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Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change
_Sharp'r_ writes Two Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change. After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
Hopefully it will. We should at least convert our base load power to nuclear as a start.
I guess that's it settled then!
Screw storage. Use solar when it's available, but fall back on nukes when it's dark/cloudy/raining/snowing.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
"Renewable energy technologies, as they exist today, simply won't work."
So, what? We should stop pursuing them altogether?
Are you crazy? Civil war in no time with that plan. People need their time consumed and need to feel it is happening at least semi-constructively.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
With a network of solar satellites, night, day and weather wouldn't mean much at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ironically, environmentalists and their 'spooky nuclear' protests is why we are still so reliant on fossil fuels and still pumping carbon into atmosphere. Nuclear technology, especially breeder reactors that produce minimal waste, is how you eliminate emissions. Wind and solar are unsuitable for base load due to variability, and require often non-renewable backups.
We have the problem that we expect to be able to work whenever we want. But the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest at certain times, not all the time. Solution, reduce waste, and work when the energy is available, or find more power storage technologies and install 'em. Either way, big changes in the way energy is handled.
We're coming to a point where we need less and less workers, but we're expecting to do more and more work. What?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You assume that economies can't lose any money in transition.
This is a flawed idea in that just refuses to consider political action in response. When you can't imagine a government putting the externalized costs of fossil fuels on fossil fuel consumers, this conclusion is a natural one.
That's not to say a nuclear heavy solution is bad, either. The real amazing thing here is that there are so many solutions that simply require not keeping the status quo, and we can collectively bring outselves to do none of them.
What about brick production, which emits massive amounts of CO2? What about declining rain forest and other ecosystems that store CO2? What about undoing the damage that's already been done? What about the positive feedback loops like methane being released from the tundra as it melts? The global climate is way more complex than this, and buying a Prius and high efficiency light bulbs aren't going to cut it by a long shot.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels*
* when you don't take into account 24/7 requirements.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels*
*When you include the pollution costs of fossil fuels.
i.e. until fossil fuels have to pay for the cleanup of the CO2 they are releasing it's simply not a fair comparison for renewable sources.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Who will build and maintain the infrastructure needed to accommodate said leisure society?
So, two guys gave up after four years or study and conclude the whole thing is futile?
Sure, they're probably smart guys. But, their inability to solve a decades old problem in a few years doesn't mean anything more than they didn't come up with a magic bullet.
Maybe the problem is the arrogance of Google engineers who think they're going to solve something like this is a short period of time where nobody else has succeeded.
So, you'll excuse me if I take their sweeping proclamation with a giant grain of salt.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Nuclear is a kind of funny animal in that regard.
It's just as dangerous and expensive if you keep it running all night or turn it on or off. The only major difference is fuel costs, and that's just not that much of the cost of a nuclear facility.
The biggest cost of solar is improving minimum performance. Batteries, liquid metal cores to concentrated solar collectors, flywheels: all very expensive.
The biggest cost of nuclear is improving maximum performance. At some point you just need another reactor, with all the maintenance and safety costs that requires.
Neat.
Do you have any other trillion dollar solutions to billion dollar problems?
Magnetbox
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'd say solving our economic need for oil far outstrips billions of dollars.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The two google engineers in question found that if we cut off carbon emission TODAY (like, say, going nuclear) it would already be too late. They were advocating climate engineering, which is to say we need NOT ONLY a cuttoff of carbon emission, but also massive carbon CAPTURE.
The submitter apparently didn't even read the article this time. How Sad.
Nukes need to move forward in a deliberate manner.
1. A few reference designs need to be established, accounting for some reasonable subset of possible sites such as coastal, inter coastal, inland, etc.
2. These designs would be vetted by the Industry, the feds, and what the hell, invite the Greenies.
3. Once approved, the designs should be exempted fro EPA meddling and some reasonable level of lawsuit immunity...as in the construction can't be delayed decades by lawsuit after lawsuit.
4. Operators should undergo the same rigorous training as military nuke operators...subs, ships, etc. Not the same, but just as rigorous. We don't need fucking button pushes on the night shift. They have to understand the plant, the theory and they consequences of each action they take.
5. Parts should be manufactured in factories using standard methods and specifications. Parts should be interchangeable from site to site. Minimize customizations as much as possible.
The Free Market is great, but this is one of those things he Feds can and should do.
Oh, and none of this jetting into D.C. for 1 day a month for hearings crap. Get all the experts into the same room and lock the door. Make it into a Manhattan Project kind of thing...get it done and get it done right.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
you don't need a PhD to know this. Its common sense. The equation is very simple and doesn't need calculation. First you ask yourself, how much energy does it take to create renewable source X for energy production. How much energy is required to keep this source X going for Y years... and without knowing what X and Y is you can answer : YES it will not work. Now I don't contribute to up to this point to the question that has arisen. "How to tackle our current overkill of the planet?"
:)
My answer and it may be radical, delusional and fantastic but: "Stop fooling around, go to "google" or "Apple" and tell them that the easiest way to world domination or a dystopia of an apple or a google... is to design, create and build alots of fusion or plasma reactors... meaning "find the solution for infinite energy" for todays needs and you will rule the world. Trust me, they will listen and they are the only ones willing to invest and got the guts to invest, including having the funds to invest in such ridiculous ideas.
How? With what kind of source? or whatever else is needed to release this idea doesn't matter here. What matters is time and we don't have it to dwadle around and discuss about problems. We have to tackle them.
My contacts are saved in slashdot. Contact me if you need me to solve this issue, all I require is your funds.
Their suggestion at the end of the IEEE article is to quit trying to pick winners in energy research. Fund development of known sources, and also fund wild ideas that won't necessarily (but might) lead to a breakthrough. Things like adding ethanol to gasoline and loaning money to politically connected businesses are dead ends.
I think they have massively missed the point...
Our society is hooked on CHEAP energy, it's cheap because the energy used to create it has become embodied over millions of years, we dig it up and burn it in a few seconds. Cheap energy from coal that remains cheap will exhaust itself and at the same time, it appears, affect our climate. Market forces should take over at some point of course, but the damage could be done.
An alternative conclusion could be: to reduce climate change the increase of price of burning coal should be artificially increased to make it more expensive than renewable energy so that the market forces kick in earlier and the change happens earlier?
Is this what is supposed to happen with carbon credits etc?
No, I'm saying satellites are fucking expensive compared to just building goddamn solar panels on earth, and running some electrical lines.
We're not talking about billion dollar problems, that's a severe underestimation.
Climate fuck-up and possible extinction (yes, it CAN get there, albeit not in the next few centuries, hopefully) can't be counted in dollars. It's actually reaching an infinite amount in damages.
So yes, if a solution costs trillions, then so be it. Do you think it's a lot? What's the total USA debt?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
While I agree in principal. Even a lesuire society will still be doing things. They just won't be doing things to survive.
Also it has to be done slowly. As we need to wait until after generation X starts dying of old age before we can make serious changes.
