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On Electricity (Generation)
Engineer-Poet wrote a piece a few months back that focuses on electricity production; or rather how or what we will need to do to keep pace with people's demands while balancing that with environmental and economic impact. Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.
They will not post what they disagree with. Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why, and they turn their nose saying, "But, but, but, but its GREEN!"
Good find man. I think I'll post it in a few of my discussion nodes.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I'm no longer a member of Technocrat, and I barely know what Hugg is. But I know Michael Milliken reads my blog, so I expect things to be noted at both Worldchanging and Windsofchange in the next week or two.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Wait for the baby-boomers to die off. Suddenly energy, housing, and jobs will become plentiful. ;)
The article is banned by the filter here at work but the answer is obvious - build more nuclear power plants.
For a science-fiction cant on some of the issues raised in TFA, take a look at The Bikes of New York which explores a post-energy crisis near-future in which impoverished people have the option of riding stationary bicycles to spin massive underground flywheels that top up the energy needs of commercial enterprises.
I think creative solutions to electricity problems are in all our futures. Personally, I live about 75% off the grid and am looking forward to be able to afford to get all the way off -- but I need to get my roof re-done before I can even think about solar panels or mounting a wind turbine up there.
At any rate, fiction for thought.
These stories are free but worth money.
..Hybrid Sweaters!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.
Dude, what the hell is something like that doing on slashdot? I need more psuedo intellectual rants about how the RIAA is going to eat my first born!
Monstar L
I have tons of excess electrons in my house. Ever seen the movie Cat's Eye? That's what it's like in my living room. If only I could harness that source of power...
Ummm, try doing a search for "Other Issues" on that page and you'll find what he is talking about. It's clearly there.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Ethanol is being used to reduce emissions on that small fraction of badly running automobiles out there. It does not have any effect on modern engines except to lower their mileage. Modern engines don't even require the "higher" octane rating, as they can compensate as required for slightly lower octane ratings.
Ethanol actually reduces the specific energy of gasoline.
Lastly, ethanol's true cost is in growing and producing ethanol - namely, water use and the agricultural pollution.
Ethanol is not the answer. Neither is bio-diesel. Nothing that replaces the current liquid storage medium will be the answer. The true answer is either nuclear or solar (also nuclear:) or wind/tidal. The last 3 are all extra-planetary in their power source and thus not add to planetary heat as we're merely shifting energy from A to B: solar/wind are both driven by the sun, and tidal is mostly driven by the moon). Nuclear is still using "stored" power, thus can still have a net add to planetary heat.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The real pay off for ethanol will be when a good process for making ethanol from cellulose is developed. Cellulose is just long chains of sugars, and it is just a matter of time before the chemistry becomes a reality.
In the meantime, ethanol for corn will help get the infrastructure in place.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
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because for all the work we do it won't amount to a hill of beans if China doesn't play along. Go look at many of their cities, they look even worse than the US did at its height for pollution.
:)
Hell, their only fix for good air during the Olympics will be to ban cars and shutdown nearby industries.
Still got to love this comment on his blog
"There is sufficient biomass energy to replace motor fuel and then some... if the energy is not wasted. "
Well duh. Thats the problem with his whole page, its all stuck on a BIG bunch of IFs.
but the biggest problem is turing grain crops into fuel, there are just so many uses for grain crops in everyday products that a slight increase in their pricing because of competition with fuels could force consumer prices up, masking the true cost of these new forms of power creation.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Not that anyone reads those pesky things... but your concerns are mentioned.
It's not that it's energy negative- we still come out ahead- it's that it's not energy positive enough. There's a lot of other things we could be doing with that corn instead of turning it into ethanol. We are paying tax money through subsidies for something that's not going to be a long term solution. It's a waste of money and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Another thing that contributes to the articles 'suck' is that nobody anywhere has proposed ethanol as a source of electricity. Ethanol will eventually solve the problem of providing a high density energy source for vehicles.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This is a really nice piece of work. A couple of technologies that were missed are marketing mechanisms related to solar http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/solar-power-am way-way.html
and fly wheels http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/saving-not-bor rowing.html, described on the Real Energy blog.
Sure - the proposal to produce charcoal will allow for some soil renewal, but to allow this process to become sustainable, we'd also have to manage our soil resources much more carefully than we have been. Oh well, one problem at a time, I guess - global warming-related climate change would likely destroy even more viable soil than this proposal (it dries quicker in some spots, erodes others much quicker), so it's certainly an improvement.
Ryan Fenton
"Engineer Poet"? What, because you're both smart and creative? (Sound of ralphing on shoes.)
that's right, 'xxxJonBoyxxx'. what's that mean, are you one of those annoying straightedge kids who puts the Xs in their name to let everyone know they're sXe? (sound of ralphong on shoes).
jesus, of all things, making fun of someone's nick is about the lamest point you can make.
Not that I disagree with nuclear (from a pragmatic point-of-view), but I'd like to see more self-generating forms of electricity. Things like exercise gyms that double as power generators. That way I could convert my eco-guilt into a strong exercise regimen.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The only reason ethanol is being pushed in the US is because the government is getting tired of paying the thousands of corn farmers to keep growing far too much corn, and is hoping that burning corn will convince prices to rise so they can quit giving money away to farmers who should be growing something else.
At least thats what I hope they're doing. The corn farmers have destroyed pretty much everything else thanks to their ridiculous subsidies, getting them off of their subsidies and getting food diversity back into our food chain will benefit everyone from the diabetic to the e.coli sufferers.
Seriously, do you think energy conservation and looking for cleaner forms of energy are all in response to a hoax? if so you should consult your mental health professional and up your meds.
Sure coal could be used albeit not very cleanly, but do you think no one dies in mining coal?
Agreed, but you don't want to live in a black cloud of unhealthy fumes. You really don't. NUCLEAR is the answer.
Be happy. My country banned nuclear energy in the 80's, at least you can use it.
Global warming is a cube.
I agree. It is a shame that environmentalists often oppose nuclear power, as it is still the best solution we have for generating pollution-free energy on a practical scale.
By campaigning against nuclear power stations, environmentalists have forced more fossil-fuel stations to be built. Their actions helped to prevent investment in an infrastructure for sustainable energy, and have thus furthered our dependence on dirty fuels like oil and coal.
They should have been campaigning *for* nuclear power. They should have demanded the closure of all fossil fuel stations, to be replaced with both renewable energy and nuclear power. But they couldn't see past the A-bomb and Chernobyl.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
From TFA:
Other issues This analysis is limited to the replacement of fuels for ground transportation and electric generation. I include no energy to replace heating fuel, industrial energy consumption or several other types of essentials; some of this demand might be handled with better architecture and cogeneration, but the details are beyond the scope of this analysis. Neither do I consider the wisdom of relying entirely on biomass-derived energy and liquids to replace liquid motor fuel and fossil fuel for electric generation. Reliance on a single source risks all end-uses if the supply is interrupted. This would probably be very unwise indeed, and it appears foolhardy not to add large amounts of e.g. wind generation in the mix. The combination of battery-electric vehicles, wind farms and easily-throttled fuel cells would certainly have a total effect greater than the sum of the parts.
