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To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com)
Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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Can't tell if that's a serious statement or not...
But there isn't always a single path forward... FTFS:
"Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal"
This doesn't sound like a good idea to me:
Instead, it uses excess electricity to pump water into the underground shale rock found in new wells dug for the purpose or in abandoned oil-and-gas wells. After water fills up tiny cracks in the rock, forcing more in creates pressure, which compresses shale like a spring.
I known nothing about this at all, but... won't the water come back contaminated with oil? Will that contaminated water get dumped into a lake or river? This doesn't sound like a good idea. Can someone explain?
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... are responsible for bad ideas like shitting in your mess kit.
Shareholders, CEOs, and investors are, more often, manic about asymptotic profits over nanosecond time frames.
Economies built around such shortsightedness are like train wrecks: It doesn't end well.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm willing to accept a solar and battery install from Bill Gates in my house, to help his investment in energy storage, of course.
I'm always excited about new battery technology, but aren't molten salt batteries already providing a pretty low cost, high energy density solution? Japan has been rolling them out for their wind farms, but I haven't heard anything about using them in the US.
Storage can achieve 70-80 percent efficiency with compressed air, which is fairly tech driven, but modern tech patents can achieve 60-80 percent themselves.
Even pumped water up an incline, which works both with dams (and has the lowest impact for mini-hydro) and solar water distillation, is fairly efficient. If coupled with renewables, which tend to overproduce at certain periods, this allows you to achieve 120 percent renewables, allowing for variation, and export of the stored energy.
Large trains and trucks are optimized for large-scale fuel cells, but if you want to reduce GHG emissions, you shouldn't be using methane, other than as a capture technology to remove it from escaped gasses, such as with landfills, algae, and, yes, diapers on cows (it's more of a building capture method, really).
The major missing part, as it was with renewables before, is the lack of capitol. So Gates is spot on by leveraging capital here.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm picturing a fire at a "grid-scale" lithium-ion battery farm...
I guess the fact that most new technologies are more efficient and environmentally friendly is lost on you.
... that more money to your name doesn't make you smarter. It might make you think so, though. A special case of Dunning-Kruger, etc.
Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
There are alternatives to storage:
1. Long distance HVDC transmission, to move supply to demand over a larger area.
2. Flex-pricing, to shift demand instead of shifting supply.
These will help, but you still need storage.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
We already have ideal energy storage - crude oil. We just need to stop squandering it on nonsense like SUV's and bitcoin mining.
Getting population growth negative wouldn't hurt either.
Not going to happen though.
It not being a cycle is!
E.g. gasoline is perfectly clean and renewable, if burned in a fuel cell, and its exhaust gases are compressed and sent back, to be turned into gasoline again. It just takes a lot of energy to do it. But we can do it in remote deserts with way more sunlight than we need year-round, so it does not matter that it is not instantaneous.
In general, there re two kinds of processes: Those in stable and hence infinite cycles... and those that end.
Especially not growingy let alone exponentially. Because that is called a deadl pathogen or an explosion. And both kill their host.
It is so blatantly simple and ideology-free, that it is sickening that this ia not the standard way of doing everything.
Storage allows you to make better use of energy sources that can't otherwise be scaled to match demand. Winds don't blow according to when we need air conditioning; that's why we need natural gas plants. If we could store the wind energy when the wind happens to blow, and release it when we need air conditioning, we would need less natural gas.
Another ignorant statement. The batteries are only good for so many charges. Cost of buying minus cost of limited charge/recharge cycle is uneconomic - but using old depleted car batteries is cost effective. Tesla and Prius owners are unlikely to sell back to the grid, given the retail cost of battery replacements. Hydro remains cost effective, and solar cells are retail effective, with tidal energy not bad in some places.
Solar molten salt plans depend on subsidies, but may get there.
If an investment return matters, bioreactors are profitable again now that china has stopped importing low value waste. Hydro will remain the best investment because it has base load capability, and Google knows it.
Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years but we're seeing effects on the scale of decades which is hundreds of times faster than normal. No surprise since we're adding carbon into the air that's been locked in the ground for millions of years. We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs. There's so much plastic in our environment that it's guaranteed to be locked into our fossil records now. The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
It might be a spectacular fire but, even if you put all the batteries in one place, it would be nothing like Chernobyl if something went wrong because they use a chemical relation, not nuclear, so once the fire burnt out there is no dangerous radiation hanging around for decades afterwards and lithium isn't particularly toxic so while there might be some contamination it should not be that hard to clear up.
However, the more import question is why would you put all these batteries in one place though? A far better design is to spread them out and store the power locally. Then, not only can you gain in efficiency but you also gain in reliability since if a transmission line goes down you have several hours of battery power during which you can repair it.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ...
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
This is not in dispute.