Personally I like getting baby boomers rules up about equal rights and then point out that women weren't allowed to have credit cards in the use in their own name until 1974. The older a person is the more likely they gloss over base facts and assume it was always that way.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
From the IEEE article:
"As Hansen has shown, if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability. "
Their main problem was that fossil fuels are cheaper because the infrastructure is already built and they can dump CO2 into the atmosphere without any cost.
The easiest way to address this problem is with a carbon tax which uses the money to build renewable infrastructure.
Even with this, we may be toast.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
And you miss the point.
I'm all for solar. Satellites are a fucking moronic way to implement it. Like it would take the world's GDP several times over to launch enough satellites to meet the world's energy demands.
Not. A. Good. Solution.
It is as if they tried to study energy needs in a vaccuum. Yes, many changes will accompany a change to renewable energy. Getting rid of gasoline and diesel vehicles leaps to mind. Cutting back on the use of large ships is likely and international tourism may be sharply curtailed. Our appliances have been changing for quite some time already. Your lED monitor burns far less energy than your old tube monitor. We will see homes and buildings with plantings on the roofs or even fish ponds on the roofs. For much of the nation solar hot water heaters has worked well clear back to 1910 or maybe earlier. And bamboo may be the fuel winner of all times. Bamboo absorbs carbon for the first five years of its life and only returns that carbon to the atmosphere when burned. In addition bamboo can be very, very fast growing and is easy to harvest and requires no fertilizer or chemical sprays. We have plenty of space to grow bamboo forests and bamboo can also be used to make paper and build homes. So yes, we will change almost everything to have renewable energy but guess what. All hell will break lose if we do not go to renewables and in that scenario everything would change for the far, far worse than we have now.
The second is a fair point: the main problem with coal and other fossil fuels is the external cost exported to society at large. (CO2 and other emissions.) If you could factor in that cost - and make the generators pay it - the cost of electricity from fossil fuels would go way up. (And, if they can afford to pay it - actually clean up their emissions to the point where they aren't harmful to the environment - then we don't actually have a problem with fossil fuels, except for the limited supply.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Not entirely true, if anything, it's MORE dangerous if you're changing power levels to match load.
There's a reason France (along with nuclear-powered ships) are the only ones that do such a thing. (In both cases because they have to - those communities have gotten VERY good at doing so, but it's still NOT an optimal way to run a nuke plant and does introduce new ways for the plant to have an accident.)
Nuclear reactors have properties that cause delayed reactions to control inputs, if you don't handle these properly, Bad Things happen. (And in fact, such Bad Things DID happen in an extreme case at Chernobyl. They tried to restart a xenon-poisoned reactor too quickly, and when the xenon finally burned off, there was a massive power transient.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
GAAAAHHH !!! A FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS !!! I CAN'T SEEE !!!!!
Except, with all the tax money changing hand, plus the political "land grab" taking place, I do not expect any change.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Or that that being employed makes people feel their time is being used in any way constructively.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Okay, you're the third person to misunderstand
To rephrase:
The cost of solving this problem other ways is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The cost of solving this problem by launching enough solar satellites is in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
All I'm saying is that launching spacecraft is really expensive. Prohibitively.
Yeah, and that.
I didn't want to spout my mouth and say that and be corrected by someone more knowledge of the increased safety of modern reactors. I just wanted to stick to what I knew was true for sure.
Standford: The Harfurd of the West Coast.
~Idarubicin
If we launched the Earth into orbit, we wouldn't need satellites anymore.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
It all depends on the reactor design, load follow in PWRs can be done perfectly safely. Many plants were not designed to follow load, there was no need and the economics made sense to plan to run at full load all the time.
In reality, nukes are terrible as backup power. Just assuming you have a plant that can ramp up and down quickly (most can't), nuclear plants are almost all capital cost. Hence they need to run at a high capacity factor to pay back the investment; it doesn't pay to idle them. But if you're wanting to use them as gap filling in low wind/solar times, then that's exactly what you're suggesting be done - sit idle until more power is needed. It's a terrible use of a nuclear plant.
Pumped hydro isn't that expensive. It's currently the cheapest option out there by a good margin (except for uprating already-existing conventional hydro). But other techs are trying to beat it. Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs. The randomness goes way down when you do this. NG is commonly used as a peaking fuel, and I see no problem continuing to do this (instead of doing energy storage) if you can keep it down to an average of under 10% or so of the total generation mix. It's low carbon to begin with and modern NG peakers can hit upwards of 60% efficiency once warmed up. So 90% renewables, 10% efficiently-used NG, you're talking near total elimination of electricity-related CO2 emissions.
Trick People Into Clicking Your Headline With This One Weird Trick!
No, because there's almost half a decade worth of FUD been spent on making people equate "nuclear" with "bad."
"Half a decade"? If you mean "half a century", you're about right.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
CO2 never has been and never will be a pollutant. Without it, all plant life on earth would be impossible. There is zero scientific proof that it causes atmospheric warming. For you true believers, please cite the scientific paper that convinced you beyond doubt that CO2 is the dominant driver of climate warming. Note, it your paper uses computer models or least squares curve fitting, it is worthless for proving causality.
People would spend their time engaged in their preferred hobbies. Tinkerers would tinker. Musicians would make music. Writers would write. Programmers would program. Gardeners would garden. And on and on. I see nothing wrong with such a world.
Now, whether people's needs (let alone wants) could be met when you're having such a big global GDP cut, I think THAT's a more serious concern...
Trick People Into Clicking Your Headline With This One Weird Trick!
A huge number of environmental problems could be solved if we could just get couples to have only 1 child. One side effect of this would be an aging population and reduction in labor force. But health care improvements and automation could cushion that.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It is already in the orbit, we should start constructing Dyson sphere already.
You only describe less than 10% of the population.
Meanwhile back here in the real world, people would drink and smoke pot and sleep all day and beat their wives/girlfriends. Then they'd have sex with the neighbors. People would get shot or get their throats cut based on that, depending on the firearms availability. They'd quickly band together in groups and despise outsiders. A quick devolution to anarchy would result.
Much better to keep everyone *busy*.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?"
Ummm, no.
As long as NG peakers are $1/W CAPEX and ~2 cents OPEX, nuclear is as dead in the water as it is today.
For comparison, the average price for nukes in the western hemisphere is about $8/W and ~5 cents OPEX.
Oxygen is lethal in certain concentrations, you know that right?
CO2 is a proven heat trapper, you acknowledge this yes?
By putting more of it into the atmosphere than we take out, the system is changing to have more heat trapping gases in it.
Now perhaps the system can continue to function as it has for recent history (less than 10,000 years) while having millions of years worth of CO2 added to it in just under 200 years, but that would be a pretty brazen thing to assume wouldn't it?
CO2 is not the largest driver of warming. Nobody literate in the science claims it to be. The largest driver as I'm sure you know is water vapor. CO2 is the focus of climate change because it is the single biggest change occurring. We ARE dumping millions of tons more of it in to the air than is being removed.
