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Saving Energy Without Derision
George Maschke writes "Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation). The author welcomes comments and intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I can't comment because I can't download the fucking 5MB .pdf ...
Why do people use PDFs when HTML works perfectly fine? Do you REALLY need to control the layout that much?
Might be outdated! HERE
With the increasing interest in hydrogen fuel cells it may be time for the 'coalition of the willing' to begin the inva^H^H^H^H liberation plans of those countries that possess surplus hydrogen reserves.
It also might be time for a manned mision to the sun...
[insert obligatory joke about overheating server]
Read the HTML version instead, without the pretty graphs
Google is your friend.
There is a definite need for energy conservation ideas that can be directly supported with economic validation. So many "green" initiatives are driven solely by politics and have economics, and often even environmental impacts, that are questionable. We need more people installing compact flourescent lamps and water heater blankets...not $20,000 solar panel arrays. A healthy dose of common sense here could really make energy efficiency ideas more popular. Here's hoping it works.
...is that it isn't an energy *source*. You have to make hydrogen, either by splitting it out of water, or some hydrocarbon source (e.g. petroleum), then pressurize it to extremes in order to get any usable range out of it in an automobile. If hydrogen can be manufactured by renewable means (geothermal, for example, would work well in Iceland), then there is some benefit to it.
However, if you use solar energy to create electricity to electrolyze water, and make hydrogen gas that way, you end up with less energy at the wheels of a car than you would just charging a battery from the same solar energy.
So you have to ask yourself, who benefits from multi-billion dollars of investment into a Hydrogen energy infrastructure?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
I beleive in this stuff, I really do. /.'d currently - but we all know the content - "Install insulation, drive a fuel-efficient car". Lovely, great thought - but how do you put it into practice. I don't own a car, I make a point of not owning one but how do you convince Mr Tinyknob in his suv-sports-environment killer to drive something fuel efficient? He's never going to impress people any other way.
I can't rtfa as it's
OK, I'm being harsh, but it's fair. I take all sorts of precautions to leave a fair planet for my (currently) 5 week old daughter, but I frequently wonder what the "£$%ing point is if the guy at the next desk drives 500 miles weekly in his V8 5litre penis extension because he's got no self esteem what-so-ever?
Driving a modern VW or MB diesel whether or not you ever plan to use a single drop of domestically produced biodiesel is a good place to start.
My 2003 Jetta TDI has 40862 miles on it and I've used 832.7 gallons of diesel (and 56.9 gallons of biodiesel) thus far. For those of you keeping score at home, that's about 45.93 mpg over the life of the car. Not too shabby.
Why wait 15-20 years for hydrogen when we can start reducing our dependence on foreign oil NOW?
Batteries are amazingly corrosive.
A lot of the U.S. gets its electricity from coal and other non-replaceable fuels that damamge the environment.
Everytime you drive it you have to plug in and get more electric charge from the above environment destroying power plant.
Where's the bonus?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
You are forgetting that in a hydrogen society - there is now room to bring nuclear power back into the picture. Now people have the potential to create hydrogen on a vast scale far away from any place that might have political fallout.
In spite of all the bad press, the fact is that nuclear is still the safest, cheapest, and most environemtally friendly energy source ever created. IMHO, it's bad wrap had far more to do with its threat to OPEC then it ever had to do with safety or radiation.
a PDF is a text file made slightly fuzzy so it looks shit.
Instead of investing billions in pipe dreams, we should focus on excellent technology that can be implemented in the next few years for a reasonable cost. Renewable cellulose-derived ethanol could reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels and is neutral in net carbon impact (the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are offset by growing more low cost fuel crops that take CO2 out of the environment). And current gasoline engines run with minimal modifications on E85, an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline mix. Making FFV engines (flexible fuel vehicles - compatible with ethanol and gasoline in various mixtures) can be done for at most 100-200 dollars of extra cost at vehicle build time, and many FFVs are already on the road in the US (in many cases, people don't even know they have them, the manufacturers build them for tax breaks then don't market the features outside of certain areas of the midwest where corn-derived ethanol is available at the gas station).
