Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Can FOSS Help In the Fight Against Climate Change?
dryriver writes: Before I ask my question, there already is free and open-source software (FOSS) for wind turbine design and simulation called QBlade. It lets you calculate turbine blade performance using nothing more than a computer and appears compatible with Xfoil as well. But consider this: the ultimate, most efficient and most real-world usable and widely deployable wind turbine rotor may not have traditional "blades" or "foils" at all, but may be a non-propeller-like, complex and possibly rather strange looking three-dimensional rotor of the sort that only a 3D printer could prototype easily. It may be on a vertical or horizontal axis. It may have air flowing through canals in its non-traditional structure, rather than just around it. Nobody really knows what this "ultimate wind turbine rotor" may look like.
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
The easiest way to find such a rotor might be through machine-learning. You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today. Is this something FOSS developers could tackle, or is this task too complex for non-commercial software? The real world impact of such a FOSS project could be that far better wind turbines can be designed, manufactured and deployed than currently exist, and the fight against climate change becomes more effective; the better your wind turbines perform, and the more usable they are, the more of a fighting chance humanity has to do something against climate change. Could FOSS achieve this?
The best way to fight climate change with it is to turn it off.
This is a job for evolutionary software. Definitely.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Now that the question has been answered, let's close the topic and move on.
FOSS can solve the hunger crisis, cure all disease, and anything else your imagination wants to believe.
Reality may be different however.
Bettridge's Law says the answer is 'no'.
You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor"
You're describing Genetic Algorithms. It's a fairly old technique. It shouldn't be too hard to implement it. The problem here is not FOSS, it's computational power. You need quite a lot of CPU time to run all the simulations and evolve the solution.
Some sort of distributed computing framework like INSERT_PROJECT_NAME@home would work. But then you'd have to convince everyone to use it....
... unless it's GPL3.
no
...Such that they slice the birds into easy-to-swallow bite-sized pieces instead of mostly just pulverizing them?
Summer BBQ season is nearly upon us, after all.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
And they’re wasting tons of energy for funbux.
A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels and slowing global warming.
A massive carbon tax so that, to start with, Americans pay the same for gas as Europeans, who do just fine with that, and then keep increasing it.
That's the best thing that would work, because except for tilting the playing field the way we have to move, it lets the free market take care of how to achieve the change.
But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take politicians with brains, a conscience, and guts. So I'm not that optimistic given the garbage we currently have.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Traditional" turbine designs are already up to 80% theoretical maximum efficiency. Trying to eke that last 20% is not really going to save the planet since we're nowhere near using that much wind in the first place.
That is - if you want to get FOSS to improve tech adoption, direct it to making things more affordable or accessible, not toward having more expensive higher-efficiency, higher-complexity devices.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor" or something closer to it than what is used in wind turbines today."
That pretty much sums up machine learning/AI today. A million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare. Except it won't happen.
Slashdot was once a tech site for CS and EE news, operating systems, Linux, BSD, etc. It veered of course a couple times with the Jon Katz episodes, but was able to quickly restabilze.
These "glboal warming" stories have pretty much hijacked the content on Slashdot. It is political and completely off topic for tech news. It reeks of George Soros and other globalist one-worlders and fellow traverllers.
Please boycott the advertisers until Slashdot rights itself, if that is even possible. Slashdot is only a name, just another entry in some godless corporate log book of an anonymous holding company.
The real core who originally made Slashdot what it is have been gone for ages. Now we have pretenders using the name but the the spirit of what had made Slashdot popular and famous.
It reeks of George Soros and other globalist one-worlders and fellow traverllers.
Sounds like someone has been sucking too much Koch.
Yeah right like best to create fire is with flint and a steel.
Why not use your computer for something useful like engineering efficient rotors rather than playing games or surfing Facebook.
Nothing against FOSS, it's great, just the head up yer ass notion called climate change.
True or False?
But I use Gentoo, so... screw the climate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
Fluid flow simulation is what one might call a military grade problem - efficient and accurate ways of doing it are either protected by commercial secretcy (because CAD software to design multimillion dollar yachts and aircraft is expensive) or actual military secrecy - because the problem you're solving is the same sort of problem that's being solved (for example) when designing SSBN propellers and hulls to minimize cavitation and make the ships run silent.
