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The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas To Counter Sea Level Rise
waderoush writes "What do Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They're just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise. It's time for these organizations and other innovators to put some of their fabled brainpower into coming up with new ideas to counter the threat, Xconomy argues today. One idea: the Golden Gate Barrage, a massive system of dams, locks, and pumps located in the shadow of the iconic bridge. Taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China, it would be one of the largest and costliest projects in the history of civil engineering. But at least one Bay Area government official says might turn out to be the simplest way to save hundreds of square miles of land around the bay from inundation."
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit need to snap to it, then. If they started now they could get it in place in a few years, before the seas come rushing in. They've got the funds. Money, meet mouth.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Or they could just move and leave it to the city See also : coal corps, oil corps, every other corp.
...maybe put that brainpower into solving the actual global problem, rather than finding a bandaid solution to the local symptom....
Word game?
Let's build an extremely complex system of levees in an area prone to high magnitude earthquakes.
What could possibly go wrong?
With how American Politicians almost uniformly deny global warming and sea level rise, I am surprised that none of them have yet suggested building a couple of large gigawatt nuclear power station barges and huge pumps then pump seawater into the middle of Antarctica where it may freeze...
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
hahah *gasp* heh *gasp* *snort*
good one.
You propose saving hundreds of miles of land at a cost of hundreds of billions.
I propose a cheaper alternative, move. Build a big tower inland and move there.
I wonder if we wouldn't just be better off writing some laws now that say, "look, don't come crying to us when your expensive beach-front property goes underwater. Factor that into the price before you buy."
We need a carbon tax just to speed the transition to less less-polluting energy sources; if we instead use that money to repair thousands of miles of coastline and keep burning fossil fuel, we solve nothing.
That should be good for a few feet of water.
just ask help to the Dutch
Which is cheaper, the Space Elevator or building dams and pumping stations using fossil fuels?
If they're going to be "underwater" by 2050 that means that they're flooded right now. The worst case scenarios from reputable sources put the sea level of 2050 two feet above where they are today.
Better idea still? Move further inland.
According to NOAA, the actual average sea level rise over the last 100 years has been about 2 MILLIMETERS per year, or 200mm/century, or about 8 inches per 100 years. Here's the official data http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9414290. If you look at the chart you'll see that the trend has actually dropped to about zero mm / year for the last 30 years.
So, in light of this, we need the biggest engineering project in history?
Why not just move? Sea barriers is literally pushing the problem around. That solves nothing.
Joseph Elwell.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They're just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise
And all this time I thought Global Warming would be a bad thing. Is there any way we can speed this up, get those companies under water faster?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Let nature retake it. Before humans settled there and paved the swamps it was a great haven for all kinds of animals. Constantly pumping to avoid moving up the hill a bit is really wasteful and all it takes is a dam failure to have another Katrina style disaster.
If Emperor Norton didn't come up with the idea, it's just ridiculous blue-sky dreaming.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
dihydrogen monoxide sequestration
it's not really a band aid solution, but a practical one, verbatim:
After weighing the potential benefits and costs, the commission came down pretty squarely against the idea. “Given the enormous cost, limited effectiveness, questionable feasibility, and probable significant adverse economic and ecological impacts of such a project, it does not seem prudent to seriously further consider such a proposal,” the report concluded.
But that was before the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that a three-foot rise in sea levels is almost CERTAIN by 2100.
Just pump the water out, desalinate it, and send it to Los Angeles. Solves a couple of problems.
So we have to build this to protect companies. Actually, company property. OK, no, actually the property that they rent, since they probably don't own it. What about the PEOPLE that will be flooded. Why should I care about protecting companies? Is our mindset really so fucked up that companies come first? Rhetorical question.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
hahah *gasp* heh *gasp* *snort*
good one.
You propose saving hundreds of miles of land at a cost of hundreds of billions.
I propose a cheaper alternative, move. Build a big tower inland and move there.
I hear Greenland is finding themselves with an increasing area of land these days. Seems like the obvious place to relocate to; added benefit is that the Danish government actually seems to be promoting both the environment AND technology.
Without truly massive pumps it's not going to work because the Bay doesn't just receive water from the ocean, but also from the Sacramento River and other minor waterways (plus storm drain runoff from most cities by the Bay).
The Sacramento River peak volume during a flood event (such as might be seen during a tropical storm with heavy rainfall) is 650,000 cubic feet/second (18,000 m^3/sec). The pumps are going to have to pump at least that much water up over the sea wall or the Bay is going to fill up from behind.