What drives water vapor concentrations in the air? Ambient temperature.
This is called a feedback loop. The logic is quite simple. Is logic alone enough? Of course not, but studies have shown temperatures rising pretty significantly and quickly during the last 200 years. Are there anomalies like the last 10-15 years? Sure, but after 2 centuries of rapid and increasing warming, assuming that any deviation from that upward rise means it is definitely not anything serious and is going to stop is one heck of a conclusion. One not supported by any evidence.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
According to those Google engineers, Nuclear power can't solve the problem either.
The problem isn't cheap energy but man made global warming and climate change; the CO2 levels are now so massive that inventing a zero emission ultra cheap energy source, that globally replaced all other polluting energy sources in an instant, no longer is enough stop the global warming process going on for hundreds of years.
You simply have to do much more than just making zero CO2 emission energy to stop the accelerating global climate change going on.
Beside that, nuclear power also fail on price; it simply can't compete against cheaper energy sources, despite direct and indirect subsides. This is the main reason why very few new nuclear power plants are being build.
Maybe nuclear is the way out
Maybe it's not,
But to abandon renewables,
'cuz 2 Guys With The Googles,
gave up is premature,
is it not?
Burma Shave
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Local farming and gardening
Hate to break it to you, but farming is a mining activity. It extracts resources (by means of plants) and transforms them into a usable form. It's incredibly intensive resource-wise. That wears out soils fairly quickly with the amount of food we need to produce. That's why we've resorted to mining the atmosphere for nitrogen to put back into the soil to be extracted by plants.
You can't have 7+ billion locally farming; it just isn't going to work (at least not in the "organic" sense). Farmers have struggled with this issue for millenia, solving the problem by moving around frequently (rotating fields and general locations). Manure and compost are only a stop-gap which recycle a fraction (not even close to 100%!) of the nitrogen. The reason we can support a modern population is that the efficiencies of a central nitrogen extraction plant and farming area are far higher and less destructive than a modern population all trying to farm without using atmospheric nitrogen. Or do you propose providing a fairly large scale power plant and a dangerous extraction facility to every local community?
It's a damn good thing there's so much nitrogen in the atmosphere and we know how to mine it, because natural fixation isn't good enough for our current population size. If we didn't know how to extract it, can you say, "famine"?
Chemical batteries clearly aren't going to cut it, so the question is, what massive physical process can we use to store power that's more efficient than moving water arround?
I measure 'efficiency' by the amount of human effort it takes to run the machine. So, if the process can be automated and low maintenance, efficiency isn't really relevant outside the amount of real estate needed to do the job.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Nowhere does the article mention nuclear. They argue for distributed and dispatchable power, hardly features of any nuclear design.
Which is what being fully environmentally conscious always amounts to.
They are right... renewables can't compete with coal economically, and it's foolish to try.
Where they *DO* compete with coal is in longevity.... in partictular, being sustainable for durations that are many orders of magnitude longer than any fossil fuel based system can hope to achieve while still keeping the planet's ecosystem unaltered. Yes, it costs more, but until somebody finds another habitable planet for us to live on and a way for us to actually get there, even a more expensive option is more desirable than no option at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Note, it your paper uses computer models or least squares curve fitting, it is worthless for proving causality.
OK then, no computers. But in fairness I then request that you also start checking your email on your trusty logarithmic slide ruler.
I'm always puzzled that people who present critical views of renewable energy always seem to rely on old data. News flash, massively popular and fast growing industry changes quickly. You can build utility solar plants that profitably sell electricity at 0.06 $/kWh. Look no further than report released by Lazard today... When prices are 30% lower in 5 years, like will happen, they'll be citing 0.06 $/kWh as too expensive, meanwhile ppas will be signed for 0.045 $/kWh.
You are surely aware that nature rarely follows simple linear constructs like you cite. There is an extremely complex non-linear partial differential equation that describes the temperature of a finite volume of atmospheric gas over time. Variables in the equation include initial conditions, radiation from the sun, the effect of cloud cover, humidity, the magnetic field of the earth, distance from the poles, heat constants of the various elements that make up the surface and near surface layers of the earth, and the makeup of the atmospheric gas. Nobody knows all of the variables, how they interact, or if the "constants" are really constant (for example the flux of cosmic radiation, or the strength and direction of the earth's magnetic field). What these AGW alarmists are saying is that the entire equation boils down to how much CO2, a trace gas at 0.04%, is in the atmosphere, and not only that, but only the tiny part that man has added since around 1900. Never mind that the temperature has been going up and down for millennia, no it is the 0.003% CO2 from humans that is the forcing function. This does not even pass the laugh test.
CO2 is a proven heat trapper
Actually, it turns out that in the atmosphere, CO2 is a coolant.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Bill Gates' TED talk "Innovating to Zero" is a great talk on this subject.
Fuel to the fire: http://www.scientificamerican....
6. Anyone with responsibility for the safety, maintenance and/or operating budgets of a nuclear plant must reside, with their spouse and dependants, on or near the grounds of said nuclear plant
All your eggs in one basket, eh?
You don't want 2/3 of the people who have the best understanding of the facility to be taken out in the first few minutes of an accident. You don't want first responders burdened with the problem of evacuating dependents.
Not so evil after all?
Obviously there's benefit to Google in long term if renewables can be made cheap. But either way, it is research done on google's dime that helps public.
GDP is funny. Most formulas for it include not only production but also other economic activity. So production of steel and food and iPhones counts, but so does the activity of the PHB and the ad agency making popups. We certainly would be poorer if reduced working hours led to a decrease in primary production, but would we be if the service industry was reduced? Fewer investment bankers, fund managers, ad execs, and those people who stand in department stores spraying perfume in your face?
Western economies add mostly service industry activity as they grow. I suspect that this is really just a combination of the idea that we all have to have jobs and work forty plus hours a week and increasing wealth. Make work jobs.
Energy density of beams to earth is known and not a problem. Read the literature.
It's whom, not who.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The article keeps talking about cost. The energy has to be lower cost, companies won't switch if it costs them profit, coal is still lower cost, etc. The problem seems to be our economic system, not our technology level. We'd love to save the planet, but it will cut into profits, so we can't.
How crazy is this? The future of our civilization is at risk, but our economic system won't let us address the issue. It's as if Capitalism is more important than the civilization it supposedly serves. It is not even questioned that saving the planet has to make a profit. Oh, it will cost money? Well then, sorry, can't do it because everything done in America has to be profitable. It's like Capitalism is a suicide cult or something.
Since 2008 the Federal Reserve has tripled the money supply to save the oligarchs, I mean the economy. Would they print that much to save the planet? I mean, if it's really just a matter of money, the US can create all the money it needs. They pulled $700 billion out of their ass to bail out the banksters, I mean the economy. Why not bail out the planet? The fact is, neither technology nor markets will save us. They may be the tools we use, but what we need is a new attitude and perspective; one that's not a slave to money and profit. We could do all kinds of things if we weren't hamstrung by needing to make a profit. But it seems instead we'll just go over the cliff with our favorite ideology intact. Amazing.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If these people were on the EPA science advisory panel, would their study have to be ignored too?
