The odds of having a significant lull in wind across the entire country is actually very high
The claim was across North America. We're not talking, say, the UK here. The US and Canada are already well connected, and just the US alone is massive. There's not even a single time that is "evening" in the US, as the east coast is three hours later than the west coast. Add in windy western/eastern Canada and Alaska and you get two more time zones.
At any given time, in the US alone, there's 2-3 fronts crossing it west to east, plus significant northern/southern differences and added effects from the jet stream, oceanic systems, etc.
Blustery and multi directional wind conditions severly impact wind output.
"Multi-directional"? Sounds like you're talking near-surface winds, which have no applicability to commercial wind turbines, which are well above the turbulent boundary layer. And you size the nameplate capacity for how "blustery" (I assume you mean how high the windspeeds in your area tend to be) your area is. A typical profile is slightly-more-than-cubic rise from the minimum speed to ~25mph (at height), roughly constant from there to ~55mph or so, then reduced/stopped generation thereover. So as a severe storm moves over, turbines in the most intense parts of the storm may be shut down (feathered/braked), but the entire surrounding region is at 100% capacity.
Good wind sites with steady winds that make sense for wind farms are not everywhere
Nor do they have to be with a HVDC grid. You can shunt power from one part of the country to the next. No, there is not a "tremendous cost"; the estimated cost for a nationwide network is about 0,3 cents per kWh, saving about 1,1 cents per kWh in peaking/generation hardware. The lines themselves are actually cheaper per unit power than AC lines, and they don't need to fan out to cover a whole region like AC does; HVDC moves in large jumps between nodes and transfers power to/from local AC grids. The substations actually cost more than the lines. And the US already uses HVDC substations to share power between its disjoint AC grids.
Listen, you don't have to take my word for it, there have been many peer-reviewed studies on the subject that say the same thing: this isn't a problem. It's economical with today's tech at today's prices. And it is thus going to keep moving in that direction of its own momentum even if all aspects of the technology each stagnate.
Lastly: they're called wind turbines, not windmills. Wind turbines are where wind energy is captured by spinning a generator. Windmills are where the wind is captured for direct mechanical power, such as pumping water or grinding grain.
I guess I'd put it this way: I like my internal hardware Japanese but my connectors and casing Soviet.;) Low tech and heavy, but able to survive 30 years bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck in Kazakhstan.
How do you break a headphone jack or plug? I doubt they'd break if you hit them with a hammer. Okay, if you put the jack side in a vise, then hit the other with a heavy hammer blow, you'd probably bend the pin. But it'd probably still fit in and out bent and still work.
No kidding. This year at New Years I wrote "2016" in big letters and threw it into a 2-story-high bonfire just so I could send it to hell personally. Next year I hope 2017 gets a proper burial with honors;)
I dunno. I live in Iceland and we're a very aggressively metric country, to the point that windspeeds aren't even measured in km/h, but meters per second. In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of one thing at all where imperial measurements are used.
And that thing is screen sizes, in inches. And I understand it's that way in other countries too - for example, I've been told that in Japan, the only two things they use inches for are pizza and screen sizes.
Hmm, now that I think about it, we use inches for pizza also. Hmm, let me do a search to see if I can came up with some others. Let's see... I guess tires too, yeah... Oh, and Subway sells their sandwiches in inches, but they're a US company and all of that stuff is standardized the world over... And I guess if you want to go that far, when working on cars that were made in the US, you have to use imperial-measure tools...
I wish there was a better way to quantify the durability of phones. Something akin to crash test ratings. You can get water resistance and dust resistance for phones... add scientifically measured standardized scratch, bend and shatter resistance tests.
And yes, while I think that it's unfortunate that they're doing this just to feed a hungry 4k screen (I'd much rather just not have the 4k screen), and also that they're shrinking the width ("Meh"), kudos to them for bucking the "must get thinner every time!" trend.
