Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wait for the baby-boomers to die off. Suddenly energy, housing, and jobs will become plentiful. ;)
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.
As it so happens, Ethanol is being used as an ocatane-booster additive in the majority of gasoline today. In part, it's because it's safer than cleaner than most of the chemicals previously used to improve octane ratings. Another part of it, however, is that up to 10% Ethanol mixtures are helping to lower the cost of gasoline as the prices for gas surpass that of Ethanol.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
"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!"
Wow, what an uninformed stereotype. Plenty of us green environmental lefties have serious issues with increasing society's reliance on industrial agriculture, and see the potential usurpation of the oil lobby by the corn lobby as a meaningless substitution. Our leaders keep trying to find new and exciting ways to supply our energy demand without examining the nature or utility of this demand. Sustainable energy will come from changing cultural attitudes regarding the worthy expenditures of energy, not a shuffling of environmental issues.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
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!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
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.
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
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?
I've been around quite a few what I would consider hard core environmentalists and I've never gotten that impression. In fact, some of them seemed to be apprehensive about ethanol because of how they view the impact some of the corn production in the US has on the Mississippi delta--i.e. the dead zone.
Maybe I've been around some of the more logical and open minded environmentalists, but my recollection is that they seemed to think solar and wind hold the biggest promises with ethanol being good if the major issues can be worked out.
It's true that in a pure-ethanol vehicle, you'll need more fuel to make up for lower energy density. However, the faster and hotter burn cycle can be compensated for, allowing engine designers to extract a fairly competitive amount of energy from the fuel.
The lower energy density just isn't that big of a deal when the choice is between needing 20% more Ethanol fuel at $2.50/gal vs. purchasing petroleum fuel at $3.75/gal. This must be the oddest argument I've ever heard against nuclear power. First and foremost, any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. So plants try to loose as little as possible. However, they do lose some, but nowhere near enough to have an impact on global conditions. "Global Warming" models are not based around how much heat that power plants release, but around concentrations of greenhouse gases that hold heat in. The theory is that if the concentrations were lowered, the Earth would be better able to radiate away the excess heat.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You won't be laughing when the moon comes crashing into your house!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
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)
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
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
And your original point is wrong. You are backwards, power reactors don't receive subsidies to dispose of their waste. They've been paying into a DOE waste fund since 1982. The cost of waste disposal has already been factored into the economics of their operation.
It's true that Yucca mountain will most likely not be used as a commercial power reactor waste repository site. But it is not as if the billions of dollars in the nuclear waste fund will go to waste. The money will be used towards another storage solution or, more likely, waste reprocessing.
As for the insurance costs, it most certainly is not free. Power plants spend huge amounts of money for their liability insurance. What you are probably thinking of is the price-anderson act, which states that power companies are only liable for the first $10 billion in damages due to a nuclear accident, where the federal government picks up the rest. While the act makes it so that people cannot sue the power companies for _punitive_ damages in a nuclear accident, it also states that the power companies cannot defend any action for damages. It's a fair two-way street that makes nuclear power commercially possible.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
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.