But only if you quit wasting time asking about it on Slashdot and start doing it! What are you waiting for?
The whole point of a carbon tax is:
Energy != Fossil Fuels
There are other ways we can harness solar energy, and geothermal energy. Our addiction to the drug of cheap fossil fuels is preventing us from getting to those other ways fast enough.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Ask /. How can I help my local Bitcoin miner who is consuming lots of energy?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/se...
https://nikolamotor.com/one
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/mo...
https://www.arcimoto.com/vehic...
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com...
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you don't agree with spending the tax on R&D into new energy economy technologies, then you can just lower income taxes by the amount of revenue taken in by the carbon tax, or use it to start funding the universal basic income we're going to need soon because of automation and AI.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Bitcoin will help us fight climate change by saving the trees that are killed to make paper for money.
Or mining Bitcoin.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
A free software package, Tux Racer, could help in the fight against Climate Change. No, I'm not talking about the Tux Racer game as we all, ahem, normally play it. This would be a version where the player moves a cardboard cutout 'tux' down the 'screen' (a big sheet of cardboard.)
The energy savings would be immense, though Steam would lose a lot of revenue.
The computational problem is like ray-tracing, but with wind instead of light. The problem is that you need to generate turbine shapes to do the analysis, over-and-over again. The computation will involve a supercomputer; but, hey, yesterday's Cray is today's cellphone.
If you want to save the world through free and open source software, there's an easy way to do this: stop building systems that waste resources.
Don't use programming languages that spend 10 CPU cycles to do 1 cycle of work. Don't arrange things so a program is recompiled every time it is run. Write software that uses less RAM. Write replacements for spyware-laden crap. Do not support battery-burning DRM and tell them why. Encourage wired rather than wireless connections.
Stop thinking like a coder and start thinking like an engineer.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Ah yes, thinking of problems from mostly an engineering and technical perspective. I am an engineer and so traditionally came from a similar vantage point.
However, helping to encourage behavioral changes on a municipal scale can be just as important. There are commercial packages that exist, but are expensive. I'd be interested in an FOSS and potentially contributing.
Gas! Half of the American houses are heated with diesel, ain't they?
And in European old cities they still use coal to heat the tenements.
All this hysteria about gas is just to forbid people owning cars. There are many many more embarrassing things that consume fossil fuels, see above.
eg https://eawephdseminar.science... p33
in which he compares cfd results from the free software OpenFoam for a wind turbine in cfd and in reality. Military grade my arse.
I just do not believe that we humans will be able to do anything about it in the next 50 years.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Yes, so we at least know we can make the situation worse.
In this case, the design of the blade for wind turbines is only a part of the answer and good vertical axis wind turbine, needs a far more complex design to achieve really good outcomes and the blade itself, whilst important does not the whole design create. A really tricky problem to resolve but human imagination always delivers in one way or another. I find it a interesting subject and have whiled away many an hour coming up with and investigating various designs. Always puttering around with one in the back of my mind, it's an interesting subject.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Also, Can making strawberry flavored crepes help in the fight against climate change? I need an expert with moral authority to make me feel better about myself. I mean, I've never made crepes before, but I can make good pancakes with pancake mix, and I can dream you know.
It's relatively easy to make pancakes from scratch. Look up a recipe and be daring: make some and be proud!
Nah, for OP the best way to fight climate change is for him to /wrists.
Yes take a look at: http://www.solarnetwork.net/v4...
I cannot take Slashdot seriously if you continue to post this garbage.
For Bob's sake, call your local supercomputer center, or speak to the people in national research organizations. You have an ensemble of parallel optimization problems that can be run on hundreds of thousands of cores. Now how much would a per-core licensed HPC code costs? Little too much for your company maybe?
If the return on energy invested by designing a better blade is high enough, you win even if the computing time is coal powered, as you deploy many blades.
This having been said, I don't think the article writer has much understanding of the amount of computing power required for CFD to model a wind turbine individually and as part of a wind farm, if they are suggesting a million iterations. And modeling in the context of a wind farm with disrupted air flow is required, and in a variety of weather conditions.