Eric Schmidt runs Google and seems to have great influence on its overall direction and this project in particular. Many people think of Google as a generally 'good' company, and by extension Mr. Schmidt should be good.
But there is strong evidence that he dances with wolves. That he is very adept at maneuvering among regulators, the military elite and masters of industry. And it is industry and conservative industrialists who have been fighting the 'green thing' since the beginning. It is known that he meets and mingles with these people but it is difficult to know what they talk about together.
So, if we 'follow the money', we might find that this study was influenced inappropriately.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Basically intermittent renewables need to be paired with plants that can ramp their energy production at need, the most likely pairing right now is natural gas. Add a bunch of nuke plants and hydro for solid base load and you've pretty much got things under control.
Nuclear won't be accepted as a solution until people who claim to believe that climate change has the potential to end civilization accept that the only proven technology capable of replacing base-load coal is nuclear, and that climate change is a technological problem, not a social problem.
This will take a long time.
The green activist movement is completely dominated by Naiomi Klein-style social engineers who don't care one whit about the environment, but who see it as a useful tool for defeating global capitalism. Thus their opposition to any technological solution to the problem of CO2 emissions whatsoever.
Now that climate change is increasingly widely acknowledged as a real issue--the Pentagon takes it seriously, can you get realer than that?--the green activist community will increasingly be seen as the major impediment to solving the problem. The question is: will we push these utopian socialists aside quickly enough to save the planet?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
As a side benefit we could produce more satellites than absolutely required and get the DoD to kick in a big portion of the cost. I mean who doesn't want orbiting death rays?
The energy problem is definitely bigger than billions.
f there's a 2' hole in my boat and I am unable to 100% patch that hole should I give up?
Yes. If you have a 2 foot hole in your boat you are fucked regardless of what you do. Depending on the buoyancy of the materials in your boat it is going to sink in seconds.
Anyway just for fun...
A 2 foot hole is 452.39 inch^2. Fill 80% of it and you still have 90.48 inch^2 of unfilled space. 1 US gallon is 231 inch^3. So for every inch of water that comes through your 80% filled hole you have ~0.39 gallons of water coming through.
Your boat is going to sink.
Depends on the boat. For example, your average aircraft carrier can easily cope with that amount of water leaking in. And small craft, with enough boyancy chambers or incorporating enough lighter-than-water materials, won't sink completely. So don't be so quick to abandon ship, matey :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Let's assume water pumping can have 50% efficiency, and your hypothetical low-human-effort method has 0.5% efficiency. 100 times the power generation capacity would be required to make your system work. You need a better measure of efficiency.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Actually, that was debunked last year...from someone not exactly an AGW proponent either...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
For starters all renewable energy scenarios involve a reduction in energy us by 80% which is easily achievable when you isolate your homes and make devices more efficient.
The EU thinks this change is possible. And for example Denmark want to be totally free of carbon emissions by 2050.
The problem of these two guys is that they want renewable energy at the same price as coal plants which are directly and indirectly subsidized in many ways. In addition you normally do not pay for the environmental impact of extracting the coal from the soil. There for coal is much cheaper.
And by the way we had in western Europe a decline in energy consumption over the last decades while still the economy was growing. There for, the assumption that growth implies more energy consumption is not generally valid. And furthermore, economic growth might not be a present indefinitely. So many assumptions of those two Google guys are wrong and therefore their conclusion is also wrong.
100 times the power generation capacity would be required to make your system work.
Why should I care if it requires no more effort on my or your part? If you have space/time/weight issues, sure then efficiency requires more attention, but for stationary energy production, I don't see any insurmountable problem, other the money/political/cultural thing. The tech is comparatively trivial.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wow, so you're rolling with the whole "forced work is good for proles" thing then?
Ignoring all historic data that shows the the temps go up and down with great frequency as have the CO2 concentrations, being lower and much higher than now. Basically the feed-back loops ignore the dynamic nature of a living planet.
Cheaper than coal is a false assumption error
Coal is subsidized in transit, insurance, pollution caused healthcare and climate change costs.
All these differed costs are borne in TAXES.
Oil receives all the usual tax breaks, about $40 billion / year in the U.S. alone, plus healthcare costs plus the costs of a deepwater Navy and Marine force whose only job at present is keeping the M.E. Oil Business friendly.
Like every problem in nuclear, the issue is "how much does it REALLY cost?".
Subsidies like the federal liability limit, reprocessing costs, shipping and long term (>9000 years) storage costs keep nuclear on the low end of costs by hiding those costs in tax payer money
Coal, of course, leads the pack in carbon dioxide caused climate change. Until ALL those costs are figured in, coal looks cheap, nuclear looks reasonable
And, of course, they aren't and cannot be made so.
So boys, return to your sliderules, show us full cost accounting for ALL long term costs and then get back to us with real numbers.
I thought that was the whole idea of employment. Keep the people busy in their jobs so they have no time to get into trouble thinking about their capitalist overloads.
Peakers don't have time to 'warm up'. Hence the term 'peakers'.
It would be insane to build combined cycle peakers. The heat recovery steam generators would only be there as decoration.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And you just proved that you have no understanding of this issue.
Do you have any idea how much oil is used for electrical generation in the US?
Less than 2% of all electrical power comes from Oil. Far less than wind or solar. It is only used really in remote locations like Hawaii where gas and coal are not practical.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And it doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless you pull a C02/temperature/Water vapor positive feedback coefficient from a dark place and plug it into the model.
Why do you think the models have such a range? Because nobody knows what the positive feedback coefficient is, hence a range of numbers is run. Alarmist prefer a high coefficient. To the point that they have occasionally embarrassed themselves by proposing obvious nonsense.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You can't just ramp up and down a nuclear power plant when the sun goes behind a cloud (exaggeration for affect). It takes a long time for a reactor to heat up and an even longer time for it to cool down. They are very poor when it comes to the use you are advocating.
"Chemical batteries clearly aren't going to cut it, so the question is, what massive physical process can we use to store power that's more efficient than moving water arround?"
Ever hear of this magical thing called a flywheel?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Ignoring that while temp and CO2 swings are normal, the SPEED at which they are happening right now is unprecedented.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Is it a disease?
No, it's a naturally occurring phenomena.
Hot earth -> warm earth -> cold earth -> ice age (no more dinosaurs!) -> warm earth -> warmer earth....
Lather, rinse and repeat.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Looks like they missed a Stanford result. http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
'Busy' and 'constructive use of time' are separate concepts. If you just want people to busy to rebel, making them work on non-constructive projects is ideal: You'll never run out, and they'll never be done.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JVOm...
Actually, that was debunked last year...from someone not exactly an AGW proponent either...