NYC faces the same problem with any Sea Wall plan - the Hudson and East Rivers are going to fill in the sea behind the sea wall, so even though the Sea Wall might keep out a high storm surge, you can't keep it closed for long or you'll be flooded anyway.
Inject particulates into the upper atmosphere. It worked for Pinatubo: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Volcano/
Maybe a little radical and untested an idea, but maybe moving above sea level to somewhere else might be a little easier than building a massive system of dams, locks and pumps in an area that is prone to major earthquakes. I'm surprised nobody writing the article considered this for a nanosecond or two.
Thought this article was from the Onion for a bit, there are rivers running into S.F. Bay. Does the dam back the water up until it reaches Stockton, which runs somewhere around 10 to 30 feet above sea level? So might not every foot of dam will have the same amount of water on both sides after awhile. Oh, yeah I forgot there are going to be big pumps putting all that water on the other side of the dam. Wonder what is going to power those pumps? Will it eventually look like the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Katrina?
Passionately Indifferent
So our solution to global warming it to copy King Canute. Great.
So, in order to protect against a rise in sea level of no more than 1 foot in the absolute worst case, they need to build a system of dams, locks and pumps greater than 600 feet high???
From the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
Climate Change 2007
Sea level is projected to rise between the present (1980 - 1999) and the end of this century (2090 - 2099) by 0.35 m (0.23 to 0.47 m) for the A1B scenario ...
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch11s11-9-4.html
Costly too.
There is only one way for ocean water to go in and out, and that’s through the Golden Gate, a 300-foot-deep gap in the Coastal Range that was originally gouged out thousands of years ago by a mighty river.
As a result of this lucky geological accident, it would be possible in theory to control the water level in the Bay—to put a stopper in the bathtub drain—by building a massive tidal gate, more or less in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The ideal location, based on tidal velocities and the topography of the Bay bottom, would be about half a mile east of the bridge, as shown in the graphic above.
The author overlooked the Sacramento & San Joaquin Rivers, both of which drain into the San Francisco Bay. You don't put a "stopper in the bathtub drain" when you cannot turn off the faucet flowing into that bathtub.
Without those companies, how will those people be able to afford their environment-saving Telsas? And send their kids to private schools so they don't have to mix with the proels. Please, please think of the children.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yet another marvelous idea to treat the effect of sea rise without facing and treating the cause.
Treating the cause would be bad for the economy, so let's all die for capitalism, and consumerism !
Beurk !
Try one of the following government/bureaucratic sized (and mentality) programs:
1. Start taking ocean water, run it thru a desalinator, and pump it into the aquifers to build up stock levels. :) It would be cool to walk to Alcatraz ;)
2. Start taking ocean water, run it thru a desalinator, and irrigate all the desserts from Sahara to Death Valley
3. Start building huge snow blowing/making machines and start layering all the glaciers to rebuild them artificially.
4. Put in few freezer units into the north and south poles to ensure ice packs are rebuilt. -- why not put a few on the equator for good measure.
5. Build a few more dams and seal the grand canyon and fill it with ocean water, thus reducing ocean levels.
6. Build a dam blocking san francisco bay a la Netherlands and dry out the bay and turn it into farmland.
7. Block all rivers flowing into oceans and pump all the water back thru pipelines to the headwaters -- isn't that how recycling works?
Any more great ways to spend money and get the job done? I thought that is how government works. :)
How about moving to an area which is NOT prone to flooding?
"simplest way to save hundreds of square miles of land around San Francisco Bay"
Not really, the US has a lot of land, its not like some small countries which "must" reclaim land from the sea. There are huge swaths of uninhabited land.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
If an area is prone to floods/earthquakes, etc and you keep rebuilding after the last leveling.... isnt that insanity?
We saw well how a series of pumps and dams worked for New Orleans during Katrina. Just fill in the bay. Then you can get rid that ugly eyesore of a bridge and have lots of new land to populate.
Actually, I don't really like SF to begin with, so let it flood.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
They're building the defensive wall along the Pacific Rim to give them time for the Jaeger program.
The NSA is just covering it all up.
(seriously though, if you haven't seen Pacific Rim yet, go see it - it's really good)
Surely they can't be seriously considering New Orleans II. We all know how that catastrophe has worked out.
And then there's the question of how long the environment would take to reach its next steady state. Even if all of humanity went carbon-neutral today, the climate still has to catch up with the 33% change we've made to this massive system.
There's been talk of turning the Bay into a fresh water lake for decades. This is just a thinly disguised attempt to use the hot button topic of global warming to once again trot out this tired horse.