It looks like you and your mouthpiece have forgotten how to read. The "Other Issues" section is about 1/4 down the page. If you disagree with any of the quoted facts in the article, please, enlighten us with facts to the contrary. If, however, this article simply ruffles your feathers by not agreeing with your personal politics, don't try to disguise your Troll as an educated post, it's annoying.
One of the biggest threats the USA faces today is a serious shortage of energy.
I flip a switch and the light comes on. I bump up the thermostat and the furnace comes on. I need to drive to Toledo so I fill the tank. The stores are full of food and manufactured goods from around the world. I can order up a computer, cell phone or HDTV, have it flown in and delivered by a man in a shiny brown truck with no pain, delay or unreasonable expense.
Where's the energy shortage?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WK11e8_pmBU
:) Still think you are being told the truth?
Enjoy
True, although moving to easy, more natural crops like Switchgrass will alleviate some of our problems.
Much of our soil erosion and depletion is due to the way we grow crops: in strict rows, with chemicals to kill weeds and grass. While killing weeds makes picking corn easier by keeping the rows clean, there is a lot of exposed soil under the plants.
Grasses don't have this problem and actually help to maintain or even expand soil over time, and most have the added benefit of being perennial and self-propagating.
I'm curious, though... this article only outlines crops that work in the US. What will other countries do? Will rice or other water crops work for coastal countries?
Typically, the choice for a new generator boils down to nuclear or coal. When certain environmental groups (of which I am a member) block the construction of a new nuclear plant, it often results in a new coal plant being built instead. The result is that instead of having our nuclear waste in a known location here on the ground, we end up spewing radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
Although I'd love to see us not need nuclear fission power, for the time being it's the better alternative.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Different sources on the wide Web trot out wildly different facts on how much energy a human being might be able to output this way, with some claiming that one couldn't even keep a light-bulb lit while others claiming to be able to store battery power for running laptops, DVD players and even very small appliances.
Naturally, the energy isn't free: it comes from food (which is also not free). However, a person can work all day dribbling out energy as they do quality control watch on an assembly line, or they could output some of those calories to contribute to an already spinning flywheel (NB: their effort doesn't have to start the flywheel -- it's already in motion). Even if they only put out 150 watts they would be contributing to accelerating the flywheel by a small degree, or stemming the loss of momentum to friction.
In the story, such efforts are only worth nickels and dimes.
These stories are free but worth money.
How to end US carbon emissions in 30 years without damaging the US economy:
Step 1: Build nuclear power plants. Update the designs with modern technology and give tax incentives for every new nuke plant built.
Reason: 50's and 60's technology nuke plants currently generate electricity for less money than any other technology, even coal. They cost less than a third of what oil and natural gas plants cost. With modern technology its likely we could improve safety while lowering the cost further. Speaking of safety: the worst US accident in 50 years of opererating nuclear energey plants was three mile island, in which no radiation leaked and no one got hurt.
Yes, worse accidents are possible. That means that over a long enough period of time they will happen. But weigh the rare environmental damage from a meltdown against the continuous destruction of the atmosphere by hyrdocarbon burning plants.
Step 2: With the cost of electricty driven cheap enough by nuke plants, shift to hydrogen-based internal combustion engines. With electrolysis done at off-peak hours to generate hydrogen from electricity, every home can be its own fueling station. Hydrogen burns with oxygen to make water, so go drive a steamer.
Reason: Imagine a city, maybe the city you live in, where the only air pollution is the occasional methane from peoples' farts! Nuclear makes its possible and these technologies are economical now, not just in some hypothetical future after more research.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
When someone with a weak position tries to make a point, they usually do it by attacking someone speech or written word. Something which you have done. Are you really qualified to sum up a response by referring someone to a Mental Therapist? I would guess not, I would guess you are just a mental midget, who has no real knowledge, just wishful opinions. Do everyone a favor and educate yourself whith something other than democrat talking points.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
A previous poster mentioned a similar idea out of a work of fiction and your comment has a humourous angle to it. I don't see why this couldn't be a local-scale solution, though. Right now, all of the work that I do on the stationary bicycle during my lunch hour is turned into waste heat. Electricity is not my strong point, but it seems reasonable that many low-power generators could be put to some good use.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
The answer is sitting in the fucking sky.
Solar energy is there waiting to be harnessed.
The smart people will setup solar farms.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Start at home!
Ingredients:
(1) Suitable exercise device (treadmill, stationary bike, etc)
(1) Automotive alternator (w/ voltage regulator if it's not internal)
(1) Heavy-duty 12 Volt rechargeable battery
(1) DC Inverter (400W or better)
(1) Free weekend or two
Combine with any required hardware. Plug in TV/DVD player/Computer and work your ass off to keep that battery charged while watching your favorite movies. Battery provides temporary power for appliances while you get on and off the equipment.
=Smidge=
I've worked out the math before, and a serious workout could generate a significant amount of electrical power. I'm a marathon runner, and the amount of electricity I might generate from my daily exercise routine would probably generate all of my electrical needs for that day, with a little extra left over. Granted, just as with ethanol, there's still a question of supplying me with calories.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
All of a sudden Hitlers ideas don't seem so bad now, huh?
When did Hitler do much waiting?
And how do you manage to equate population modeling with genocide?
Wow.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There is still the problem of steady growth and the consumption of finite resources. Even if we come up with some new and novel way of producing/extracting energy, the exponential growth problem does not go away.
There's an interesting lecture by Al Bartlett that covers this quite well, IMHO.
"In the summer of 1986 the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well your reaction to 1.7% might be to say that that's so small nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year. So you calculate the doubling time you find its only 41 years, now that was back in 1986, more recently in 1999 we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7% to 1.3% per cent per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year.
Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just seven hundred and eighty years and then the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just twenty four hundred years. Well we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make for a cute cartoon, the caption says, "Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive offer for your square".
There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population growth is gonna happen. Now we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it, its going to happen whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not. It's absolutely certain people could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore today's high birth rates will drop; today's low death rate will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will certainly be in a time shorter than several hundred years...
In the words of Winston Churchill, "sometimes we have to do what is required." First of all as a nation we have to get serious about renewable energy. For a start we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to understand the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth's finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth in rates of population and growth in rates of consumption of resources can not be sustained. What's the first law of sustainability? You've heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is, population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That's simple arithmetic Yet nobody that I'm encountering will tell you about that when talking about sustainability. So I think it's intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious facts that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability."