That was NOT the article or the study I sited - my link is from a paper just published last April, and it's about the coolant effect of CO2 in the middle and lower atmosphere, not the troposphere. Since you couldn't even bother to click on the link when I posted it, here is a quote from the abstract:
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I think the difference between me and the opposing commenters is that I have actually lived in the ugly communities, and they haven't.
I used to act as a local law and insurance adviser and do taxes for people who didn't know how to do this kind of thing for themselves. Please don't call me a community organizer heh. Anyway, the racism and hatred you find in such places must be experienced to be believed. These people need to work - if only to force exposure to other people and to understand that we are all human and must live within some kind of rules to avoid bloodshed. Otherwise, the scenario I painted above is reality - and will become more prevalent when work is optional.
I live in a nicer place now, but I still have friends from those communities and I still remember how things were. They tell me nothing that makes me believe things have changed.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
CO2 is a proven heat trapper
Actually, it turns out that in the atmosphere, CO2 is a coolant.
That article is quite interesting, but it is not relevant to CO2 warming of the lower atmosphere and climate change.
It's talking about radiative cooling of the thermosphere which is a near vacuum and gas temperatures reach up to 4,500 degrees F (or 2,500C), and how the solar cycle influences the variability in radiative cooling.
Well how relevant CO2 concentrations are to climate change is still up to debate. But this indicates it is more relevant to the cooling of the thermosphere than previously though. It's not like the thermosphere is irrelevant to earth's temperature.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Your reply boils down to: "you are wrong because <insert-authority-here> said <unspecified-thing-here>." You didn't even bother citing arguments from your source. C'mon, can't you do better than that?
I enjoy being proven wrong, but you're not living up to expectations.
You forgot to tell how we mine nitrogen from the air. It is done by burning coal and driving a compressor from that.
From Wikipedia:
The Haber process now produces 500 million short tons (454 million tonnes) of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3–5% of the world's natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply).[15][16][17][18] In combination with pesticides, these fertilizers have quadrupled the productivity of agricultural land:
With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today.[19]
The GP means you could solve it with grid-level storage, which is on the order of a billion dollar problem, but solar satellites would be more expensive.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Solar kills a lot more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear does: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Hydro kills far more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
It's almost like this is a very HARD PROBLEM that hundreds if not thousands of very, very bright people have been working on for years without much success.
Huh. Who'd'a thought?
(I think this entire project, while worthy, shows a staggering level of conceit, if not profound disrespect for brilliant scientists and engineers of previous generations. "Well, if we just get some smart people - I mean GOOGLE smart - and let them think about it, I'm sure they'll find the answer!")
Sometimes the historical ignorance displayed by people today is breathtaking.
-Styopa
For all the talk of the dangers of nuclear, it has still caused less deaths per amount of energy generated than any other method that has been used to practically generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... If you're not ignorant of these facts, then the only remaining reasons to oppose nuclear are either political (Naomi Klein-style anti-capitalist), or you're simply a misanthrope.
The whole issue of waste has been beaten to death. Reprocessing and breeder reactors leave only a little waste that can't be used for energy, and waste transmutation is a proven concept that further reduces any dangerous waste. With these processes, the actual nuclear waste left over is a tiny amount, and glassification trivially takes care of that.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
i.e. until fossil fuels have to pay for the cleanup of the CO2 they are releasing it's simply not a fair comparison for renewable sources.
I'd look at a heck of a lot more than just CO2. Consider the effects of acid rain, especially back in the day - excess SO2 and NOx releases not only harmed people, it also harmed infrastructure. For the longest time living next to a coal power plant would give you the same odds of lung cancer as being a lifelong smoker.
And yes, by the time you force them to clean up their act(still cheaper than absorbing the resulting medical and social costs from the pollution) renewables look a lot better.
I don't read AC A human right
And what's to stop us from using <insert-other-power-source> instead of coal? I have my favorites and I'm sure you have yours, but power sources are fungible in this particular instance.
efficiency isn't really relevant outside the amount of real estate needed to do the job.
I think you're mixing up efficiency and density of power/energy.
Remember that there's human costs tied up in generating the power in the first place - both capital in creating the equipment to do so*, and the maintenance required to keep it generating.
As such, a system that's highly efficient - it produces 90%+ of the energy you feed it back when you demand it, can actually be better even if it requires more human labor to keep it going, because it means that team x needs to get onto fewer roofs to install solar, and team Y needs to erect fewer wind turbines, and team Z doesn't need to build another nuclear plant.
I actually figure that Batteries might actually cut it. There's already massive battery banks in the power system. For example, Fairbanks has a 27Mw, ~6.75Mwh battery as part of the grid backup system. If Elon Musk gets his way with his 'gigafactory' for LiIon battery packs for Tesla, that's a stream of relatively huge batteries being produced for HALF the current price per kWh. That would be approaching lead-acid cost levels. Give them 10 years and they'll be entering the waste stream - but I figure a 85kWh pack will be replaced by the time it hits 60kWh. If, rather than recycling it immediately, what if we reuse it? The old pack should be pretty cheap, but let's say we use them as grid-connected UPS units, until they average out at ~40kWh. That's roughly a day of power usage for a household per EV battery we put towards it. Still at roughly 90% efficiency, which is a heck of a lot better than water's 50-60%.
*I'm keeping it power agnostic.
I don't read AC A human right
Two Standford PhDs, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked for Google on the RE<C project to figure out how to make renewables cheaper than coal and solve climate change.
Yes, that's true.
After four years of study they gave up, determining "Renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
Well, yeah, that quote is in the article, but it's not in response to the question "can renewables be cheaper than coal".
As a result, is nuclear going to be acknowledged as the future of energy production?
No, because you're answering the wrong question.
Let's go back to the article:
At the start of REwith steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
There's the quote in the summary, and those bolded sentences are what it's referring to. Not "can renewables be cheaper", but "even if we switch to renewables, can we significantly reduce CO2". And from the sidebar with the two graphs:
Yet because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for more than a century, reducing emissions means only that less gas is being added to the existing problem. Research by James Hansen shows that reducing global CO2 levels requires both a drastic cut in emissions and some way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it.
While nuclear may be a fine technology, it doesn't "pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it". So, no, Subby, nuclear is not the answer to the question they were asking either.
I had to look up the 1974 thing. I'll admit to being shocked. If there wasn't a valid reason for doing stuff like discounting a woman's income(probably already lower) by 50% when computing her limits, I can't help but think that if I went back in time to before 1974 I'd do the same thing as happened in 1975 - open a bank for women* that offers services that more accurately asses the risk, IE a lot cheaper for women, hiring female workers(for less, but still more than market), etc... and still make a killing as they all flock to my services!
*I couldn't call it a 'women's bank' because I'm not a woman.
I don't read AC A human right
Imagine what would happen if there were fewer ad companies around pushing more stuff into our face attempting us to buy the product they were hired to promote.