At current gas prices, cellulose-derived ethanol is actually more than competitive, it is cheaper than gas - the problem is the long term instability of gas prices makes investing in infrastructure to produce cellulosic ethanol as a fuel substitute too risky - it's hard to compete with something pumped out of the ground, where most of the costs are transportation, and political/defense issues. Please note that we're NOT talking about corn ethanol, which a highly subsidized and environmentally contentious product due to high energy costs of growing and harvesting corn.
I went shopping this morning - spent my time shuttling my car between various big-box stores. WalMart, the grocery store, the bank. I've got a 2 year-old, so walking is out of the question (and, honestly, I wouldn't want to walk that distance anyway). The truly sad thing is that the shops are "next to each other" but separated by huge expanses of parking lot. What makes it truly sad is that there is an LRT line that runs through the shopping district, with a stop at 2km intervals. Too far for anything but waiting for the busses (which run on a 45 minute schedule on the weekend). My point? Its nearly impossible not to have a car, and each of the free-standing houses in the surburban neighbourhoods is approximately 2000 square feet. Most are at least 2km from shops, schools, and rec centres. I doubt many residents want to live in the area, but we cannot afford expensive "trendy" inner city homes. And the developers seem stuck in a rut -- they just churn out more sprawl each year. I wonder if its possible to make them change? Signed, Sad is Suburbia.
Build more nuclear reactors. Develop a working plutonium breeder (invest money in research). Drive down the prices on solar and wind (a wind turbine that can be manufacured in 300-400$ cost 2-3K$). Move out of teh suburbia. Start buying from local shops instead of driving to Walmarkt. Move closer to your working place even if the rent is 20% higher. Use the bike more often (is healty, environmental friendly and cheaper). Recycle. Increase the thermal efeciency of your home (better insulation ....). Get a VIA C3 or Crusoe instead of the P4. Get a hybrid car or a diesel. And most important DON'T VOTE BUSH! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
I'm no expert, but I've believed this to be the case ever since I wrote a paper on it for a chemistry course and (for an unrelated course) designed a methanol reformer for use on a fuel cell vehicle. I've never said much about it, because I thought, "Well, who are you? All these specialists and people who make energy policy seem to think it's feasible.."
It warms my heart to see a expert saying what I already thought.
(Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's [hydrogen] a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)
What is also sad from my viewpoint is that hydrogen, technically, isn't really a "fuel". You need a lot of energy to make it. Now, if one uses solar power to make electricity to crack water to make H, then you've sort of solved part of the problem, but solar panels have a shelf life, and are dependent on local weather conditions.
I don't see Hydrogen as much of a solution for transportation. But I do think it could be used for home heating and local electrical generation in adverse environments. Still, the generation of Hydrogen is the big nut to crack. I think one nation on earth could become the Saudi Arabia of Hydrogen: Iceland.
1. They're an island, so they have all the water they need.
2.The whole freakin' island is basically a lava slick.
You don't have to drill very far down to get Enormous Amounts of geothermal energy, which they are already tapping for island electrical needs. All they have to do is build extra geothermal plants and crack the Atlantic Ocean. Geothermal s steady and continuous power (the earth isn't going to cool off anytime in the near future, and as Iceland is part of the Atlantic Spread, I don't think anything we can do will slow plate tectonics or cool Iceland off).
Hawaii and Vanuatu could be the Pacific Equivalents. Steady energy, lots of water. With that kind of a set up, we'll have a situation more like petroleum, where we'd have a real "fuel" i.e., lots of stored energy for very little energy expenditure in its creation.
I used to be all into Hydrogen - thikning - Hey - it turns into WATER when you burn it! KEWL!
But when I found out that the easiest hydrogen to get is out of petroleum, and that getting it out of either water or petroleum takes a lot of energy (which we get from either petroleum or fission - neither of which is renewable, except for the politically suicidal option of breeder reactors) my enthusiasm faded.
The first thing is conservation, and the article provides a lot of great ideas (many of which I am already doing, and had pointers for some that I will be dong!) for that. But I'm afraid that the next several decades will be warfare over water and energy, and we really need to find solutions to both problems.
