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Green Energy From Manhattan's East River
circletimessquare writes "New York City's waterways are geographically unique in that they force tides from Long Island Sound down the East River in one of the most concentrated, powerful flows on the East Coast. If all goes as planned, a company called Verdant Power will build a $20 million, 10 megawatt underwater turbine field there by late 2005. The turbines spin slowly enough so that they pose no threat to wildlife (har har), are placed in spots where they do not interfere with commercial shipping, and are deep enough to not interfere with recreational boating. About the only drawback to the scheme are the supply shortage periods when the tides are slack. The New York Times has the scoop."
Thats good, but how much energy does New York use?
Will this have any large effect on the overall ease of burden from other power sources or is this just "extra cheese" as far as they are concerned?
Maybe one day they'll be able to get clean water from it too.
I've seen a lot of green stuff in that river, but I didn't think it was energy.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
It's more of a brownish-octarine-indescribable colour. Wonder if smell could generate energy..
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
True green energy comes from Kryptonite.
I wonder what they're planning on building these out of. I live a few hundred yards away from the east river in brooklyn and everything in the water for more than a day has the odd tendency to melt... or mutate.
^nA! Creatures in my Head
Yeah, isn't Doc Ock's ball'o'fusion at the bottom of the river now?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Giant spinning fan blades don't really care how fast they're spinning when they hit soft squishy meat.
The East River has no pcbs, it was the Hudson that got dumped with pcbs. All jokes aside, the East and Hudson rivers are now pretty clean, clean enough to swim in at least.
Seriously, what exactly is Michael's contribution to slashdot, other than trolling and baiting everybody?
More like Green Sludge
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
There was an Ask Slashdot some months ago discussing ways to get off the grid using something like this. Whilst what the NYT article describes is certainly not for your average DIYer, some very interesting points were made in that Ask Slashdot about this form of enery generation.
The revolution will not be televised.
Thats just a tiny contribution to the total usage....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm making a radio broadcasting book, and I had a question about the New York water system that I never quite addressed.
It's on this picture: http://www.usinternet.com/users/kyledrake/newyork- radio.jpg
It's an old field strength determination from the 1920s. See the water area below the taller buildings with the '20' strength? Is that water salty, fresh, or a mix of both (salty-leaning, or fresh-leaning even)? The reason I ask, is because if it is salty, it shows with more signifigance the blocking ability of structures (as salt water is very conductive).
Thank you!
Yes, that's right except for those in the desert! I imagine every river deep enough can be seeded with these turbines. As the river flows, it water is passed through a giant pipe that has these blades. The blades turn generating electricity.Here no body would really need falls onto which to construct a dam. But maintenance would be a problem in my view. But before I posted this, I talked to m\one of my buddies who told me that the water current several metres below the surface of a river flows much more slowly or not at all. Any slashdotter know can confirm this?
There is only one other project like this that I have heard of. It's in France, and its the Usine de la Rance.
The Usine Maremotice de la Rance is based on the French equivalent of the St Lawrence Bay. This is a place where the tide amplitude is one of the highest in the world.
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore. I have been there, and it's amazing how far away the ocean can go... and how fast it can come back. Saint Malo, the nearest city, was actually (a few centuries ago) an island at high tide, and people had to wait for the low tides to cross over the sand to the city.
The 'Usine' itself has been pretty successful, and provides 'clean', tide-based electricity to Saint Malo and other cities, but its ecological impact has been underestimated: the Rance, which used to be a clean river is now severely clogged with mud and silt that are not evacuated by the tide, to the detriment of wildlife. Many bird and fish species have left the river for others or have died off completely.
I hope the company that will build the New York project has taken this data into account for its project (which seems to be the case).
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
It also highlights the difficulty that all green based solutions have, nature. Solar power has cloud problems, windmills will lack wind, and hydro-electric dams face droughts.
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands. While this one will at least be very predictable, it will only be able to generate power when the tides are right, and that has no relation to peak power usage times. Sometimes the timing will be right, but the rest is wasted.
This will probably get me mod'd Troll, but nuclear power is the best available option, and since we cut research into making it better, we are now behind France (the horror) in nuclear technology.
Despite all the concerns, nuclear is the best choice we have until we can finally find a more efficient way to generate electricity without using steam.
Though I don't think 10MW will make a huge difference as far as power needs, this certainly does show a good step twords so-called "green power". Here we have a system with theoretically no environmental impact. As for the power limitations..."Of what use, madam, is a newborn baby?" Maybe these can be placed in lakes, canals, mouths of other rivers. Don't get excited too soon...but don't give up on this techlology early either. -- Rock the vote. Be a part of 20 million loud, this November 4.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
"None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands."
That's why over two decades ago. Someone in Popular Science suggested building slow-motion turbines in the Gulf Stream.
in fact, the salinity goes up to poughkeepsie (the river to your left, the hudson) a 2 hour drive away... during low rain periods, such as the summer, the salinity creeps up even higher than that, but poughkeepsie is generally considered the point where brackish water gives way to fresh water
on the right is the east river, which leads to long island sound (all ocean) and behind you, from the picture's perspective, is the atlantic ocean (all ocean)
that spot you are talking about is between the tip of manhattan and governor's island, al ocean water, all the time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't really very much... The company I work for allready sell windtubines at 3MW. Other companies
sell even bigger ones (4.5MW I believe.)
