Yes, it is. It is a pretty cloudy place however. Coastal Alaska isn't exactly in the sunshine belt for certain, and as you note, the latitude difference makes for a lot less intensity. Solar is bottom of the barrel fringe useful in Alaska, but the total insolation is the same. Those long winter nights would keep me from installing solar there.
In the end, I think that alternative energy systems are really best tailored to the locale. Here where I live, the Allegheny front is nearby, and a lot of wind turbines have gone up, and more planned. In some places solar is obvious. Where we vacation during the summer, panels are everywhere. In some other places, it's hard to find a local alt energy source.
There's where I get into trouble with most everyone. I'm envisioning a small nuc reactor power generator like the Ill fated SL-1, only with modernized safety features.
I don't see why the cars would have to talk to each other. After all, a safe driving system wouldn't trust anything it received from another car.
Let's assume you have a thousand cars on a section of freeway. 4 lanes of traffic. Now the cars are optimized for speed and following distance. You are in the left lane. It's rush hour and the highway is pretty busy. now you need to get to the exit. Just as turn signals allow us to let other drivers know we want to get over, autonomous automobiles will need to do the same. so they'll need to communicate, in like manner to us. The same with merging and other lane changes. We don't see much of that now, because the autonomous vehicles react to what meatbag drivers are doing, and I have a deep suspicion it will be different when there are only autonomous vehicles on the road.
And yes, it is a personal security and safety issue.
In addition - and this is an aside - I wonder how many people will have the patience to allow the cars to adjust to the traffic. Humans are by nature competitive, and since I've found that driving near the speed limit is a lot less stressful, I've also found that I'm the slowest sonuvabitch on the highway. I'm going mayb 70, and being passed by a lot of people at 90+ mph. Often in vehicles that have no business going that fast. But it has allowed me to observe that the peopel going way fast have a completely different impressino of how crowded the highways are. They think - and I am guessing alittle about th details - they highway is really crowded with idiots. Because they travel in a big clot of cars down the highway.
And here I am doing 70, and I see a clot of cars coming, kockeying with each other, messing with each other. THen thy pass me, and I have a big stretch of highway to myself. Until the next clot arrives, and also passes me. Rinse and repeat all day long. A possible good aspect of autonomous vehicles would be to smooth that stuff out.
I'm just not certain how small towns are going to pad their coffers - a different matter entirely, but nonetheless important to the small towns.
The free market is basically just an optimizer and anyone whose ever played around with one of those can tell you that you can do some very strange things to the results by adding a few constraints.
In some cases, protecting the free market from itself. Free market is good, but humans? Not always wanting a free market after they've achieved some success.
If Bambi walks onto the highway, will the car decide to sacrifice you and hit it full speed, in odrer to not have apileup behind you?
That shouldn't be a pileup unless people are tailgating behind you. The definition of tailgating is that you're driving too close to avoid a collision if the car in front slams on the brakes. So yeah, the majority of people on the highways tailgate, but will that still be the case when everyone drives a self-driving car?
These freeway pileups occur because people are making the choice to drive unsafely.
From what I've been told, autonomous cars will be able to drive at a minimum stopping distance, and given that the computers are much faster than humans ad adapting, the old rule of thumb of one car length for every ten miles per hour will be able to be reduced significantly.
So, you pick up on one snippet and apply it to everyone who speaks the actual facts? That is you attempt at a clever deflection.
My my, but after you accusing me of lying, you are a bit of a sensitive little snowflake ani't ya?
I merely gave a little throwaway statement, you accused me of making it up - lying - and I provided the citation.
Yes, Germany isn't a terribly good place to be doing solar energy. However unlike many here in the USA, they have not declared perfection the enemy of good.
Now if you wanted to have an actual conversation we could. We could talk about concentrator photovoltaics, we could discuss whether the technology is frozen at this point, with costs remaining forever the same, efficiences never to be exceeded.
We could discuss if batteries are also at their zenith.
Then we could discuss if gas and petroleum are inexhaustible resources.
Then we could discuss the actual costs of nuclear power - and I am not anti nuc, I just would like it's fans to be a little more honest about it. Okay, a lot more honest.
But something tells me you might be a little sensitive about seeing anything you disagree with, and need to insult people by calling them liars.