Nothing to see here folks...
Instead of continuously screwing around trying to fight a losing battle against nature,simple move to where there is less chance of nature causing disruption.
If it floods there....move
If there's a lot of wildfires...move
If there are landslides...move.
I think it would be much cheaper to just move and then use the money that would have gone for fighting nature with the "biggest and costliest project in civil engineering" for humanitarian purposes, like say, feeding and housing the poor.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
We see in so many movies that have underwater cities etc... they all have bio domes and seem to have their infrastructure and atmosphere all encapsulated, but I guess this could have happened over time instead of all at once, as this could be a sign of changes to come, if the sea keeps rising, then we could just need to start building a dome like encasement, allowing us to keep the buildings where they are without too much worry about moving or losing the investment of that chosen physical location.
Protection from rising sea levels, and protection from kaiju. Build the wall tall!
It'll cost Americans less to fully fund relocation than it will to have our governments hijacked and made to fund idiotic and extremely expensive bandaids just because the corporations won't spend a dime to solve their problems.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Man isn't causing global warming, it's natural cycles. Watch this documentary for the real science:
http://www.globalwarmingclassroom.info
This is Fool's Day worthy. Those buildings aren't national treasures. Most of these guys only care about quarterly reports anyway. They'll write it off and move to some low-rise flex space further away. By the time there's any real threat of flooding, a series of 10 competitors will have eaten their lunches too.
Aside from that, the environmental lobby would never stand for such a thing.
Why not start with something simpler? Cut a tunnel through the coast ranges and pump ocean air into buildings during the Summer. Ludicrous of course, and you couldn't even get 380 extended from the airport to the coast side. They spent decades debating over a tunnel from Pacifica to points south, and just completed it this year. How many people died in cliff-side accidents before they built it? I don't know...
Not that I know anything at all, but it seems like their trying to hold back the ocean. That seems counter-productive to me. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense, seeing as how we're land dwellers and all, to simply build-up the land? We've been extending cities out into lakes and oceans for centuring -- filling in the ocean one block at a time. That's why my city has a front street, then a lakeshore street, and then harbour street, and then thirty yards of land, and then finally the lake.
I'd imagine that heaping on some dirt, and lifting the buildings higher (yes, rebuilding them as necessary) would make the most sense.
I don't care. Move to higher ground if you want, or drown. It's your choice. Plenty of cheap land available, but like lemmings you choose to live near the sea for some unfathomable reason.
Sure, enormous walls holding back the Pacific Ocean right next to an large active fault line. What could go wrong?
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1892858/pg1
Keeps the bill collectors away!
The article is laughable in so many ways. From a technical p.o.v. though, the comparison with the Three Gorges Dam is plain idiotic.
That dam is huge because of the enormous shearing forces at the base. On the other hand, a 99% submerged dam will feel mostly tidal forces, which are many orders of magnitude lower. Heck, it would be exposed to less stress than a 50' normal dam.
Oh but it's so much easier to just adapt to global warming! Think how much it would cost to pay slightly more for cleaner sources of electricity and pay a bit more up front for an electric car that then only costs pocket change to fuel! You might as well condemn all those people to death right now!
But... But... won't the "free market" reward them for breathing water?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
WHAT sea level rise? Oh yeah 2 mm per year. So in 500 years we're talking about 3 feet. In 500 years. Venice has survived much more than 3 feet. I challenge you to build a "defensive" structure that will last that long, in an earthquake area, with a bankrupt state. Surely there are other things to waste limited funds on rather than this witch hunt?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Have a bunch of solar panels (a few hundred miles) to power a massive ice cube maker. Make ice from sea water
I was just last night thinking about ideas to counter sea level rise. I came up with a rather unfeasible plan that I want to share with you since it illustrates the scale of the problem rather nicely.
My plan was to pump all additional water onto the South Pole. In order to counter the projected sea level rise for the 21st century, we'd have to pump up the equivalent of about 10-30 times the flow rate of the Mississippi river (something like 15000 cubic meters per second). The south pole has an elevation of 3000 meter.
(9.81 (meter / (second^2))) * (3 kilometer) * (15000000 (kilogram / second)) =
441450 megawatts
Ridiculous.
0x or or snor perron?!
Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit need to snap to it, then. If they started now they could get it in place in a few years, before the seas come rushing in. They've got the funds. Money, meet mouth.
But if they simply figure out how to reverse global warming, then the Barrage would not be needed.
I wonder if anyone at the companies is working on that?