A decent simulation requires of the order of 10**5 core hours, so we are talking 10**11 for a million simulations, or 10**13 with a decent population, or 10**11 kWh. That's assuming each design gets a full simulation, though, so you might be able to reduce that by a couple of orders of magnitude. I'm also not convinced you'd run for a million iterations, so that might knock off one or two orders of magnitude.
In any case, this isn't ML, it's a GA.
About 60 % of bitcoin mining (FOS) is done in China.
They have the most stringent money export laws, the most rich people (in total), the most computing centers, the most coal burning power plants.
And if you try to stop it, their bitcoins just go elsewhere.
Depending on the date and origin of studies, 10... 15 % of global co2 emissions are caused by IN related reasons (webserver running Apache, Wordpress,... ... ..., pcs running browsers, routers, WiFi stuff..., linux based stuff (game consoles, phones, iOT, ...)
This margin would be *much* higher with commercial sw, but FOS isn't eco friendly per definition. Quit the opposite.
an Archimedes screw approaches theoretical maximum efficiency
Go well
There is no point in hunting for a more efficient rotor design for two reasons:
1) The current designs are so near perfect efficiency that there's little to be gained for a lot of effort.
2) Efficiency of the rotor, once it's "good enough" is not a big deal. When your "fuel is free" except for the cost of the equipment to collect it, the significant measures of efficiency become "power per dollar spent on equipment" and "energy per dollar spent on maintenance and site and equipment amortization".
As with the carnot limit on how much of the energy in heat can be extracted by a heat engine, there is a theoretical limit to how much of the kinetic energy you can extract from the air (or other compressible fluid) passing through a given swept area. It is called the "Betz limit". It is16/27ths, about 59.3%. It occurs because extracting energy from the wind slows it down, reducing the amount of air passing through the mill. It works like the laffer curve in tax rates: If you take no energy as the wind passes by, you get no energy. If you take all the energy you stop the wind, so you get no energy. Somewhere between there's a percentage of extraction that gets you the maximum. For wind, that's 16/27ths.
As you approach the Betz limit you reach a point of diminisihing returns. You can throw progressively larger amounts of money into the design of your mill to get progressively smaller amounts of additional energy. Or you can spend a little extra money to just make your mill a little bigger, which lets it sweep a lot more area and collect a lot more energy.
Modern 3-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs), running at a tip speed ratio in the 6 to 7 range, get within a few percent of Betz perfection. (Higher TSR would get you a little more, but above 6 you're starting to get to where a storm could make the airflow near the tips go supersonic, which is a problem structurally.) Scaling them up gives you more power per unit cost, so the utility mills converged to giant 3-blade HAWTs.
Horizontal axis because vertical axis designs tend to be either FAR less efficient or have terrible issues with vibration (though the helical darrius seems practical for small mills). The main advantage of a VAWT over a HAWT for small (i.e. off-grid residential/farm/small business) mills is that HAWTs need to be made to track the wind but "furled" in a high wind to avoid damage, which makes them more complex and failure prone. (HAWTs may need furling, too, but they don't need tracking and they're easier to overbuild to reduce the need for furling).
Three blade because one blade (like a maple leaf) and two-blade have vibration problems when yawing to face a changing wind. Three or more do not. More blades don't buy you any extra efficIency so three is the least expensive to build.
If you want to improve wind turbines you'd do well to concentrate on less expensive construction methods, rather than trying to chase the tiny amount of efficiency that's left.
If you want to improve other aspects of renewable energy, there's more room for improvement in control, storage, photovoltaic designs, direct collection of heat, and cooling (including radiative coupling to the four-degree kelvin cosmic background temperature through the "infrared window").
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This thing is as far as I know neither commercially nor open source available. Maybe you can find some simulations programming languages but I would assume you will be writing the software.
Given you're most likely looking at writing a paper rather than developing a company, your software will have to be open source so it can be properly peer reviewed.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
https://github.com/bitcoin/bit...
1. Take any random story off the web.
2. Add a bit of technical jargon.
3. Claim it will fight Climate Change.
4. Profit!
As the fight is a social one, I doubt that this is the exception where a technical solution would work.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Improved alternators(they are not generators!) and reducing bearing friction will will bring a bigger gain.