Obviously there is nothing to dispute about the fact that you are simply wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
While I am okay with new technology, I am very sure this will instead become something of a venture that will just be used like a utility in the future.
Lets just have everyone have solar on their roofs and a battery to store it and all connected to a grid with other supplementary forms of power generation to offset times when solar does not generate enough energy. Between a mesh electrical network, storage, solar, and supplementary power generation we should easily have a very fault tolerant, difficult to hack, and disaster resistance power grid.
I am sure that these guys are happy to build that... if they get to own it and charge YOU to use it.
I mean this is Bill Gates we're talking about, one way or another he plans to profit from this energy storage endeavor.
Ugly problem: Billionaires must spend time deciding what to do with their money.
Who has a better life? A surfer who pays his parents $500 per month to live in their basement, or a billionaire? A serious investigation of all the associated details may sometimes indicate that the surfer has a better life.
Maybe the surfer is not doing anything that is destructive to other people.
Bill Gates said he still manages Microsoft: "I'm there about 15 percent of the time." Even though he is rich, Bill Gates spends his time managing a company that took advantage of technical limits (People can't change operating systems easily.) to abuse people.
Examples of abuse by Microsoft and Bill Gates:
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you.
Microsoft again forced upgrades on Win10 machines specifically set to block updates (March 12, 2018)
Abusing people is a really, really ugly life.
There are better batteries which they stopped producing way back, there are apparently some companies which still produce them, but I can't seem to find a price list etc.
Nickel-Iron batteries
Lots of people trying to build them in their backyards though. These would be shiit for a car or your cellphone (energy density is too low) but for energy storage for a house it seems perfect, as long as you have enough room that is. The battery life is in decades, even with constant charging and discharging.
Why did they stop making them?
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Maybe OP simply means that in a few billion years the sun will expand and burn up the Earth by raising temperatures much higher than what's dangerous. The debate is just if we get there in 50 years or 50 million years
Why did they stop making them?
From your link: Due to its low specific energy, poor charge retention, and high cost of manufacture, other types of rechargeable batteries have displaced the nickel–iron battery in most applications.
Remember: This is supposed ro be an *ice age* that we currently live in!
But keep letting psychopaths rape you in the lacerated asshole of your^Wtheir pathetic limp human sock puppet body.
but that is because of mandates and a tiny bit from ever shrinking physics involved in the silicon race.... if it went for those mandates your tv would be running on diesel
Low specific energy is less important in stationary storage and poor charge retention is less important when talking about, say, weather-related weekly cycles and very low priced intermittent electricity sources. The fact that NiFe batteries don't use any rare or problematic materials could easily render them relevant again in the future if mechanisms for automated maintenance of the electrolyte get improved.
Ezekiel 23:20
The problem right now with solar and wind (especially wind, apparently) is that, because they are not constant or reliable, you wind up with "hot standby" power generators, generators which are consuming fuel to keep a boiler hot enough so that when you have to instantly turn on a turbine, you can (without waiting for the boiler to heat up, a process which can take hours).
This means that solar and wind right now are not "green"; behind every field of solar cells or every expanse of wind turbines is a (often coal-powered) power plant on "hot standby," wasting energy.
For solar and wind to become truly "green"--setting aside the resources used to build the solar and wind turbines to begin with--you must do one or both of two things. First, you can accept "rolling brownouts"; simply accept the fact that voltages are not constant. But this means redesigning all of the equipment which uses electricity to deal with rolling brownouts: with dips in voltage and current. And that is extremely wasteful, though for some equipment (like laptops with built-in batteries) I think you can redesign the power adapter to deal with it.
Or you can build massive energy storage. As in "capable of powering the entire grid from battery backup for hours at a time" energy storage, not the couple of seconds most battery backup systems now on the grid.
And that requires thinking about more than just stringing together a bunch of batteries together.
Clearly its a joke. Tesla uses Lithium-Ion batteries... like in your laptops. Think 18650. Old, and thus CHEAP in quantities. Panasonic makes them.. again - nothing new. So, that makes tesla more of a marketing company, which 'Mericans have become accustomed to.
I think most people would agree it would be bad if nations spent huge amounts of their people's money and curtailed standards of living just so that the elites could maintain their luxury beach homes for a couple more decades
This is already happening here on the east coast of Florida, and has been for at least 15 years. They call it "beach renourishment", but that's just a propaganda name. A more truthful description would be "sand dumping". They spend tens of millions of taxpayer money on each project which dredges and dumps sand over a total of about 2 miles of beach. Pork barrel politics at its finest, especially considering that it destroys the natural ecosystem, including the breeding and feeding grounds of the endagered sea turtle.
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Indeed. Improving electrical storage would have benefits for many applications, not just for reducing carbon emissions.
