Just had an energy company that's campaigning quite hard in my area offer me FIT+2p for my PV, the somewhat less appealing catch being that I would have to switch my supply to their relatively dirty electricity.

Interesting to see power companies starting to compete for FIT business though.

Can you tell us which company that was?

They are a bulk buying company and no a generator, so their electrons are the same colour as everyone else's. They also have some strange things in their small print from what I read a while back.

As an aside, if you use all/most of your PV power at home, not exactly reducing the Grid Intensity.

Bet I could match it

Thank you, but I tend towards the atheist, though I would have looked forward to seeing Davy Jones, on a horse, in heaven, just so I can hear him sing 'Daydream Believer'.

Posted By: DaviponST there is a veritable choir this month!

We have put a ban on talking about musicians/singers we like at work as they seem to die the next day.
So we mention ones we hate instead, but it does not work that way around

Posted By: DaviponSeret, is that old fit or new?

Either. Obviously more attractive if you're on the new lower rate, as it's an extra 10%. But TBH I wonder if they'll get many people signing up. It's not a lot of extra money really, and the only people that would be happy to switch to their energy mix are those who've installed PV for entirely financial reasons and aren't really greenies at all. I suspect that's a relatively small subset of domestic PV owners.

Posted By: SteamyTeainvest in nuclear

and let others pay the real costs over the next 1000yrs

Posted By: Seretreciprocal cashons

v gd!

Posted By: SteamyTeaNot all nuclear is uranium based

thorium, nice idea, but all of the present crop is uranium - a multimutifold upscale from anything so far. Talk about discounting future costs, to be paid with life on earth as the coinage, quite possibly. The waste problem has simply been pushed off into a possibly anarchic far future. Stupidity of a hitherto unimagined calibre. You, tho long gone, will be blamed ST

That's like saying murder by garotting is better than a barrel of acid

'' I would have looked forward to seeing Davy Jones, on a horse, in heaven, just so I can hear him sing 'Daydream Believer'''

How do you know the horse can sing?

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: fostertom</cite>That's like saying murder by garotting is better than a barrel of acid</blockquote>

But that's exactly the decision we currently make with every single energy provision method we have. All forms of energy conversion we use, including renewables, have an adverse impact in one form of another. We have to balance which adverse impacts we find acceptable and which we don't.

We need to take account of true (not imaginary) health risk, in terms of the number of people who will be killed or suffer ill health per unit of energy produced; we also need to come up with a way to assess total environmental impact, again in terms of impact per unit of energy produced.

So far I've not seen one comparison along these lines whose data I would trust; the majority of such comparisons are full of emotive bullshit and misleading statistics. We can fairly readily compare the immediate death and injury per unit energy figures, I believe, as the differences between the different forms of energy production (including infrastructure manufacture) are quite stark. It gets much harder to try and determine environmental impact though. Is 3 mg per MWh of nuclear waste more or less environmentally damaging than 1024 kg of CO2 per MWh, plus ~13 kg of particulates per MWh, plus a few kg of other gases etc per MWh from a coal fired power station?

JSH I like the way you put fossil into comparable future-risk bracket. Clearly fossil is v bad immediately; agree that nuclear by comparison prob v gd in its short term (since serious roll-out) record. So if coal's really as bad as nuclear, long-term, then - well nothing new really - madness to continue with either. Agree also that if all (and I mean absolutely all) goes well with nuclear storage supervision long term, it could turn out well.

It's the consequences of even slight failure of that over the next thousand(s?) yrs, a pretty good cert I think, that makes nuclear crazy in my eyes. Mutant horror worldwide. That is a risk like no other within our power and I can't believe we even consider it. A long gamble with life itself on earth, on behalf of not just us but every other lifeform.

To compare these two monsters with renewables is like steamrollers and Dinkys.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: fostertom</cite>
To compare these two monsters with renewables is like steamrollers and Dinkys.</blockquote>

It is indeed, and let's not forget that all renewables also have some form of adverse environmental/health impact, too, even if it's only in terms of making and installing the devices needed.

I'm personally unconvinced that 0.000003 kg per MWh of waste from nuclear is really any worse than either the 1024 kg of CO2 per MWh from coal, the 838 kg of CO2 per MWh from oil, the 607 kg of CO2 per MWH for gas or all the other waste products these other forms of energy produce.

In all the emotive arguments, driven, I suspect, by the strong connection in the minds of many between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, I've rarely seen mention of the scale of the waste problem. Perhaps if people realised that enough nuclear energy to heat and light their home for a year would produce a bit of nuclear waste that was about the weight of 60 grains of sugar and less than half the volume of 60 grains of sugar, or that to heat and light their homes for around 20 years would result in a bit of waste about the size of an aspirin tablet, they might get a sense of proportion about it.