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Bad form, I know, but I had to add this.

I found the article. http://faculty.washington.edu/stovel/chains.pdf. Still no raw data though.

Carbon sequestration is like burying a ticking bomb in your backyard. A much better solution is carbon mineral sequestration - turning the carbon into rocks of some kind. That way, unlike underground sequestration (which has the potential to leak straight back into the atmosphere), the carbon stays where it is put.

Who cares where the carbon comes from? Instead of trying to capture carbon, we should simply bury the same amount of almost pure carbon in easly obtained forms. In a gas, CO2 is common. As a solid, charcoal birquets is common. I know, who is going to give up the fuel for the BBQ and bury it instead of using it? That's the point people.. Carbon is fuel. Let me repeat, Carbon is fuel. If you want to keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, let's get rid of the internal combustion engine, one of the least effecient ways to burn a hydrocarbon.

So where do I pick up my EV? A good part of my state is already wind farms.
http://www.crpud.net/residential/choiceenergy
and hydro
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/crisp/hydro/

If they didn't want me to burn carbon, they would have made it possible to use alternatives, or a more effecient way to use limited carbon.

FYI, I already drive a Prius. I'm waiting for an EV to move from reduced to none.

In case your math-skills are down, 160/12.000 is pretty much in the 1% ballpark I mentioned.

In case your logic and reading skills are down, it explains how this whole argument is a fallacy, since not only can only roughly a fifth of the energy in the gasoline be converted to torque, but that batteries aren't competing with gasoline; they're competing with the weight and bulk of the ICE.

I was talking about actual existing batteries by the way, not fantasy-ones. There are no cars available powered by fantasy-batteries. When there are, these things may change.

Apparently you've never heard of the G4e. Yes, it's a prototype, but it uses next-gen lithium vanadium oxide batteries. They don't specify the exact energy density, only that it's "double" normal li-ion. The website I linked references a paper that shows that, at least in the lab, lithium vanadium oxide batteries can have obscene energy densities (although not as good as silicon nanowire, silicon nanoparticle, or tin nanoparticle batteries).

Furthermore, the article compares hypothethical FUTURE battery-cars with poor examples of TODAYS internal-combustion engines. For example, it quotes tank-to-wheel efficiencies at 20%, which is not even state of the art TODAY.

Oh really?

So, in short, the article claims "equal" performance (86Kwh delivered from 350Kg of machinery), whereas the reality, if you buy best-of-breed from internal-combustion and batteries TODAY is more like, the battery-powered thingie will have 1:6th the range of the IC-one, and it'll spend twice the mass-budget to do that.

1) The standard for most low-cost next-gen BEVs -- the MiEV, the Aptera, the VentureOne, etc -- is around 120 miles. The standard for the high-end ones (Tesla, LightningCar, tzero, etc) is 200-300 miles. That's nothing at all like "1/6th the range".

2) In case you missed it, it shows equivalent range per unit mass when you get batteries up to 340Wh/kg. That's 2.2 times the energy density of LiCoO2/graphite and 3.4 times that of LiP. So, the best you can argue is ~45% of the range per unit weight for LiCoO2/graphite and 30% of the range per unit weight for LiP.

3) As the page referenced earlier, there are over a dozen new chemistries that all promise to deliver energy density in the 340Wh/kg range working their way through to commercialization, and one (lithium vanadium oxide) has already made its way into a prototype.

Where it gets ugly is when you add in that the IC can be completely retanked in a minute, whereas TODAYS electric vehicles need multiple hours to even do a 75% recharge.

If you had read the rest of the page, you'd know that this, too, is false with modern EV batteries. Most modern EVs have fast charge ports that can take a full charge in the range of 5 to 20 minutes if you have a source that can deliver current fast enough. Modern EV batteries are capable of extremely fast charging.

and refill in a minute

Time the time that you spend at a gas station. Include the time wasted by getting off the highway and having to get back on. Overall, you'll find that it's about a ten minute delay, more if you have to get a snack or use the restroom. Fast EV charging would hardly add on to the length of a trip. But it'd be a tiny fraction of the cost, since power is so cheap (almost all of the cost of charging would be overhead).

with 100 miles range

120 or so is currently the standard for the low-end EVs -- see the MiEV, the Aptera, the VentureOne, etc. On state highways, it means two hours. On interstates, it means an hour and a half, give or take depending on how you drive.