I've stated before that the real problem is demographic - there are simply too many people. We need to *gradually* reduce populations to a sustainable level (I would estimate a global population of 250 - 300 million could be made sustainable indefinitely) and then develop long term energy, water, and metal recycling solutions.
If we don't the not so distant future will be one of horrifying catastrophe: disease, continuous war over ever dimishing resources, no power, crushing poverty and crowding, and a long term future best described as a paleolithic extinction event.
So, these are simple little choices we can make now, so we can plan for the future. OR, we can be our typical shortsighted green eyed greedy guts eat the world up everything for me and mine, and fuck the rest of you losers and simply watch the most precious of things in the universe - sentience - disappear.
It WILL eventually disappear, but it doesn't have to go this way - so stupidly, and so preventably.
Your every decision has far reaching effects.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The watt-hour meters used by electric companies are supprisingly accurate, and resiliant to many types of 'cheats'. I've heard of several schemes to fool meters, such as drawing lots of power in very short bursts, in hopes that the meter can't keep up, etc. The results I heard were the same: The meter will do a reasonably good job of measuring your energy usage, reagardless of how you choose to use that energy.
Sure, the the diode you suggest will make your meter run slower... at the mere expense of a bulb that's not as bright as it was before. (Standard light dimmers work in much the same way: By reducing the % of the cycle the bulb is powered.) Aside from the time you spent, you'll simply come out even in the end.
I really doubt in a nation filled to the brim of SUVs that average America has a real concern for environmental and energy-related issues...
I also saw something cool on the web. Some guy had a small solar panel and battery kit which could hold enough of a charge to run a small air conditioner for most of the day (when there was sunlight). I think that is a cool idea, as most friends who must use window air conditioners always complain how much more their electricity bill is in the summer.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
If saving money isn't the botton line, then the goverment is doing it's job (which it isn't).
Money makes the world go round. We should not blame people for making decisions based on economics: rather, we must blame the government if they institute an economic and regulatory framework that fails to ensure that the good economic decision is the decision that's good for society (i.e. the environment) also. The current bad system actually subsidizes (encourages) poor decisions (dirty methods of energy conversion) and fails to appreciate the value of (encourage) good choices (clearner methods of energy conversion).
NOTE: It is the failure to *value* cleaner methods of energy conversion that prevents people from not only making the 'cleaner' choice, but also from making the more energy efficient choice. why? Simple. It's because the cleaner technologies that emit less pollution per useful unit of energy output (Pollution Efficiency) also happen to be the technologies that have higher useful energy output per unit of fuel (Fuel Efficiency)!
Therefore, consumers can't just buy a more fuel efficient car for a higher price but make it up on the fuel savings... no... because they are also paying more for the cleaner technology, but they get no reward for it!
SO, and I hope despite being AC, this idea is evaluated on it's own merits and modded up if it makes sense to you, economically recognizing the value of clearner technologies is *the* lynchpin not only of less pollution, but of greater efficiency as well!
Powering cars by rechargable batteries has MANY more problems... If 50% power loss is assumed at each step (optimistic), how much power is really needed to charge a battery, after 1) Generation 2) Transmission 3) Step down to battery V in garage 4)Recharge loss 5) Storage loss
You want leaks? Battery drains faster than hydrogen can escape
Let's not even talk about the unchanging (heavy) weight of batteries (whereas fuel weight decreases at is consumed). You are still hauling 500 lbs of battery full or empty.
What about practicality? It takes several hours to recharge a battery vehicle. They are only practical in closed loops e.g. golf courses, where usage is more or less constant. Though admittedly a setup with chargers at home +and+ at place of employment would be useful for the 9-5'ers.
What about the environment? Lead and elecrtolyte will have to be replaced regularly. And accidents will get really ugly as acid is spilled all over the place.
But the first movers on the "big ticket" efficiency ideas are the ones that get all of the press. I am not against PVs. I think it is great that the technology is progressing as it has, but there are millions of households that could save ~$100-$300 worth of electricity per year with very simple, inexpensive, boring improvements. These aren't whizbang enough to attract media attention, so people just don't know about them.