Why do we keep looking at corn when it comes to Ethanol? The short answer is that we grow way too much of it, anyway. While ethanol can be made from corn, it's not the most effective feedsource for producing it. Obviously, something like sugar is much more effective.
What bothers me every time the argument pro/con ethanol comes up is that ethanol production from cellulose materials is not mentioned. This emerging technology holds the promise of significant gains in production efficiency, allowing up to a ten-fold gain from corn, but more importantly the production of ethanol from less labor intensive crops such as grasses, and even reclamation from current waste products, such as spent wood liquor at paper mills. This technology already exists and it's just starting to be implemented.
Now is ethanol the long-term solution? Probably not, but it sure makes for a good transitional fuel until the price of fuel cells and other promising technologies become economically feasible.
This article ignores the main cause of the crisis: the overpopulation which drives the demand-part of the equation. Obviously it's being ignored because there is no expedient solution, but nature will provide its own cruel solution. If we raise the bar on sustainability, unchecked population growth will only ram us head first back into a crisis. Eventually we will hit the physical limit of what technology is able to do with the raw materials of this planet. Even with nuclear, the environment will continue to suffer from the base impact of our numbers (i.e. deadzones, overfishing, deforestation). The only solution is forced population reduction. It's not pleasant and it's not politically correct, but nature is amoral. We live with certain natural limits whether we want to or not. If our population were small enough, renewable sources alone would be enough to keep us going. As it is now, our species' population size is a result of the crutch of fossil fuels, and with that pillar removed, the house of cards will fall one way or another.
I suspect that if I tried that myself, I'd end with nothing more than a bruised ego (and possibly other bruised/damaged items). However, I do have a cousin who's pretty good with electronics... (I understand the theory just fine. It's the practice I ain't so good at.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Wait for the baby-boomers to die off. Suddenly energy, housing, and jobs will become plentiful. ;)
You do realize that the time when the baby-boomers are expected to start dropping off coincides with the time when gene therapy and nanomedicine are probably going to be fully realized?
Long version: any baby boomers who are going to make it to their mid-eighties are probably going to be able to make it to their 110's-120's, with a much
improved quality of life. Meanwhile, our Social Security and Medicare programs are going to be paying for them this whole time, and there's not enough population to pay for it without raising taxes to over 60%. We're going to have people on retirement for half of their lives. Society is going to require a major restructuring around this, either by preventing research, preventing treatment, paying for both, or rethinking the entitlement to a country-club retirement, and all of the existing models, even the ones predicting bankruptcy, ignore major advances in medicine.
Short version: We're screwed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, actually any heat we generate is miniscule compared to what comes in every day from the Sun, so your take on nuclear power contributing to heating is not actually a big deal. But, you're right that the competition for resources involved with ethanol could be a problem. Some think it is a near term problem just because of governement incentives: http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update63. htm.
s -selling-solar.html
If Brown is correct, then buying flour now would be a good hedge.
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Solar doesn't increase grain futures. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Hmmmm...so who do I trust? Some dude on
If you are running a normally-aspirated engine with no aftermarket performance mods, yes, your engine can compensate for lower octane by adjusting the timing to avoid knocking, which isn't terribly healthy for your engine. However, the timing adjustments necessary to run with lower octane gasoline burn the fuel less efficiently than higher octane gas.*
Fast forward to last year, when I bought a '97 Talon TSi (turbo-charged). Because of the increased engine pressures caused by the turbo, the manufacturer says I have to run premium unleaded only because the engine computer can't adjust timing enough to compensate for the lower octane.
*I tested this over the course of a couple of months with my '92 Eagle Talon (non-turbo) about three years ago. I could get ~180 miles (city) on a tank of regular unleaded and about 215 on a tank of premium unleaded. At the price of gas at the time, it actually cost me less per mile to use the premium gas because of the better mileage.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
But I'd prefer we have 1,000 years to solve that problem than have 100 years or so to solve the current one.
Very well put. There's only one known solution to the problem at hand, and we need to start lighting up one of these plants every two months to get the carbon problem solved - nothing else has a chance of doing it (without 'killing off the human race' as an item on the table),
Besides, we only need enough time on fission to get fusion perfected. That should take less than a hundred years. Then we only need to wait until we, as a race, consider that we have lift into space as a reliable technology. Then we just take all that old fission waste and send it into the Sun for the next generation of solar system to enjoy. And that's assuming we don't have a better solution for it by then.
But, the current course is for nothing to get done and the problem to get worse. The "environmentalist" groups seem to think that's the best course of action (scare-quotes intended) and that implementing wishful thinking is a sufficient plan.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A more pleasant solution would be the acquisition of more natural resources, by means of e.g. space exploration/colonization.
Global warming is a cube.
Wait for the baby-boomers to die off.
Haven't you learned anything? You need to back up your data!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
There is a perfectly good fusion reactor already and we orbit it. Tap in at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html. No need for fission at all.
World annual human energy consumption (about 400 quads from all sources, including nuclear heat input to electric production) is equivalent to about 40 minutes of global solar input. The direct effect is utterly trivial save on a very local basis; the warming we're seeing is from greenhouse gases which trap more of the 5.2 million quads of sun striking the atmosphere every year.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The joy of FUD. "Who needs facts? I've got dismissive quips!"
A long-term solution, in this rapidly-moving technological environment, is 50 years.
You can bet that, absent massive climate change (which my proposal is crafted to help prevent), we won't have plants stop growing and cease generating organic wastes from diverse sources in the next 50 years. Before 50 years are up, I expect that solar PV will be cheaper than wind power and will be the principle source of electric power in most of the world. Wind and wave power look good to cope with night, clouds and other difficulties for PV, and storable energy of some kind (e.g. charcoal for direct-carbon fuel cells) will fill any gaps left over from hydro, nuclear and the rest.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The 1970's called, they want their over-population fears back. The problem with your argument is that population growth has already largely been checked. In the US, birthrates are just a tad below replacement rate (continued population growth is coming from immigration) - in most of the first world, plus the former Combloc & China, birth rates are well below replacement level. Pretty much everywere else around the has birthrates that are on the decline as well. Most UN estimates predict the World population will peak sometime around 2070 at 9 billion or so people, and begin to decline from there. With proper use of nuclear, solar, and other clean power sources, the Earth should be able to support that many people.
Hum, you've forgotten the incredible subsidy nuclear power gets: It's been promised not to have to deal with the waste. That promise is not at all realistic since Yucca Mountian can't go forward. So, we're in a postion where we'll have to pay back all the energy we've ever gotten from nuclear power and then some. How much more expensive can you get? See: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/saving-not-bor rowing.html s -selling-solar.html
---
Get Real Energy: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
But it's not a Ethenol hybrid.
It's a 2001 VW Jetta TDI. Diesel. Installed a GreaseCar system. Works well, but not in this weather (-20C..-30C).
Pretty much every other time of the year, I start on DinoDiesel and once things get hot enough I switch to Waste Veggie Oil I get and filter to 10 microns from a local pub.