Signs with "last gas-station for 50miles" aren't rare where I live

Well, kudos to you. If you run out of gas, you have to push your car dozens of miles (or hike to a gas station). If I run out of electricity, I push my car to the nearest farmhouse and ask them

What I don't know is whether there is anything comparable in the areas affected by these central US tremors. A description of experiences is useful, but plenty of reports will have those. Those are easy to come by. Much rarer is actual raw data, actual hard information on the nature of the quake. A quantitative experience, rather than a qualitative one. There will be much more to the story than what could be felt or described through experience, and that "more" bit is the bit that seperates understanding from simply witnessing. The latter facilitates understanding but is not a substitute for it.

The toolkit requires you to run CGI scripts on your server to collect results, but we also have a web tripwire service that is easier to use (available on the same page above). Just add one line of JavaScript to your page, and our server will handle the integrity check and collect the results. We can then provide you with reports of the changes, much like Google Analytics.

We hope that by spreading web tripwires to other pages, we can at least deter ISPs from making further changes to web pages in-flight.

Where I live, more than half the cost of electric is in the delivery/line charge.

It doesn't matter how much is in the "delivery line charge"; cost does not equal efficiency. In the US, the average transmission efficiency is 92.8%.

you lose 15% in the charger

AC Propulsion's 20kW charger is 93% efficient, while their 150kW charger is 90% efficient. That's pretty typical for non-inductive chargers.

and another 30% to the lead acid battery.

Lead-acid battery? Lol, what do you think we're talking about here, golf carts? NEVs? Even Firefly lead acid batteries are simply unsuitable for these sort of tasks. Way too short lifespan, way to inefficient, way too low energy density. We're talking about lithium ion variants. Lithium ion batteries are over 99% efficient (that's why they charge and discharge cool).

So while at the power plant rock in efficiency, it doubles in cost getting to my house

Please learn to separate the concepts of "cost" and "efficiency".

My understanding is Gas engine are 70-80% efficient

Try about 20%, give or take.

It's okay to be unfamiliar with this topic. Just educate yourself so you're more informed for future debates and we can talk some more. :)

WSU? Are you sure it wasn't UW? WSU is an aggie school in quiet Eastern Washington, UW is smack-dab in Seattle off I-5.

http://depts.washington.edu/trac/
http://www.its.washington.edu/trafnet/

WSU? Are you sure it wasn't UW? WSU is an aggie school in quiet Eastern Washington, UW is smack-dab in Seattle off I-5.

http://depts.washington.edu/trac/
http://www.its.washington.edu/trafnet/

Wikipedia has more info on Black Holes in Networking ... and for grins, here is a Green Hole ;-)

Hypnosis can be used to remember e.g. a phone number you saw when you were 6 months old and couldn't read yet...

Hypnosis is a state of suggestibility. If while you are in a trance, I suggest to you that you can remember something, odds are good that will you will believe that you remember it. That doesn't mean you're doing so accurately. This is what leads to false memories.

there is a group of mostly cs grad students who are actively looking at the orca card. http://soctech.cs.washington.edu/wiki/ORCA/ORCA

At some level, this certainly is one given their close ties and MS's (dis?)interest in individual privacy.

Here's a link to an article on it, from UW's student newspaper

http://thedaily.washington.edu/2008/2/26/keeping-close-watch/

Pine "had" more features?

Alpine is the current version of the product (it's essentially pine 5.0, see the web site for the reasons for renaming).
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

I use it as my primary email program, inside this "fruit company".

I know, I know... this is Slashdot, I shouldn't bother. But IE 7 on Vista (running in Protected Mode) is pretty damn secure.