And of course, the issue is that once on Fox, there are a lot of people who take it as gospel truth.
In fact, Germany recieves a remarkably small amount of solar insolation, similar to coastal Alaska in the USA.
In short, I've been told in the past that in the middle of Pennsylvania - another cloudy place, that it would be impossible to use photovoltaics.
If you don't care about actual production, then what do you care about?
I care about production, but I don't pay much attention to the concept that the present situation, whatever it is, is static, and will remain so forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That sort of viewpoint would have us still using stone olive oil lamps and oxcarts, because all of the technology after that wasn't 100 percent perfect from inception.
Actually, all us evil non lefties object to is subsidies for green energy, just like we object to subsidies for fossil fuel extraction.
Odd, every far right winger I know tells me that the subsidies for oil and gas extraction are needed because the oil and gas are critical needs.
Case in point. Former Governor of Pennsylvania claimed that taxes on natural gas production would force Natural gas companies to drill elsewhere. DO I need to mention just how asinine a statement that is? Considering that even God's own Texas taxes energy production, that 20 percent or so makes for something that looks a whole lot like a subsidy.
And we gave it away.
Is giving things away part of the invisible hand of the free market? Seems to me that no matter who you are, a god fearing free marketeer, of some syphilitic inbred left of center socialist asshole, if you have a desirable commodity, you should be compensated for it. Meanwhile, they drilled like crazy for a few years, helped create a natural gas glut, and have now left, with all the jerbs they promised. Or better said, allowed dumbasses to believe they were creating.
Yeah yeah yeah, all those things look good on some power-point slides
Now that is an interesting point. Can humans, who are apparently so bad at driving, create a sysem which appears to be perfect as far as what we are being told?
Funny to see someone make fun of the way one group pronounces one word then totally fouls up the spelling of the accepted shortened version of the same word.
Not as funny as the 1990's rant "Yu spell wrung, terror yu entire argument iz wrung." Littel scuggin cow word thet yu iz.
By the way, I also made a typo on "acievement" instead of achievement. Guezz that mayks me doobly wrung.
Yes. And I would bet on a computer controlled algorithm that's been tuned over millions of miles over someone who's never been in a skid before.
Betting indicates odds and uncertainty.
But since you're sure, and all of my questions are moot, it's full speed ahead! Nary a problem anywhere, it looks like humanities first perfect and failsafe system.
How about the liberty of others to not be killed by some terribly-driving lunatic?
What are those statistics?
Its a little amusing, I chime in on autonomous driving, and I'm a luddite, screaming and yelling at those goddamned teenagers to get off my lawn, yet for EV's or alt energy, or AGW, I'm a pie in the sky progressive.
And yet, I'm not against driving aids, I have a number of them on my vehicles. I welcome many more in the years to come.
But it seems in here, anyone who dares to suggest that there might be one single flaw in the utopian dream of never piloting a car again is set upon like a wildabeest being eaten by crocodiles.
If there are no problems, then why don't we already have it? And who will be more helpful, people who say "This is awesome - full speed ahead", or people who say, "We might have a problem here"?
Any of those accidents coud have been very spectacular, and all of them would have happened in an autonomous vehicle as well.
Yes, but the car might well be better at mitigating (or even avoiding!) the accidents than you are. Remember, driving aids kick in before you even know there is a problem.
I absolutely love driving aids. My little Jeep's traction control and ABS allows me to do amazing things on glare ice. Everything but ignore centripetal force.
Lane assist is a tremendous thing. Its pretty obvious how many accidents that will eliminate.
And I can hardly wait until anti tailgating radar is standard equipment, altoghether too many people have been riding my ass so badly that they owe me at least dinner and a movie.
But the problem I see with what too many people are assuming the autonomous vehicles are going to be, which is they can kick back while the car delivers them to wherever they want to go, and not have any input is that there is so much more to it if you want that. The cars will have to talk to each other, and that means an entire wifi type system on the more crowded parts of the ride.
The resulting infrastructure will make the initial experiments today the easy part.
is a human going to respond properly to mechanical failures when they're panicking?
It is a matter of time in most cases. The idea of having enough time to react to the situation is the important thing. If I'm dozing off and something happens, the time for me to process the nature of the emergency and what to do will mean it's all over by the time I wake up.