Your headphone example is not only a great example of sacrifice in the pursuit of useless thinness, but it's a great example of the sacrifice of durability, too. I've had many USB ports and USB plugs break over the years, but never in my life had headphone jacks or plugs break. I've had the headphones and their cords break, but never the plug or jack. Because it's a thick solid piece of metal plugging into another thick solid piece of metal. That sort of thing is what I want in my ports, I don't give a rat's arse that it adds half a dozen grams to the device's weight.
And likewise, for that incentive of ditching it - pushing people towards going wireless with their earbuds - for Thor's sake, the last thing I want to have to deal with is another piece of household electronics to charge. You've got my support when you have an long-range wireless charging standard in place that everyone has agreed that they're going to move to. Not a second before then.
And so long as you're wired, it should be kept analog, because that gives you the cheapest earbuds and removes any DRM/lockout/incompatibility/etc fears from users.
A fun thing about solar thermal plants is that it's easy to integrate a peaker directly into them, using natural gas to generate steam when there's not enough solar heat and demand is high. SEGS was the first large scale plant I'm aware that combined both solar and natural gas, although there's a lot of them now.
The odds of the weather across all of North America being cloudy are virtually nonexistent. Power systems don't ever guarantee 100% uptime (not today, not in the future), because that involves planning against events that are finite but absurdly improbable. You plan for whatever 99,9+% uptime targets that you deem appropriate, with plans for how to fail gracefully. A single front does not stretch the entire width and height of North America. But nonetheless, diversity in power sources is good. Low pressure systems tend to bring clouds, but they also bring wind - just like how wind peaks at night, in contrast to solar's daytime peak. Also, peak solar seasons vary a bit from region to region, while wind seasonal peaks vary greatly from region to region (in the US, the west coast has a summer peak, while the central and eastern US have a winter peak).
Don't take my word that you can achieve statistically significant uptime without unrealistic peaking costs - read any of the studies on the subject. There've been a lot of them. It requires no new tech and no storage - although those have the potential to make things even cheaper and easier.
Beyond peaking and storage, you have entire industries where their costs are predominantly driven by electricity costs. Such industries are often quite willing to engage in curtailment agreements with power companies in exchange for cheaper rates. Which basically doubles as peaking. Here in Iceland, for example, we have aluminum and silicon smelters that import all of their raw materials, and export almost all of their products; it's worth it to ship everything to and from a remote island just for the cheap power. And boy do they gobble it up - even the smallest of the aluminum smelters uses more power than all homes and businesses combined. And beyond time-shifting of entire industries, there's timeshifting for particular hardware units in other industries. For example, chillers rarely run 24/7, and can also be timeshifted.
I'll reiterate that I think diversity is important. Picture a 100% solar world in which you have even intercontinental power transmission, ultra-high voltage DC doing hops of thousands of kilometers at a time. All of North America interconnected, running into Siberia and China from Alaska, to South America through Central America, and to Europe through Greenland and then Iceland (where there's already a lot of prep work underway for power lines to the UK). You have the whole planet equallizing you out and timeshifting - virtually no peaking/storage at all required. All well and good!.... until a major volcano goes off. When Laki here went off in 1783, the huge quantities of gases it kicked out altered the global weather so much that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans. Not from clouds, but a global stratospheric haze layer. There was plenty of wind that year, mind you, but very little sun! Being single-source dependent leaves you vulnerable. Regardless of what that source is.
If your "peaker" was a high capital source like nuclear, yes. But nuclear's not used for peaking, fossil plants are. And the majority of the costs of a fossil plant are the fuel, not the capital costs for the plant. A fossil peaker costs about $1/W in capital costs, compared to about $1,50/W for a new solar or wind plant. How much you can share that peaker depends greatly on your particular power environment, anywhere from 1:1 (every watt of nameplate wind/solar needs a watt of backup) to a tiny fraction of that.
Indeed, and that's exactly what China does. Their HVDC / HVAC lines run almost exclusively from the interior to the coast, bringing power from worthless land to the power hungry urban centres.