While there have been exploits for IE 7, not a single one of them could successfully bypass Protected Mode. I'd say that's a pretty damn good track record for a browser that has been out for about a year and a half and has undoubtedly been targeted by many, many bad guys. (And good guys, for that matter.)

Black holes and strangelets are just the beginning. Have they read Einstein's Bridge? http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/E_Bridge.html

THE HIVE WILL EAT US ALL!

alpine, it's the new pine
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

Obviously this depends on your definition of "real world." Many simulation problems in the physical sciences do not scale well, since each cell's step is dependent on all other cells. There are approximations that try to reduce this dependency, but approximations are never perfect. However, one may discount these as not "real world" since most people don't simulate low-level physics and such (and these aren't NP complete either, which are sometimes parallizable. E.g. when you double your problem, it may cause an 8x increase in work, but that may be parallizable. You can parallelize the traveling salesman problem which is NP complete according to wikipedia.)

There are much larger class that don't scale to very large scales. As I recall from my parallel programming class, after about 64 or 128 processors, shared memory breaks down due to limitations on bus interconnections needed for cache coherency. You can emulate shared memory with MPI and things, but it's WAY slower to the point of being useless for applications without a high degree of spatial locality. In fact, all but the embarrassingly parallel don't scale linearly due to shared memory and synchronization, so I've yet to see many non-trivial problems that scale to massive levels well. I'm talking 1000 processors or more (which is where we are headed, it seems, since they can't increase processor speed much. They have to do something to sell us new CPUs.) You may double the processors but only get a 20% speedup. One of many examples after 15 seconds of Googling, here Another one here where they doubled the processors and only got a semi-logarithmic increase in speedup (very common from what I recall from class.) Database updates won't scale well, since fundamentally you need some concurrency control to ensure ACID and that can't scale forever.

So almost anything can parallelize, but not everything can do so well. Sure it may be faster, but not nearly as fast as doubling the CPU speed. For many systems going to 2 or 4 processors will help a lot, since people also use multiple programs or services in the background, but that's low hanging fruit. (And welcome, I use dual core CPUs and find it helps for that reason. But 1000 cores? I don't think that will help do any common task for an average user.)

So, basically, I think we are all right. It's generally faster with more CPUs, just not much faster in the higher cases and we'll reach a point of diminishing returns. Is it worth it to double the cost of a CPU for a 5% speedup? For some, I'm sure, but eventually it just don't be worth it to increase the number of cores. I used to work with people who made parallel simulations and they'd spend years getting an application working on a specific architecture. They'd be ecstatic when they got a 10% speedup. Not really practical for most consumer products.

This is like the crazy patent claims Microsoft made against Linux (what was that? 184 alleged patents? More?) Examples would be nice.

I know this is SORT OF off topic, and I am by no means on Microsoft's side in their Patent-War-On-Linux, but I CAN give you an example (albeit stupid):

Microsoft's patent on Long File Names on FAT/FAT32. Like it or not, it is there. To make matters worse, the Official Microsoft spec has bunches of code snippets that it seems a lot of developers never care to rewrite. They even stick to the same variable names/structures that are within the spec. Now I am not saying this constitutes patent infringement, but it gets harder to say you aren't violating someones software patent when you are using the same variable names/structures/code snippets from a spec describing said patented code.

Bit Tyrant already does?

Here is the link to the SDSS image: http://www.astro.washington.edu/west/rc3/NGC2770.jpeg

Other propulsions systems could make a round trip feasible by allowing solar powered launch.

Here's two.

Something to see, and it's done far far ago. For extra safe kernel believers.

And efficient, too :).

On a really small scale you can "make your own waves" -- see the Pogo Foil. I rode it once, lots of fun. http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/parker/pogo_foil.htm

fyngyrz wrote:
>
> Thirty six years from now, that ability to "simulate a few cells" should
> grow just in the *normal* scheme of things into an ability to simulate a billion
> or so cells without any trouble.