These turbines takes a lot of manpower to keep running. Stuff needs to be repaired every month or so. I can't start to imagine the problems one would have when trying to put them down into the salty waters of East River!
But then again: One have to try and get the technology running. That was how the windturbine-buisness got started, too, and that is big buisness these days.
"Though I don't think 10MW will make a huge difference as far as power needs, this certainly does show a good step twords so-called "green power"."
People expect a "silver bullet" solution. One energy source that'll solve all their problems. However a wise energy policy is a distributed, varied enery policy. From green generation, to efficient homes, and businesses.
I'm thankful all the time that I live in British Columbia, with our abundant hydroelectric power.
Just like the pious liberal hypocrites of Nantucket Sound, where wind energy could supply immense amounts of clean energy-- but ohhh, NOoo, the windmills get in the way of the view from the deck of my yacht, put them where some poor white trash live, thank you; serves them right for voting for Bush.
Fucking hypocritical limousine-liberal scum like Teddy Kennedy make me sick. I hope the bloated swine croaks soon.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
i would think the fish might even be entertained
;-)
for us it would be like running through a rotating lawn sprinkler and avoiding getting wet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That said, I totally agree with you about nuclear power. Modern reactors are much safer and produce much less waste than reactors of the past. Some reactors can use weapons-grade plutonium, which provides an easy solution to the problem of decomissioned nuclear weapons (a problem that both the US and Russia have been having to face recently). I believe "pebble-bed" reactors can use junk Uranium, the kind that usually gets thrown away (correct me if I'm wrong about that one though, as I'm not entirely sure).
With the hydrogen economy on the way, we're going to be seeing a demand for TONS of electricity to get hydrogen out of water. Nuclear power's time is now.
Perhaps the could just burn the river for energy.
Seriously, though, when I was a sophomore in college, I took a road trip from Oregon to San Francisco with some friends. We were driving down the 101 coastal highway (for those of you unfamiliar with the 101, you can see the ocean almost the whole time. It's beautiful), when I had a Eureka moment. I was looking at the ocean and it suddenly dawned on me, Holy shit! We could put turbines out there on the coast to collect power from the tide. They'd be an almost totally clean and renewable source of energy. I'm going to win the Nobel prize when I tell people about this! I told the other people in the car about my prize-winning plan and my friend Bex told me, "Yeah, they have those already. They kind of suck." I was pretty crestfallen.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
I was about to call troll on the submitter myself, but I believe it's really a joke on the fact that the East River is so polluted, there is little to no living creatures in it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Hydro is so abundant here that we only have to import 10% of our power needs! =)
That's right, we're power importers in BC. We're just lucky that BC Hydro can literally turn on and off the generators with next to no cost. This lets them, and eventually us, benefit from high priced exports when there's peak power demand elsewhere, balanced against larger amounts of relatively cheap imported power at off-peak times.
I guess my point would be, don't be too proud of power being mostly "clean" hydro - it may not stay that way forever.
a 2 hour drive up the hudson river is a city on the banks of the river called poughkeepsie (vassar college)
they have been getting their water supply straight from the hudson river for decades, no problems!
read all about it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So much for privatization of essential services. :rolls eyes: .
The humour comes from the fact that there's nothing alive in the east river. It's too heavily polluted for anything other than microbes to live in.
...until someone comes up with some form of pigeon-based fusion.
At least the power coming from it will be environmentally friendly, even if the water isn't.
NTITE
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
I wonder why they went that far for testing anyway?
dont wan't to be dredging things up from the river bed do we?
tides are caused by equal parts lunar and solar gravity
that's not once but TWICE per orbit of the moon, which is ever 25 hours, so the cycle is every 12.5 hours...
but wait there's more: as mentioned in the article, the turbines swivel on their base and face the incoming tides, then swivel on their base and face the outgoing tides... so really, that's FOUR TIMES per every 25 hour tidal cycle, so that's 6 hours 15 minutes between high and low tide, the vast middle period of which the turbines are cranking away
as mentioned in the article, there's only roughly 6 hours every day when the turbines aren't moving... and those 6 hours are cut up into 4 equal pieces, equally spaced apart, in a 25 hour cycle, which means that every day, the slack periods shift an hour
so the devil's in the details, but it certainly means that this power source isn't as transitory as you initially described it, although it is still most definitely cyclical, just on a much tighter schedule than it originally appears to be
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands.
Hydroelectric power aka dam power.
And while these typically need speical circumstances to be viable, they are one of the ways that you can have green reliable power.
But like most people here I agree that nuclear is the way to go in the long run. The Japanese have that neat little one that's about the size of a large bus if I remember correctly. Perfect for small towns.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
There is also a tidal-power plant in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Like these ones, it was built as a test of the technology. Only it's already been around for 20 years.
It puts out 20 MW, and is on the Bay of Fundy, where you will find the truly highest tides in the world.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
...somebody is very pissed off at having to pay shipping costs for a 10-ton hydroelectric turbine he never ordered.
Linda: I'm sure those windmills will keep them cool.
Morbo: Windmills do not work that way! Good night!
That's right. All your base.
Most conservatives do not lecture everybody else about how they should properly spend their money or what they should do with their own private property. The average conservative could care less where a windmill is built, as long as he's not taxed to pay for it.
Everybody loves to see a hypocrite exposed, and it works both ways-- don't fucking lie to me and tell me you didn't laugh your ass off when Jimmy Swaggart got caught with a twenty dollar hooker.