And if I have to remain completely vigilant, ready at any moment to take over the car, hands on wheel, feet at the ready, then what's the point?
This is why I support most of the driving aids like anti tailgating radar, lane assist ( a huge one) parking assist, and others, I still think the way to keep an alert driver is to keep them in the loop, aka driving the car.
In those situations it's either the act of an ignorant fanboy (eg. worshippers of 1970s nuke tech who say we should build dozens of nukes now instead of incremental improvement then dozens of nukes that may be half-decent) or deliberate lies. Stuff like that derails discussions especially when someone like the GP only talks about a single energy source in what is supposed to be a complementary mix.
The contrariness is probably a little bit of both. I often get bitchslapped based on my ideas for modern nuc power stations, as in small, least stressed designs in many locations. That has the advantage of safer design, less loss over the lines, and strategic robustness. But no, we have to make them balls to the wall, and as few as possible. It was a lot of fun arguing with my nucE friends. Those guys I can have a good discussion with. In here it tends toward me just being called a jerk or worse. Or a scientific racist! Had to work that in.....
It's just a shame there are so many buggy whippers on Slashdot.
Meanwhile, the solar panels and wind turbines go up. Meanwhile they go on line. Meanwhile the EV's roll out. And if you dont like them, its okay to lie: http://techland.time.com/2013/...
I think this pretty much sums up the state of the altenergy deniers:
(1) It was never 'physically impossible', it was not very practical.
Depends on who you were talking to. A lot of folks I've dealt with in that past considered lead-acid cells the alpha and Omega of electric vehicles, IOW, golf carts.
It still isn't, but for the huge subsidies on both production and demand side.
We'll chat about that after the subsidies go away for all.
(2) Germany has a surplus for a few hours. For the other part of the day, they import nuclear from France and Sweden.
That's how progress works. None of this stuff spouts fully formed from the ocean like Venus, and if we demand it does, we won't get anywhere.
While once upon a time we had some things like Bell Labs doing research, modern US corporatism is too risk averse to fund basic science and startups that are as likely to fail as succeed.
But as more and more of this activity is shifted to countries who are willing to put in the basic research, we'll just sit back and become an also-ran.
I'm not even anti-nuc, but dammit, I'll wager a cup of crap that they are "free market" advocates. Those billions for that, and the taxpayers bearing the reisks of nuc plants sounds like the invisible hand of the free market is giving a reach around hand job to the nuc industry.
Not to worry. The Koch Brothers will never permit renewables to overtake oil. Jesus loves oil and will send every single advocate or developer of renewal technologies to hell after having them assraped by demons. The Koch's will give Congress and State legislatures enough hookers and blow to create a new constitutional amendment allowing alternative energy researchers to be hunted down and killed for sport.
Of course that won't happen. But I suspect that large portions of the country are becoming so anti-everything except what their paid representatives tell them they believe that we stand a pretty good chance of becoming a world backwater, possibly even to the point of slipping into the second world.
Another article talking 'capacity' but not talking about how many MWh's each source will actually produce. Capacity alone is a meaningless unit. Natural Gas is the biggest addition by far in terms of how much electricity will be produced.
First it was this is physically impossible.
then it was there isn't enough wind or solar - Germany is sunnier than the USA.
Now it's not about capacity, but how much is being produced at any given moment?
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot call 'gas' a renewable energy.
After my lunch today, I'm not so certain.
Germany is far more south than 'coastal Alaska'.
Yes, it is. It is a pretty cloudy place however. Coastal Alaska isn't exactly in the sunshine belt for certain, and as you note, the latitude difference makes for a lot less intensity. Solar is bottom of the barrel fringe useful in Alaska, but the total insolation is the same. Those long winter nights would keep me from installing solar there.
In the end, I think that alternative energy systems are really best tailored to the locale. Here where I live, the Allegheny front is nearby, and a lot of wind turbines have gone up, and more planned. In some places solar is obvious. Where we vacation during the summer, panels are everywhere. In some other places, it's hard to find a local alt energy source.
There's where I get into trouble with most everyone. I'm envisioning a small nuc reactor power generator like the Ill fated SL-1, only with modernized safety features.
I don't see why the cars would have to talk to each other. After all, a safe driving system wouldn't trust anything it received from another car.