Well, let's say you're right and researchers are able to simulate 10 billion neurons in 36 years. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain, with 10 to 20 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex alone (a figure which does not include glial cells, which may also play important roles in cognition, and of which there are 10 to 50 times as many as there are neurons).

But, let's further postulate that given another 10 years (now we're up to 46 years from now) researchers will be able to simulate the 10 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex. Even then there's still a much harder computational hurdle left to overcome that hasn't even been touched upon in our calculations here. Namely, the interconnections and communication between the neurons. There are 60 to 240 TRILLION synapses in the cerebral cortex alone. And then there's all of the uncounted communication between the synapses via various neurotransmitters. How much longer is it going to take researchers to be able to simulate all that interconnection and the communication going on between the simulated neurons?

(See this link for more interesting statistical facts about the brain.)

Hmmm. I wouldn't say that it's retarded. I haven't really seen a lot of evidence even that some form of extremely basic life could be formed in any sort of atmosphere even resmbling ours (if I remember correctly, there was something about some scientists that was recently able to get proteins to form in very exact and beneficial conditions, but that's about it). Why should I really believe that life could have possibly formed on some remote place like Mars, where the temperature apparently ranges from 27 degrees Celsius to -107 degrees Celsius.

Basically, all evidence that I see points to not having life elsewhere. Infinite possibilities? In order to have infinite possibilities, strictly speaking, the universe would have to have been eternally existent.

As for being too close minded for being a scientist, I would be interested to know exactly how open minded you have to be. It is extremely hard to prove the absence of something entirely, as can be seen in this thread (how do you prove life never existed on Mars?). It seems that the possibility of life being on Mars, even with an infinite universe and an open view of evolution, is significantly less than the possibility of a military transport accidentally dropping a tank on exactly the spot you sit at your computer. So, maybe I should be spending money on making sure my house's roof could withstand a tank falling on top of it, since it's possible?

Of course, the probability of life evolving is a rather big topic. It'd be interesting to try to calculate the probability of the two ideas and see which one is more probable.

So just let the scientists be scientists, since raw empirical evidence is the only way we'll ever answer this question in our lifetimes.

Yes, so it should be. In fact, raw empirical evidence has shown that microwaves cause DNA breaks. But the scientists doing those experiments are ridiculed, or have seen their funding pulled. Henry Lai for example: http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/wakeupcall01.html

On the final webpage before completing a purchase, Amazon.com states that "[w]hen you click the 'Place your order' button, we'll send you an e-mail message acknowledging receipt of your order. Your contract to purchase an item will not be complete until we send you an e-mail notifying you that the item has been shipped."16 This communicates that the buyer, by proceeding through the shopping cart system and placing an order, is making an offer that will form a contract only after vendor acceptance.

Both the 5mx and Netbook have been used successfully by mountaineers; the Netbook in particular was used by a Hungarian team while climbing Mount Everest. They have been out of production for years but it shouldn't be difficult to pick them up (probably used) for a small fraction of what a normal laptop would cost.
http://www.psionteklogix.com/public.aspx?s=us&p=News&POid=367
http://www.project-himalaya.com/news-00-shishapangma.html

I have never used a Netbook, but was pleased with the 5mx that I used years ago (though not for world travel or mountain climbing or anything like that). It fit in my pocket, had a VERY comfortable keyboard for its size (I could type at roughly 2/3 of the speed that I type on a full-sized keyboard) and ran for a good 30 hours or so on a pair of AA batteries. It survived a number of short falls--about 3 feet onto hard surfaces--without any problems.

Both use CompactFlash for removable storage, and can be used with a cell phone or modem for Internet access. The Netbook has a PCMCIA slot as well, which (with appropriate cards) adds Ethernet or wireless capabilities.
http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/showthread.php?p=321802

The 5mx probably won't be of much help when it comes to creating backup copies of photos, but the Netbook might with appropriate accessories (either sending them over the Internet or mailing home CompactFlash cards).

And yes, both will run Linux if you choose, though there are some limitiations.
http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/howtos/netbook_new/index.htm
http://staff.washington.edu/dushaw/psion/openpsion/
http://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/howtos/series5mx_new/index.htm

Actually, what was old is new again ...