I guess the fact that most new technologies are more efficient and environmentally friendly is lost on you.
No, the realities of Global Climate is lost on YOU.
And the fact that you believe in the "technology will bail us out" fairy tale, just shows how stupid you really are.
We are not going to get a carbon neutral electrical grid without nuclear power.
Smart grids and energy storage can do a lot on making wind and solar more viable for producing reliable energy but it can't do it all. Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power. I know people will claim that wind and solar will get less expensive with advancements in technology but then so can nuclear power. We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now. We used to build a lot of nuclear power plants but we effectively stopped for four decades. Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down.
Storage also helps nuclear power as much as wind and solar. Any steam based energy source does not follow load well, whether that steam is produced by natural gas, coal, solar collectors, or nuclear fission. If we are going to add energy storage to the grid then nuclear power starts to look even better. We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.
Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear. Prices will come down for all of these energy sources in time. I see no reason to expect that the development of solar will allow for energy cheaper than nuclear any time soon. Wind is pretty cheap but it needs storage. Once we start adding storage to the grid then cheap energy sources we already have now start to look even cheaper, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. If the goal is to replace coal and natural gas then the technologies that replace them will include nuclear power.
Not using nuclear power means increased prices, brownouts and blackouts, or burning more natural gas.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I don't think my grandma can maintain solar panels on her roof. I don't think she wants to maintain batteries so that she has enough power stored up over the summer to last her the winter. Heck just in the spring she would need a large set of batteries to even out her personal usage. Maybe she could get together with a couple of neighbours and share a battery, maybe one neighbour could put up a windmill so they have an alternative. Wait, even better they could get together with even more neighbours and maybe dam a river and then add hydro to their mix, or put the solar panels in a field or on a tall building. Even better is if this group of neighbours got together with another group hundreds of km away where the weather was a bit different and the solar and wind production between all of them might be more even.
Solar, batteries and everything else will always be better and easier to manage if we create a large grid. I can manage batteries and solar panels but guess what my time is worth so much more doing other things that it is worth it to me to pay someone else (say an electric utility) to manage them.
Unless we reach a tipping point. in which case it doesn't matter what we do, we will all be fucked. After that the best we can do (as a species) is try ride out the storms, the droughts, and hope that some of us make it through the next phase, which is worse btw, another ice age. We may survive as a species (I think) but our civilization will be back in the dark ages.
For whom? Do you honestly think mega corporations like the petroleum / oil industry are just going to roll over and play dead because something better came along? I know it's just conspiracy theory talk, but how many people have "disappeared" when they showed up with a car that could run on water?
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
I bet you are one of those people who doesn't bother to recycle because "They will do it afterwards, why must I bother!". Sadly you are wrong, they don't, it goes into a landfill and gets buried. Even places that do recycling and fetch your nicely separated recyclables don't bother trying to recycle it if you haven't cleaned it properly first. They simply chuck it into the landfill.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Are you referring to the fact that the sun is getting brighter at a rate of about 1% every hundred million years? That is true, but has nothing to do with the time scale of human civilization.
Eventually temperatures will rise to and exceed the levels we've been told are bad, it's simply a matter of how quickly they get there.
Yes, in a few hundred million years we may need to worry.
I think you and headwind are talking about different things.
You are talking about eutectic salt thermal energg storage: https://energydesignresources....
He is talking about molten-salt electrolyte batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Completely different things.
They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
Yes Mr. Pedant, over a timescale of multiple tens and hundreds of thousands of years that's obviously true.
I thought it was understood that the time frame under discussion is the one which climate alarmists talk about which is the next few hundred to a thousand years following our relatively recent emergence from an ice-age.
Thanks for trying to muddy the waters though, that's what's needed for people to come together on rational strategies.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
Y'all got trolled. Have you never seen the idiotic shit ~110010001000 posts in every story about Tesla? He's clearly hoping his shorts don't bankrupt him.
You're dragging in a climate effects that works over multiple thousands of of years, whereas man-made climate changes works over a few centuries. And you're accusing the opposition of muddying the waters. Man, that is Trump-level projection.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
The bold part is wrong (unless you are referring to the sun exploding into a red giant). So why are you thinking I'm mudding the water?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I said that Bill Gates apparently spends part of his time being abusive. Maybe there are other things he does that are helpful: Cascade Investment.
I did not criticize the "other billionaires".
I guess the fact that there are more people every day and they want the same things as us
Most of the industrialized nations these days are no longer at replacement level for births.
Population of the earth as a whole is still growing slightly, but at this point mostly in third world regions who do not want "the same as us", they are have greatly reduced needs compared to new first world citizens.
Earth is a finite, closed system.
Sun says NOPE for all practical purposes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for the excellent link: Cobalt mining for lithium ion batteries has a high human cost.