.... also handy in case of giant kaiju attack!
You have a source for your 30 ft elevation change between the two canals? If true, any large pipe between the two oceans would be a 30' hydroelectric source providing boundless clean energy. Thanks for solving the world's energy crisis.
The tax will be collected, so its just a matter of everyone stepping up with their own pork barrel projects to get a piece of it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why build a exorbitantly costly structure that needs to never fail, to fight a battle against an enemy that will never give up?
Why not just make a plan to move away?
It's not like you have run out of land. There is plenty of land in California that's barren.
No matter how big all these companies are and how big cash they have, they are there to make profit using their product. They need to remain focused on the product and not get into construction business.
I like how no one took your bait, try again.
I haven't even bothered to read the article. The current rate of sea level rise (which has been a nearly linear rate for the last century) is 40mm per decade. Mid century means that by 2050, the sea level will be 148 mm higher than it is now. I would hope that Google built their facility a BIT higher above sea level than that. Why do these ridiculous claims get such traction amongst people who should really know better?
planet texture maps and more
The problem is cities. They created global warming because they are unsustainable drains on resources and polluters. So the cities shall suffer the wrath. Big deal. Wonderful fun to watch them be distracted by the symptoms rather than them actually solving the problems they created. Good riddance.
It is not so sudden if you have a 50-100 year warning... so it would be cheaper to move, just not all at once. Start now by placing incentives in place. It is not in the public interest, for example, to provide government insurance for known coastal flood zones.
Like so many problems, it is not an all or nothing deal. Declare now that public funds will not be used for massive dyke projects, and publish a reasonable timetable describing tapering off of any flood coverage, such that the percentage of coverage is zero in 50 years. You can't fight nature, but there will be no end of people willing to take the money to try.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Of course they are. In fact the computers they're using are generating so much heat that... hey, wait a minute...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
it would cut into the profits of major industries like coal and oil.
Sounds like "May the country, the world and new technology die off. As long as the oil guys get their money."
When you coax or gently prod nature the results are generally favorable. Outright giving it the middle finger usually results in disaster. I'm not sold on The Great Seawall of America yet, especially considering how much undeveloped land (and time) we still have.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
The real problem is not the median rise in sea level per se, but the actual risk factor is a combination of frequency of 500 year storms (which now are occuring every 2-3 years) plus maximum wave height given the new median sea level.
You can build a four foot dike, but if waves vary by 20 feet in storm surges, you would need a series of dikes that can withstand 24 foot waves.
Baffle systems that channel and break wave structures might help, as well as power generators that use wave energy (eg cylinders that move up and down on fixed floats), but the main problem is the total energy in storm surges is now greatly increased due to climate change, and the resulting force makes standard earthworks fairly useless.
Until you solve that, you'll be continually surprised by how many sharks get over your anti-shark wall.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A far easier way to deal with encroaching seas is to end tax deductibility for all residential, commercial, and industrail properties within a specific height from sea level, within about 10 miles of the oceans.
This would allow the market to force people to move, while balancing the budget.
Any revenues from the ending of said tax subsidies could be used to pay down the national debt.
But that's capitalism, not mercantalism, so Congress would never agree to it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'll propose launching a solar shade it at the next planetary council meeting, but Dierdre is just going to vote against it again. I can't (cheaply) reach her yet. Someone wanna take her out for me?
As a native and card carrying NIMBY, I am too familiar with California municipal paralysis. Nothing will be built.
On a related note, this would be a great time for you to invest in my startup: Silicon Valley Gondola. We have WiFi.
Moving out is cheaper for everybody.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
and stay out of AZ!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
There was a project for a 3-way dam to keep the fresh water separate from the salt water. The project died an early death in the environmental backlash of the mid 60's.
This is a horrible idea. I will totally change the ecology of the SF bay. It will probably kill most of the salmon going into central California via the Sacramento/San Joaquin rivers. And how much energy with the pumping plants need?
Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900.
Four to ten inches per century. Look out for the tidal wave.
Variation by a factor of 2.5? That's VERY noisy data to use for the extrapolation of rates. How few samples and what level of noise do they have that they can't come up with better error margins?
This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year.
And with noisy data you occasionally get an outlier on one end or the other. Of course if you want to produce panic you treat the biggest excursion as if it's the average, and extrapolate it out for a century. But even if you do that you're talking a whole 12 inches sea rise in a CENTURY.
It's been less than 2.4 centuries since the American Revolution, a little over five since Columbus made his famous trip. Don't you think that, if the sea level gradually rises by a foot per century the new construction will just be up the hills a little more and the companies will move?