No. But it's not prohibitively expensive, generally adding a couple cents per kWh to your total costs**. The amount of peaking/storage required depends on a lot of factors, including climate, diversity of generation (e.g. wind + solar has much higher statistical reliability than just wind or solar, as they tend to run counter to each other), and the amount of long distance transmission (HVDC/HVAC), for 1) geographic diversity of weather, 2) sharing common peaking resources, and 3) timeshifting of loads/generation. A recent study in nature estimates that a nationwide US HVDC network would cost 0,3 cents per kWh but save 1,1 cents per kWh in generation/peaking hardware costs. The cost of peaking (and type) depends on location. Hydroelectric turbine house uprating makes for very cheap peaking where available (transforming baseload hydro into peaking hydro). Pumped hydro can be affordable, but only in limited areas. Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade. In the US, where natural gas is cheap and plentiful, the vast majority of new peaking capacity is NG. In countries where natural gas is expensive, other fossil fuels are used.
Also note that up to a certain level of penetration, solar actually does more to help remove variable generation (load following plants) than it imposes (peaking), as daytime loads are higher than night, and are higher on sunny days than cloudy days.
** - A peaker that's used only several hours a year may charge $2/kWh or so... but you're not buying a lot of kWh from it. A load following plant that's used a bunch every day may only charge $0,1/kWh... but you're buying a lot of kWh from it. It all depends on what sort of power you're needing to buy.
Indeed, and sometimes COPVs designed for other uses have various outer linings or coatings to protect the CF. But this comes with mass penalities. And rocket engineers are anything if not focused on not including any mass that they don't feel that they absolutely have to. And remember, SpaceX had no problem with their COPVs exploding prior to this one event; none of their testing had previously induced an explosion. So it's understandable that they'd have felt that it was fine. But LOX can be a harsh mistress. Not as unpredictable as, say, H2O2, mind you. But reading through past LOX incidents can be enlightening. For example, the Bell X1-D - it ultimately turned out to be that the gaskets had been treated with a softener, and that softener got into the LOX tank - and as soon as the tank started pressurizing, they hit LOX's critical pressure with the chemical and it detonated.
It's worth noting that the prototype ITS LOX tank that they made (also CF) is linerless. No coatings at all, just bare CF. Now, that's a different situation, it's not part of a helium COPV and thus not subject to the exact same failure scenario. But one doesn't have to wrack their brain too hard to come up with other failure scenarios related to transient impact, friction, general heat, bending or shock (all things that can set off LOX reactions). With aluminum, LOX reactions require fairly severe conditions, and generally self extinguish. With CF, that's not the case.
But perhaps I'm too much of a pessimist. I really want SpaceX to prove me wrong here and show that you can make safe, reliable LOX tanks out of CF:)
LOX is unstable in contact with most organics. To the point that with the exception of some fluoropolymers, it's generally considered that all organics have a critical pressure in which they'll spontaneously combust with LOX. For many organics that pressure is below atmospheric pressure (aka hypergolic). For most plastics it is above atmospheric pressure, but not tremendously so. This includes the epoxy binders used in composites.
Yes, CF is the standard abbreviation for carbon fibre.
The LOX is supposed to be squeezed out of the CF as the COPVs pressurize. The COPV are comprised of a non-permeable aluminum inner liner and a permeable carbon fiber overwrap that bears the load. By freezing solid, the LOX was unable to escape the overwrap as the pressure increased as the COPVs were filled, and was correspondingly pressurized inside of it.
The system was not "designed so that it has areas which are likely to detonate". The LOX was supposed to be squeezed out of the overwrap, not become trapped in it as SOX.