So why not expose the commie-greenie bastards when it turns out they're more selfish than all us poor dumb schmoes who have to pay for their idiotic ideas?? John Kerry is all for oil conservation, but my goodness, he owns three Suburbans.
Barbara Streisand is as shrill as anybody when pontificating to Middle America about its selfish use of oil, but oh! for her, it's an air-conditioned 25,000 square foot mansion on one of the most scenic beaches in the country, and private jets all over the world. She uses ten times as many natural resources as I do.
Fuck her and everybody like her. Let them set an example to the rest of us, or SHUT THEIR FUCKING FAT MOUTHS. When some empty-headed celebrity harpy like Barbara Streisand moves into a normal size house, and swears off limousines and overseas travel forever, then (and only then) has she earned the right to say JACK SHIT about environmentalism.
Until then I'll spend my money as I please, and the environment be damned.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Some chance the greenpeace guys will still complain?
"Most conservatives do not lecture everybody else about how they should properly spend their money"
War on Drugs, anti-prositution, Christian group boycotts. Abortion bombings
It can act as a means of disposal for the mob.
sorry, st malo doesn't have them, two or three places in the world can argue this one, there a place in canada I think, fundy / funday bay or something, bristol channel, etc... they all get about 16 metres at peak....
e rn.jpg / se vernbore.jpg
very close to st malo is the ras de sein, which can lay claim to having some of the fastest tidal currents on earth, eg 9+ knots (real fun in a 30 foot sailing boat with a max hull speed of 7 knots, even more fun when wind and tide oppose each other... lol
the bristol tides run up the severn, which narrows gradually over many miles, leading to something known as the "bore"... surfers have ridden this wave for several miles...
links to pix of the bore
http://www.xmission.com/~dlweber/images/sev
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/research/theory/Berry
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
conservatives don't tell you what to do with your money, but they tell you how you should live your life (social conservatives)
liberals tell you what to do with your money (fiscal liberals), but they don't tell you how you should live your life
so liberals lose monetarily, and conservatives lose socially
and therefore, liberals are friends of the poor, whie conservatives are friends of the rich
it's a choice you make, which hypocrisy bothers you less, and frankly, i like people who tell me what to do with my wallet a lot more than i like people who tell me how to behave in the bedroom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
wow, finally, killing two birds with one stone, solving NY's power consumption and getting rid of that green glow in the east river.
That being said, I consider most environmental regulations to be a good thing.
testing out my trending skills
In order to extract energy from the water, it's gotta slow it down somewhat. When you do that, you cause sediment to settle out prematurely where it never settled out before. That can change the direction of flow, causing erosion in new places and deposition in others - maybe cause loss of habitat for some animals and plants.
There isn't *ANY* power generation system that doesn't have some kind of impact. The issue is whether this has a more acceptable impact than the other ways to get that much power.
The problem I have with these projects is that if you spent the same amount of money on energy saving plans, you'd end up with the same results - but with LESS environmental impact - not more.
For example, I live in Texas where a large fraction of everyone's electricity bill is paying for airconditioning and heating. By spending about an extra 5% on the price of my house, I ended up with about three times better thermal insulation factor compared to a typical Texas home. As a result (since A/C and Heat are such large fraction of electric bills here), it's no suprise that my electric bills are about half what my friends and neighbours are getting for similar sized houses. (My house is built with this stuff: http://oikos.com/companies/grnblock.html)
Crunching the numbers, my additional 5% up-front cost is repayed in about 5 years...and the house should last at least 25 years so this is a really good deal.
However, getting people to pay that 5% up-front cost is HARD. (Why else would so few houses be built that way?)
But what if the government or the electricity generation companies paid you to add that extra insulation and took the cost of it back from your fuel bill savings in the form of a tax of some kind? An initial outlay of $20M would halve the electicity consumption of about 5,000 houses like mine. That's about the same as building a 3.5MW powerstation. Not as good as the 10MW one that they are planning to build in NY for $20M - but mine lasts for 25 years without maintenance, labor, etc - has not technical risk and has a really GOOD effect on the environment by reducing the net amount of electricity that has to be generated.
That's just one example - I'm sure there are others.
www.sjbaker.org
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands. While this one will at least be very predictable, it will only be able to generate power when the tides are right, and that has no relation to peak power usage times. Sometimes the timing will be right, but the rest is wasted.
This is something that needs to be underscored; what is even worse is the magnitude to which green energy sources fall short. It's a myth; it's outright LIES at worst. Hydrogen is not an energy source, as many people - even professionals who should know better. Oil is effectively free energy, millions of years of solar power stored up and scooped off the ground - and it is going to take a HUGE investment in nuclear infrastructure to catch up.
Solar is an excellent possibility; however, research into efficient solar cells is lagging, and the energy efficiency of those cells is questionable. It doesn't do much good if you're producing cells using oil, and the cells take more energy to make than they will return over their lifetime.
That's also the problem with oil in the first place - there is more oil than will every be extracted from the earth. The problem is that the amount of energy to extract the oil is increasing, and once oil becomes an energy storage mechanism, and not an energy source, we are in big big trouble.
The unfortunately alarmist sites Die Off and the link in my signature are excellent sources for data backing up these claims - many of those studies are in fact funded for by congress.