The article puts things together in a clear way. Points out what's wrong with the nut-jobs who think the world can be run off of butterflies and rainbows.
To those back-and-forthing on Ethenol - think about how much energy there is in a litre of ethenol. It's very very small. Production is expensive ($$$ & energy).
I don't 100% agree with the article's view on charcol fuel sources. But I like the analysis, not many gems like that.
My thoughts on how to solve this? Okokokok I'll tell you anyways. Grow alge, crush it into oil and use that. Alge grows 100x faster than canola/soy/rapeseed, is 50% oil, and only requires sunlight, (non-)salted water, heat, dirt and shit. No expentive farming equipment guzzling diesel to harvest. Just settling ponds like at the local water treatment plant to skim off the alge.
Anyways. Alge == good. Alge has had about 3-4 Billion years head start on Solar-power. Don't believe me? Take a deep breath.
Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.
As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.
Sustainability actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:
It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
There will have to be multiple, complex solutions to this coming energy crisis, but 2 things will have to happen: 1) The public as a whole is going to have to be better informed and concerned enough to force the politicians to move, and 2) A huge majority of the public is going to have to make a few changes.
:)
Which green solutions are best is sometimes debatable. But there is a new company that seems to best cover both 1&2, and it is one of the 'no-brainer' solutions. Citizenre will be renting solar panels out, letting them almost immediately save everyone money, while making each customer a sales person, familiar with product and issues. Its 100,000 panel/yr manufacturing plant is scheduled to come online in September 2007. They're currently using 2005 average power bill prices, and will switch to 2006 on Jan 31, 2007. The rate my Dad locked in, just by registering on the website, was 37% less than his current bill.
If you live in the US, and would like to sign up under me, sites are:
http://www.jointhesolution.com/solarnevada (as customer)
http://www.powur.com/solarnevada (as sales associate)
To ruthlessly give someone else commission, www.citizenre.com.
Corn ethanol is not green. Greens aren't following your agenda.
Stop getting your perspective on "greens", "environmentalists", and "lefties" from the dirty energy meme-machine and you might find that there are some green environmentalists who know what they are talking about. Many of them are conservative (in the true sense of the term, not like the radical pro-monopoly big-government neo-cons who masquerade as conservatives).
Your statement is essentially the same kind of blind prejudice as "black people all like chitlins and watermelon"; it's a way to depersonalize a whole group of people so you can discount their value.
The tides slow the Moon but this pushes the Moon further out from the Earth rather than closer.
Although the article is too governmental/environmental for my taste, an honest reading reveals proposals to cut some of the government interventions in the market. It's an honest attempt to evaluate improvements in a big, complicated system. I think his estimates are a little too optimistic, but note that he is predicting both economic and environmental gains for his techniques. This deserves serious consideration.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It's used today to confuse anyone with an engineering or scientific education. That means, anyone who could possibly make a difference. It's one of the ways the oil conspiracy are trying to sow confusion among those who promise to replace oil with renewables... The author of the article is a plant...
Deleted
Maybe instead of giving benefits to families with children we should force additional taxes on them. This would HOPEFULLY cause families to think before having children and possibly limit having children to somewhat better-off families. Possibly improving the overall genetics of our population (wealthier people tend to be somewhat smarter than dirt poor people). Extremely sorry if this offends some poor people out there, it is a harsh truth though. A huge portion of poor people in developed nations (IE. USA) are either extremely stupid or extremely lazy.
Just read some other posts by 'engineerpoet' and you can see un-reasonable.
Yeah, because hydro, solar, wind, geothermal... those are all just wacky-heads talking.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I live in an apartment (unfortunately making the devices somewhat impractical in the first place) and walk to work. Also, I should point out that when I'm talking about "my" electrical needs, I'm referring to the ones I actually pay for - i.e., I'm not counting the power I use when I'm at work. At home, I rarely use air conditioning. Probably the single biggest consumer of electricity in my apartment is my refrigerator. I've forgotten how many kilowatt-hours I tend to use in a month, but I believe it's less than 1/day (IIRC, I use about 20 KwH/month - but your figure of 20/day means I'm going to have to look that up when I get home).
Also, doing a little Google search, I found a bike that claims to generate 400 watts, and a pedal device that claims to generate up to 1000 watts. Of course, I have no idea how sustainable those powers are.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Energy generation needs to be localised. Everyone needs to be aware of their usage, control it, and take on the responsibility of generating it themselves, be it photovoltaic, wind turbine, or micro hydro.
Pollution-free?
O RLY?
The half-life of one of the main fission products of uranium, Strontium-90 (causes bone cancer), is 28.8 years. Let's say it's a lot safer after 20 half-lives. So, when you called it "the best solution we have", did you factor in the costs of having a heavily guarded (war on terror, remember?) storage facility, for 576 years?
Including personnel costs?
Now, is it still cheaper than renewable alternative energy sources?
Nitpick: I didn't mention Iodine-131 because it decays rapidly (in the Netherlands they didn't let the cows out to graze for a week after Chernobyl because of the iodine). And Cesium-137 is comparable in radioactivity to Strontium (half-life 30 years) but you can pee it out, it doesn't get stored in your bones.
I would think the reason many environmentalists are against nuclear power is because it is insane and desperate to reap the short-term profits of it (short term = 100-200 years) at a price of waste storage for 500-1000 years (yes I'm making these numbers up, I don't have the figures handy). Especially given that for the cost of building a heavily guarded large nuclear power plant, and dismantling it again after 50 years (something they're still working on at the nuclear power plant at Dodewaard, which was closed in 1997, and will be dismantled at unknown cost in 40 years when it's less hot), you can invest a LOT of time and money in windmills, geothermal energy, fuel-cell efficiency research, etc. etc. etc.
I can't be bothered to go into your straw-man argument in your second and third paragraph.
Let's just say that I think that nuclear fission power hasn't been proven cost-effective yet.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
My grandparents had a treadmill that didn't use electricity, however. Theoretically, one could make a treadmill generate electricity (presumably using an incline), but it wouldn't be as efficient as a stationary cycle or other device would be.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The average person can generate 100 Watts continuously while exercising. A reasonably fit person 150-200 W. If you assume they do that for half an hour, every day, that's less than 1/500 of the energy the electricity they will use per day in their house, not counting gas/heating energy or power. Home electrical use is only a fraction (less than half, if I recall right) of the power we generate. By my math, it would take 70 years for this "average" person to pay off an initial investment of even just $100 to generate power from a stationary bike...if the bike even lasts that long. I'm not even sure if it comes out net-energy if you account for the energy consumed building the power conversion. It might be workable in a gym, though, with bikes being spun for a majority of the open hours. It could probably work on ellipticals, too. It wouldn't work on treadmills.
No, they are either unwieldy or simply *not enough*. Nuclear's only disadvantage is a high setup cost.