Fuel cells, PVs, super-insulated passive solar houses...these get the press...or at least did at different times since the 70s. Turning down 10% of the water heaters in America by 5 degrees and installing a water heater blanket will save more energy than produced by all of the PVs ever produced. See, my argument is that it must be economically viable in order for Joe Average to bother with it. There are economically feasible efficiency ideas that are commonly overlooked because they are so boring.
Good example. I have a ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump in my house. I had a hard time finding a dealer to install it. They just aren't that popular. During heating season, it operates at a coefficient of performance of about 4. Every watt of electricity I put in, I get 4 watts of heat out. My electric bills are only about $100/month, even in the winter (Southwestern PA)...compared to people who got $400 gas bills last year. That is an energy efficiency and an economic win. But, there was no promotion of geothermal heat pumps. There was no discussions of them in the press. Energy efficient ideas have been divorced from economic viability for far too long...lining them up right next to people wearing hemp clothing. This needs to change. It should not be "fringe" to be energy efficient.
As father of five kids, with seven people in the house, basic things such as double-paned windows, water-saving shower heads, gas dryer, hot-water blankets, compact flourescent bulbs, and so on have been the mainstay.
If this was not the case, my monthly utility bill (in California) would easily hit $500-$600/mo. As it is, we're lucky to have bills typically in the $200-$300 range. (I have two mini-servers for my business that are never off)
Often, these kinds of things provide clear advantages beyond merely saving money.
Recently, the water-saving shower head in the downstairs bathroom broke, and I screwed on the original shower head, which I still had in the shed, thinking this would "get us by" until I could get in for another one.
Boy, was I wrong! With the old shower head, we could shower everybody in the household, one right after another in about one or two hours, including dressing.
But, with the new shower head, we ran out of hot water within 20 minutes, making showering everybody nearly an all-day venture while we waited for the hot-water heater to catch up.
Once, my son left the shower running hot water all night long, and in the morning, we found the shower going, and there was still plenty of hot water!
Another example: Flourescent bulbs not only use far less energy than incandescent, they also last much longer (who wants to replace light bulbs once a month?) and don't heat up the house.
I noticed the difference when I changed out the three 60-watt bulbs on the living room fam with three 15-watt flourescent! The room was, if anything, brighter, and, previously, when the fan was on low, you could FEEL the heat coming off those three 60-watt bulbs!
Double-paned windows mean that my teen children can blare their punk music as loud as they want to without pissing off the neighbors. Also, we live on a somewhat busy street, and I can sleep off hours without car noise waking me. (as long as said kids don't blare their punk music)
Also, in the winter time, you can sit next to the windows and not feel cold. That adds much to my sense of well-being on a cold winter morning...
Embrace conservation. It doesn't *have* to be a hassle!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The article (which I've only read through the google cache link) has a bunch of images, which are probably bloating it to the 5MB mark. The cached version, including all of the crazy markup google uses to make the HTML look like the PDF, is ~380K.
...alternative energy conversion devices, but I'll be the first one to admit that more sane conservation will do more in the short and medium term than anything else. It's jhoe sixpacks best bet dollar for dollar right now. Making homes with double the insulation for example, and using triple pane nitrogen gas filled windows, or integral blinds, etc are all great. The water heater blankets. Much better quality home appliances, like sunfrost units instead of el cheapos, and etc.
Basically, I like both methods simultaneously. My theory is you work both ends towards the middle. Produce (or use) more of your own power using renewables, and conserve what you use, use less but get more. Eventually those two lines meet up and you are sitting pretty energy wise.
some more things I'd like to see:
LEDs becoming commonplace in replacement of incandescents and fluorescents
Solar hot water heating and some more PV action on all the millions of sunny roofs out there
More commercial sized wind gennys on farms, both to help out the farmers and to add to the grid redundancy without resorting to more fuel burning plants.
Electric vehicles are practical enough now, need the manufacturers to just come up with a few normal looking models and sell the dang things, recharging at night is a benefit to the big power producers as well,they have to keep their units running even when demand is low like at night
Building codes and mortgage lenders need to get into the act and stop lending or approving dismally low levels of insulation in new construction
Stop the destruction of community small scale hydro electric like they are doing now, hydro is the cleanest and most cost effective low tech solution for electrical production.