Also, lithium ion batteries age and lose storage capacity. They are very expensive to buy and replace.
That is an example of an issue I mentioned. Always examine all the surrounding information.
This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand.
That is not so simple, climate has quite an inertia, and true the Earth was worm in the past but not with 7+bln people mostly leaving at the coastal areas. There are estimated maps available online, which shows coastlines depending on average temperature increase.
There is no need to impose hardship on anyone when the solutions are more desirable on their own.
Yes, that what we always worry about - the hardship of coal industry. The fact that green-energy industry employs people the same way, giving additionally savings due to clean environment benefits on health, not to mention costs of rebuilding coastal cities or relocating people due to floods somehow are not mentioned.
Mod XXongo up.
That's strange. You made 27 posts on a Tesla story a couple of days ago, all of them attacking Musk and his cars.
27 comments on one Tesla story
How come you are now supporting his technology?
There should be a -1 Insincere mod just for you.
Tesla did use 18650 cells, but their new factories and cars use the new and bigger 21700 cells.
#DeleteFacebook
True Believers will die from old age convinced we're a decade or two away from the Apocalypse.
Why did they stop making them?
They didn't. But their price to performance for most applications isn't very good so there have never been a lot of them. They are expensive, they have relatively low energy density and low specific power, they charge slowly and discharge slowly (not good for large sudden power draws), they product a lot of hydrogen requiring ventilation, their charge characteristics are challenging with solar inverters, they require frequent and routine inspection and maintenance to maintain performance, and they are very bulky and heavy.
They have their uses and have been used in specialized applications for a long time. But there are better options out there for most use cases.
The battery life is in decades, even with constant charging and discharging.
Only with very diligent maintenance. They aren't very good for applications like solar.
None, since that never happened? Water is the low-energy waste product of many chemical reactions. You might as well try to burn ashes.
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
Newer AND bigger?
quote>Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
Cost has a lot more to do with scale than it does anything else. And there isn't just one type of Lithium Ion battery out there. Li-Ion is a family of battery chemistries with varying performance and price points. There is no fundamental reason to believe Li-Ion batteries cannot be made for reasonable cost given sufficient volume and advances in chemistry.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
People are doing just that. But do not discount the economic value of standardizing on a common technology even if it isn't optimal for a given use case.
I thought North Korea can use this, or any country that has some mining and heavy industry but not much anything else yet want to do everything themselves. Well, that leaves North Korea as the only candidate country I know of. That the battery is reliable and robust under abuse is great.
But if the production is too energy intensive I think that defeats the point. They have fairly cold winters too...
It is time we start to thing long term and strategically. Other wise just let the nukes fly now and get it over with.
We ether become part of the solution, or were part of the problem.
This is how we start, and this is how we do it.
He's referring to ice ages. We're coming out of one. Then we'll be going into another one. Humans have experienced several of these.
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"like China did with their one child policy"
And look how well that worked! Now it's a country full of spoiled brats who are used to getting what they want.
China finally woke up and is trying hard to reverse that policy, but sadly not before WAY too many spoiled brats made it into the population.
We have not even begun to see the problems that policy is going to bring to the whole world, not just Chine.
Remember - it's kids who are used to getting anything they want. The rest of the world is in for a world of hurt.
Here is a company that will sell you a complete system. Various sizings with prices included. You correctly hit on their biggest benefit which is that they take abuse well, but their cons make them not all that worthwhile for almost all other applications. Low specific energy, heavy, poor charge retention, and cost of manufacture. Also each cell has a fairly low max discharge rate compared to other batteries of similar capacity. So at present they really are only good for home level renewable storage where space isn't a huge concern. For grid level storage there are better cheaper solutions like sodium-sulfur batteries which would be better for grid operators to use.
Time to offend someone
Current rates of change are still dwarfed by those in the Younger Dryas.
Ya ya ya, it was a non-global event, for those 1,300 years, sure it was.
This is why I'm not worried about climate change getting out of hand.
It already has.
On population control: Bring that up around the wrong crowd and you get pounded into oblivion with insults and claims that you're trying to make the economy collapse on itself because without new revenue generators (babies) continuing to be produced faster than past generations fall off the buying cycle (die) entire industries will be forced to shut down. And if the money stops flowing upwards, we're ALL fucked.
Or so the theory goes.
The Earth has been warming for 10-12 thousand years. Since the last major glaciation. Yes. The Earth would be warming without humans.
Justify your statement. Prove that the Earth would not have warmed from the last glaciation without humans being present.
Whenever someone has to add the phrase "this is not in dispute" or "everyone agrees" or "accepted by all" or "proven", you absolutely know, without dispute, that what was just said is NOT agreed by everyone.