"Green" energy sources are an interesting experiment but they WILL NOT solve the upcoming crisis from a shortening oil supply. The solution is to apply taxes to petroleum now and get that money into base research into solar cells, nuclear power, space based solar colletion, and other possibilities that offer energy densities that are a reasonable replacement for what we have now.
If you have energy, you have everything. Without energy, you have nothing.
..don't panic
There is a sister project to Wikipedia called Wikibooks. The goal of Wikibooks is to create student textbooks and distrubte them under the GNU FDL (a GPL-like licence). Another project that is in planning stages is Wikiversity, which aims to use content from Wikipedia and other open source sources to create reuseable/modular learning content.
There isn't *ANY* power generation system that doesn't have some kind of impact.
Disregarding the manufacturing stages... solar cells have little impact if they're used where shades would be used to begin with (roofs, windows, walls) and nuclear stations have little impact other than water disposal and waste storage.
I agree with you about the bad construction. I'm apalled to see how many North Americans don't even know which way their house windows face: South-facing is bad in hot areas and North-facing is bad in cold areas.
-hadohk
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Also known as conservation of energy.
The wind-turbine people said "oh, it couldn't possibly make any difference." Now - surprise - there's some evidence wind power screws with wind patterns.
The tidal-power people are saying "it couldn't possibly make any difference" and give figures like "the entire planet's energy needs could be filled twice over by the ocean's tides". Except that actually getting that much energy out of the ocean would involve, oh, stopping the tides, and I don't think anyone's claimed that won't cause serious problems.
So this generator produces 10MW, does it? Where's the power coming from? Answer: it's slowing down the river. Will this cause future problems? I have absolutely no idea, but it's something that would be nice to find out.
Whenever someone comes up with a source of untapped power, think for a second and figure out where the energy is actually coming from.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Why did you stop taking your meds?
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
But $2/watt is a good price. Last time I looked solar panels were going for about $10/watt.
Also: Around here solar panels generate the equivalent of about 5 hours worth of their rating per day and I bet a tidal generator would do significantly more than that.
What's (24 / PI) * integral[0 = x pi] (sin(x)**3)? It should beat that because it would flat-top rather than being 10 Mw at the minute of peak flow.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore.
And how, pray tell, is this feat accomplished?
Actually this reminds me of one of the stupid practical jokes the more experienced hands would pull on the 'boots' (newcomers, green-behind-the-ears, etc) when I was in the Coast Guard. They were so used to finding various lines (ropes) for different things-- anchor lines, mooring lines, whatever, that when told to go find a shore line, they'd start looking for rope. The laughter would always come after they'd come to you asking where to find it. Just like that left-handed monkey wrench, or the smoke shifter.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
It sounds pretty bad to be poor and white. You poor thing. *pets gently on the head* Have a doggy biscuit.
there are 2 low tides and 2 high tides every 25 hours
so that's 1. coming in, 2. going out, 3. coming in, 4. going out... every 25 hours, all of which the turbines harvest
there is only one moon, but there is a tidal bulge facing the moon, and an equally large bulge on the other side of the planet
why this is so is beyond the scope of this post, but if you just gis for tides, you'll see that i am right
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The idea behind the turbines is to harness the energy in the East River, right? That energy must be doing someting in the local environment. What happens when that energy is used by the turbines? Hard to believe there won't be some environmental impact somewhere downstream.
Slashdot is reminding more and more of a bunch of stupid people in a stupid scene of this stupid movie (who's name escapes me) where people went to a book club to discuss a book without actually reading it. I guess some people just like the clitty clack noise of the keyboard.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
any multi-story building with large windows will kill birds. the total number of birds killed by windows vastly outnumbers the number of birds killed by windmills.
I wonder how much maintenance the turbines at eg glen canyon or hoover dam take then?
from Aquanox?
[Well, over 160 posts and NO aquanox references? I had to.]
No troll. I meant it.
Give a choice between the welfare of people and the welfare of animals, why choose animals? Would they sacrifice themselves to protect us?
It's wrong to think of humans as anomalies in an otherwise pure and pristine natural setting.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
apparently, tides are less directly gravitational as they are oscillations and centrifugal effects on earths rotation from the moon's gravity... very complicated, over my head in understanding
on top of that, you have spring and neap tides... spring where the sun magnifies the moons effect by 20-30% when it is parallel to it, and neap when the sun reduces the moons effect by the same amount because it is perpendicular
so if we lost the moon, we'd still have tides from the sun, only 1/3 the size
there's also some sort of tide every 1.5 years when the moon is closest to the earth, adding another appreciable percentage
and if you want to get really wacky, you can also, apparently, measure the minute gravitational effects of mars and venus on the tides
weird!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Think about where tides come from. If you can stop _that_, then you're really on to something.
I'm curious what evidence you have that wind power 'screws with wind patterns'?
just maybe
libertarianism to me seems like nothing more than pure selfishness dressed up in philosophical language to sound respectable, when it is, of course, nothing of the sort
i think libertarianism is sort of the opposite of communism: that being fiscally ultraliberal and socially authoritarian
and we all know communism is stupid
but the mirror image of stupidity is not intelligence, it's just more stupidity
true intelligent social policies balance the altruistic nature of humanity with our selfish nature
concentrating on our altruism: communism, is stupid
but so is concentrating on our selfishness: libertarianism
you need a balance, and the most successful societies (like the us) are capitalistic with socialist safety nets... or perhaps socialist with a strong capitalist engines: like europe
you can't remove the socialist safety net from american society and expect nothing bad to come of it: noway, no how, you are a major fool if you really believe that
the ideal is a balance, not an extreme, and i'm sorry, libertarianism is just another form of an extreme, with all of the seductive promises, but also all of the real-world failings, that communism has
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All coal is not created equal. Eastern coal = the devil. Western coal = Not as bad.
