Air quality improves in Spain, but it is nowhere near meeting new European limits

https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/air-quality-improves-spain-but-far-from-20240621074937-nt.html

Live link: https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/a-quality-improves-spain-but-far-from-20240621074937-nt.html

Not as though Spain is alone!

https://www.accuweather.com/en/es/ba...y-index/307297

Sorry no idea why my original link did not work

https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/a...074937-nt.html

I can't comment on Barcelona, but we visit Madrid every year and think there has been a noticeable improvement in air quality over the last few years (and less traffic noise too). The busy road that runs alongside the Royal Palace, for example, has been rerouted underground and the surface area pedestrianised with planting, it is now a pleasure to walk along. It is not the only road that now runs underground.

It's hard to improve air quality in Spain when much of the particulate matter is caused by the influx of the increasingly frequent Calima events from the Sahara.

According to that report the biggest source of pollution is motorised traffic, so with the LEZs, continued pedestrian-friendly city planning etc etc, improving the air should be possible even if making it really clean is much harder.

The report also mentions pollution from factories, and another thread on here mentions how green enery production in Spain can sometimes exceed demand. I wonder if the two can combine with brick batteries to reduce manufacturing pollution from heat production (see ). Can anybody with more factory experience than me (none) see this working?

Wow. He’s re-inventing the electric storage radiator that I had 60 years ago! It was a metal box on the wall that heated up overnight on cheap electricity (it was called the Economy 7 tariff) and released the heat during the day. It was very popular and successful.

Guess what the storage medium was - BRICKS!

Isn’t progress amazing!

I'm not too sure what is on the storage radiators nowadays but it still works on a similar system.

ULEZs in London and Wales do seem to be having an impact on air quality where they are

Economy 7! A girlfriend had that too and swore by it. The bricks in the video fill a room and are heated to over 1,000ºC, then you can use that heat to make things. Because they're just bricks with iron wire (needed to heat the bricks evenly and avoid them breaking) they're easy to make at scale.

EDIT: According to The Economist (17-Feb-2024 "The burning question") there are other 'rocks in a box' in development. The article mentions one using volcanic rock, another using solid carbon for temps up to 1,800ºC, and another that uses molten tin at temps of 2,400ºC.

And now the London mayor's been re-elected (it's almost as if people don't like being poisoned!) maybe the municipalities here will be emboldened to bring in theirs.

I didn't know that "LEZ's, which are obligatory for municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, came into force at the beginning of 2023" (from the surinenglish.com article linked to up top). My municipality has much more than 50k and still there's many old bangers.

Given that tin melts at 240c one has to be a little sceptical about the above!

According to Wikipedia tin melts at 232 and boils at 2,602ºC, so having molten (i.e. liquid) tin at 2,400ºC seems possible. Or have I misunderstood you?

An interesting thing about this one is that "Because the tin glows white hot, specialised photovoltaic cells inside the system mean that energy can be withdrawn in the form of electricity as well as heat. In areas with variable power prices, it can run at a profit simply by storing heat when power is cheap and dispensing electricity when the price rises." So maybe in time we'll all have on in our back gardens as a side-hustle

Yes, it does, but the quote was about molten tin so I am not sure why you need to be sceptical.

Since we seem to have gone a bit off-topic about pollution and are now looking at energy storage, there is one really big possibility that hasn't been mentioned.

The obvious storage option for green electricity is an electrical battery. They are big and expensive, however, if we are all going to drive electric cars in the future, that's an awful lot of batteries which spend most of their life not being used. There are technologies already available to use that stored energy for purposes other than powering the vehicle. In its simplest form, which most new models have is "vehicle to load" which gives you a 230v socket in the boot to run an appliance like an electric BBQ on camping trips etc. The next level is "vehicle to house" which carries out the same function that batteries in a solar system do, ie store cheap energy and use it when energy is expensive. The third and ultimate option is "vehicle to grid" where the car battery can send power to the grid. If you have as few as 100 million cars worldwide with 50kw batteries available to store green off peak energy that is a huge amount of power available at no extra cost for expensive mega-batteries.

If your town council or region is a PP-Vox coalition then you will probably find they're dragging their feet implementing them or implementing them without any fines for driving old cars inside the area. Because of course they are.