As far as that goes better bearings would improve energy use in many areas!
So what did he say about telling the truth enough times?
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Even assuming its real, which it almost certainly is not, "climate change" (didnt that used to be "global warming", huh?) is all set to benefit me immensly. I live inland from the sea and in a fairly cold climate. I am FULLY armed, so economic migrants wont be able to attack my family, and I am well employed in a great career writing and maintaining software for other guys like me. If we need to we can even just form our own economic group to support each other on basic economics.
There's plenty of renewable energy out there and our technology to extract it is for the most part is pretty good as it is. The biggest problem is a way to store this energy efficiently and cheaply. We have no solution for this at the moment. Power grids for example need to match usage exactly with generation at every instant. Don't do that and you start seeing brownouts (causing problems with consumer devices) or worse the generator blows up. Fossil Fuels are used for the reason that they're highly compact and huge sources of energy available on Demand. It's why they've been so difficult to get away from.
Can programmers take their heads out of their asses long enough to realize they're by and large not making the world a better place? The feel-good marketing bullshit coming from every silicon valley startup seems to have led to some kind of collective delusion in the field.
is this task too complex for non-commercial software?
or is it too complex for commercial software?
In any case, commercial and FOSS are not mutually exclusive.
Yes. The "GreenCode" initiative. Start it:
Java must die. .NET must die.
Frameworks must die.
c# must die.
Javascript must die.
Write efficient code. Don't be lazy. That is how FOSS can help in the fight against climate change. Think EnergyStar ratings on appliances. Create the same standards for code.
Just think of the energy wasted by .NET and java.
Agree. The best way to fight Climate Change is to put an end to the folly that is the Information Age. No computers = no computer crime. No internet = no cyberbullying. It's that simple.
Change the title of your post from how can we fight climate change with FOSS to "Optimizing wind turbine rotor design with FOSS".
Can we be honest?
No better than 10% of the world's probably can be solved well by technology. At least as a proximate solution or tool. 90% of the world's problems are generally made worse by technology if that's all you do! Instead most problems involve boring and yucky old interpersonal people-to-people meatspace skills. The very top one: sitting down with someone and just talking, or better listening, to them and then finding the cheapest solutions which pretty much NEVER involve technology but involve behaviors, agreements, rules, norms, and fairness.
Why do I say this? Because I've been an engineer for nearly 40 years and the ONE THING that usually fucks both humanity and engineering is the misapplication of technology to problems that simply are NOT BEST SOLVED by technology. This is my direct experience as a "high priest of technology" during this time.
If you are starting with a solution and looking for a problem, you are doing problem solving 100% wrong!
if your first "go to" is technology for any problem, you are doing problem solving 100% wrong!
if your first urge is NOT to involve the simple act of talking, face-to-face, you are doing problem solving 100% wrong!
This is a case of when your own only tool is a hammer (e.g. technology), every problem looks like a nail. And that ONLY ends well, if your problem actually involves a nail.
with some assembly required
Nice links, but I don't see any real answers to the questions AC above asked....?
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Can FOSS help write a memo?
Can FOSS help add up a column of numbers?
Can FOSS get a person on the inter-webs???
The Stupid is truly Strong here.
Already blew the 1.5 degree carbon budget. On track to blow thru the 2.0 degree carbon budget very soon (2024? 2027?)
Wind power (and other alternative energy) is still good as are batteries that would allow coal plants to run at more efficient levels as are electric cars as are LED lighting solutions to reduce consumption.
If you want to address climate change you need to either find a safe (switchable) way to block incoming energy in huge quantities or you need to find a safe way (i.e. again- you can turn it off) to rapidly extract carbon.
For example, something that extracts carbon to make to rapidly make carbon fibers solid graphene would be useful.
But you are talking about needing to sequester 17 gigatons of carbon annually starting in about 10 years from now just to avoid blowing the 2.0 degree carbon budget.
Think larger.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No I don't. Been advocating for years. You should avoid stereotypes unless you enjoy looking like a partisan hack.
The whole point of carbon tax is to introduce taxation to a global population. It is but a stepping stone towards a one world (fascist) government.
(Sorry Al, it's 2018 and the polar ice caps are still there.)