Global warming is a cube.
I paid $17.72 last month. Part of that ($5?) is a monthly service fee that has nothing to do with my electricity usage. So, perhaps $12-13/month goes to my kwh usage. (When I first moved into the apartment, we only had to pay the electricity for the air conditioner. Since I wasn't using it during the late fall/winter/early spring, the only fee I had was the flat monthly charge. I determined it was cheaper to pay the disconnect/reconnect fees once a year than to keep paying those monthly charges.)
I should also point out that we don't have a washer/dryer in our unit, but there is a common one that we use. I'm currently not counting that, either.
So, for sake of argument (and so I can do some math), let's assume that my wife and I use 5 kwh/day. If I were to maintain 150 watts for 24 hours (no sleep), that'd only get me to 3.6 kwh/day. However, if my wife had her own machine, also generating 150 watts, then we'd only have to work for 17.67 hours/day, leaving 6.33 hours for sleep. (We'd eat on the bikes, of course.) Just think what great shape we'd be in! Of course, we might need to use more air conditioning...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's a threat you fool. If I face the threat of my legs being broken by a debt collector, I don't start dancing around the room to demonstrate ways in which my legs aren't broken.
If Kim Jon Il threatens to nuke my city, I will not start sending him mocking letters saying "Where's the radiation, Kim?"
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Ethanol is not the answer. ... The true answer is ... solar ...
I hope I'm not the first one to point out that Ethanol is nothing more than stored solar energy. CO2 and H2 are combined with the help of photosynthesis into O2 and hydrocarbons (aka bio-mass). That reaction requires solar energy. When you extract energy from bio-mass by, for instance, creating Ethanol out of it, you're extracting what was once solar energy.
Now, of course, there are a few more conversions in that route than going directly from solar energy to kinetic energy or electricity, but some means of bottling solar energy will always be needed; the sun doesn't shine 24/7.
Do you have kids?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Water, Wind, Sun. What a great idea!
Yep. There's two parts: erosion, and depletion. There are already solutions to erosion (IIRC: "cover cropping"). I'm no farmer, but I find soil depeletion to be a much bigger problem.
Why depletion? Well, for starters: we use natural gas to produce fertilizer in the USA ("appetite for oil" indeed). So in order for just agriculture as we know it, to survive any kind of oil crisis, it's another problem that has to be addressed. Otherwise, any kind of crops-for-energy program is just going to hinge on oil-well methane production - unless we manage to get that from somewhere else.
The other side of soil depletion, that you mention, is just conservation. And I agree wholehartedly that it's key in all this. If the USA moves to a crop-based energy industry, the value of every cubic inch of soil will increase in response, making that dirt every bit as imporant a resource.
My guess is that we'll have to see a new kind of crop in heavy use, and crop rotation come about for any of this to work. I'm talking a complete end-to-end solution here, to fix the soil problems you mention, plus the energy needs and concerns that are all over this thread.
So the silver bullet here is a plant that is nitrogen-fixing, covers the ground like crazy, crowds out weeds, grows off-season to another major crop, will grow in a wide variety of climates in poor soil, and has a low water-to-carbon ratio. Any takers?
From what I've since read, I could probably generate 150 watts for a couple hours. I suspect that if I paced myself, and didn't have to worry about going to work, I might be able to generate 1 kwh/day (e.g., 10 hours at 100 watts) - with practice.
Of course, all of this is assuming that the bike is at least close to the most efficient one could do. I wonder how much power one could generate doing bench or leg presses. (Obviously one would generate more power doing leg presses than bench presses.) If I lifted 250 kg (550 pounds) for 50 centimeters (straight up), that's 1,225 Joules. Assuming (poorly) that I could convert this to electricity at 100% efficiency, then 100 such lifts (no easy task) would generate 122,500 Joules. That equals about 0.034 kwh. Back to the drawing board.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Nuclear's *only* disadvantage is a high setup cost? That's priceless. Brings a tear to my eye. *sniff*
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Uh, I think you missed the whole point of the Price-Anderson act. It does far more then just give a modest subsidy to power plants. It limits the maximum liability a power company must pay in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. The chances of a disaster are infinitesimal, but because the cost of such a disaster would be so astronomically large, insurance companies were unable to provide coverage because they wouldn't have the resources to make the claims payments on hundreds of billions of dollars. And if power companies can't get insurance coverage, then they can't build the plants.
What P-A does is let the government pay the liability costs over $10 billion if such a disaster would occur. This makes commercial nuclear power possible. Some people have this misconception that nuclear power is uncompetitive, and that it requires government subsidies in order to be economically sustainable. This is not the case, all P-A does is allow the government to essentially act as the insurance agent in case of a nuclear disaster. It is the value of this insurance coverage, the coverage of claims over $10 billion dollars, which is valued at $2 million per reactor. You might think "how is it that insurance coverage for a disaster costing over $10 billion would only cost $2 million per year?" It is because the reactors are designed, operated, and maintained with such high safety standards making such a disaster nearly impossible.
Well, we've ramped up quickly to save Europe before so I don't think that is the issue. And, if the initial indications of a reduced salinity in the North Atlantic continue to build, it would make WWII kind of pointless not to make some kind of effort. Our systems supply 100% of a home's power usage over a year. Granted, they still need the grid and other power sources, but those power sources are used that much less. We can do this up to about 25% of the power consumed on the grid without needing to reengineer the grid. So, it makes a lot of sense to start this way while at the same time planning for the reengineering that will be needed down the road. To me, energy storage is the key issue because a roof can do 100% already. I'm definitely taking suggestions on this at the Real Energy Blog: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/.
Still, things do look ominous with the more rapid than anticipate melting in Greenland. We may have crossed a threshold on the circulation without having any sure way of knowing until the extreme effects are manifested. Still, does it not seem to you that a reduced heat input in the North Atlantic might slow the melting and thus bounce us back after a short while?
I'm a member in good standing of the animal kingdom (genus Homo), thankyouverymuch....
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Ditto solar. The resource may be available, but it's not economical to make use of it right now except in special circumstances. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any great evidence that the cost is going to come down particularly quickly either.
The smart people setting up solar farms will rapidly go broke.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
when a bunch of us were watering you last night, and you thanked us as we were all zipping up.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The problem with most of the algae-based systems is that they rely on powerplant exhaust as a carbon source, and don't even manage to capture all the carbon. They cannot be part of a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy system. A better possibility is a scheme for using wild-type algae growing on sewage-treatment effluent, pulling carbon out of the air. If this also captures and concentrates nutrients like phosphorus, it will be a triple-play: clean sewage, generate energy, recover elements otherwise lost.