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/

Videaowall build up of 55" screens. e.g. 4x3, like here
It might be that you need 12 different recievers to make it legal. That should however not be an issue.

What I would also love to see is this going to court God against the copyright law. Who will win? And if copyright wins, doesn't that mean that there is no God?

What you have sloshing around is not liquid Helium, as this page's phase diagram shows:
http://quench-analysis.web.cern.ch/quench-analysis/phd-fs-html/node45.html
you can see that liquid stops being meaningful above 5K and helium becomes a strange not-liquid, not-gas fluid known as a supercritical fluid. I am not certain, but it is possible that a super critical fluid makes sloshy noises due to turbulence from surface interaction.

Another possibility is that in fact it is the nitrogen that has liquified - balloon gas is in fact mostly nitrogen to save money. However, looking at this page:
http://www.astro.washington.edu/larson/Astro150b/Lectures/Fundamentals/fundamentals.html
it seems that the critical point for Nitrogen is still well below room temperature.

In any case, making helium a liquid is not necessary to make it more dense than air. Hydrogen is even more convenient to work with, as metal hydrides store more hydrogen by mass than even liquid hydrogen! (and they can be safely handled)

What a bunch of BS. There are SEVERAL exceptions to the DMCA, e.g., research, education, etc. You don't know what the f you are talking about and comments like this are why slashdot is a cesspool of intellectual discussion compared to what it used to be.

F you and everyone that modded you informative.

If you need help with alpine, your best bet is to sign up for the alpine-alpha email list at http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/alpine-alpha and ask your question there. The developers already have some ideas on what might be wrong in Windows 98, and how to fix it, but do keep in mind that Windows 98 is a rather old system these days.

I had been downloading and compiling PINE because of this license issue, so I expected some third party to create a differently licensed clone for some time. Imagine my surprise when the expected PINE clone (no pun intended, honest) arrived from no less an institution than UW, distributors of the original PINE. For those who, like me, wondered why they didn't just relicense PINE and call it "PINE 5.0," the Alpine story 'splains it. I never realized that trademark issues were involved. Quoth Alpine:

We wanted to reorganize the Pine source code, distribute the Web version that has been very popular here at the Univerity of Washington, and relax our trademark obligation for source code quality control to a world-wide customer base. The trademark obligation represented an ongoing administrative effort. Coincidentally, the UW is standardizing its license for the several other products we offer to the Apache License, Version 2.0. The cleanest way to do all this was to stop developing Pine (a registered trademark) and start a new product that would be released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Thus Alpine was born.

The trademark obligation represented an ongoing administrative effort. Coincidentally, the UW is standardizing its license for the several other products we offer to the Apache License, Version 2.0.

The cleanest way to do all this was to stop developing Pine (a registered trademark) and start a new product that would be released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Thus Alpine was born.

A gas engine in a car is only 12%-15% efficient in the form of turning the gas into momentum. Most of the energy is released as friction in the engine

From here:

"Today?s efficiency situation:

FUEL 100%
PUSHING THE PISTONS 35%
OVERCOMING ENGINE FRICTION AND PUMPING THE AIR AND FUEL (typical US driving condition) 20%"

Some ICEs on the road are more like 25% efficient in typical usage, but that's still nothing to boast about

Documentation 101

http://www.sagemath.org/SAGEbin/apple_osx/

"**
    These are only for OS X 10.4. They will not work on OS X 10.3.
**

1) Download the file here to your Desktop (or wherever -- put it
      in a directory with no spaces in it):

      http://sage.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin/apple_osx/

2) Double click on it.
3) Once it extracts double click on the "sage" icon.
4) Select to run it with "Terminal":
          Choose Applications, then select "All Applications" in the
          "Enable:" drop down. Change the "Applications" drop down
          to "Utilities". On the left, scroll and select "Terminal".
          Click "Open", then in the next dialog select "Update".

5) SAGE should pop up in a window.