None of their statements that I've come across mentioned "heating". They did, however, mention that the solidification of the LOX led to a pressure buildup. I've read quite a few LOX handing guidebooks (for working on a project involving LOX), and LOX pressurized against carbon fiber is considered an explosion hazard. You don't even store LOX in composite containers in low pressure conditions long-term. You know the main differences between a LOX dewar and a LN2 dewar? The latter often has either no lid and/or contains plastic or composite or silicone components. The former always has a lid and does not contain (non-fluorinated) plastic or composite components, and rarely silicone (fluoropolymers are usually okay). Also some metals don't work with LOX either.
It's not a case of "you say detonation, I say combustion". The spontaneous pressure-induced reaction of LOX and CF is a detonation. The rocket as a whole however was primarily consumed by a deflagration (non-supersonic combustion) between LOX and RP-1.
Nowehere in anything that I've seen from them were "sparks" mentioned.
Your "sparks" and "temperature" comments are directly in contradiction to SpaceX's comments about the conditions causing the formation of SOX and preventing the egress of LOX from the overwrap.
... to actually get to see a detailed breakdown of the cause of the last explosion, rather than having to piece it together from bits and pieces of what's been said so far.
So far, it seems that there was (expected) supercooled liquid oxygen seeped into the CF reinforcing fibers on the helium COPVs (as was expected), which was just above its freezing point. They then began loading cold helium. Had the oxygen stayed liquid, it would have squeezed out (expected behavior). Rather, the oxygen wasn't able to seep out fast enough, and the increasing pressure caused some of it to solidify, blocking the escape of oxygen from the CF. LOX is inherently unstable in contact with organics, including carbon fibre, and can detonate under high temperatures, high pressures, shocks, etc; it has to be handled gingerly. In this case, the pressure continued to rise as the COPVs filled, until the LOX reached a critical pressure and detonated - thus rupturing the COPV reinforcement, thus the COPVs, thus the second stage and destroying the vehicle.
That's what it sounds like happened. But it'd be nice to get that confirmed or corrected if inaccurate. If this is correct, there's a number of things they could do to remedy it; I'd think the most likely would be to fill the COPVs before loading LOX.
As a side note, I'm really uncomfortable with their plan to make IPS entirely out of carbon fibre. As they're finding out (and has others have found out in the past), it's really difficult to use LOX with composites. And perhaps most importantly, inconsistently difficult. And the failure modes can be catastrophic - instant explosive rupture at the point of failure. Aluminum is not only light, but (by pure coincidence) one of the easiest things to work with LOX, as the oxide layer does a good job protecting the metal (even still, aluminum can detonate in contact with LOX in the right temperature/pressure/shock conditions, but said explosions are only self-propagating under significantly elevated pressure conditions). Also coincidentally, aluminum-lithium is even more resistant to reaction with LOX than lithium-free aluminum alloys. Basically, rocket manufacturers have been "having it easy" working with LOX by virtue of making rockets out of aluminum. You give that up when you go to composites.
But.... it's their rocket company, I guess we'll see how it goes.
There is news. Just today they announced that the next launch is planned for 8 Jan.
As for crew, SpaceX has contrarily argued that even if the risk of an explosion is lower hours after fueling vs. during fueling, it still exists, and the last place you want astronauts during an explosion is in the tower on their way into the spacecraft. The safest place for the crew to be, apart from "nowhere near the rocket at all", is "inside the capsule". Crew in the tower during a sudden explosion would have basically no chance of survival.
SpaceX has something which the Shuttle didn't - a near instantaneous abort system. They argue, and from an outsider's perspective I'd say they are probably correct, that even in the sort of catastrophic pad failure that occurred, the abort system would have saved the crew. There's no way that the Dragon could have suffered too much heat load during the brief period it would have been exposed to the fireball (this is a craft designed to survive launch and especially reentry heating), and the exploding stage just didn't have that much "ripping" power. This can be seen in many ways - for example, how the hydrazine tanks on the satellite didn't explode until the satellite hit the ground (after falling through the fireball). And the crewed dragon is a lot better protected than AMOS-6 was.
I'd imagine that NASA would insist that they prove it, mind you, before they allow crew onboard. But then again, NASA's hardly one to speak, having approved the Shuttle with no launch abort system at all.