"Sustainability" links to Greenfuel (a company which recently produced fuel-grade ethanol and biodiesel from carbon scavenged from the stack gas of a powerplant in Arizona), but there's now the example of Solix which might be a better fit. Solix's test system is growing algae on CO2 from a brewery, which is about what you'd get from the combination of fuel-cell exhaust and fermentation products of algal carbohydrates.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Cellulosic ethanol would be better, but we use so much motor fuel in this country that we run into limits of carbon capture. We just can't grow enough biomass to even replace gasoline with it. (Syntec claims 100 gallons per ton with their gasification process. Replacing the energy of 140 billion gallons of gasoline would require about 210 billion gallons of ethanol. Got 2.1 billion tons of biomass handy? Even The Billion-Ton Vision only came up with 1.3 billion tons! For Iogen's enzymatic process yielding 70 gallons/ton, you'd have to start with 3 billion tons of inputs.)
The problem is, it doesn't matter if it can never work: the ethanol lobby uses some really dirty tricks to make sure they get your money.
Fixing this problem means eliminating the efficiency losses of both ethanol production and the internal combustion engine. Both have to go.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Read http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html it will surprise you!
A government physicist, Alex Gabbard, calculated that the general public is directly exposed to 100 times more radiation each from coal-fired plant, than from each nuclear plant of the same megawatt output.
He also says that, while it is very widely distributed, lessening the danger, in 1982, each typical coal-fired plant released 5.2 tons of uranium, and 12.8 tons of radioactive thorium in to the environment. These elements are extremely long-lived, and accumulate in the environment over time.
On top of that, massive amounts of heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide are released by burning coal.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Wouldn't you rather get that electricity from something we produce domestically? Something we even throw away? No terrorist is ever going to bomb a corn-stover terminal, you can bet on that. Why NOT run on a fuel which yields 80% efficiency? Or are you just jealous that you didn't propose it first? (I doubt we'd actually use it on anything as small as trucks, but the idea might have merit.)
Sustainability and energy independence essay
So you know what they did? They asked me to be part of their policy-formation group. And I acted as critic and reality check.
I didn't sign onto their product because I thought it was way too timid (and if you've read Sustainability and EA2020, you'll know why), but I hadn't had time to finish my own analysis by their deadline so I cannot fault them.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
A nuclear plant has a 10-year planning horizon. The current spurt of license applications just started in 2006, so we're looking at 2016 before the first ones come on-line... assuming they stay on schedule.
Nine years to go before we get perhaps 2-5 GW. We don't have nine years! We are looking at serious problems much sooner.
Wind farms have a planning horizon of around two years; the installed base is growing at about 25%/year, doubling every 3 years. Small-scale fuel-cell generators (250 kW-1 MW) literally fit on flatbed pallets and can be put into operation in days. The problem is going to be coming up with enough fuel to feed them. If we can start making direct-carbon fuel cells running on charcoal, we can make one hell of a lot of fuel from agricultural and forestry wastes, or even tree-trimming wastes in forested cities.
I have literally nothing against nukes, but we can't sit on our hands until they light up.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The problem is that you are feeding the same old inefficient combustion engines (14.9% tank-to-wheels net for a non-hybrid) only now you are adding losses as great as 50% in the conversion from cellulose to ethanol.
If you need 3 quads of work but your system has a 15% efficient engine and a 50% efficient fuel preparation system, you need to feed 40 quads of something in at the beginning. Try as you might, you won't get far.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
You'd think that you'd welcome anything that prompts a big move from annuals seeded in bare soil to perennials which are cut or coppiced from long-term rootstock.
Not that corn stover and other byproducts of annuals wouldn't be valuable feedstocks, but when you could turn an orchard's pruned dead wood into profit you might just have something worth looking at more closely.
Maybe you're the person to do it?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Rolling blackouts and empty gas stations may be the least of your problems. I'd like to aim for a future which precludes those possibilities, thanks.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The US uses about 17.4 quads/year of gasoline, and another 8.7 quads/year of distillate (diesel and heating oil). This is about 7640 billion kWh, or about 1.9 times total US electric energy consumption. Losses would increase this figure considerably. You're not going to supply this by electrolysis from nuclear powerplants, because nobody is stupid enough to try.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The US uses on the order of 2-3 billion gallons/year of cooking grease. We burn 60 billion gallons/year of distillate, and 140 billion gallons/year of gasoline. Niche solutions are okay, but we need to take on the rest too.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
For one thing, I don't think you do your homework.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Are you saying that ethanol SHOULD be a source of electricity (at what net efficiency from the source material?) or that it shouldn't be?
I propose ethanol as one of several storable products of an energy-production process which begins with non-edible biomass. The other storable products are charcoal and biodiesel (formed by transesterification of algal fatty acids) or light hydrocarbons (formed by thermochemical processing of the same fatty acids). The non-storable (but easily transported) product is electricity, which is the product of equally non-storable (and non-transportable) pyrolysis gas. Please see the section from "Bi-cycles and re-cycles" down to the bubble diagram before the next section header.
I don't think we should use ethanol to make electricity. Too many losses in the pathway, and far more complicated than starting with charcoal.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
For instance, I postulated 50% efficiency for the fuel cell end of the biomass processing system, but some people are already talking 80%.
I also didn't postulate any liquid-fuel production from the charcoal pathway. Feeding the charcoal to direct-carbon fuel cells yields CO2, which can be fed to algae same as at the biomass-processing stage. The algae produce fats (biodiesel feedstock) and carbohydrates (ethanol feedstock). The only issue is that the products will almost always wind up in the atmosphere rather than sequestered, but that's an issue of priorities. Roughly 2/3 of the carbon winds up as charcoal, so you could potentially triple the liquid fuel output beyond my basic analysis.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
And I do thank you for your contribution to it.
You will receive your return as an in-kind payment.
To wit, a WP grenade in your pants.
I do hope you are as eager for this as I am.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I'm sure you do. . .
BTW, interesting paper, though it appears your concept of "carbon-neutral" differs from mine.
Why do we talk about producing more, we don't we use less. OK we cannot stop individual developing countries from polutting the shared planet. However, when they cannot see the Sun anymore, have respiratory deseases, can't drink the water etc, as happens in some Sino-Asian towns then they will switch quickly. I used to live in London, history of the town is such that when the city got too bad 100yrs ago, people moved outward e.g Hampstead. When things got better people moved back downtown. History will repeat itself. Some countries are going through the wests industrial revolution.
c _environmental_projects
s ustainable_storage
This is what is possible: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/my_domesti
Personally, computers are a big electricity waste. I design computer systems, I like my company, as we were the first to have low power coomputers (T2000 with niagara Chip) and also can store data in a sustainable fashion. Think about sustainable processing and storage: http://blogs.sun.com/ValdisFilks/entry/cool_data_
Less is more.
Serious political problems, yes. But there really isn't a serious technical problem with it. (For just one example, that material could simply be un-mined: ground up, mixed with mine tailings, fused, and put back into the very same hole it was dig out of.)