Rarely do you see the words "The earth is round. That is not in dispute." But nearly every time someone talks about climate change or global warming, they are compelled to add some claptrap. It is simply Debate 101 -- take the smarter-than-thou road to belittle your opponent.
Sigh. Unfortunately it makes the rest of what is said be judged as coming from an sanctimonious blowhard.
That will need energy storage too.
Do the math.
The 1% are not willing to give up anything for anyone else, nevermind everyone else on this "doomed" planet.
We need to kill the 1% with more poison Chnese drugs and personal assassinations. Its the only hope for change.
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It's became blindingly obvious that the people who kept telling us it was a crisis weren’t acting like it was a crisis. They kept their big houses, SUVs full of bodyguards, and private jets. They’re like fervent abolitionists who never got around to freeing their own slaves.
Nature on average is very slow giving time for living things to adapt and change. Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years
Temperature drops can be very fast during each wave of glaciation in our current ice age. Temperature rises are what's typically slower, although there are some spikes in the ice core records.
We're already causing such a huge animal extinction event that it's big enough event to match the extinction of dinosaurs
Maybe it will go that far, but it hasn't yet. Mostly we're affecting other species by taking land for our needs.
I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
I'm not sure they should. At any rate I'm sure that people should decide democratically, not have any reduction in standard of living imposed on them by some aristocracy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yep! Probably a new flavour with less sugar and no HFCS, too!
#DeleteFacebook
Energy storage allows the purchase of cheap, low-efficiency popcorn solar cells and whatnot to charge on sunny days. It also allows long-distance electricity with inefficient loss because who cares when the sun is doing it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Climate change is suppose to occur on the scale of thousands of years but we're seeing effects on the scale of decades which is hundreds of times faster than normal.
I keep hearing this but never really sat down to think what this means. Let's imagine this means the expansion of the tropical climate towards the poles.
I grew up on a farm and my dad would rotate crops like any modern farmer would. To do this we'd have equipment for the planting and harvesting of crops like alfalfa, corn, and soybeans. Just for harvesting this meant a combine harvester with a bean head and a corn head, and a "haybine" (so called as it was a kind of combine for alfalfa and other hay type crops). We also had balers and such for bringing in the crops. This equipment wears out in a few decades like most anything else. Often the farmers will trade in equipment before its worn out completely so they can get something bigger and better. Those that buy the used equipment maybe someone in another state as this kind of equipment can be very expensive and putting it on a truck for the best price can be profitable.
So, assuming the climate is shifting on a scale of decades we'll see farmers that used to rotate corn, beans, and alfalfa like my dad did have to at some point have to stop growing beans and instead rotate in something like wheat. Maybe in the time of a young 20-something farmer today seeing in the next 40 or 50 years of working the same plot of land see the crops they grow be completely different than what they started with. During that time the farmer would have had to swap out his equipment three or four times over and maybe have only a small tractor he keeps for sentimental reasons as the same thing he started with. Also in this time the farmer would have done things like install irrigation, put in drainage ditches, or made other changes to the land itself.
But that's just farming, what about things like forests and other wild areas? A tree can't simply walk away. That's true but trees of all kinds are able to survive through floods, fires, and droughts. They spread seeds by wind, water, and animals that eat their fruit. A tree doesn't move but a tree line does in fact move. Assume a tree lives as long as 50 years. Assume that this tree matures to where it is a prodigious producer of seeds in 10 or 15 years. In the lifetime of a single tree natural processes will spread those seeds miles around, a single tree in a prairie can turn into a forest in 50 years.
Sea life moves, adapts, and shifts quite well on the scale of decades. We have protected areas around the most sensitive areas of the sea already to protect this life. The unprotected areas still have lots of life in them. This life may have shifted because of mining, fishing, and farming, but there is life in the sea yet.
I started with assuming that global warming meant simply the shifting of tropical areas to the poles but it's not that simple. As the climate changes the local climate in a given area may be in fact much warmer/cooler, drier/wetter, or whatever. This produces areas for plant and animal life to move to and adapt for.
In short, I'm not seeing anything to get all that alarmed about. We can adapt to the shifting climate and the wildlife can adapt to the shifting climate. Does this mean we do nothing? Of course not. Just as the hypothetical farmer shifts the crop he grows over the years so must we all adapt. We should continue to reduce, recycle, and reuse. People seem to forget just how far we've come. Does anyone even talk about acid rain any more? Well, outside of communist hellholes like China?
I reject your premise that nature cannot adapt to the speed of current climate change. As proof of this I can point to all kinds of examples around the world. I know plenty of people can point to barren places as "proof" of the opposite but this is always a temporary situation. Return to this same barren place in 50 years and it will quite likely have been replaced with wildlife again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. ..