And while we're at it, how OLD are these high-tek companies, and how long before they're replaced by a new generation? Do they actually expect to be in existence and in the same buildings after fifty or a hundred years? The mind boggles.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Create a naturally occurring ubiquitous process where carbon dioxide is converted into oxygen. Oh wait...
On the topic of carbon tax...
An emission tax might difficult to estimate and complicated to keep tabs on.
However, taxing extraction of fossil carbon would be much simpler because coal/oil/gas companies keep careful track of what they extract.
This has several advantages...
- As pointed out above, it's simpler, easier and therefore cheaper and more accurate.
- The added price (due to taxing extraction) of fossil carbon would flow through the whole economy. Those products and services that require more fossil carbon would have a higher cost increase than "leaner" products and services. Market forces would favour the "leaner" options.
- The longer an economy stays on fossil fueled energy, the longer it remains burdened by fossil carbon tax. So the whole economy would benefit by moving to cleaner energy.
- This would affect all kinds of fossil use, not just the burning of fuel, but also the manufacturing of plastics. This may seem a bad thing, but consider that oil reserves are running out as it is, and finding alternate sources for plastics would be good. Again, this encourages market forces to start innovating new ways to produce plastics.
- One could perhaps even allow carbon tax rebates for carbon that is sequestered and stored away (much like "spent" nuclear fuels are today). Though I doubt it would be profitable enough to be a viable business model.
There is the risk of people using non-fossil fuels (such as forests). So perhaps a combination of a fossil carbon tax and a habitat tax would be a better option. I dunno.
However, no ecology copes well with sudden changes, not even "economic ecologies"*. So a fossil carbon tax would need to be introduced as a small tax and slowly increased over time.
* Funny how so much of big business and politics harp on about how sudden changes to economies can cause such adaptation pains to markets that they can collapse, yet won't acknowledge that sudden changes to climate can cause such adaptation pains to ecologies that they can collapse.
Speaking of China, wouldn't the rootless cosmopolitans in question just pick up and move their campuses somewhere drier --- such as the next emerging superpower? When your business is the movement of bits, why should you care about the fate of some particular spot on the earth, especially when it would be very expensive to do so? It would also be a betrayal of the tech elite's emerging neoliberal ideology to prioritize anything over profit, especially the environment, "communities", and above all, the fate of San Francisco.
Now you get floods with your earthquakes!
--- wad
And move all of the silicon valley employees out of the valley to hot-inland locations? Sure they can move the buildings, but they can't move the interactive mind-share that only goes on in a reasonably large urban area with weather that is conducive to outdoor activities much of the year.
If people have to stay indoors, they will be isolated and there will be less of the creativity spawning interactions between engineers of different companies.
Google would never have been as successful as it is today if it had been in Redmond. Think about how many companies buy each other and merge -- and think about how well MS's purchase of skype has paid off.
From San Francisco to Malibu, much of the CA coast is classic Mediterranean climate. Cross that with good access for mobilizing goods (people included) in and out of the area and you are reproducing the environment that spawned much of western civilization.
If the weather conditions get too far from idea, that climate might start looking like Seattle, if it goes wet, or if hotter like the Tigress, Euphrates and Nile river valleys that are now desserts due to over development and deforesting.
Who knows -- maybe Bush's sale of many coastal old-growth forests off the NW coast will eventually dry the climate up north and Silicon Valley will HAVE to move northward to maintain it's climate, but that's likely, at least a century away.
Sure, because the electric power grid is so bullet proof and under utilized.
If electric cars (as currently imagined) were a good idea you wouldn't have phrases like "rolling blackouts" and they would have learned a basic concept that every RC car guy learned a couple decades ago called "swappable batteries".
What I find rather interesting is that people continue to buy coastal low level land, especially considering that interactive maps (like http://flood.firetree.net/ ) clearly show what a sea level rise will do to that land. The site I use has been around since 2004. Are these people expecting that the government pay them when their land goes underwater?
But it gets even more interesting (when you use the link I provided) to raise the sea level as many meters as is now predicted. Places such as the Salton Sea might actually become connected to the Pacific Ocean because of the low level land to the south. Rivers that dump in to the ocean, as sea levels rise, the land on either side of the river upstream will flood.
As to the topic of this article, there is a solution besides relocation, such as using buildings that float. Otherwise, relocate to a location at a high enough altitude that future sea level rises will not affect them. And to start the process now instead of waiting until the last moment.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
Swappable batteries are dumb because everyone will go for 12+ hour charges every couple hundred miles? Really?? I guess we will no longer have interstate freeways...