I don't read AC A human right
So what?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Misanthrope much?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Oh, now I understand.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Like you wouldn't believe. I'm still not sure if it's a prerequisite for being a software developer, or an occupational hazard.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I purposely left out the source of energy because it's irrelevant to the argument I made. You can try to make assumptions about which energy sources I prefer, but it'd be much easier to check my comment history.
The argument I made is that the demands of a modern population require the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere by mechanical/chemical processes.
Where you get that energy from is yet another debate, one which I didn't feel like having today. You're free to figure it out yourself, but you keep trying awfully hard to imply I suggested things I didn't say.
Fossil fuels are cheap because their costs are externalized: the person buying the coal doesn't have to pay for the climate change. The obvious and correct solution is to internalize that cost, and put a heavy tax on carbon fuels.
My pet proposal is a carbon tax collected at the source: as the coal or oil or gas leaves the ground or enters the country. This extra cost would be passed along through the economy, raising the prices of things in proportion to the CO2 generated in making and using them. You can return the tax revenue to the people as a flat rebate, a reduced income tax rate, you can keep it to balance the budget, I don't care: run your donkey-and-elephant politics however you like, it's the environmental benefits of the strong tax disincentive that matter to me.
For the value of the tax, I propose a tax that gradually ramps up to effectively equal the current price of oil by the end of the century. This is steep enough to kill off coal power in under a decade, but otherwise would let us gradually transition to green technologies and minimize the economic shock to the economy.
One last thing: goods imported from countries that don't have a comparable carbon tax should be charged an additional tarrif when imported, to compensate for their lower tax burden.
Many Slashdotters are free-market libertarians, and find taxes disgusting. I'm right there with you, but this is not a problem the market can solve on its own. But by taxing the problem, you allow the market to find an optimal solution for you, which is much more libertarian than allowing the government to pick and choose green solutions. If on the other hand you deny that there *is* a problem, that's a whole other conversation.
well then,it' settled.
Oh, but the numbers show they are wrong.
Anyway they only showed one thing: That in a pure capitalist society, nothing will change.
Yes, we can, in fact, replace coal with renewable energy, yes it might be marginally more expensive in the short term.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously, all this "it's too hard" stuff by researchers at other universities.
Listen up, children, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are no longer cheaper than solar or wind any longer.
Heck, you can literally cut GHG emissions in half for existing coal plants just by installing scrubbers and using cogeneration.
Now I know it's hard to admit that installing 1980s coal technology could improve the basic 1918 coal plant design, but if you stop reading industry funded "oh it's too hard" PR flak maybe you can figure it's not that hard.
And that's just coal.
Here at the UW we literally can make cheaper solar energy - solar biofilms that shape to cars or walls, windows that absorb energy but still let light in (think of those fancy window shades you see in SF movies), or you can just use low carbon emission wood frame buildings with high insulation properties and passive solar.
We MAKE that stuff. You whine that you can't do it. We build many giant buildings across our 50,000 person campus.
It's the 21st Century, children. Not the 18th. Wake up and adapt. Cause you're out of time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You're paper is based on the same data. The debunking clearly shows the why what you're saying isn't accurate.
That CO2 and NO radiate heat doesn't make them 'cooling' agents in the way you're trying to imply. It means that they prevent the passage of heat energy, on the outside they radiate heat into space when they are hit by a solar flare. SOME energy does get through and the agents now keep that energy locked up longer because they restrict escaping heat.
ANYTHING hit by a solar flare is going to heat up and then start radiating heat away from itself. CO2 and NO block much of the Suns energy, we'd fry if we had all the energy coming in. That again doesn't make them 'cooling' agents. They are insulators keeping heat on whatever side of the border it currently is. If you pile more blankets on your bed, you get warmer.
That's what we're doing with CO2 in the atmosphere.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
That article was about the thermosphere which is from around 85 km to 600 km above the surface of the Earth. The ISS orbits in the thermosphere FFS. The effects of CO2 in the near vacuum of the thermosphere doesn't have much to do with the effects of CO2 in the troposphere. Even in the stratosphere increased CO2 has a bit of a cooling effect but it doesn't change what it does in the troposphere.
With which materials? Even if you took all the Earth itself, it wouldn't be enough for a single satellite in a Dyson cluster.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
1. Switch to renewables completely and suddenly.
2. Wait a year or two for 6 billion people to starve to death.
3. Invest heavily in casket industry.
4, Profit!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I guess you don't think the sun has anything to do with earth temperature, either - I mean, it's so far away and everything, how could it, right? It's CO2 all the way down...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You're paper is based on the same data.
"YOUR" FFS. I can't even go on after that. It's not even my paper./P
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The Sun is the source of essentially all of the energy at the Earth's surface. Without it the temperature of the surface of the planet would be close to absolute zero. The Sun is constantly raining energy on the Earth, much of it gets reflected (albedo) but a substantial portion of it gets absorbed. When that absorbed energy gets re-emitted it's in the infrared radiation range. This is where the greenhouse gases (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.) come into play. Without GHG's in the atmosphere that re-emitted IR radiation would just shoot straight through the atmosphere lost to space and the surface of the Earth would be around -17.8 degrees C (0 F), about the same as the average temperature on the Moon. Because of GHG's (mostly) the average temperature of the surface of the Earth is about 32 C (58 F) warmer than that. The discovery of the greenhouse effect is nearly 200 years old now. Joseph Fourier figured out that the Earth was warmer than it should be just given the Sun's input in the 1820's. In the late 1850's John Tyndall's work the effect of various gases on radiant energy quantified the effect of GHG's on IR.
So CO2 combines with a lot of other things to determine the temperature at the Earth's surface and changes in any of those things will affect it. CO2 happens to be one of those things that is changing the most and also something we could have some control over unlike incoming sunlight and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc.
Remember that there's human costs tied up in generating the power in the first place - both capital in creating the equipment to do so*, and the maintenance required to keep it generating.
*sigh* --- I measure 'efficiency' by the amount of human effort it takes to run the machine. So, if the process can be automated and low maintenance....
You didn't see that part, did you? If we make machines that can make their own batteries from raw materials, why should I care how long the batteries last? That is a problem for the machine to deal with.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This does not even pass the laugh test.
Actually, your posts are much funnier. First, "Without [CO2], all plant life on earth would be impossible.", but in your very next post you mock people who believe that "a trace gas at 0.04%" could have any effect.
I'm sorry to say this, but you sound like a poe - "it's so small it's can't possibly have any effect our lives, but for God's sake don't lose it or WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" or "She couldn't have killed anyone, she only put a little bit of arsenic in that great big water tower.".
There is an extremely complex non-linear partial differential equation that describes...
Except you don't really need any of that. It's fairly straightforward to calculate (and then check by direct measurement) how much less infrared radiation is being emitted by the earth at various wavelengths. And like any physical system, if less energy is leaving then changes will take place to restore equilibrium - it might be higher temperatures, it might be a higher albedo (as through cloud cover), it might be a reduction in some other heat-trapping gas, it might be people pulling CO2 back out. But something, on a rather large scale, is going to have to change, just because of basic thermodynamics.