I agree, but I still feel obligated to point out that there's not much new housing construction in urban areas, of which NYC is one.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
The house should last at least 25 years?
Shit, dude, if I was building a house that thing would be around until someone knocked it down. No crappy construction for me.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Given the amount of power that manhattan requires, the use of tides will probably slow down earth's angular velocity. Expect havoc when the day becomes twice as long.
Abortion bombings are not supported by anywhere near a majority of conservatives, it's a very tiny minority.
Those "Christion groups" are mainly fringe groups, but even if they weren't, they aren't asking for taxpayer money, they're getting a group of like-minded people to stop supporting whatever. Asking people not to support x is different than taking taxpayer money and mandating it, even an idiot such as yourself should be able to see that's the way it should work. Isn't it the same reason you're against the war on drugs? The nanny state controlling your life? You should like the means, even though you don't like the cause.
social conservatism is not authoritarianism
so your observations are sound, but your criticism of what i am saying is unfounded, since you are not talking about the same thing i am talking about
and you seem to have a problem with generalizing... duh, who doesn't, but i'm not generalizing people's behaviors, i'm talking about ideological definitions
so again, your observations are correct about authoritarianism and generalizing, but you don't seem to be able to grasp the fact that i'm talking about neither thing
you can criticize me all you want, but you shouldn't criticize people if you don't have a grasp of what they are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Good call. If you're willing to spend some extra money on energy conservation, you might as well spend a little extra more and construct a house that will last. Hire a good architect versed in sustainable design, and make it quality.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Green energy? Since we're talking about the East River, maybe we should specify: glowing green is more like it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
i think libertarianism is sort of the opposite of communism: that being fiscally ultraliberal and socially authoritarian
Uh, you just demonstrated your total ignorance of libertarianism. Libertarianism preaches the exact opposite of social authoritarianism, it preaches social independence. I dont think you quite understand just what libertarianism is - it is making authority as minimal is possible. I dont know why you are trying to talk with authority on a subject when you just fatally proved your own argument to be totally horribly incorrect.
and we all know communism is stupid
Care to back up that statement? Didn't think so.
you can't remove the socialist safety net from american society and expect nothing bad to come of it: noway, no how, you are a major fool if you really believe that
You are the major fool if you believe that the current system is some shining example of the "ideal" government.
It would be nice for this to be a success, given New York's history as the location of the first electric company.
Regarding the East River, a suitcase full of human limbs was found floating a few years ago, and a cop on the news said, "This is a very rare event. I've been working here 15 years and I've only seen maybe 40 cases like this."
every stain tells a story
thank you for the fresh breeze of thought before action
the guy is attacking me because he can't read
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Finally, another Texan who spells "neighbour" correctly. I wish more people would spell "litre", "centre", "fibre", etc correctly.
Baka
It's not "repayed", it's "repaid". You don't get "payed", you get "paid".
(A pox on Scott Adams for printing such a horrid thing in the Jan 4 1994 strip of Dilbert.)
The famous energy debate.
Wind power: Sux
Tidal power: Sux
Solar power: Sux
Coal: Sux
Geothermic power: Sux
Hydroelectric: Sux
Biomass: Sux
Ethanol: Sux
Blah blah blah conservation of energy blah blah blah moon falls out of orbit blah blah blah river sediment destroys entire regions blah blah blah volcanoes swallow the Earth blah blah blah water all gone blah blah blah we need four million times the energy to grow corn blah
Solar energy is the solution because all the energy on the planet comes from the sun.
Sorry, everything's was invented in the 19th century when we started using oil in the first place and we're running out of oil so everyone will just have to get used to the idea of going back to oxen, covered wagons and wood stoves. Thank you and goodnight.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Solar. This energy is produced by processes on the sun which release electromagnetic energy in both wave and particle forms. This energy can be converted into electricity by photovoltaic cells; can be converted to kinetic energy in a substance; can be converted to chemical energy usually by photosynthesis (wood, coal, oil); or can be directly used as infrared (hydro, wind), visible, or ultraviolet light depending on purpose.
Nuclear. This energy is produced by the fission or fusion of the nuclei of atoms and is commonly associated with radioactivity. This process is found in naturally occuring materials in the earth, and is believed to be the base form of energy driving plate tectonics, vulcanism, and geothermal activity. Non-natural materials may also be used for nuclear processes. This energy is typically used to generate electricity by inducing kinetic energy in a substance to drive an electric generator. It has also been applied directly by exploiting an uncontrolled fission chain reaction to accelerate and move very large amounts of material in a very short amount of time. Byproducts of nuclear fusion and fission may be used to produce electrochemical potential energy (batteries).
Magnetism coupled with planetary motion. This form of energy concerns variations in magnetic fields, and how the magnetic field is altered by motion and interaction with nearby objects. We can see a practical example of this in the typical rotary electric generator; our concern here is planetary magnetic fields and how they are affected by nearby celestial objects (such as the effect of Moon on Earth's magnetic field). I admit I know very little about this, and I know of no practical exploitation of this by man.