The problems are political (and often funded by the fossil fuels industry) with a fair smattering of educational (e.g. an amazing number of people think that longer half life means more dangerous instead of safer). The hypocrisy of the fossil fuel industry is rather amazing in this regard; here we have an industry that routinely vents it's waste into the atmosphere, with probable long term consequences far, far worse than even the most unlikely nuclear FUD story, but they even daily release more radioactive waste (mostly C14) than nuclear plants are permitted to.
Think about that. There isn't a coal fired power plant in the country that wouldn't be shut down tomorrow if they were held to the same standards as nuclear plants are under the laws enacted by the pro-fossil fuels lobbies and their pet congress critters. When the fossil fuel industry reaches 99.99% carbon sequestration and cuts their radioactive emissions down to something legal, then let's talk about the "serious" waste management problems facing the nuclear industry.
--MarkusQ
We are not rapidly running out of natural gas. We're running out of domestic natural gas, but world natural gas supplies are still quite plentiful. Note that the US used to use a significant amount of oil for electricity generation. When it became expensive, we switched, and now oil is almost unused in this country for power generation (except for backup power). Barring some instant, "ooops, we're out of natural gas -- when the heck did that happen?" moment (which is essentially impossible), there's not going to be an electricity shortage.
As for a charcoal fuel cell: it's not about whether or not you can get energy from charcoal in a variety of manners. Feeding it and removing the byproducts, even in a slurry, is the problematic element -- especially when you factor in the cost of making your charcoal consistent enough. Don't believe me? Here's what the associate of the inventor of the charcoal fuel cell has to say:
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage4635.html
"Handling of solid fuel, such as charcoal, is not easy. If we want to feed charcoal into the cell continuously, we have to solve the problem how it can be fed. This is one of the biggest problems of solid fuel," Mochidzuki said.
As for charcoal itself, its production is a lossy process. Much of the original energy is contained in the released gasses -- namely CO, H2, and volatile oils/tars -- but they're mixed in with lots of CO2 and H2O, making for less efficient combustion (not to mention the energy loss involved with the process heat). Not to mention that, if you don't want to get tar deposits clogging up your generator, you need to use the more expensive "downdraft" gassification method. Then there's all of the energy expended not just in production, but in gathering and processing the biomass (not applicable for some kinds of biomass, but definitely important if you want the vast amounts of biomass referred to here).
The issue is that this article's author basically assumes that people are morons -- that biomass gathering and charcoal conversion simply hasn't been considered before. Charcoal is just too expensive for it to be economically viable right now. And I can just picture the author's response: something along the lines of "Just give the technology some time..." Just like the crutch that they used with the "just over the horizon" battery technologies. There's a big problem with this logic: you can't point to "just over the horizon" technologies for the techs that you like while ignoring them for techs that you don't like. Want to include better battery tech? Well, you should include cellulosic ethanol, then, since we're just as close to having that as we are to having better electricity storage. Heck, while we're adding in techs that are "not quite there", we'll have to add improved bitumen extraction, shale extraction, methane hydrate/clathrate extraction, thermal depolymerization... (on, and on, and on...)
"What is the difference between a Ponzi Scheme and an Investment Bank?" -- Jon Stewart
What we've got here is an evolutonary change on the level of energy supply:
Every bit of this can be accomplished by increments, unlike the "hydrogen highway" which has to be complete before any vehicle can drive it end to end. Vehicles are replaced one at a time. Producers of fuels from farm and forestry byproducts go into business one at a time. The whole thing can be done by baby steps, and it works just fine at every intermediate stage.
That was one of the points of the exercise.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
My wife and I consumed 143 kwh last month (31 days). So, that comes out to 4.6 kwh/day, which is definitely a bit more than my original assumption/claim of less than 1. However, during a typical summer month (when I have the air conditioner on), I used 276 kwh. I really should look closer at those bills. Although that bill was only about $13 more, that's a whole lot of extra power for only running the AC. (Also, the dollar figure I gave you previously was for my gas bill, not my electric bill. The electric bills were about $20 and $33, respectively.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
But then again, you're just a troll.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
And, GW emissions aside, how exactly does this helps our energy security and balance of trade situations? There is considerable resistance to LNG terminals also.
A point I've made frequently. (Note that "petroleum" in that table includes refining byproducts such as petroleum coke, so the total of liquids is even less.)
The primary replacements for oil-fired electric plants were nuclear and coal. Recently we've added a lot of gas-fired capacity. We can't add more gas due to supply limits, coal is a pollution and GHG nightmare and nuclear has a 10-year or so planning horizon. The immediate problems require other solutions, and I think the primary ones are going to be wind, efficiency and cogeneration.
Impossible? It happened to New Zealand:
It ain't what you don't know that'll get ya. It those things you know that ain't so.
Consistent? It only has to be fine enough (and ball mills are very good at guaranteeing that). The actual feeding is an engineering problem; if engineers can build gravimetric feeders for powdered coal in furnaces which require steady flames, the management of a carbonate bath which needs feeding every half-hour or so can't be all that difficult. And here's what the originators say about ash:
In other words, you're going to need to deal with other things before the electrolyte composition changes enough to bother you. More about ash on pages 11-12 of this PDF.
Quite right! Charcoal produced by flash carbonization yields about half the input energy as gas and heat (a pyrolysis process driven by external heat would convert more to carbon and le
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I posted a reply last night but didn't see it show up.
And forcing ourselves to be dependent upon nations which foster terrorism is desirable?
Until about WWII, the USA was an oil exporter. The world does not depend on the US importing large amounts of its energy supply. We might as well be part of the supply side.
And when they run out, what then? Gas isn't like oil. Oil is a viscous liquid and it flows more and more slowly as a field is drained. Gas flows easily through all but the tightest rocks and goes right down to zero. Lifespan of a gas field in N. America is down to about 18 months. This gives you very little time to obtain new supplies or convert to other sources.
Precisely why we should be working to create alternatives for the main uses for oil. Peaking oil production is already leading to military adventurism to grab resources; create ready alternatives, and the pressure to grab (and the value of what's grabbed) goes way down. If the alternative is superior in other ways, it puts even more downward pressure on the value of oil.
Quite right. This is why I think our primary medium for transportation energy should be electricity rather than liquid fuels, because there are far more ways of making electricity than gasoline/ethanol. It's also much cleaner and quieter, and available from the plug at about 75 cents/gallon equivalent (after losses on the way to the wheels).
Does it matter? Cooper was using a range of stuff including de-ashed coal. He got his best activity from bio-chars. What you're implying is that the differences are sufficient to make a DCFC work badly, and you've cited no evidence in support.
That's why the article says "... even heavy trucks may be too small." The analysis went forward assuming only batteries, backed up by internal combustion engines burning biofuels. Would you agree that those engineering problems have been essentially solved?