Legalise industrial hemp and partially use it for liquid fuel production, the "solar conversion" with plants is very good and the ethanol or methanol or biodiesel that can be produced burns fairly clean. Hemp is good because it grows so fast, requires little attention or fertilisers compared to alternative fuel crops like corn for example
Higher mandated average vehicle mileage. Detroit whined and sniveled, said it was impossible, but once it was passed, by golly they met the goals. They could do it again because the higher mileage vehicles are out there now in other areas of the world, and until there's an incentive like a law, it won't happen as much as it needs to happen. And include normal pickups and SUVs into the mix. They could add take a scosh better mileage.
R&D I'd like to see
I think there's some huge power to be harvested in the areas of atmospheric static electricity and in the "differential" areas like in the ocean thermocline difference and with deep earth to surface differences. Pilot programs have shown it's there, just needs a little more work to get it consistent and useable
More work on improving permanent magnet motors and generators, they also show some decent promise in efficiency gains in a variety of applications
More mandated recycling, stop the nutso throw away culture. Products should also have their recyclability taken into consideration during design phases. Most people don't mind recycling at all-if it's convenient and actually useful
A LOT more methane production from ag waste and community sewer treatment plants. It's barely got off the ground in some places and it's proving practical, just need more of it and better designed digesters, etc.
The normal Prius uses its battery pack to help acceleration, hill climbing, and to power accessories. The battery pack is recharged by the gas engine and by regenerative braking. Every place except North America, the Prius has an EV button, which turns the car into a pure electric car -- but only for a mile or two before the battery reaches a state-of-charge (SOC) that is too low. The Prius battery back is designed to last an extremely long time (warranteed for 150,000 miles), and one way Toyota assures that is by limiting the SOC to a small range, from about 25% full to 80% full.
Priusplus is adding a separate "traction" battery, that works with the normal Prius drivetrain, to provide a long-distance EV mode. In their first proof-of-concept car (which should be finished this weekend) it uses 12 motorcycle Lead-Acid batteries, and it should go about 20 or 30 miles on an overnight (or overday) charge. Using far superiour Lithium Ion batteries, they should get about 80 miles for a battery pack that costs about $5,000 or so (although current Lithium cells are quite small indeed, requiring a rediculous number of batteries wired into a large pack)
If I could go, say, even 40 miles on a charge, I wouldn't use the gas motor in my Prius except to climb very steep hills during the week. I'd effectively get well over 100 mpg (Electricity costs, even in California, give a price-per-mile of about 2 cents. Unfortunately, at this point, the cost for the traction battery (because it is more deeply cycled it doesn't last as long) probably adds another few cents/mile.
PriusPlus is hoping to display there car at a show here in Los Angeles at the end of the month, and is attempting to persuade Toyota that this is a car they should build. Once people are educated about the benefits of hybrid technology, it should be a small step to show them the further benefits of plugging them in.
I fervently hope that PriusPlus will succeed!
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
I don't care about anyone being an 'anit-consumer'.
Consume less all you want I really don't mind, in fact since less demand = lower prices I'm all for it.
The problem that I personally have (and I think that most anti-green/socialist types have) is that the only way they (enbormentalists/socialists) can force their utopian agenda on the rest of the world is by government action (people with guns forcing me to do stuff I don't want to do).
In other words it is a freedom issue. I think we all want clean air/water, good health care, nice work environments, etc. The argument is how to get there not on what the goals are.
The way I see it enviromentalists/socialists are objects of derision (at least in my mind) because they either truely don't understand how the world works (they want stuff for free as in free beer with no thought on who pays the bill) or they do know the cost and are more than happy for me to pay it for them even though I don't agree with their plan.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is my opinion but perhaps you will find it usefull to understand how the 'oposition' thinks. It isn't that we don't want those things it is that the price of the system that you are advocating (my freedom) is too high.