Let's assume you have a thousand cars on a section of freeway. 4 lanes of traffic. Now the cars are optimized for speed and following distance. You are in the left lane. It's rush hour and the highway is pretty busy. now you need to get to the exit. Just as turn signals allow us to let other drivers know we want to get over, autonomous automobiles will need to do the same. so they'll need to communicate, in like manner to us. The same with merging and other lane changes. We don't see much of that now, because the autonomous vehicles react to what meatbag drivers are doing, and I have a deep suspicion it will be different when there are only autonomous vehicles on the road.
And yes, it is a personal security and safety issue.
In addition - and this is an aside - I wonder how many people will have the patience to allow the cars to adjust to the traffic. Humans are by nature competitive, and since I've found that driving near the speed limit is a lot less stressful, I've also found that I'm the slowest sonuvabitch on the highway. I'm going mayb 70, and being passed by a lot of people at 90+ mph. Often in vehicles that have no business going that fast. But it has allowed me to observe that the peopel going way fast have a completely different impressino of how crowded the highways are. They think - and I am guessing alittle about th details - they highway is really crowded with idiots. Because they travel in a big clot of cars down the highway.
And here I am doing 70, and I see a clot of cars coming, kockeying with each other, messing with each other. THen thy pass me, and I have a big stretch of highway to myself. Until the next clot arrives, and also passes me. Rinse and repeat all day long. A possible good aspect of autonomous vehicles would be to smooth that stuff out.
I'm just not certain how small towns are going to pad their coffers - a different matter entirely, but nonetheless important to the small towns.
The free market is basically just an optimizer and anyone whose ever played around with one of those can tell you that you can do some very strange things to the results by adding a few constraints.
In some cases, protecting the free market from itself. Free market is good, but humans? Not always wanting a free market after they've achieved some success.
If Bambi walks onto the highway, will the car decide to sacrifice you and hit it full speed, in odrer to not have apileup behind you?
That shouldn't be a pileup unless people are tailgating behind you. The definition of tailgating is that you're driving too close to avoid a collision if the car in front slams on the brakes. So yeah, the majority of people on the highways tailgate, but will that still be the case when everyone drives a self-driving car?
These freeway pileups occur because people are making the choice to drive unsafely.
From what I've been told, autonomous cars will be able to drive at a minimum stopping distance, and given that the computers are much faster than humans ad adapting, the old rule of thumb of one car length for every ten miles per hour will be able to be reduced significantly.
So, you pick up on one snippet and apply it to everyone who speaks the actual facts? That is you attempt at a clever deflection.
My my, but after you accusing me of lying, you are a bit of a sensitive little snowflake ani't ya?
I merely gave a little throwaway statement, you accused me of making it up - lying - and I provided the citation.
Yes, Germany isn't a terribly good place to be doing solar energy. However unlike many here in the USA, they have not declared perfection the enemy of good.
Now if you wanted to have an actual conversation we could. We could talk about concentrator photovoltaics, we could discuss whether the technology is frozen at this point, with costs remaining forever the same, efficiences never to be exceeded.
We could discuss if batteries are also at their zenith.
Then we could discuss if gas and petroleum are inexhaustible resources.
Then we could discuss the actual costs of nuclear power - and I am not anti nuc, I just would like it's fans to be a little more honest about it. Okay, a lot more honest.
But something tells me you might be a little sensitive about seeing anything you disagree with, and need to insult people by calling them liars.
First it was this is physically impossible.
then it was there isn't enough wind or solar - Germany is sunnier than the USA.
Can you provide a reference to any of those? I never heard those claims before. I think you just made them up in an attempt to sound clever.
I think I didn't make that up just to sound clever. I gave the link below in another post, but ask and you shall receive again:
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...
And of course, the issue is that once on Fox, there are a lot of people who take it as gospel truth.
In fact, Germany recieves a remarkably small amount of solar insolation, similar to coastal Alaska in the USA.
In short, I've been told in the past that in the middle of Pennsylvania - another cloudy place, that it would be impossible to use photovoltaics.
If you don't care about actual production, then what do you care about?
I care about production, but I don't pay much attention to the concept that the present situation, whatever it is, is static, and will remain so forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That sort of viewpoint would have us still using stone olive oil lamps and oxcarts, because all of the technology after that wasn't 100 percent perfect from inception.