Maybe it means that you can't deal with the problem cost-effectively with units smaller than ten megawatts. Maybe you need an eddy-current pump recirculating electrolyte through a mixer to add charcoal. (Cooper proposes pneumatic feeding.) If you can't manage this well on scales smaller than 300 megawatts, guess what - we can't manage coal-fired power on scales much smaller than that, and it's far harder to throttle a steam turbine than a fuel cell.
Nobody's even tried this on a pilot scale yet, but the commercial MCFC's are doing fine. There's a 1 MW plant at the Sierra Nevada brewery, running since 2005. Believe me, this is just "engineering problems", ones we'd be well-advised to tackle right away.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I've heard this offered as an explanation for why nuclear is so much less popular than fossil fuels. While the probabilistic number of people killed is much lower than the actual number being killed by fossil fuels right now the people killed by fossil fuels are mostly the poor (e.g. black lung), foreigners (e.g. oil wars) and elderly (e.g. premature death due to pollution) whereas a nuclear accident might kill the people who are actually using the power.
Get some perspective here. Not only are fossil fuels more deadly in the short run, but they are far, far more dangerous in the long run. Look at Venus. At the north pole, in the dead of winter, it's a balmy 750 degrees. That's what runaway greenhouse looks like. If you were forced and gunpoint to move into either the "dead zone" around one of your worst-case nuclear scare stories, or a planet sized pizza oven, which would you choose?
This is the standard "conflate chemical toxicity with radiation danger" shell game. But it is a shell game. Our bodies do not deal well with any heavy metal in soluble form. It doesn't matter where they come from or (to a large extent) what they are. The actinoids (including plutonium and uranium) are chemically indistinguishable. Our bodies simply can't tell them apart, and there is absolutely no difference in our ability to tolerate them.
The whole leaving the Earth to the roaches nonsense is right out of the oil industry's anti-nuclear energy playbook, 1955-1975 editions, when they actively encouraged this meme despite the fact that it has no basis in fact. And, in case you wonder, radiation won't make the bugs big, and it won't make them glow, either.
I find this claim hard to believe. Can you source it? And does it take into account the ecological consequences of producing and deploying the solar panels, and the risks associated with maintaining them?
--MarkusQ
I disagree that our trade status is irrelevant. Right now, the US produces around 7.5% of global oil production and imports another 15% or so; this is a factor in many issues of concern to the public. As we shift to the production of vehicle fuel from food grains, we are increasingly affecting the ability of people overseas to avoid starvation. Further, the fact that we can't trade electricity between continents doesn't hurt efficiency; the transmission losses of such long distances make it a rather poor idea. Last, the conversion of foreign forest and cropland to make vehicle fuel for the USA is politically problematic and, if it affects food supplies (as ethanol already is) it is morally untenable.
The USA is in a position to be an exporter of carbon-free renewable fuels. This would more likely be charcoal for electricity, rather than liquid fuels for ICEs.
Sure. For now. But nature isn't refilling those fields, and sooner or later the last one of them will be going empty just like Maui. When that happens, the problem won't just be finding a new fuel source; it will have grown to building a new generation infrastructure. A small country like New Zealand doesn't have the investment capital or manufacturing base to go on a crash conversion program when that happens (and I wonder if the USA still does). The only way to make sure you address the problem in time is to start early.
There is also the issue of carbon emissions. Natural gas has the least carbon/BTU of all the fossil fuels, but it's still not low enough to stabilize the atmosphere even if we used nothing else. If New Zealand is going to do its part, it has to avoid gas, oil and especially coal in favor of solar, wind, biomass, hydro and nukes (like they'll ever do that). The world is just a bigger version of the same picture.
I'd like to see oil products taxed higher; that way, the money wouldn't go to hostile regimes and movements. The externalities of oil justify large taxes, and I'd rather see "bads" taxed than "goods".
What doesn't exist outside the lab? Electric motors? They've been equal to the Otto-cycle engine for a century, and today they're much better. Power electronics? Adequate for years, price/performance still increasing rapidly.
The only problem is batteries, and even spiral-wound lead-acid is sufficient to get started. If the car is designed to a standard form factor for batteries and can handle varying voltages and charging curves, there is no reason that it can't be upgraded as its old batteries wear out and better ones become available.
Excuse me, but what infrastructure? You could put a million PHEV's on the road tomorrow and people could plug them into any convenient 110 volt outlet at night. The average passenger car is about 8½ years old, meaning that it's ultimately retired at the age of about 17; there's plenty of time for any infrastructure needs to be built out as the vehicle mix changes.
$20K of
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Way to misunderstand the English language. The first clause was clearly not a proposal to do so (even so, a million cars is only about 21 days of sales and could theoretically all be delivered to buyers on the same day) and you ignore the truth of the second clause.
So right on the first page, it has:
In transport-speak, "infrastructure" refers to highways, streets, roads and bridges, rails and pipelines (consistent definition here).
You are either too stupid to understand English, or trolling.
Given you as an example, that's a pretty safe assumption.
That's exactly what we did in the 1960's as US oil production peaked and fell while consumption continued to climb. This led to our vulnerability to the OPEC oil price shocks in the 1970's. Why should I expect the public to learn such lessons from history? It's not like they ever did before. Heck, the same thing happened again in the 90's: business interests fought energy-efficiency standards for buildings in the name of "consumer demand", and now we are looking at having to import LNG in order to heat them. Designs available during that same period would need little or no heat. Why didn't we use those designs? Because people are idiots, QED.
And since I did the research for this, I'm going to post it:
25 Wh/kg will get you 4 kWH out of 160 kg. That's plenty for driving around the neighborhood (12 miles @ 200 Wh/mi) plus surge power and regenerative braking. When they wear out, you replace them with carbon-foam backed lead-acid at 260 Wh/kg. They might be only 1/3 as dense, so you'll only get about 90 Wh in the space of your former 25 Wh cells; your capacity goes from 4 kWh up to 14 kWh while the weight falls to about 55 kg. This brings your all-electric range up to 50 miles plus surge power. The carbon foam backings eliminate the corrosion and sulfation failure modes of standard lead-acid, so they last about 10 years. If the car is worth refurbishing at 13 years of age, Li-ion chemistries will be ready to take over from lead-acid at that point (or you might just fit it out with 5-year-old units from a newer car being upgraded for better range).
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I saw this and I just had 2 tell u.
And to think that you insulted me, when by your own numbers (5.9 million/year), it's ~62 days.
He never used 5.9 million in this thread. Your a fuckhead.
My google search for "grid services" comes up with
Duh, your 2 dumb 2 follow a link. Your a fuckhead.
I could harp on you about using terms in a way that other people don't use as much
And biologists and jailers use "cell" 2 mean 2 different things. Your a fuckhead.
Sorry I had 2 repeat it so many times, but u have a reading problem.
EErrkk. Total US electricity use is more like 400GW. More like 45 km square total area.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.