Those things have no crumple zones at all. You get into a crash, they stop suddenly, and none of the energy is absorbed by the car - it all gets transferred to the people in the car. Squish.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I live in Tucson, AZ, in a 2500 sq. ft. house, with lots of windows. The electric bill runs about $150 in the middle of summer, $60-$75 in winter. I do have 2 PCs and various other equipment running 24/7.
Friends who live in a 2000 sq. ft. home built by a volume builder pay about $300 right now, and I have heard of people that have $600/month power bills.
We spent a few $1000 extra to get a more efficient house:
- blow-in insulation was used everywhere. There's more than a foot of the stuff under the roof, and 6 inches in the walls, packed tight.
- most windows are dual-pane Low-E2, tinted to reduce glare
- we limited the number of skylights
- the A/C is a high-efficiency, dual-compressor model (18 SEER)
- we use fluorescent lights where possible
- we keep shades drawn in rooms we don't use, such as a guest room, and my office on weekends.
It looks like we'll recover the extra cost in about 5-7 years.
Hydro is not environmentally friendly. It dams up rivers and destroys ecosystems. Making solar panels takes energy, and produces pollution. Wind energy kills birds in large numbers.
The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Okay, now you have to enrich it. Now you have to use the fuel without meltdowns. Pebble beds solve that problem - it's really not the big problem with nuclear power plants.
Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff, and you can't just haul it off and dump it in a salt mine because in order to haul it off, you have to cut it up, and cutting it up releases a giant plume of radioactive dust into the environment.
Pretty much any energy generation system has costs associated with it. I think the cost/benefit analysis for nuclear really sucks, and the story for some other forms of energy is much better, but let's take off our rose-colored glasses and look at all the costs, not just the costs of the energy generation systems we don't like.
Most modern water heaters already have the equivalent of the insulation blankets people put on older models. A recent model will not benefit from the blanket nearly as much as an older unit. More insulation always helps, but the gains become very small after a while.
A quick reference on when to use or not use the blanket. Anybody reading this should note that the original poster's "warm to the touch test" is absolutely correct-- if it isn't warmer than the surroundings, it isn't losing much heat.
What you REALLY want to fix this "keeping a tank of water warm all the time" problem is an on-demand water heater. They're a little more expensive than normal water heaters, but they have a few key benefits:
1. No tank to take up space.
2. Never runs out of hot water.
3. Doesn't have to keep a tank of water warm when not in use, making them much more efficient.
I'm surprised that #2 alone hasn't made them the de-facto replacement for tank water heaters in America (I understand they're common in europe and japan). Energy efficiency aside-- you can't run out of hot water with a tankless, on-demand water heater!
If you're even *considering* a new unit in the near future, go tankless! Installing them isn't any different than anything else that needs plumbing for water and gas-- even if they've never heard of one, your local contractor will be able to install it.
Knowing the inner-city conditions and living costs of most major cities i've been to, i'm continually amazed anyone wants to live there.
I'm amazed that anyone thinks suburbia is a good place to raise kids. I was a prisoner in my home until I was 16 and allowed to drive a car. After-school options until that age were curtailed by the lack of transportation. It would have been good to have some kind of after-school clubs to go to, but who's gonna drive us home? Our school was 7 miles away. If you wonder why our culture is so vapid, maybe it's because the last generation of kids, instead of going to band practice or drama practice after school, went home to watch the Jefferson's on TV.
When my sister and I were in high school, we both had our own car, and worked crappy McJobs to pay for them. That's one household, four cars. We didn't need to haul things, usually--we just needed them to get ourselves places. What a waste.
I live in "inner city" San Francisco now, without a car, and I love it. My stress is so much lower now that I no longer spend an hour a day fighting traffic. No place in the city is more than 2 blocks from public transit. If I need a car, I can rent one, but so far I haven't needed to at all this year. My neighborhood isn't "crime-ridden." There was a murder a couple years ago, but the locals were as shocked as if it had happened in any Mayberry, USA. We have great parks that are much more interesting than any fenced-off suburban yard.
I do miss having a dog. Maybe when I can afford doggy day care...
Just for fairness' sake:
:-p
The fact that nuclear power does not work should be hinted by the other fact that, doh, nobody wants to build them anymore.