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
You're not really disagreeing with him. It will still swing back and forth, regardless of human activity. It would still be going up right now, regardless of human activity. The speed at which it goes up matters, though.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But storage of what? Winding down the fossil fuel economy means more than just making bigger batteries. You still need an energy source, otherwise you're just standing still.
Look up "duck curve".
Solar panels produce the most power mid-day and produce little/no power in the evening... when people get home and start cooking dinner. So if all these new storage devices do is 'time shift' the generated solar power by 6-12 hours, that will be immensely helpful.
They pool their money together to get the first dumbass to sell out, so Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson can enslave humanity even more.
Whenever you see billionares pooling their resources together, it's a huge red flag for:
1. enslaving yourself more
2. doing to exact opposite of what their stated goal is.
However, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson are merely underling boot lickers
Let me rephrase the question - perhaps I was not specific enough. If there is a battery that can be used for stationary storage, which has a LOT more recharge cycles and does not have to be replaced every 2~5 years, why are they trying to replace them with a clearly inferior product? But the same sort of question is "Why do they glue cell phone / tablet batteries into the devices, forcing you to replace the entire device? " MONEY. Fuck the environment, fuck you and me, the corporations want their revenue stream. Same can be said (unfortunately) for a lot of other things, repealing net neutrality comes to mind. But now my question is rhetorical, since I answered it myself.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
It's a great start, 1 billion for that group is such a small number though, for Bezos alone it's less than 1% of his net worth. Why not invest 1 billion EACH, then another 1 billion EACH giving away free solar and wind installations for schools, libraries, and parks, get the ball moving faster...
What I find obnoxious about this is this should be a government project for the people. But even Gates and his friends pay the minimum tax so they can do their own thing with their Dukes/Duchess mindsets. Worse, they will "own" it when it is completed and can become even richer if it succeeds. Unbridled capitalism at its best. Time for a french revolution.
Erm, isn't this a problem all over the world, Millennial's who grew up with helicopter parenting and living on their cell phones? It's not just China facing this problem.
The real reason China "woke up" was because they realized that they had an aging workforce nearing retirement, with not enough replacements. That is also why they did a lot of stuff by hand instead of automating as much as they could, they had the manual labor workforce to pull it off. Now China is frantically trying to automate stuff that was done manually, because there are not enough people to do it, and a shortage of labor also drives up wages, which increases prices and makes their products no longer as competitive. It's got fuckall to do with spoilt children.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Actually I think Bob the Superhamste hit the nail on the head. There are better alternatives. Perhaps I should put my tinfoil hat back on.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Yes, absolutely. But that's some tremendous amount of storage needed. So I don't think it's much viable yet except for off-grid people.
See for example the large Tesla battery installation in Australia, it has good power capacity - watts, megawatts - but relatively little energy capacity. It's still tremendously useful in improving the local grid.
More storage is better but time shifting by several hours is not much practical, it'll be done but not to shift an entire "duck" to tens millions of people, in my opinion.
So you still need to mix solar, wind, hydro, long distance HVDC to mix the wind etc. over large areas, probably some decades of nat gas use to come though the less the better...
Lithium ion batteries? They on the way out man. There are people at universities and independent labs close to production of batteries that will make everyone forget lithium ion like we forgot lead acid.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Those with no counter argument and/or ability to express any such resort to knocking down strawmen and schoolyard name-calling just as you've done. [slow golf clap]
Way to keep it classy, Bro.
I would expect NK to be getting their resources on the common market. Really the only way to keep the peace.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I think it is mostly a design consideration to reduce manufacturing costs and allow more freedom to engineers and designers.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
space usage is a major fucking concern at my home.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The best alternative is probably 250 million electric cars with their 100kWh batteries. My back of the envelope calculations (250 million cars, 125 million households, ~30kWh/day/household) means that's enough storage to run the entire residential load for almost a week.
Other interesting thing about cars, is that they tend to congregate where the people are, which is often where the power use is.
I'm already storing my extra energy in random lumps of coal.
Flex pricing is just “serve the rich” and “make the poor not be able to afford it, thus lowering their standard of life, making them practically poorer”.
You can’t shift demand, just strangle it.
I mean I’m pretty ok with it I guess, but let’s call a spade a spade.
Sweaty Javier still wants AIr conditioning weather he can afford it or not.
The best alternative is probably 250 million electric cars with their 100kWh batteries. My back of the envelope calculations (250 million cars, 125 million households, ~30kWh/day/household) means that's enough storage to run the entire residential load for almost a week.
Other interesting thing about cars, is that they tend to congregate where the people are, which is often where the power use is.
Haven't you been following the self-driving car hype? By then nobody will own cars anyway as they'll be all be autonomous and continuously driving themselves about while people hire them via apps.
