Will heat pumps cause blackouts?

[Krill]

Rule of thumb. Entropy wins, so doing less keeps you alive for longer.

Except for solar panels which cool the world.

[nowty]

Next, how much heat does PV avoid. If a panel generates 1kWh of leccy, has it reduced the solar gain from the sun by 1kWh(t), I really don't know.

Do you not remember my experiment proving operating panels run cooler than disconnected ones.
https://camelot-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/view ... f=11&t=290

Hiya. Actually I did and that was what prompted my thinking, but couldn't recall if the heat and energy matched.

I've had a long think too along your lines of pure heat and ignoring the displacement of FF heat and greenhouse gasses.

Nuclear obviously adds heat to the planet as your releasing heat energy normally bound up in the Uranium.

A solar panel is usually dark, arguably near to a perfect black body and we install them 99%+ of the time on surfaces which are less perfect black bodies. Therefore because of less albedo effect Solar panels will heat the atmosphere more than what was there before. As I understand it visible light does not heat up the atmosphere much. But it heats up a black body which then re-transmits the energy as infrared and that does heat up the atmosphere but only because of the interaction with greenhouse gases.

I'm not trying to make up a climate deny theory here, the amount of extra heating by solar panels and nuclear power must be negligible compared with all the sunlight we get and the losing of sea ice and glaciers must be enormous compared with area of installed solar panels.

Its the greenhouse gasses that are clearly our nemesis and that comes primarily from FF burning.

So far this year I have only ran my aircon for I think 2 days so far but I was using my A2A HPs as recent as yesterday for heating.

[Moxi]

Got to rush as I am in a zoom meeting soon BUT

The suns rays hit the earth at a given irradiance per square meter relative to the position from the equator, solar panels operating at around 20+%take that irradiance and convert a proportion of the energy to electricity the rest is wasted heat. We cant make more energy but we can reduce the energy lost by the system - in this case Earth.

Earth loses energy primarily by radiation back in to space.

At the moment of writing we are as a civilisation releasing stored energy as well as receiving the standard daily gift of fresh energy from the sun. Thus the energy outs is significantly less than the energy in. Any power generation or heat system that uses power generated by the sun is arguably neutral, a heat pump doesn't add more heat (if its powered by green energy ) it just concentrates existing dilute heat and pumps it to a place where it can be made use of.

The green house gases that reduce radiation back into space combined with the release of stored energy from fossil fuels and atoms are the issue or if you want to be obtuse and look through the other end of the tube, the problem is there's just too much sun hitting the planet to allow us to keep burning stuff at the rate we do.

Easier to stop burning stuff or build a sun shade for the planet ? - They have considered it and proven that it can be done.

bit rambling and I am out of time but HP are not the problem

Moxi

[spread-tee]

The stored energy we dig up and release of all kinds is absolutely insignificant relative to the incoming solar radiation, barely enough to be noticeable on its own. The insolation is about 1300W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere and about 1000W/m2 at ground level, multiply that by the area of the globe in m2 and you get a truly colossal number, nearly all of that energy is re-radiated out to space again, it has to be otherwise we would cook in pretty short order. The problem we have is the extra CO2 in the atmosphere scatters some of that IR on its way back out to space and radiates it back down to earth, that's why we are warming up. If I remember correctly the entire energy output of civilisation warms us by less than a tenth of a degree C.

Desp

[spread-tee]

Just did bit of man-maths, the top of the atmosphere receives 745,388,800,000,000 kW from the sun, Global energy use works out at very roughly 200,000kW, basically fuck all compared to the planetary energy balance.

Based on a very quick googling so could be a couple of orders of magnitude out, but that would still be small change.

Desp

[nowty]

Just did bit of man-maths, the top of the atmosphere receives 745,388,800,000,000 kW from the sun, Global energy use works out at very roughly 200,000kW, basically fuck all compared to the planetary energy balance.

Based on a very quick googling so could be a couple of orders of magnitude out, but that would still be small change.

Desp

200,000 kW cannot even be remotely correct for the whole plannet.

I worked out global energy use at 18.39 trillion watts but my head hurts trying to convert it to kW.

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challeng ... onsumption

I converted this to joules / second or Watts,
"The annual global energy consumption is estimated to 580 million terajoules."

[Oliver90owner]

Don’t ignore the albedo effect. What used to be directly reflected back to space as white light will be absorbed by the uncovered areas. That reflected light would not be absorbed by CO2 in the atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is light goes in (some UV is absorbed/reflected by the glass), the light is converted to thermal energy inside the green house but the re-radiated energy is in the IR part of the spectrum and cannot get through the glass.

That is just another facet of a warming planet. Less snow cover means more solar insolation absorption, requiring the subsequent IR radiation to be lost to space - but unfortunately collected by the atmospheric CO2.

[spread-tee]

Just did bit of man-maths, the top of the atmosphere receives 745,388,800,000,000 kW from the sun, Global energy use works out at very roughly 200,000kW, basically fuck all compared to the planetary energy balance.

Based on a very quick googling so could be a couple of orders of magnitude out, but that would still be small change.

Desp

200,000 kW cannot even be remotely correct for the whole plannet.

I worked out global energy use at 18.39 trillion watts but my head hurts trying to convert it to kW.

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challeng ... onsumption

I converted this to joules / second or Watts,
"The annual global energy consumption is estimated to 580 million terajoules."

So if you divide the 580 000,000 tera joules by 3.6million you get kWhr/yr I think then divide that by 8200hrs/yr and I made that as an average power of 200,000kW..........I think

Edit, the meds must be messing with my brain, I was in fact 6 orders of magnitude out, whats a million between friends eh? so make that 200,000,000,000 kW average power use, still a tiny proportion of the solar insolation

[Moxi]

I’m back , meeting went over and then kids tea time etc etc. I see things developed while I was otherwise engaged . I think the point I was trying to make earlier was if we removed the other energy input and stuck to that directly provided by solar insolation then we would tackle the heat up two ways less energy released and less atmospheric pollution to reflect and lock in necessary radiant energy. A do one thing get two positive benefits type deal.

It’s really startling how much energy the local fission reactor gives out tho isn’t it! Throw in the local tidal energy body and we really shouldn’t be generating power by other methods.

On a linked thought process why don’t we have white tarmac roads to reflect the suns energy ? It would reduce incidents of melted roads in summer, make driving at night safer ( tricky in snow I accept) same with buildings roofs, why are all these materials dark ? Would a change like that globally make a difference?

Moxi

[Countrypaul]

Article on painting roofs white: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2023 ... dian-slums