Except China, which plans to build quite a few brand new nuclear reactors to try and keep up with the energy requirements of their increasingly metropolitan way of life. I think they are or planning on damming the Yangtze for hydroelectric as well. I know it's easy to overlook China, as it contains the largest population of humans on Earth.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I don't think what he's suggesting will dim the bulbs. His suggestion is basically a hack that screws with the oddities of AC power. Without checking things exactly, I believe what he's done is screw up his Power Factor. In the US (I believe), residential owners are billed without consideration for the Power Factor, so he's probably right that this will save you money. The light won't be any dimmer.
He's also right that it doesn't save any power. And he omits the fact that screwing up your Power Factor is not good for the efficiency of the grid, and probably ends up costing the grid more power than just running normally in the end.
I have heard that other countries measure the PF for residential users-- which is why you see computer power supplies marketed with "active PF correction" to keep your 600W gaming machine's PSU from fucking up the power grid.
Here's an article (and another) that explains the basics of AC Power Factor-- an excess of capacitive or inductive loads will result in a leading or lagging power factor, which results in you getting more current delivered for the same amount of power used, and they eat it as line loss in their grid. Industrial facilities in the US *are* charged for having a leading or lagging (ie, not 1) Power Factor, so for factories with lots of electric motors (big inductors), they'll often have a big capacitor bank to pull the PF back in the other direction.
His trick is to use the fact that light bulbs could care less about PF, AC, or DC to run them roughly DC. The diode clips off the bottom half of the 120V sine wave. The capacitor (charged during the "up" cycle) will supply power during the "down" half of the cycle (which is now off, thanks to the diode), with side effect of giving him a leading power factor.
My EE classes are getting rusty, so if anybody wants to post a more thorough analysis or point out any mistakes, feel free.
and the energy balance is heavily dependent on finding uranium with a high concentration of the good isotope, else the enrichment costs eat up money and energy.
Nonsense. Breed the stuff, don't worry about digging it out of the ground.
Nobody wants to build them anymore because of the ridiculous liability concerns, which is hardly fair. Coal plants kill way more people than nuclear plants do, by crudding up the air. They cause respiratory problems, they shorten lifespans, and the radiation they spew into the air causes cancers. But people have this notion that if you distribute a problem widely enough, it suddenly becomes not a problem anymore, and so you can't sue coal plants when they thorium they emit as a waste product gives you cancer.
That's just silly, no matter how you look at it.
I have my displays set to turn themselves off on sleep mode. It isn't perfect, since it still uses something like 3 watts, but it's better than a couple hundred by far. Another thing that helps is to search for computer equipment that's Energy Star compliant. It means that the equipment is guaranteed to use at most a certain amount of power when set to sleep mode. The bonus is that the computer starts back up in a matter of seconds. If that isn't fast enough for you, then you really need to take a break.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
Some industrial waste is stable. Arsenic waste from tin mining, mercury waste from gold mining, cadmium from discarded rechargable batteries, beryllium from heat transfer uses.
None of this stuff decays at all. Waste that just goes away if you wait long enough looks good by comparison.
More significantly, there is an inverse relationship between half-life and activity. When you take out your spent fuel rods there is some U235 left, with a half-life of 700 million years, and also Strontium 90 with a half-life of 29 years. The Strontium 90 with its short half-life is releasing its energy quickly. This contributes to making the spent reactor very radio-active and very dangerous. But 290 years later 99.9% of the Strontium has decayed. Meanwhile the Uranium, which is releasing its energy too slowly to be dangerous, clouds the issue of how long reactor waste lasts. Long after the waste has ceased to be dangerous, it remains slighty radioactive.
One mind boggling point is that Uranium used as reator fuel supplies about a million times as much energy per unit weight as coal. Coal is a fairly pure product and contains only about 1.5 parts per million Uranium as a contaminant. So about 50% more Uranium goes up the chimney of a coal fired power station as goes into the reactor of a nuclear power station.