6) For the graphical notebook, type
          notebook()
      and follow the directions, which are to open firefox or safari (your choice)
      to the URL
              http://localhost:8000/

-- William"

Um. No. Not really.

I wish you the best of luck but this why I use MATLAB.

See https://sage.math.washington.edu:8102/home/pub/11/

Try out Sage's notebook interface right now (before it gets slashdotted)!

      https://sage.math.washington.edu:8101/

Just click on "Sign up for a new SAGE Notebook account". Make sure to
use Firefox, Safari, or Opera.

William

> The success of Sage won't be determined by how powerful it is.

The success of Sage with research mathematicians may be determined by how
powerful Sage is, but you're right -- the success for 99% of users won't be
determined by that.

> As others have observed, it is largely a mashup of existing stuff.
> Its success will be determined by how easy it is to use. If someone
> can put together some decent documentation

We have many people in the development team who are really very interested
in writing good documentation (and who write published mathematics books as
part of our jobs). For example, the author of "Adventures in Group Theory:
Rubik's Cube, Merlin's Machine, and Other Mathematical Toys" is
one of the main Sage developers (he's coming out with a new version of the
book that uses Sage soon).

> and a semi-intuitive UI, it will take off.

From the start we've had many undergraduates with a software engineering
background involved in the project and they have helped immensely with
the browser-based GUI (which one can use locally -- no need to be online!).
Also, us "professional mathematicians" -- even the ones that use mainly FOSS --
really do greatly value having a nice GUI. You might be able to try
out the GUI right now here:

          https://sage.math.washington.edu:8101/

that is, if it hasn't been slashdotted into oblivion already!

  -- Willam

... and there's actually another SAGE project at the University of Washington (which I can't find a link for) which does something entirely different.

I found the audio for a talk he gave at UW about Sage earlier this year.

The site is already very slow, so posting the actual links.

http://www.sagemath.org
http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage
http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sage
http://www.opensourcemath.org/sage/
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/sage
http://sage.apcocoa.org
http://echidna.maths.usyd.edu.au/sage
http://sage.scipy.org/sage

Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.

Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had .41 gun deaths per 100,000 people, versus the U.S.'s 14.24... more than 30 times as many per capita source. Obviously this strategy just isn't working out for the Brits and they need to rethink the whole plan. A single shot zip gun is not going to be anywhere near as reliable or accurate as a .22 pistol, and carries the additional risk of blowing up in the owner's hand at a relatively unacceptable rate. Homemade automatics would have similar issues with respect to mass-produced, high-precision firearms-- they just don't scare me as much. Not to mention that far fewer people have the knowledge and motivation to actually do this, than do walking down to the sporting goods store and buying a gun.

I'll concede this point, since I have no source, with a question: how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?

A generalization, I admit. I would wager that far more humans are killed by handguns than animals are each year. Besides, it would seem, that handguns used for hunting are of a different class than say semi-automatic 9mm or .45 weapons. I wouldn't think a handgun would be a very sensible hunting weapon, especially something that's likely to break your wrist, but hey... to each their own huh.

Ah, the oft quoted self-defense argument.

In general, research shows that guns increase, not decrease, the health risk of gun owners: risk of domestic homicide increases three times when one has a gun, and suicide increases fivefold if a gun is present in the house. A published study showed that when guns are bought for self-protection, they are 22 more times more likely to be used to kill someone the owner knows than to be used against strangers in self-defense.

I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.

"...specially modified AT&T cellular phone towers which, in addition to their normal communications duties, will relay an aircraft's position to air traffic controllers and other aircraft in real time."

Am I the only one this rings a big alarm bell with? Anyone who's been in an earthquake or similar disaster knows how quickly the cellular network becomes utterly useless, either due to being overloaded with "We just had a quake!" traffic or equipment failure. Witness the Nisqually quake of 2001, or the Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area in 1989.

Within five minutes after those events, the cellular phone networks in the area were completely unusable. I know, because I lived through both events. The only things that kept working were (in most cases) POTS landlines (and even then you sometimes had to wait about a minute for a dial tone), public-safety two-way radio systems that did not depend on the cell network, and ham radio repeaters.