Gravity coupled with planetary motion. More commonly known as tides, this form of energy concerns the gravitational attraction between celestial objects, and how it affects substances on a global scale. We tend to think of oceanic tides, but tides also affect the water in our toilets, the constant known as acceleration due to gravity, and land masses. The typical application of tides is direct coupling to turbines which in turn drive a generator.
I submit that every form of energy you can imagine can be traced to one of the above four fundamental forms of energy creation. We must realize however, solar power is really not a fundamental form; it is rather an abstraction of the other three: nuclear, magnetism, and gravity.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I think that the real question is: Won't all the dead bodies jam the turbines?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
1 year == (365.25 days)(24 hours/day) == 8766 hours.
1 megawatt == 1000 kilowatts, of course.
10 megawatt-years == 87,660,000 kilowatt-hours.
The article says that the turbines are slack for 6 hours out of every 24.
My Con-Ed bill says that kilowatt-hours cost $0.16 delivered, retail price. The NYT article says that electricity costs $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, wholesale.
So that's $3,300,000 per year of tasty electricity.
About 0.1% of what NYC uses, according to the article.
Beware the Kraken!
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make install -not war
NYC is about 32x32Km (1024Mm^2), receiving about 250W:m^2 average across day/night, seasons, weather. That's 256GW incident sunlight. The average New Yorker (of 10M, counting commuters & tourists) consumes under 2KW, averaged across the year, for 20GW consumed. If solar panels, storage and transmission achieved 10% efficiency, we'd "generate" 25GW, 20% more than we consume. Even accounting for 10% surface in rivers, roads, parks and other open space, self suffiency could be achieved by covering all our roofs with solar panels.
Considering the reduction in solar heating of our big buildings in Summer, with consequent reduction in air cooling bills, we'd probably have enough energy to export. Include these river turbines for another GW around the 5 boros, and we're looking at something like 5GW @$0.05:KWh, which is $600M:d. Even in NYC, that's real money: almost $220B:y. Even the $50B:y City budget looks cheap in that light.
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make install -not war
Yes this is all great but will it grind up all those dead bodies floating in the east river so we don't have to look at them?
if every roof had had solar panels over their shingles, and every telephone/power pole had a mini turbine ontop of it, then i ask you...
Electricity production is typically operated by companies for profit, and distributed production doesn't fit their business model. You can't control the supply like you can with single-source generation, nor can you charge consumers as easily with such a system.
A parallel would be decentralised p2p telephone system. It could probably be done too, but it won't be (for consumers at least) because the suppliers of the status quo would be obsoleting themselves.
I'm sure something like that is technically possibly, but I've no clue how to get around the politics of it all.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
My house isnt too energy saving - although the addition of a few measures has improved matters somwhat.
;-)
It was however built in 1880 and will likely last another couple of hundred years being made of those robust materials Granite and Slate.
I wonder what the full balanced result would be of having one miodestly energy efficient home for 300 years, or rebuilding an energy efficient one 12 times in that period.
I suspect the building of temporary homes causes a fairly large additional energy cost. Not to mention living in hostile environments like Texas!! Find somewhere with a nice climate folks!!
The US citizens consume by far the most energy in the world since a long time.
;)
If the goverment wants to support youre attitude, the most siple (and least popular) sollutions is taxation. For example gasoline in The Netherlands is taxed for EUR 0.67 / litre + 19% VAT (about USD 3.15 / gallon + 19%). Trust me: our cars use less fuel
What if nuclear power wasn't subsidized, or was subsidized through a tax on power being generated. The cleanup would be paid by people who use nuclear power. If the cost was too high, they wouldn't use as much and the demand would be lower.
This would cause people to conserve power instead of wasting it by building energy efficient homes and buying energy efficient products. But people would still be allowed to buy gas guzzlers and live in 250 year-old houses with no insulation if they had the money to waste.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I'd like to add to that, that trees are great for shading. They're leafy in summer, and barren in winter. Thus regulating the amount of sunlight/heat reaching the house.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
I guess it all depends on how Green you want to be. If you want to argue "pure Green" then nothing in the world that we can forsee right now will be that pure.
Solar power? Need wide spaces of land that will undoubtably be fenced off. Unless your going to restrict them just to the deserts not very viable.
Nuclear power? Mines to find the power itself and then you have to store the waste. Not "pure Green" by a mile.
Wind power? Again, large patches of land are needed and while they don't really require fenceing like solar, they might be anyway. And won't someone please think of the birds!
And finally Dam power. While I'll grant fully that they will totaly wipe out the ecosystem that they flood they do somewhat balance that out by creating a new one. Lakes sport all sorts of life and are pretty nice to boot.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Not as big of a loser as people who type M$ and communities that pretty much support the murder of CEO's because their product dwarfs what you only hope Linux will ever be.
If Linux was the premier operating system you'd be supporting something else because you aren't actually supporting the OS your just expressing your need to be different and fight against the power and make yourself feel special and stand out and superior to others.
You guys spend your lives trolling windows forums and making responses to any question regarding windows by saying "Just use linux!"
Someone asks for help on Microsoft Exchange, Linux_Cult_Member_003 replies - "Just use sendmail!"
God forbid someone not be as knowledgeable, then we break out the RTFM when help is asked because anyone who doesn't understand every last line of kernel should just kill themselves.