Actually, all us evil non lefties object to is subsidies for green energy, just like we object to subsidies for fossil fuel extraction.
Odd, every far right winger I know tells me that the subsidies for oil and gas extraction are needed because the oil and gas are critical needs.
Case in point. Former Governor of Pennsylvania claimed that taxes on natural gas production would force Natural gas companies to drill elsewhere. DO I need to mention just how asinine a statement that is? Considering that even God's own Texas taxes energy production, that 20 percent or so makes for something that looks a whole lot like a subsidy.
And we gave it away.
Is giving things away part of the invisible hand of the free market? Seems to me that no matter who you are, a god fearing free marketeer, of some syphilitic inbred left of center socialist asshole, if you have a desirable commodity, you should be compensated for it. Meanwhile, they drilled like crazy for a few years, helped create a natural gas glut, and have now left, with all the jerbs they promised. Or better said, allowed dumbasses to believe they were creating.
Yeah yeah yeah, all those things look good on some power-point slides
Now that is an interesting point. Can humans, who are apparently so bad at driving, create a sysem which appears to be perfect as far as what we are being told?
Funny to see someone make fun of the way one group pronounces one word then totally fouls up the spelling of the accepted shortened version of the same word.
Not as funny as the 1990's rant "Yu spell wrung, terror yu entire argument iz wrung." Littel scuggin cow word thet yu iz.
By the way, I also made a typo on "acievement" instead of achievement. Guezz that mayks me doobly wrung.
Yes. And I would bet on a computer controlled algorithm that's been tuned over millions of miles over someone who's never been in a skid before.
Betting indicates odds and uncertainty.
But since you're sure, and all of my questions are moot, it's full speed ahead! Nary a problem anywhere, it looks like humanities first perfect and failsafe system.
And that is great heaping gobs of sarcasm.
Holy smoke AC. Most of the world would kill to have the economic prowess of little Germany.
No problem, all you need is a shared currency to keep appreciation down while you run an export economy to have a favorable balance of trade.
Huh, I thought that the invisible hand of Laissez-faire economics was the only system that could ever work. Who knew?
How about the liberty of others to not be killed by some terribly-driving lunatic?
What are those statistics?
Its a little amusing, I chime in on autonomous driving, and I'm a luddite, screaming and yelling at those goddamned teenagers to get off my lawn, yet for EV's or alt energy, or AGW, I'm a pie in the sky progressive.
And yet, I'm not against driving aids, I have a number of them on my vehicles. I welcome many more in the years to come.
But it seems in here, anyone who dares to suggest that there might be one single flaw in the utopian dream of never piloting a car again is set upon like a wildabeest being eaten by crocodiles.
If there are no problems, then why don't we already have it? And who will be more helpful, people who say "This is awesome - full speed ahead", or people who say, "We might have a problem here"?
Any of those accidents coud have been very spectacular, and all of them would have happened in an autonomous vehicle as well.
Yes, but the car might well be better at mitigating (or even avoiding!) the accidents than you are. Remember, driving aids kick in before you even know there is a problem.
I absolutely love driving aids. My little Jeep's traction control and ABS allows me to do amazing things on glare ice. Everything but ignore centripetal force.
Lane assist is a tremendous thing. Its pretty obvious how many accidents that will eliminate.
And I can hardly wait until anti tailgating radar is standard equipment, altoghether too many people have been riding my ass so badly that they owe me at least dinner and a movie.
But the problem I see with what too many people are assuming the autonomous vehicles are going to be, which is they can kick back while the car delivers them to wherever they want to go, and not have any input is that there is so much more to it if you want that. The cars will have to talk to each other, and that means an entire wifi type system on the more crowded parts of the ride.
The resulting infrastructure will make the initial experiments today the easy part.
is a human going to respond properly to mechanical failures when they're panicking?
It is a matter of time in most cases. The idea of having enough time to react to the situation is the important thing. If I'm dozing off and something happens, the time for me to process the nature of the emergency and what to do will mean it's all over by the time I wake up.
And if I have to remain completely vigilant, ready at any moment to take over the car, hands on wheel, feet at the ready, then what's the point?