Then having a more energy dense solution would be a better option. I did qualify my original statement when I said where space isn't a concern. Putting them up in the rafters, if conditions would allow that, may be an option in which case you would be making use of otherwise unused space. Even there I'm not sure if the environmental conditions would be appropriate for them.
Time to offend someone
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
If your investment strategy is that you've been going short before the stock goes up, and now that it went up you're going long, you're doing it backwards.
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy
Actually we know how to solve this. Education, especially of women.
It results in women having far fewer children, to the point where many first-world nations are below replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman (1 to replace the woman, 1 to replace the man, and 0.1 for infertility and death before reproduction).
France is at 2.01, US is 1.84, UK is 1.81, Germany is 1.5, Japan 1.46. Their populations are stable or growing only because of immigration (except Japan, which shuns immigrants).
In Africa, programs to educate girls have resulted in many countries going from about 5 children per woman to about 2.
Just keep teaching, and it will work out.
Storage is a big part of the solution.
A gas turbine can spin when demand is high, and slow down when it is low.
Wind turbines don't work that way. They spin when the wind blows.
FTFY.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Not really. If you plot the curves of solar and wind, it closely matches the actual power consumption of end users.
Really? So demand for electricity varies according to the wind with more electricity being used on windy days than on calm ones? Not to mention that usage will have to drop to zero on a calm night.
I think there is some averaging going on in whatever comparison you are referring to and to average out fluctuations in power consumption and generation you need storage.
Wouldn't really hurt us to live a simpler life that didnt demand a gigawatt of power for a family of four.
Apart from the fact that you are about 6 orders of magnitude off I think your concept of a simpler life is not actually any simpler. It's far simpler to buy groceries once a week and store them in a fridge or freezer. It's simpler to use electric lights instead of oil lamps and candles (not to mention safer). It's a lot simpler to have a central water or air based heating system that uses electric pumps/fans to circulate air instead of having to have fires in each room that need regular deliveries of coal or wood. Hot water heaters and electric cookers are far simpler than heating water or cooking using a fire.
Going without electricity is NOT a simpler life - it's far, far harder.
Just be patient for PV to get cheaper until you can fill a desert with it. There's still lots of room for it to get cheaper.
That's economists. Meanwhile cornucopians will say more people will mean more innovation, will mean better lives. While liberals will say you're racist.
What do you do with countries which are beyond the tipping point such as Burundi? Where overpopulation already makes any chance of developing a decent economy a pipe dream and TFR is 6?
I see only three solutions for a country like Burundi, mass displacement of people which risks destabilizing any country they move to and setting it on the same path, Malthusian collapse or some kind of top down imposed limit on their population growth. The last one seems to me it would cause the least human suffering, shame "human rights" make it a non option.
When filthy alberta shale oil brings in a big return, he does that (so massive is his personal and his save-the-world "foundation"'s investment, that canada raised the % stake that a foreigner can own in one single company - just for his g8zness!)
Of course, batteries will be a huge long term return, that's obvious... And the mega-rich who can afford to get the inside track on this will be shoveling the profits, down their profit-holes, while venting bilious liquids slowly down their avaricious chins...
very sad.
The other issue is that I'm not sure if people can honestly sacrifice their standard of living even slightly to accomplish a reversal until it practically blows in their front door.
That's a false dichotomy.
We can both improve our standard of living and reduce the impact we've had on the environment. We do this with nuclear power. Perhaps in the future we will have another choice but right now the choice is petroleum (and the effects that has on the environment), reducing our standard of living, or nuclear power. I may have just given my own falsifiable set of choices but you've only given the first two in my list, oil and ecological disaster, or wind and sun and reduced quality of life.
There is a third choice and ignoring nuclear power as that choice means misery.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Did Micro$oft recall Melinda Gates to do their latest super-crappy Hotmail/Outlook PoS interface? I believe she must be the unholy architect behind it?????
Bill Joy is getting into the act with polymer/solid state batteries.
When did Slashdot get a "-1 I don't understand science" mod? I've been seeing this more and more, where simple factual statements get modded down.
Temperature record, meet the industrial revolution.
5000 years of cooling prior to the 1800s say otherwise, but I'm sure you'll have some explanation for it.
That's strange. You made 27 posts on a Tesla story a couple of days ago, all of them attacking Musk and his cars.
27 comments on one Tesla story
How come you are now supporting his technology?
There should be a -1 Insincere mod just for you.
That's a short seller or a troll for a short seller. They have gotten crushed lately on their TSLA shorts but at the time still had a chance of not being completely destroyed. Hey 110010001000, how's that TSLA short doing for you today, or are your PUTs worthless instead? Probably didn't realize an option's price could go negative did you...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
What do you do with countries which are beyond the tipping point such as Burundi? Where overpopulation already makes any chance of developing a decent economy a pipe dream and TFR is 6?