A linux user has alot of nerve using the word troll, you really do make me smile.
actually, while this is funny, its also an interesting misconception. The green (and general turbitity) in water in northern waters is actually from algae, various forms of plankton, etc, living in the water. There is some pollution in the hudson adneast rivers (though far less than there was in the past), but it is not the cause of the water's darkness.
the carribean, prized for its clear water, actually contains very dead water, which is why it isnt murky.
--Aaron
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
How cool would it be if we just sent a big ol' magnifying lens into outer space so we could get more power out of the solar plants we have? Just a thought
The turbines spin slowly enough so that they pose no threat to wildlife (har har)
Are these wild Har Har fish any relative of the african aquatic He He?I couldn't think of a sig.
Gas centrifuges require about 50 KWh per SWU, giving an electric consumption of about 6 GWH per fuel load. That's 4 load's worth of fuel for a day's reactor output; put another way, one reactor working 300 days per year could produce fuel for 2400 reactors.
Assuming 24 million BTU/ton of coal and 10,200 BTU/KWH heat rate, a 1 GW coal plant would have to burn 425 tons/hour of coal to get the required 1.02e10 BTU/hour of heat. That's 10,200 tons of coal per day, or over 3.6 million tons of coal per year. A pile of coal that big would completely cover a 1 GW nuclear plant; there is no way that construction of the plant would require more energy or release more CO2 than is in so much coal.You're either a knowing participant or a willing dupe in a disinformation campaign. If the latter, reconsider your information sources; if the former, please jump off the nearest object more than 20 meters tall (the world doesn't need any more liars).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Please don't even attempt to compare our plants to the Russian ones. We have much better designs, better monitoring systems, more regulation, concrete containment domes, freedom of the press, etc. Something like Chernobyl is pretty much impossible. Three Mile Island is a better comparison.
I'd agree with you that half would be a pretty hard case to beat, but in my estimation the truth value is more like 2%, and another 5% which happens to be based on fact but applies to 1940's-era weapons production and has nothing at all to do with commercial nuclear electric power. The rest is made up.
Nuclear is the alternative to coal. How long does a bit of coal take to burn compared to how long it laid in the ground? How long will the CO2 be in the atmosphere? (I've heard figured up to 200 years, which is about six half-lives of the longest-lived of the really nasty isotopes in fission products. It would not be at all difficult to ensure foolproof isolation of all fission products for longer than the age of the pyramids in Egypt. In that time any danger from strontium-90 or cesium-137 would be gone, and all you would have remaining is the long-lived isotopes which last so long because they are only weakly radioactive.) All you have to look at on the input end is the cost of yellowcake. That price incorporates all the energy inputs and everything else, and it looks like it is downright cheap.On the subject of "life threatening waste", have you looked at the criteria that the government is using to determine if a disposal site is good enough or not? Over hundreds of thousands of years some of these isotopes might migrate a few miles, and if someone drinks the groundwater from that area they might have their risk of cancer go up a few percent. People who drink water from outside that area would never be affected. (The only reason people would be drinking water there is if civilization collapses and people forget how to make radiation detectors; the carrying capacity of Nevada desert in the absence of modern infrastructure such as aqueducts isn't all that high.) This is supposed to rule out the use of a technology that keeps all of the carcinogenic arsenic from coal out of the air, not to mention the mercury emissions. On the balance, I do not think that the anti-nukes are interested in public health.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Our house will certainly last well over 25 years - I used that number as a worst case.
The technology in our house is known as 'insulated concrete forms'. They built the house out of foam blocks just exactly as if they were Lego bricks (they even have the studs on top and interlocking holes underneath). Each brick is two thick foam blocks with a 6" gap between them. The two blocks are held at that spacing by a pair of carbon-fibre plates. As they build, they thread a web of re-bar inside. Once one floor is finished, they pour concrete down between the foam block, then build the interior walls, and the upstairs floor - then proceed with another layer of "lego" bricks - and then fill that with concrete. Then they brick up the outside and sheet-rock the inside. The result is brick/1"foam/6"concrete/1"foam/quarter-inch plaster. The walls are now almost a foot thick.
The house is supposed to be able to resist 300mph winds (which is actually a significant bonus in Texas).
Whilst concrete isn't the most ecologically sound material, the long life the house should have (FAR in excess of most Texas wood + stucco or siding buildings) ought to be worth it on balance.
It has a couple of other unexpected benefits - one is that there are almost never any insects in the house because the floor slab and the walls form one continuous concrete barrier. Another is that it's very quiet inside. The insulation that keeps out the summer heat also keeps out the noise.
The major downside is that it's not possible to add new windows or doors once construction is underway. It's also necessary that the garage is heated/air-conditioned because there is no insulated wall between it and the main body of the house. We needed a special insulated garage door in order to avoid that being a major energy lossage.
www.sjbaker.org
That is definitely interesting. Concrete is a fascinating material. It doesn't get used much for residential stuff where I live (New Orleans), because it'd most likely just make the house sink.
An insulated garage door. That's interesting. So the interior walls aren't concrete? Just framed out?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
There is some clever science involved in this stuff.
Our house is built on a heavy clay soil known locally as 'black gumbo' - the surface of our land rises and falls up to 6" between the wettest and driest parts of the year. As a consequence, the house is built on a 'waffle slab' - which means that they dug broad trenches in a waffle pattern, threaded steel cables through tubes in the center of those trenches - then filled them up with reinforced concrete. Once the slab was poured and dried, they 'post-tensioned' it by pulling the cables very tight to apply positive pressure over the whole thing. The re-bar in the slab was left poking upwards around the edges so that when the walls were poured, they form a seamless concrete 'container'.