This is why I support most of the driving aids like anti tailgating radar, lane assist ( a huge one) parking assist, and others, I still think the way to keep an alert driver is to keep them in the loop, aka driving the car.
In those situations it's either the act of an ignorant fanboy (eg. worshippers of 1970s nuke tech who say we should build dozens of nukes now instead of incremental improvement then dozens of nukes that may be half-decent) or deliberate lies. Stuff like that derails discussions especially when someone like the GP only talks about a single energy source in what is supposed to be a complementary mix.
The contrariness is probably a little bit of both. I often get bitchslapped based on my ideas for modern nuc power stations, as in small, least stressed designs in many locations. That has the advantage of safer design, less loss over the lines, and strategic robustness. But no, we have to make them balls to the wall, and as few as possible. It was a lot of fun arguing with my nucE friends. Those guys I can have a good discussion with. In here it tends toward me just being called a jerk or worse. Or a scientific racist! Had to work that in.....
Then we win.
One of my favorites!
It's just a shame there are so many buggy whippers on Slashdot.
Meanwhile, the solar panels and wind turbines go up. Meanwhile they go on line. Meanwhile the EV's roll out. And if you dont like them, its okay to lie: http://techland.time.com/2013/...
I think this pretty much sums up the state of the altenergy deniers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That should be an obligitory link on all of these threads.
Socialism. It'll hang on a bit longer than Communism. A bit longer.
Holy smoke AC. Most of the world would kill to have the economic prowess of little Germany.
Better look at some of the numbers before you open your mouth to insert your foot.
You spout make-belief.
(1) It was never 'physically impossible', it was not very practical.
Depends on who you were talking to. A lot of folks I've dealt with in that past considered lead-acid cells the alpha and Omega of electric vehicles, IOW, golf carts.
It still isn't, but for the huge subsidies on both production and demand side.
We'll chat about that after the subsidies go away for all.
(2) Germany has a surplus for a few hours. For the other part of the day, they import nuclear from France and Sweden.
That's how progress works. None of this stuff spouts fully formed from the ocean like Venus, and if we demand it does, we won't get anywhere.
While once upon a time we had some things like Bell Labs doing research, modern US corporatism is too risk averse to fund basic science and startups that are as likely to fail as succeed.
But as more and more of this activity is shifted to countries who are willing to put in the basic research, we'll just sit back and become an also-ran.
But if the annual fatalities drop from 99% from 30,000 to 300, that still sounds like a net win, no matter how bloody the aftermath.
And if farts were gold, we'd be stinking rich!
Aren't you also interested in seeing if the coal industry and the oil industry are able to continue without tax breaks?
http://www.taxpayer.net/librar...
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...
http://www.investopedia.com/ar...
And that's a wrap! AC down below has forgotten - or refuses to account for the huge amount of subsidies received by Coal, Oil and Natgas.
Now of course, the crowning acievement of subsidized energy Nookyalar! http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-...
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/bl...
I'm not even anti-nuc, but dammit, I'll wager a cup of crap that they are "free market" advocates. Those billions for that, and the taxpayers bearing the reisks of nuc plants sounds like the invisible hand of the free market is giving a reach around hand job to the nuc industry.
Not to worry. The Koch Brothers will never permit renewables to overtake oil. Jesus loves oil and will send every single advocate or developer of renewal technologies to hell after having them assraped by demons. The Koch's will give Congress and State legislatures enough hookers and blow to create a new constitutional amendment allowing alternative energy researchers to be hunted down and killed for sport.
Of course that won't happen. But I suspect that large portions of the country are becoming so anti-everything except what their paid representatives tell them they believe that we stand a pretty good chance of becoming a world backwater, possibly even to the point of slipping into the second world.
Brothers and sisters aren't allowed to get married, silly.
Another article talking 'capacity' but not talking about how many MWh's each source will actually produce. Capacity alone is a meaningless unit. Natural Gas is the biggest addition by far in terms of how much electricity will be produced.
First it was this is physically impossible.
then it was there isn't enough wind or solar - Germany is sunnier than the USA.
Now it's not about capacity, but how much is being produced at any given moment?
Hey - we'll get off your lawn, mister.
The tech just isn't good enough yet.
Yet being the key word there.
Is the tech going to respond properly to mechanical failures?