I see only three solutions for a country like Burundi, mass displacement of people which risks destabilizing any country they move to and setting it on the same path, Malthusian collapse or some kind of top down imposed limit on their population growth. The last one seems to me it would cause the least human suffering, shame "human rights" make it a non option.
A Rhonda like genocide is a possibility as those are the same conditions that caused that tragedy. Does that count of a Malthusian collapse?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
While I actually agree with you, the problem is that the people in power do not want an educated populace, so a systemic destruction of the education system has been carried out. And not just where I live. Before all you needed was a high school education to get a decent job. Now if you don't have a degree you are going to have trouble getting into the workforce. My wife decided to change careers in her late twenties, with no work experience she had to move to the other side of the country to find work (which luckily was where we met). And that was ages ago, it's worse now.
But now we have an ineffective education system, math's teachers who don't know math. English teachers who can barely speak english. Out of this huge failure they are ejecting students (who barely have to attend class to get an automatic pass, regardless of their marks) and we have totally destroyed any benefit of getting through high school. So people don't. They get pregnant and drop out of school, because then they get government grants. Want more money, get more pregnant. This behavior would be "fine" if it was a small part of the demographic doing it, but when it's a large part things get a bit sticky. Currently the unemployment rate where I live is somewhere around 26%, and personally I don't trust the figure, besides that, when a large portion of the female population decide to live off of the state you are going to get high birthrates, and it's sponsored by ME because I pay my taxes. So my question is, how do you teach people out of that when getting an education is pointless, and there is a big incentive to keep breeding?
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
The activities of man are a statistically insignificant factor in climate change. The purpose of the "climate change" meme is to extract more taxes from willing liberal/progressive/socialist sheep.
..equiped to deal with a transnational crisis without a gaurentee of profit? Government has repeated demonstrated the ability to look beyond profit, private enterprise? Yeah not so much!
Ild say YOUR assumptions are the ones needing a check, and take that rich man's cock out of your mouth while you're at it.
This isnt about fixing our planet, its about being able to steal enough energy to live in orbit once things really go to shit here in 50 years.. all those rich bastards are planning to still be alive then too because its all about them.
Millions of those gender-skewed boys have grown up in a culture that ACTIVELY encourages them to be gay because there is only one chinese woman for every eight of them.
What a GREAT culture! Sooo #1!!
Youre an Amerikuk. We can tell. No need to keep spelling it out all the time you mongoloid.
Engineering school is as dangerous to the human mind as religious school. Put em together and you have only the very best terrorists money can buy!
You can't help people who do not want help. Most countries do want help, and are already bringing their birth rate down.
There will always be outliers. They will "fix" the problem through famine and strife. About the only "good" news is so far it looks like that will be mostly contained within the countries that fail to fix the problem.
Flex pricing would inevitably induce investments into energy storage on all levels: producer, distributor, and down to the level of each individual consumer. However, first to come will take the lion's share and than the rest will have too little to gain from procuring energy storage, unless they invest in local power harvesting as well, but once big guys reach equilibrium, perhaps it will be cheaper for little guys to just trade with grid (which will be able to absorb fluctuations at marginal price hit) then to keep their own batteries. On the other hand, once the monopolization kicks in, it will be once again prudent for consumers to install their own storage (and to hide it cleverly from captured government's enforcers).
Most people buy a new phone before their battery needs replacement. It is also easier and cheaper to produce a phone with an enclosed battery.
What they could do though is make the battery better and more expensive so you have an incentive to use it in your new phone that you bought without a battery. Although that would require some sort of battery standard.
What Billie and his buddies are betting on is that governments will force taxpayers and ratepayers to pay for this storage, making it a sure thing even if it is not economically feasible on its own. It's required by the dominant religion.
The flow battery has already been tried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc–bromine_battery
JCI spun off its ZBB unit as ZBB Energy which is now known as Ensync and will probably go bankrupt in early 2019. ZBB Energy/Ensync has never made a profit in its ~20 years of existence and accumulated deficit is closing on $300M
It may be calm where you are, but over a region, there tends to be enough generation.
Actually, that has been shown not to be true for continental-sized regions. There was a study done in the UK several years ago that looked at this and discovered that over a region the size of Europe there was a high degree of correlation in wind patterns. So if it were calm over the UK then the chances are that while there might be some wind in other areas of Europe it would not be very much: the amount of wind was correlated over very large areas. The conclusion was that while regional sharing gains you something it is not much and nowhere near enough to provide a stable source of power. You have to have storage.
It would still be going up right now, regardless of human activity./iY ... and especially winter "peak lows" (if you can say that) would be 30 degrees lower than they are right now.
No it would not, it would be stable
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.