The whole house is therefore like a solid concrete box (except for the roof and door/window openings). It's designed to float on the underlying clay soil - with the waffles in the slab providing traction to stop it sliding sideways. Since concrete is very strong under compression but has almost no strength under tension, the post-tensioning trick prevents it from cracking under the hydrostatic forces from the clay soil.
The 'waffle slab' part is a very standard construction technique on this kind of soil.
The interior walls are just regular wood-framed walls with sheet-rock. Since they don't play any part in supporting anything - or insulating anything, they are little more than room dividers. Making them out of concrete would be unnecessary - and limit scope for remodelling the interior in the future.
The floor upstairs is bolted to the exterior concrete walls using bolts that were placed into the walls as the concrete was setting. This means that the interior walls play no part in supporting the floor at all.
There are a couple of other 'convenience' features of the foam 'bricks' that I didn't mention: The carbon fibre 'webs' that keep the foam in place while the concrete is poured have to be strong because they support the pressure of the liquid concrete until it sets. They also extend into the foam blocks. This turns out to be useful if you need to screw something to the exterior walls because you can screw into the carbon-fibre instead of trying to hold up a shelf with just foam and sheet-rock!
I designed the house myself (although I paid an architect to redraw my plans, certify that it was legal and such) - but the idea to use this construction technique happened after I thought I'd finalised the plans. In retrospect, that was a bad thing.
Just like Lego bricks, your house design is limited by the size and shapes of the 'bricks' they make. When I built (about 6 years ago) they only had 90 and 45 degree corner bricks - so my design for hexagonal 'turrets' in the corners of the house had to be changed to octagonal turrets - with smaller windows as a consequence.
There was also a problem with where I wanted an exterior door that resulted in a long chain of complicated dependancies breaking down. As a result, my kitchen is 6" smaller than I designed it to be - so the refrigerator doesn't fit where I wanted it to be - so the kitchen isn't as ergonomically 'correct' as I'd intended...urgh!
Another downside is that routing cables and pipes through the outside walls had to be done before the sheet rock was put up so that they could cut channels into the foam for the conduits. Hence, it's essentially impossible to add more cabling along the external walls of the house - which is why all my 1GHz ethernet outlets are on the interior walls of the house!
www.sjbaker.org
Cool deal. My question about the interior walls was geared more towards the wall between the garage and the rest of the house. That wall can sort of straddle the line between an interior and exterior surface. In hinsight, maybe it could've been done made of concrete?
If the exterior walls are the only thing supporting the floor, then what kind of interior spans are you looking at? I think that is the thing that would bug me the most about that sort of construction. Breaking up the ceiling plane (double height spaces and such) would become much more complicated. Platform framing with interior walls carrying structure is pretty flexible in terms of inital design. Of course, your point about being able to reconfigure the interior walls whenever you feel like it still stands.
Post tensioning is good stuff. They usually do it for parking garages. If for some reason you ever get a chance to watch them post tension a parking garage, when the tension gets high enough, the whole slab sort of bounces up and flexes in a way that you can hardly imagine concrete doing.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
A 28 year ROI is very bad. I doubt many new home owners could afford to add $14K the cost of their house: which would also increase the ROI time because of the extra interest on the additional principle. This will probably drag out the ROI to someting like 40 years. I doubt I'll own the same house that long. Also, what's the annual up keep on these panels and how well they survive in a hail storm ? In general will home owner's insurance cover losses on these panels ? Lastly I have three very tall and bushy oaks on my property that shade the roof of my home. I'm betting that will cut down on the efficiency of the panels: I will not cut down these beautiful trees.
Yes, I agree, this is a big investment in money and upkeep for a homeowner, and a worse-than-28 year ROI is terrible.
I was objecting to the original poster saying that "the idea of green energy is impossible - wind and solar take up too much space to be viable" .
Eventually, prices for green energy sources will come down. Hopefully other energy costs will go up to account for the environmental damage they cause. Once the ROI makes sense, mass implementation will follow.
Yes it is hard, that's why they made it compulsary for new homes in my state (NSW, Australia) to do so, http://www.iplan.nsw.gov.au/basix/
From the website -
"From July 2004, NSW leads the Australian states in promoting sustainable residential development. How? Simply by requiring a BASIX Certificate with proposals to build homes.
The BASIX Certificate is proof that your proposal satisfies the NSW Government's targets to reduce the amount of water and energy we use in our homes. To get a certificate, you need to complete a BASIX assessment."
So it means that you need to have insulation, water saving taps, etc.. is that really so bad?
A semi-retired nuclear engineer/tour guide that sowed a group of us around an unfinished reactor building in Hanford said that the containment building could take an impact by a loaded 737. Those walls are insanely thick and the rebar is about as big as thick as an arm and the stuff is woven together before the concrete is poured. It's damn impressive.
There are certainly larger aircraft, and maybe two or more would break the building, who knows. Point being, if you want to take out a nuclear reactor with a civilian aircraft, you're gonna have to work for it.
If you did manage to hit the containment building, I'm guessing the reactor would be safed immediately, just on principle. And the turbine buildings and other auxiliary buildings were ordinary steel buildings, and would certainly be thrashed by flying debris and heat, so the reactor won't be doing much useful work anyway.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.