Just tread lightly for now and survey the wreckage in a few years time.

    Good advice, although I'd wait four or more years before buying. Personally, I abandoned the UK for Poland, savings rate on the Zloty is 5%, increasing 0.5% soon and inflation 3%, pretty much certain to apreciate against the Euro over the next few years as well.

    One thing I found, its cheaper to go to a Northern town, such as Hull, for a night out (including the train fare to get there) than it is in London.

  3. People got into huge amounts of debt because it was easier than demanding decent wage rises.

    Wages in the USA and UK have stagnated since the 1970's when the USA and UK adopted neo liberal policies.

    Now the music has stopped.

    Been feeding n internet crap have we?

    Real disposable income per person has gone up over 150% since 1971

    Page 62

    Real Wealth per household has gone up over 130% since 1971

    Page 67

    Chart showing wages increasing more than inflation since 1970, page 70

    http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends39/Social_Trends_39.pdf

    I can tell you from personal experience that people are much wealthier than they were in the 1970's

  4. ...a gradual slide is OK in my book 10% real 5% nominal per year, to bring back some sense of normality over the next ten years...this is to give our youngsters a chance to save for a deposit so that they may buy a home that they can actually one day pay for instead of any of their deposit savings being eroded when there was very little chance of catch up due to highly sophisticated, engineered, and manufactured artificially high prices.....

    The last crash took five years, I think they have slowed the process down this time. I expect the bottom to be seven years from peak, say -5% per year.

  5. Personally I would avoid the 787 'Dreamliner', althought it should probably be called NightmareLiner.

    Its three years late, and has the largest number of orders of any new aircraft, so Boeing have a massive incentive to rush it as they are facing massive penalties (billions). Its full of new technologies such as non bleed air for electric generation and carbon fibre construction. The potential for something to go wrong is huge. As a example the recent in flight fire knocked out the power to everything - its not supposed to do that and it was caused by a 'foreign object' in an electrical cabinet. A screwdriver nearly wiped out a 787 . This was an aircraft that has 500 engineers working on it every night for certification testing.

    I find the story about sub-standard parts in the 737 a bit doubtful, there are 5000 flying continuously and they would be falling out of the sky all over the place if there was an issue.

  6. Dont be scared of buying shares. Its simple to do, and can be as cautious as you like.

    For example buy some long term holdings in defensive stocks with large steady market caps that profit from stuff that will be in demand for the coming years like gas and uranium. Or copper. Or oil.

    In fact the dividends in something like centrica could pay your gas bills which are gunna be higher soon.

    I agree, shares pay a dividend and give capital appreciation if they are solid companies. The reason share prices are climbing as they are considered an inflation hedge by institutional investors.

    Forget holding much (<10%) gold or any other metal, its a very high risk Ponzi scheme, probably at its peak and when gold crashes it does so spectacularly. Just holding gold loses money with inflation and turns you into an obsessive gold ramper apparently - well how else would the 'investment' work if you can't get other people to prop the price up.

  7. The numerous flaws of wind power are finally coming to light:

    My link

    How is that a flaw? first there are substitutes and second if supplies ran short all the world wind turbines would continue to produce electricity and it can be recycled.

    There are very limited supplies of fuel for nuclear reaction, should we not use it in case we can find some stunning alternative use in future?

  8. And the stock market continues to climb.

    Just goes to show how joe public and the mainstream press's view is so out of whack to the markets.

    Once joe public and the press are bullish on everything then will be the time to sell all risk assets.

    The stock market is going up because its an inflation hedge, like gold but it actually produces an inflation proof return every year.

    Jo Public has little to do with the rise, its institutional investors getting away from Fixed Interest Bonds.

  9. If it's going to provide up to 10% (or perhaps 46%, depending on who's figures you look at) to the entirety of Europe then it's a completely different scale of magnitude to what already exists. Also, I would like to see some proved, we-could-build-it-now evidence of large-scale solar generation and accompanying storage so that we can't only turn the lights on during the day, evidence that this is a viable, practical scheme to accompany a large increase in wind power generation. It all looks far more like a future concept of the type we need to be thinking up, but not part of the immediate (i.e. next 30-odd years timescale) issues that we're faced with now, which have to be based on 100% known methods that require no further development to be made practical. Who is champing at the bit to start building all of this stuff?

    UK ALREADY gets 10% of its electricity from wind power. Wind power is almost the majority (40%) of new power plant manufactured in Europe this year. China and the US are each building the same capacity as Europe (about) something like 20GW each per year, world production is about 80GW per year and growing fast. Many countries like Spain and Germany have a much higher percentage of their power from wind right now. Some countries are almost 100% renewable already ( e.g.Purto Rico with Hydro)

    I think you are missing an important point. The capacity/cost calcualtions are based on a percentage of operation time. Look in the PDF I linked to.

    The very best areas will get over 3/8th of the year blowing a very strong wind allowing maximum production from the turbine. But a lot of other area's may only get 20% of top production. The point is by placing sufficient turbines over a large enough geographic area you would need only one operating at 100% (and the other four at 0%) for the system as a whole to produce economic, cheap even, electricity.