If NASA refused to approve the current design for some reason, SpaceX can always go back to non-supercooled propellant. But they'd likely have to respond by lengthening their tanks; there would be a testing and reapproval phase.
Cinema Sins ripped into the original trilogy worse than they've ever ripped into any other movies, and a lot of their criticisms I found ot be dead on.
* It was a constant violation of the rule "Show, Don't Tell". They're constantly describing events that happened off camera that sound a lot more interesting than what they actually showed, which was awkward forced "romance", politics, and badly done CG battles.
* Everybody's beliefs and motivations were so constantly shifting that it was as if they decided what they needed someone to believe for the plot and rolled a die to determine which Jedi it would apply to. Obi Wan thinks it's good to train Anakin, then he thinks it's too dangerous, then keeps switching throughout the three movies, arguing with other Jedi whose positions likewise constantly flip with no obvious explanation as to why. He's constantly switching from scolding Anakin for being reckless, and then doing things even more reckless than him and scolding him for not doing actions that would have been reckless. The "Force is clouding the Jedi's vision" only when it would be harmful to the plot for them to see the future, but stops clouding their vision whenever the plot needs it to (and not just in line with what would be most advantageous for Sidious). And on and on. It's like they had a list of key points that they wanted to happen, and spent far too little time trying to figure out the in-between in a realistic manner.
* Anakin and Padme's romance is one of the most unrealistic ever to appear in a major movie. The lines are awful and forced; you actually feel bad for the actors having to say them. Padme's entire character is transformed from "strong and bold warrior queen" to "sniveling lovesick damsel" with no explanation. She has no reaction whatsoever to the many times that Anakin presents himself to be an immature asshole. Just terrible writing. But again - they had the "this must happen" plot points they wanted to fill, and everything in-between was half-arsed.
* Lucas's obsession with special effects (perhaps most exemplified IMHO with the "Anakin passing Padme a piece of poorly done CG fruit with the force" scene, as if hanging a freaking piece of fruit on a wire was somehow too hard to do any more) always bothers people, and Cinema Sins really nailed why. In the Phantom Menace, there's a scene on the Trade Federation vessel where the Jedi are attacked by a bunch of droids. After a big battle, they've defeated the droids, and you see... a couple dead droids on the ground, a couple cut off heads/limbs, and otherwise everything else is exactly as it was. No blaster shots on the walls. No scratches on the floors. No burns. No shrapnel. No soot. No little bits of debris everywhere. It's like a hospital ward, immediately after a battle. even if you can't specifically put your finger on it while you're watching the movie, this sort of stuff immediately grates on you. If you physically act out the scene, with puppet droids being destroyed by pyrotechnics and the like, you actually do mess up your set like you would in a battle. But in the prequels bad CGI, that just didn't happen.
* And on a more basic level, the CG characters often just look bad compared to the puppets. Don't get me wrong, some of the original trilogy's puppets were pretty bad - static or poorly articulated or poorly designed or whatnot. But a lot were excellent. My favorite example is comparing 1983 Jabba with 1999 Phantom Menace Jabba. Not. even. close. 1983 Jabba looked pretty good - not perfect, but good. Phantom Menace Jabba looked like what you get when a teenager has just gotten through his lesson on texturing in a Blender tutorial.
It's not that CG effects are inherently bad and puppets inherently good. CG can be great. Puppets can be terrible. But when you fill an entire trilogy with bad CG, expect people to hate you for it. As an example of how bad the trilogy's CG was, play Final Fantasy: The Spiri
Except that he didn't. Read the earlier scripts. Luke's dad was "The Starkiller" and was a major figure in the Rebellion. Vader was the First Knight of the Sith, the Sith being an organization of thuggish force users hired by the emperor Cos Dashit (who was not himself a Sith).
It's not clear when the precise moment of time was that it was decided that Vader would be Luke's father. But the character of Darth Vader was created and named while someone else was supposed to be Luke's father.