So even if I didn't know anything else about the subject you're going to have to give me some alternative for what happens to the excess energy, or I'm stuck with the only answer available to me - climate change.
wow, so sure of yourself you run away at one of the most common internet grammar mistakes?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Reads the articles:
"Across the board, we need solutions that don’t require subsidies or government regulations that penalize fossil fuel usage. Of course, anything that makes fossil fuels more expensive, whether it’s pollution limits or an outright tax on carbon emissions, helps competing energy technologies locally. But industry can simply move manufacturing (and emissions) somewhere else. So rather than depend on politicians’ high ideals to drive change, it’s a safer bet to rely on businesses’ self interest: in other words, the bottom line."
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
So do I. If it's fusion, that is.
because 2 so called PhD's say it isn't a solution, that definitly means it isn't a solution... NOT!
How many times have we seen so called PhD's not agreeing with each other even after a huhum 'good study'..
Because those 2 couldn't figure it out, doesn't mean it isn't possible...
Not necessarily, it depends on your usage profile. If you're talking about power suddenly dropping out for half an hour then coming back, you're absolutely right. But if you're talking about it suddenly dropping out when a certain weather pattern moves in and staying out until it moves on, then of course it'd be useful.
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Holy Red Herrings, Batman! It's almost as if I wrote "If you have HVDC, and and solar power generation in a single geographic region suddenly become stable", rather than what I actually wrote:
Even in Germany, solar plus wind alone is much less random than purely solar or purely wind. But combined over a broad geographic region, the figures are surprisingly stable. HVDC lines also (their main purpose today) link you up with other regions so that you can use them as peaking when you need it and they don't (esp. regions with hydro, since hydro is much more total-energy-limited than power-limited, and nameplate power capacity can be uprated if necessary with little ecological impact and proportionally very small cost).
Which is why Germany and Denmark are in a constant state of blackout?
That argument of yours makes no sense, since it doesn't account for capacity factor or generation profiles.
This claim is unevaluatable without knowing how much backup energy you're meaning to provide.
Storage and peaking generation are 100% interchangeable. You can use any combination of either. And as stated, the need for either storage or peaking generation depends on the randomness of the supply, and 1) the more types of sources you use, and 2) the broader the geographic area you collect from, the less net randomness in the generation.
It should be noted that the power grid today is already highly random - not in terms of supply fluctuations, but demand fluctuations. Nighttime demand averages about a third of daytime generation, and there are sudden spikes and dropoffs at certain times of day. The current approach to the grid - peaking - deals with high levels of randomness just fine.
(it should also be noted that HVDC across time zones also helps you level out time-of-day demand spikes)
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That page is ridiculous. They credit 171k deaths to hydro from a single Chinese dam failure without bothering to mention that it failed because of a freaking cat-4 (nearly 5) typhoon. And dams have saved far more people than that through flood control. The 1931 floods in China alone killed as many as 4 million people.
And beyond that, pumped hydro != conventional hydro. Pumped hydro generally uses proportionally small reservoirs, and it's not usually situated in populated areas like river valleys. Where there's a big coastal rise it's popular to use the ocean as the lower reservoir.
As I described earlier, nuclear is a bloody awful choice if you're looking for a peaker (not going to go into why yet again)
Lastly, hydro, even pumped hydro, isn't my preferred solution (for ecological reasons). My preferred mid-range solution is a geographically diverse (stretching across multiple climate zones that don't experience the same weather at the same time) high power HVDC grid with diverse renewables generation in each location (so that their randomness doesn't correspond well with each other), with natural gas as peaking. You could probably get a 90% renewables / 10% gas solution in that manner. And a HVDC grid provides a ton of other benefits beyond just reducing net randomness - it syncs up disjoint AC grids allowing power sharing, it spreads out demand peaks over broader regions where they occur at different times due to different timezones, it makes underwater transmission lines much easier, it lets you use energy resources that are "the best, period" rather than having to settle for "the best that's close enough to the demand", it lets industry position itself more ideally, it helps you keep pollution away from populated areas, and on and on.
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Quite true. People complaining about randomness on the grid and uneven supply usually don't stop and consider that the grid already faces huge randomness from the other side - demand - and deals with it just fine. Baseload is indeed a problem, not a solution, and peaking and storage are interchangeable.
I think people focusing on storage are letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough". I think storage is the ultimate future, but we're talking long term. Mid-term, peaking is the answer. Switch over the lion's share of generation to renewables, get them as type-diverse and geographically-diverse as possible, use peakers to fill in the gap like we already do, and you've taken out 90% of the problem (at least on the electricity side - still have to deal with transportation and other anthropogenic emissions).
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Why is it "bullshit"? Do you actually think there's really no health cost to dumping PM, SOx, NOx, CO, VOCs, etc into the atmosphere (just ignoring CO2)?
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You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.
(Hint: the troposphere *is* the lower atmosphere - and if you define "middle" by "half of the mass" rather than "half of the altitude", it's that too)
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It's long been known that the temperature of the thermosphere is highly dependent on what the sun is doing. It doesn't "store" energy, and there's essentially nothing above it to block it from radiating out into space. It also represents a mere 0.002% of the atmosphere.
It's not the thermosphere whose temperature people care about. It's the first few dozen meters of the troposphere that matters.
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Okay, I'll bite. here's a comparison of historic forecasts from skeptics and from mainstream scientists, versus actual measured temperatures. Who, exactly, is embarrassing themselves here?
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Please, do go on about Ukranians. I want to hear about how they crucify children to torture their mothers for revenge.
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Which is why 47 people didn't just die in a Japanese volcanic eruption a couple months ago? In the country with probably the best volcano monitoring on Earth?
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And from their numbers, it doesn't look like they're using a reasonable estimate for Chernobyl. There've been some ridiculous estimates out there from both sides, ranging from "only the couple dozen who died directly" to "millions".
One can look at the approximately 10% higher mortality rate within the exclusion zone to get a rough sense of the consequences, but without knowing demographics, it's hard to draw conclusions from that. Probably the best (peer-reviewed) analysis I've seen compared doses with the US military's mortality data from exposure to the nuclear bombings in Japan. You get a figure of about 4000 extra deaths with moderate confidence and 5000 with low confidence (the error bars can be in either direction). So very rough ballpark of 9k deaths, plus the first responders and the like.
Yes, even when you include things like that, nuclear's death toll is lower than coal, no question. But it's not as low as they make it out to be. Their bias is obvious.
Yep, nuclear disasters can happen from both man and nature. That's hardly a comfort. Will "defense department testing" cause the next major nuclear accident? Very unlikely. But there almost certainly will be a "next major nuclear accident" - we just don't know what form it will take. It's a "known unknown".
No. But if you're going to include "dam-induced casualties from storms", then you should include "people spared from storms by dams" also, it's only fair. And thus hydro's death count would be strongly negative.