  10. Right now, today? Really? No sign of any out of the window, and not very many isobars on the weather map over the North Sea suggests that there's probably not a lot of wind blowing there right now either. It's no use if it can provide 46% on average if that goes along with providing diddly squat in the middle of a cold spell, just when you need it the most. Your 46% is an utterly irrelevent number. The only one that's relevent is the minimum, because that's what you need to plan for. And the minimum isn't looking too far off zero.

    You store the energy or get it from another source. Like the Sun in the Sahara desert, where the solar plants will be built.. Thank god we don't have engineers with your mental capacity in charge of its infrastructure.

    Why? If it's only that, and requires enormous numbers of turbines and a massive grid infrastructure, it seems far more sensible to forget about it and have a small expansion of the other 90%.

    People who can do the maths have done it and worked out this is the cheapest option.

  11. So where is it blowing right now, blowing enough to provide everyone who might theoretically want wind power? It has to be near enough to the UK to not have an utterly ludicrous-scale transmission network, which would be prohibitively expensive even if transmission losses didn't kill it. A load of pictures showing averages doesn't cut it; what is important is the minimum over the entire area you're proposing to use. Or we could just forget the whole thing and build some nukes that produce electricity all day every day, and at levels that takes thousands of wind turbines even when there's wind.

    How smart of you to discover that the wind doesn't blow everywhere at the same time. I bet those guys who have spent the last hundred years of constantly measuring wind using thousands of mechanical devices and who now use satellite LIDAR to plot the flow of winds and waves over the whole planet would just love to hear your insights.

    Here is just one article explaining how they do it.

    CALIPSO

  12. And over that area there is how much wind at the moment?

    As has been quoted, more than the energy potential of the whole of the middle east's oil. There is enough harvest-able to provide 46% of the EU energy requirements in 2050.

    Wave power is several times as much as wind power potential.

    Southern Europe will get power from the Sahara solar plant planned by the Germans etc. with transmission between depending on demand and storage in Norwegian Hydro plants.

  13. That map on the post above looks a bit iffy, though, since it shows windfarms in places where the sea is relatively deep in continental shelf terms, like the middle of the Irish Sea!

    There are more accurate maps avilable, that one looked nice!

    Explanation of HVDC technology, 3% losses over 1000km

    https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission

    A map there of existing links (pre this announcement of course) is not accepted file type on HPC

    0080022.jpg

  14. So where is it blowing right now, blowing enough to provide everyone who might theoretically want wind power? It has to be near enough to the UK to not have an utterly ludicrous-scale transmission network, which would be prohibitively expensive even if transmission losses didn't kill it. A load of pictures showing averages doesn't cut it; what is important is the minimum over the entire area you're proposing to use. Or we could just forget the whole thing and build some nukes that produce electricity all day every day, and at levels that takes thousands of wind turbines even when there's wind.

    the North sea grid is being built by 10 countries, so it will no longer be a problem

    Ministers from 10 European countries bordering the North Sea have agreed the construction of a new offshore electricity grid.

    The grid will link countries across Europe and make it much easier for member states to trade energy.

    It will also simplify the exploitation of the 140 Gigawatt offshore windfarm currently being planned in the North Sea.

    Analysts say Europe needs offshore wind farms to meet emissions targets.

    The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the governments of the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

    EU countries launch North Sea electricity grid

    grid.jpg

    The potential job creation capacity of this activity by 2020 — 2030 is of the order of 100 to 150,000. The capacity in matters of offshore wind energy in the North Sea region is enormous. It even surpasses the energy equivalent of petrol reserves in the Middle East. Initial estimations show that 150 GW will be set up by 2030. They shall produce 563 TWh, which will represent 16% of electricity consumption in Europe. By 2050, offshore grid could even be able to supply 46% of Europe's energy consumption. "Until now, each country developed its own offshore farms", says the European Presidency. "By signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the States bordering the North Seas send out a signal that the development of their national farms is carried on henceforth in the European spirit and that all means will be put to use to get the best results out of this endeavor in the most cost-effective way. With this Memorandum, the objective of 100% renewable energy by 2050 is no longer a dream."

    Such a super grid will help unite Europe as one super country with a reliable power supply for all of its citizens.

    http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Europes-Offshore-Electricity-Grid.html

  15. ....and we get a blocking high over the UK ..say in easter which lasts a week or so .......what then.............. during .....those fresh crisp bright blue WINDLESS blue sky's ?

    Go ahead, invent some crap scenario to match you crap comment. Its been proven that over a large enough area there is always wind blowing, it evens itself out.

    Here is some facts. The UK has some of the best wind generating capability in the world.

    europe.gif

    europe%20wind%20resource.gif

    Details here

    Study of economics of wind power

    A figure from the PDF, large amounts of UK will produce wind power costing less than 0.03 euro's per Kwhr.

    I can remember that 40 years ago it was only 10 years ahead.:rolleyes:

    Its about

    10 years before ITER will be build and operating, they will have to experiment for years then it will probably take a decade to build operational plants.

    So twenty years is probably right.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12007965

  16. http://www.economist.com/node/15213817

    In Germany this is seen as vindication of an industrial policy that has nurtured solar power for almost a decade with incentives known as feed-in tariffs. These oblige utilities to buy all the electricity generated from renewable sources such as windmills and solar panels at a high price (currently six to eight times the market rate) for a long period.

    stop with your UNTRUE propaganda please !!!

    The is the price they are utilities are FORCED to buy NOT the price it cost to produce.

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