That is amusing in a way, but not very important, because the Uranium that goes into a reactor isn't dangerous anyway. The worry with nuclear power is the transmutation of Uranium into short lived, highly radioactive isotopes of other elements. However the point remains that the quantities of waste involved in nuclear power are very much smaller than the quantities involved in producing power from chemical sources.
Why do I care? I was six years old at the time of the Aberfan Disaster, the same age as many of the 116 children who died, suffocated under a slurry of waste from a coal mine after the collapse of a waste tip. The TV pictures of the time showed the gable end of the children's school. It was just like the one I attended and this upset me.
I have never forgotten that quantity is a quality of waste. The waste from the coal mine might as well have been composed of perfectly safe, inert materials. It would not have made any difference. The children were buried and suffocated because there was so much of it, not because it was "dangerous" in the sense that the word is used today.
Quantity.Studies find that suburban sprawl may bad for your health due to it's probable link to obesity. Not terribly surprising since you're driving most places instead of walking.
If you don't want to use your car, you should have picked the area you live in better
Fair argument, but you assume there was better choices to make near where the parent poster works.
...or make sacrifices so you can afford to live downtown somewhere with everything packed together.
Nonsense and balderdash. This assumes that the only downtown spaces can be person (versus car) friendly. Space-gulping pedestrian unfriendly suburban planning (or lack thereof) is *not* a given. Alternative block design and the new trend of "traditional neighborhood development (TND) bring up alternatives to cul-de-sacs, mega-mall fortresses, and strip-mall hell.
Besides, we're smart slash-dot readers, why should be feel compelled to be stuck with inferior choices when there's a possibility of smart design for our living and working communities?
My dad works for a heating/cooling company in Lincoln, NE, and they're putting these things in left and right. But from what I understand there are certain factors for the installation that makes it difficult to retrofit homes with it.
Housing makers tend to be traditional. Now I've been looking at the concrete dome houses. I wish we weren't still building places using the old hundred year old stick built homes that were built that way because it was cheap.
I don't read AC A human right
Cracking water/steam using solar furnaces - use the power-tower or similar concepts to first heat water to super-heated steam, then run the steam over red-hot iron (heated by the sun as well).
As I have noted before, I don't know why this couldn't work - or why it works. All I know is that this was a major method of hydrogen production back in the 1800's for ballooning (aerostat racing and exhibitions) - super heated steam was passed over red-hot iron and cracked into hydrogen (and one assumes oxygen - it binds with the iron to make rust?) at fast enough rates to fill a balloon envelope. If it worked then it would work now. In fact, a variation of this is how we crack hydrocarbons into hydrogen at a refinery.
I have proposed that a plant be built in Barstow/Daggett in California, near Boron. There used to be a technology marketed to bind the hydrogen to borax (similar to hydrate storage?) - making these "solid fuel" tablets of hydrogen - reacted in water (IIRC), the tablets would release hydrogen gas to run an engine, and heat (exothermic reaction) - and the water/precipitate (don't remember what the reaction created) could be recycled to create more "solid hydrogen" tablets (bonded hydrogen would be a better term).
How many times do I need to post this idea - and when will I get an answer of why it won't work (I have a theory that there may be a practical reason - but I have yet to hear it)? Such a system of generating hydrogen would be mostly eco-safe: solar, water, and iron (scrap cars?) would be all that is needed, and a source of borax (hence the location for the plant - plenty of nearby borax, location on a fairly major trucking route to ship the resulting fuel, and plenty of sun year round for generation!).
BTW - the test plants that were built in Barstow/Daggett - they routinely output 10+ megawatts, and used very little ground area for a solar plant (less than an airport - possibly even less than a conventional power plant)...
Damn - why aren't we doing this!?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Yes, if you try to download it, it downloads a PDF that basically says "email me if you want a copy". I did, and he sent it within 15 minutes. I'm in the process of putting it on my website right now: Here
(And as soon as I find an existing torrent for it, I'll join the stream.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
My book "Saving Energy without Derision" can be accessed in the at several mirrors and by Bittorrent. Mirrors are posted at: http://www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/#PayPal_Line Bittorent file at: http://www.zelicoff.com/SMLR/SavingEnergy.torrent