Speak for yourself. I live in Iceland where over 99,9% of the grid is renewable (primarily hydro). 99,9% renewable baseload at that. There's even serious preliminary work looking into building the world's longest submarine power cable to export power to the UK.
Again, not saying that hydro is my preference - I've stated my preference above. Just pointing out that your claim is wrong.
(Concerning the power cable: I'd support if A) they'd only be adding geo plants and wind to meet the extra power need, and B) the government would tax the power sales to the point where the cable makes just barely enough profit to economically justify its existence... but I'm sure that A) they'd probably just dam up the highlands some more - who gives a rat's arse that we have some of the world's most abundant and cheap geo and wind power that could easily compete on the European market, hydro gives a tiny bit more profit margin!; and B) the government would hardly push back at all on power export royalties because, hey, JOBS! Jobs damming up the highlands!)
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Uranium will run out in less than a century at the current rate of use. No point in increasing the rate of use if it means the new power plants won't have fuel for their rated lifetime.
There is not enough uranium to replace coal. So, there is no proven nuclear technology, just fast breeders that blow up pretty often.
Excess energy is probably radiated out. The hotter something is, the more heat it radiates. Water vapor interacts with pretty much the exact same spectrum as CO2, and is far, far more prevalent. And comparing CO2's efficacy in a biological system to its importance in the weather is pretty lame. Oxygen plays a tiny role in the greenhouse effect but without it no animal life exists. I am confident that AGW will be shown to be the biggest scam in human history.
*sigh* --- I measure 'efficiency' by the amount of human effort it takes to run the machine. So, if the process can be automated and low maintenance....
What about the human effort required to make the machine? Or perhaps I'm expanding the scope of the machine you're looking at - beyond the storage system to also encompass the generation systems, because if you make the storage systems more efficient you need less generation, and on average that will indeed save you human effort if the extra efficiency isn't too expensive(in human labor and such).
I don't read AC A human right
Are you seriously suggesting that all the climate scientists in the world forgot that fact, or are you suggesting that they are all in cahoots to pretend that's not a fact? Either way you are a muppet of monumental proportions. Just thinking about what you just said should make you realise that...
Flywheels (in vacuums with magnetic bearings) can achieve up to 85% efficiency, and pumped storage hydroelectricity has been used with up to 87% efficiency, I'd say you need to go brush up...
How many times we'll have to say: WE NEED AN ALL OF THE ABOVE solution.
We need as much solar as possible. As much wind as possible. As much biomass as possible. As much geothermal as possible. As much new hydro as possible. And yes, as much nuclear as possible.
The real problem in this debate are the ideologues that want solar+wind and reject nuclear.
But it's not enough to just say yes to nuclear. We must undo a lot of the regulatory runaway regulation the NRC created over the last 2 decades. Most of what the NRC did AFTER Chernobyl contributed nothing to nuclear safety. I'm not saying they did nothing good, but most of it was worse than useless, because it added many tens of billions of dollars to the cost of the US nuclear industry with nothing to show for it.
The NRC is doing a huge hatchet job on new nuclear technology. New nuclear R&D has been leaving the USA for China, India, Canada because the NRC demands a prescriptive regulatory model where in order to create a new type of nuclear reactor the NRC must be PAID (US$ 300/hour) to create the regulatory demands on this new nuclear, without an ounce of predictability on the process. Which venture capitalist on its sane mind would accept this model ?
Nuclear reactors should be buildable at least 25-40% cheaper than today if the NRC was being rational.
And you just proved you have no understanding of people. People use "oil" to mean "fossil fuel". It's wrong. But it's clear and consistent.
Learn to love Alaska
All I'm saying is that launching spacecraft is really expensive. Prohibitively.
Not if step 1 is to build a space elevator.
Learn to love Alaska
It is actually who in that case. And who is acceptable in American English for all instances of whom, just possibly not preferred.
Learn to love Alaska
There is zero scientific proof that it causes atmospheric warming. For you true believers, please cite the scientific paper that convinced you beyond doubt that CO2 is the dominant driver of climate warming.
You can't even be consistent from one sentence to another. "there zero proof it causes warming" to "prove it's the dominant driver". If someone met both of those, I'm sure the goalposts would move again. They didn't manage to remain consistent within two sentences.
Learn to love Alaska
So they use oil to mean coal?
I do not think so...
I think they actually mean oil but have no clue that it is not really used for generation of electricity. I as does the gov lump bunker, gasoline, and diesel under oil but coal????
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In China nuclear costs about half as much, plants take half the time to build, but the safety is about the same. As an industry nuclear power is about 1000 times safer than coal but 100 times more regulated.
The real problem is that the creeping dead hand of the regulators have all but stopped nuclear research. - Small plants, CHP, gas core reactors, hydrogen cooled, advanced combined cycle with fuel recycling, plutonium or thorium fuel, bunker self-containment storage designs, etc..
Small fast reactors (as used in nuclear rockets) are inherently safer than big low yield reactors and potentially much more efficient, but its a technology we have barely begun to touch or design.. Then there are technologies developed at the high point of nuclear research way back in the 1950's and 60's - such as pure fusion nuclear bombs which could potentially be adapted for nuclear fusion energy production... though people would probably have to tolerate how such plants actually work remaining secret...
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
The nuke people never bring it up, they're most afraid of it.
If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Now compare that with the typical 80% efficiency of charging a battery.
"and pumped storage hydroelectricity has been used with up to 87% efficiency,"
Now try doing that in an area with severe drought, like the ENTIRE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES.
Sorry, flywheel wins. Try again when you design and utilize these systems.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Excess energy is probably radiated out. The hotter something is, the more heat it radiates.
So ... the globe probably ... warms ... ?
Water vapor interacts with pretty much the exact same spectrum as CO2, and is far, far more prevalent.
Water is a significantly stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, but because the atmosphere has a limited carrying capacity for water humidity levels tend to stay relatively constant overall. i.e. excess CO2 sticks around for a very long time, excess water gets rained out much more quickly.
And comparing CO2's efficacy in a biological system to its importance in the weather is pretty lame.
On it's own, yes. I just found the juxtaposition amusing.
I am confident that AGW will be shown to be the biggest scam in human history.
And as far as I can tell you're basing this solely on the fact that it doesn't pass your own personal laugh test. That's not a very solid foundation for the claim.
**Excluding Externalities**
The real cost of coal is already far more expensive than wind, solar, nuclear, or even geothermal.
So these guys decided that the health costs and environmental destruction that coal plants cause are irrelevant.
They also decided that Renewables were not feasible because they supposedly could not create energy as cheap as coal. Two things here, One - So fucking what if coal without the externalities is cheaper, it needs to die regardless. Two, they must suck at projections because wind is now as cheap as coal and solar looks like it will catch up.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Wiley will publish anything that anyone's willing to write and not get paid for. I've had dealings with them before, and they've received my invitation to go fuck themselves.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.