My favorite retcon is that Obi Wan was personally involved in the deaths of Owen and Beru.
We'd known from early on that he was a total manipulative liar. Telling Luke, for example, that Vader killed his father, convincing him of precisely the opposite of the truth, and then layer gaslighting Luke as if it was Luke's fault for not understanding his lie. After the original trilogy came out, it gets way worse. He lies about having never seen the droids before. He sees no reason to mention that he personally chopped up Luke's dad and left him for dead. His whole purpose for being near Luke on Tatooine is to "watch over him" "until the time is right" to recruit him into the rebellion.
So we know his motivation going into this. To recruit Luke into the rebellion. It's essential to him, for the fate of the galaxy. And we know the guy is a horribly manipulative liar. And let's face it, Luke is a moron. The guy is given a light saber for the first time and he nearly accidentally stabs Obi Wan when he turns it on.
So Obi Wan tells him this yarn about Vader murdering his father, rather than... well, Obi Wan's attempted murder of him. And then they head out and find the sand crawler, and Obi Wan insists that it had to have been attacked by the Empire because, why again? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise." Which we all know to be unadulterated BS. If it's precise, there's no way in hell storm troopers did it. And there's no way Obi Wan would think that they did. So he knows he's lying. Which means that he was probably involved in it in some way. Which means that he would have likewise been involved in the related attack on Owen and Beru. The very thing that, shock of all shocks, motivates Luke to go with and join the Rebellion, just as Obi Wan could easily have foreseen.
And there's no shortage of people he could have hired to carry out the attack, on a planet as lawless as Tatooine. Heck, I couldn't rule out him working with the Tuskan raiders themselves. Let's not forget, Obi Wan "coincidentally" showed up right on time to "rescue" Luke from said Tuskan raiders just moments before. They just ran off when he arrived and alerted them... I'm sorry, "scared them off", with a Krayt Dragon impersonation that wouldn't fool anyone. It wouldn't be the first time they had worked with a Jedi (Sharad Hett) - and Obi Wan had tried to kill the guy who slaughtered one of their villages years prior. And beyond the Tuskan Raiders, there's a whole bar full of bounty hunters and violent thugs in town who could have suited the bill Heck, he could have done it all himself, having arrived to "save" Luke on his way back from burning the homestead and sandcrawler while Luke was out searching for R2D2; all it would have taken was a landspeeder, and they're not exactly unattainable.
Is that a joke? The New Hope light sabers were terrible. Very inconsistently rotoscoped. Came across as a serious rush job - unlike in Empire and Jedi.
Seriously, a lot of the original trilogy special effects were just bad. Come on, defend the use of this hologram. Don't get me wrong, a lot - I'd say most - of their special effects worked. It's amazing how much worse Phantom Menace Jabba looks than RotJ Jabba, for example, over a decade earlier. Not. Even. Close. But just because Lucas made a habit of inserting bad digital effects is no reason to excuse places where the original trilogy screwed up. In a New Hope you can very clearly see a wire running from Obiwan's light saber into his robe. Vader's motions don't line up with his voice at one point, leaving him looking like he's doing sign language. In Empire you can clearly see the stick used to topple one of the AT-ATs. There's lots of things like this that are just simply mistakes.
And yes, sorry, but if you're going to show a storm trooper hitting his head on camera, it should make a sound. Own up to your errors.
I agree with Cinema Sins that even worse than making Han shoot first is making Greedo (who let's not forget is a professional bounty hunter) be such a terrible shot that he can shoot at Han (who isn't moving) from less than a meter away and not even be close to hitting him.
Not all of the changes were bad - just most of them. Replacing the cardboard cutouts of rebels at the awards ceremony at the end with real people, for example. Or replacing the terrible hologram of the emperor in Empire with a proper one, for another. Or fixing the low quality light saber effect in A New Hope and editing out the wires. The clank when storm trooper hits his head was also a nice touch.
