this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Hydrogen boiler push to continue despite verdict of UK watchdog (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] bernieecclestoned 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The cost to rip out all boilers and replace them with heat pumps is a fantasy. You're looking at 10k with all the tanks etc. Not going to happen.

As a transition fuel, green hydrogen makes sense, new boilers can burn a hydrogen mix and all the gas pipes in the UK are in the process of having plastic inserts installed so hydrogen won't escape.

You either make hydrogen with renewables, with the cost on a par with fossil fuel methods, which is already happening, or have to use batteries, batteries are full of rare earth minerals and are also expensive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A new hydrogen boiler costs 30k today. A new gas boiler is also not much cheaper then a heat pump and certainly more expensive to operate. Also if you can produce hydrogen on cost of fossil fuels, you could just convert some gas power plants to use hydrogen instead, as a backup. With heat pumps using enviromental heat as well, you end up using about as much hydrogen as when you burn it directly.

The key part is, you just can not just burn hydrogen in an old gas boiler. Even new ones can only burn mixtures. So installing new gas boilers instead of heat pumps is just wasting energy for no reason.

[–] bernieecclestoned 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A gas boiler that can burn 30% hydrogen is less than £3k. I just bought one, and the cost of the heat pump was £10k. Plus electricicty is at least 4x more expensive than gas, so there is no saving.

The economics just don't work. No one is going to replace their existing boiler with a heat pump.

Converting gas turbines to burn hydrogen is a good idea. We need multiple solutions to transition. There is no silver bullet