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Kev, I agree railways are a disgrace. Fortunately our roads are top qualty. Not.
Alfa Yes probably being a bit judgemental.
BorderSpirit - I think you need to be more even handed assuming that the south is not pulling its weight. In fact as there is inevitably energy lost in transmission there is a nature desire on behalf of National Grid to site the energy generation close to populations centres. In fact as sources of energy generation become less centralised this is becoming even more the case. Remember that many large coal fired power generators were only sited in the midland because that is where the coal was.
If you look at the renewables map here you can see a fair distribution apart from snowdonia, the yorkshire dales and the highlands close to aviemore.
http://www.mygridgb.co.uk/map/
HS2 isn't too far removed from state capture in SA. Budget has trebled, over 25% of staff earning over £100k a year, £21m spent on consultants, not a single metre of track laid, out of date technology that doesnt solve any of the UK's actual infrastructure problems and will definitely be late and over budget, if ever delivered. The only train running is a gravy train. Pots and kettles springs to mind.
Unfortunately worldwide we probably are near the bottom of ladder as far as railways go very poor service not enough carriages overpriced travel and little money reinvested into improvements
Mostly agree with what has been posted the whole country requires investment.and maybe the government needs to look for more private investors to get things moving
Can’t imagine green energy being produced in the south of the main population area getting planing permits for wind turbines and fields of photovoltaic panels. Protesters that oppose HS2 will be nothing compared to the trying to provide green energy where it is needed most.
Well said Sanchez, couldn't agree more - from a Mancunian.
Living in the North, most people here know that no one particularly wants the train time from Manchester to London or between Leeds and Manchester shorter because most people use that time to work and both journeys are pretty fast anyway. What people generally want is trains that simply arrive and leave on time and have seats for those who want them, and better service for outlying areas into major connurbations. HS2 is an absolute white elephant and a perfect example of people who don't live in the north trying to make decisions for the people here, and doing nothing more than showing that that they don't really understand this part of the UK.
But it could fix our energy system. That was my point.
100 Billion spent on HS2 will not fix that.
Time is not the problem the infrastructure of the country’s transportation is outdated and over pressed
Border Spirit - with respect I don't live in the south east but the east midlands. There are already trains that connect Birmingham to London as there are trains that connect London to York and York to Manchester and to Birmingham and Leeds. Shaving half an hour off the time to Birmingham does nothing to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions.
Being rather self centred by people living in the south east of the country the rest of the UK does not matter if it is connected,
if investment had been made when other countries thirty years ago built their railways we would not be having to do it now and probably not have to put up with unsafe four lane motorways with no hard shoulder to do long distance commute
So let's all lobby our local MPs.. Plus drop letters to Energy and Environmental Ministers. The press are always looking for good news items too...
My nephew is a COPs contributor/speaker...and even he will tell you what a waste of time it is now...
I was just thinking about HS2 and the number 100 Billion pounds.
100 Billion pounds is of course enough to create 100,000 Millionaires. If the project goes ahead I wonder how many of those would be in the companies building it, but I digress and must think more patriotically.
Okay let us consider that we can persuade 500,000 people from Birmingham (50% of the pop.) and 500,000 from London (5% of the pop) to use the line once a year for 10 years - how much does that work out per trip ? - Well that's 10 million more journeys, so only 10,000 pounds per trip, hmmm still seems quite expensive to me.
Okay, lets imagine that something crazy happens and the government for whatever reason decide not to go ahead, how much VRFB energy storage would 100 Billion quid get you ?
Well let's just say that Cellcube's $200/kWh figure ( https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/cellcubes-highly-vertical-ambitions-for-long-duration-redox-flow-batteries ) works out around £200/kWh when you add in all the import duties and tax and whatever, £100 Billion quid would buy half a Billion kWh, or to put it another way half a thousand GWh = 500 GWh.
This is a lot of storage, but is it as much as the UK needs ? Well the recent Future energy scenarios estimates that by 2050 we will need 50GW of energy storage, but they neglect to tell us what duration energy storage this averages out at, so let us assume 4 hours. This totals to 200 GWh.
So it seems clear that we can either press on with an overly expensive London-Birmingham vanity project or we could install ALL the Battery Energy Storage Systems that National grid says we will need, plus have half the money left over to build something like 80 GW of PV (2018 capex less than a dollar per Watt) that would be the kind of thing that you would need to charge up 200 GWh of batteries.
To me this seems like the obvious sort of no-brainer substitution that needs to happen. Boris has the opportunity to play the green card in the year of COP26 and keeps all those Tory MPs in the shires happy - the question is does he have the balls ?