Batteries are just a commodity. You can buy a propane bottle based on exchange of the bottle and you think it is impossible to buy a battery based on exchange. How about a 30 second idea on how it can work from someone who isn't even connected to the industry: You pay for a battery that is good for 1000 charges. For the next 1000 exchanges you only pay for the cost of the energy to charge it and the swap fee at the service station.
A battery is a box that holds power. It is easy to design modular boxes that can be swapped in and out. Instead of a D cell have a Z cell. A sub compact takes, say, 12 of them. A minivan takes maybe 20. That's technically impossible?
Yeah, impossible crazy idea and they will never do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg
(The only problem with the Tesla solution is it is brand/model specific.)
So what is your economic incentive to get power company share holders to invest to add additional reserve to the power system when we can't get enough power into large metropolitan areas to begin with? Hoping real hard? Blankly saying that "in the future the grid can be improved" is planning based on fantasy.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/28/0325237/us-electrical-grid-on-the-edge-of-failure
Sealab 2021 will be run be these companies!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
Swapping batteries is technically possible but that doesn't make it less dumb. EVs of the last few years can do an 80% quick charge in half an hour. The only way to make charging an EV take 12 hours would be to try to do a full charge on a high-capacity model from a 110v socket.
But what makes it dumb most of all is that it requires long-term planning and sacrifice to solve a very short-term problem. Batteries are already good enough for most uses, and as capacity goes up the swappable battery infrastructure makes less and less sense. In 20 years it will seem as silly as having an F1-like quick tire change setup on every car and a pit crew with pre-heated tires in every gas station.
So your "obvious" solution is to queue up cars to wait their turn (for god knows how long) so they can sit in a place that they don't want to be for half an hour? You must not have anything you do with your time. Let's just ignore the part about repeated fast charging damaging the battery and voiding the warrenty.
You have no reason to charge the CAR. You only have a reason to charge the BATTERY. Keeping the car there is silly. Even more naive is to give the requirement for "long-term planning and sacrifice" as a reason it shouldn't be done. ALL energy infrastructure requires long term planning. The current gasoline distribution infrastructure takes an amazing quantity of planning that is quite detailed for more then a decade into the future.
As far as sacrifice... Does it really have to be spelled out for you? What do you think you are paying for? If it is really hard and requires "sacrifice" you get to charge a price for it. Whole industries have risen on the idea that a company can do the difficult work so the consumer has to do none. (Really the "sacrifice" comment is the dumbest thing you have said. Don't advertise stupidity.)
BTW - I did notice that you ignored that fact that battery swaps have already been embraced by one manufacturer because the consumer public needs the service.
About the power companies, isn't that supply and demand thing supposed to work? When the power cuts out the power companies aren't making money.
Well it hasn't solved the current problem where the grid can't handle the seasonal highs that are expected every year. So why hasn't your "obvious" solution panned out every year? (Maybe the problem is that it requires "long-term planning and sacrifice" to build and improve an electric grid.)
A simple look at what consumers are willing to put up with will tell you that you have less then 5 minutes to get the vehicle full of energy. You can pump it in as gasoline, you can pump it in as hydrogen, you can get it in as charged batteries. If the person has to wait more then 5 minutes they will never go for it. That leaves you with a choice of gasoline power, fuel cell power, or swappable batteries.
I am going to be driving over 2000 miles in the next week. I will enjoy the fact that I WILL NOT be sitting for 10+ hours during that time doing 20+ "fast charges". I will also enjoy the fact that you have no part in the long term planning and sacrifice of our nation's energy infrastructure.
just move?
Wait, isn't the predicted sea level rise a total of almost 3m over the next 100 years? I'm not familiar with San Francisco, except what I've seen on TV and movies (lots of Hills with a huge bridge and trolley cars). But, are all those offices really located only 3m or less above sea level? If not, then they have over 100 years to relocate their offices. I doubt they would have been in the same offices anyway as they would have expanded or contracted as a business over that 100 years. Even if they are only 1m - 3m above sea level, they still have time to move. They could also look at turning San Fran into the Venice of California if it is really going to be struggling with the water.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Sea level rise is a serious threat. It has great implications in terms of environment. A proper commission of experts should be set to find out why sea level is increasing, how much it is increasing by, and what is the most efficient way to counter this threat. Such threats should not be neglected since they affect not just local but possibly distant communities as well.
DbaiG
Bolee.com