I don't care how "specially modified" these towers will be. The idea of entrusting something as critical as air traffic control data to something that's part of the cellular network makes my skin crawl.

True, which is why most of the new hydro projects aren't "build more dams" but "make them more efficient". The generators can be significantly more efficient.

This is true, but it is a case of diminishing returns. Winn friction, not heat is the biggest loss in some hydro plants. When Ice Harbor dam was built, they had some Westinghouse and some General Electric generators. Using the same water turbins, it was easy to compare the output capacity of each. One was conservatively rated and easily met performance standards. The other barely met spec. Two generators with the same specifications can be as much as 10% different in performance.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:OrJTCRPTx2cJ:www.nww.usace.army.mil/html/offices/pa/FactSheets/ICH2005.pdf+Ice+Harbor+dam+generators&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us

Most of this type info is not public. Expansion by replacing generators is possible in some cases, but often the improvement margin is under 10%.

Also, did you know it takes petroleum to run a hydroelectric dam? With all the turbines, you need some pretty serious lubrication, which means you also need a bunch of huge pumps to push that oil around, and so you tend to have big ICEs running pumps. I know of projects attacking this problem, too -- one dam (I forget where) is apparently petroleum-neutral.

Reference please..

My dad was a power house operator on McNary dam and moved to Ice Harbor dam. When the powerhouse noise became a problem with his hearing and he moved to BPA as a substation operator. This big gas engine needed to pump tons of oil is news to me. I've never seen it even though I have had the cooks tour of the generator deck. They do have a gas back-up generator, but that is to provide control power to bring up the dam from a standstill. All the water gates are electric. Once the dam is operational, it isn't used. I've never seen it operate.

http://www.nww.usace.army.mil/html/pub/pertdata/ihpert.htm
http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/apt/nsf/previous/powimage.htm

I've been on this deck and the one below.
http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/apt/nsf/previous/mcnary2.jpg

For all you back to the future fans, take note.. McNary dam produces 1,200 Megawatts of power. (Hint, convert to GigaWatts)

True, which is why most of the new hydro projects aren't "build more dams" but "make them more efficient". The generators can be significantly more efficient.

This is true, but it is a case of diminishing returns. Winn friction, not heat is the biggest loss in some hydro plants. When Ice Harbor dam was built, they had some Westinghouse and some General Electric generators. Using the same water turbins, it was easy to compare the output capacity of each. One was conservatively rated and easily met performance standards. The other barely met spec. Two generators with the same specifications can be as much as 10% different in performance.

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:OrJTCRPTx2cJ:www.nww.usace.army.mil/html/offices/pa/FactSheets/ICH2005.pdf+Ice+Harbor+dam+generators&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us

Most of this type info is not public. Expansion by replacing generators is possible in some cases, but often the improvement margin is under 10%.

Also, did you know it takes petroleum to run a hydroelectric dam? With all the turbines, you need some pretty serious lubrication, which means you also need a bunch of huge pumps to push that oil around, and so you tend to have big ICEs running pumps. I know of projects attacking this problem, too -- one dam (I forget where) is apparently petroleum-neutral.

Reference please..

My dad was a power house operator on McNary dam and moved to Ice Harbor dam. When the powerhouse noise became a problem with his hearing and he moved to BPA as a substation operator. This big gas engine needed to pump tons of oil is news to me. I've never seen it even though I have had the cooks tour of the generator deck. They do have a gas back-up generator, but that is to provide control power to bring up the dam from a standstill. All the water gates are electric. Once the dam is operational, it isn't used. I've never seen it operate.

http://www.nww.usace.army.mil/html/pub/pertdata/ihpert.htm
http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/apt/nsf/previous/powimage.htm

I've been on this deck and the one below.
http://www.ee.washington.edu/energy/apt/nsf/previous/mcnary2.jpg

For all you back to the future fans, take note.. McNary dam produces 1,200 Megawatts of power. (Hint, convert to GigaWatts)