Honestly though, more than that, I'd love to see the version 2 script of A New Hope ("Adventures of the Starkiller") made into a movie - with the characters looking as much like they did the actual A New Hope, just to enhance the mindfuck effect. Because it had so much that was the same, but so much that was utterly different. Leia wasn't Luke's sister; she was Owen and Beru's daughter, who had a crush on Luke that made him uncomfortable. The capital of the empire wasn't Coruscant, it was Alderaan, but looked like Cloud City. C3P0 fired the shot that destroyed the Death Star. The Emperor isn't a Sith, he just hired the Sith as muscle - and his name is Cos Dashit (seriously). Storm troopers had silver shields and light sabers. Tuskans ride landspeeders and spy for the Empire. Grand Moff Tarkin is a "birdlike" rebel commander. Luke (Starkiller, not Skywalker) is a wannabe-archaeologist with a magic crystal. Seriously, look it up. Somebody totally needs to make it, it'd be hilarious.
There is one thing that they changed from the 2nd draft to the final draft that I actually think might have been better left in. In the 2nd draft, Han agrees to take Luke to Aldaraan for a high fee as before, but then it turns out in the next scene that he doesn't actually own the Millennium Falcon like he claims; he's just a low-ranking crewman to the main pirate/smuggler. So he fakes a reactor leak on the Falcon to get the others to leave, then steals it, without letting on to his passengers what he's just done. Chewy is in on the plot, as is an android science officer (glad they got rid of the latter).
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The claim was across North America. We're not talking, say, the UK here. The US and Canada are already well connected, and just the US alone is massive. There's not even a single time that is "evening" in the US, as the east coast is three hours later than the west coast. Add in windy western/eastern Canada and Alaska and you get two more time zones.
At any given time, in the US alone, there's 2-3 fronts crossing it west to east, plus significant northern/southern differences and added effects from the jet stream, oceanic systems, etc.
"Multi-directional"? Sounds like you're talking near-surface winds, which have no applicability to commercial wind turbines, which are well above the turbulent boundary layer. And you size the nameplate capacity for how "blustery" (I assume you mean how high the windspeeds in your area tend to be) your area is. A typical profile is slightly-more-than-cubic rise from the minimum speed to ~25mph (at height), roughly constant from there to ~55mph or so, then reduced/stopped generation thereover. So as a severe storm moves over, turbines in the most intense parts of the storm may be shut down (feathered/braked), but the entire surrounding region is at 100% capacity.
Nor do they have to be with a HVDC grid. You can shunt power from one part of the country to the next. No, there is not a "tremendous cost"; the estimated cost for a nationwide network is about 0,3 cents per kWh, saving about 1,1 cents per kWh in peaking/generation hardware. The lines themselves are actually cheaper per unit power than AC lines, and they don't need to fan out to cover a whole region like AC does; HVDC moves in large jumps between nodes and transfers power to/from local AC grids. The substations actually cost more than the lines. And the US already uses HVDC substations to share power between its disjoint AC grids.
Listen, you don't have to take my word for it, there have been many peer-reviewed studies on the subject that say the same thing: this isn't a problem. It's economical with today's tech at today's prices. And it is thus going to keep moving in that direction of its own momentum even if all aspects of the technology each stagnate.
Lastly: they're called wind turbines, not windmills. Wind turbines are where wind energy is captured by spinning a generator. Windmills are where the wind is captured for direct mechanical power, such as pumping water or grinding grain.
I guess I'd put it this way: I like my internal hardware Japanese but my connectors and casing Soviet. ;) Low tech and heavy, but able to survive 30 years bouncing around in the bed of a pickup truck in Kazakhstan.
How do you break a headphone jack or plug? I doubt they'd break if you hit them with a hammer. Okay, if you put the jack side in a vise, then hit the other with a heavy hammer blow, you'd probably bend the pin. But it'd probably still fit in and out bent and still work.
No kidding. This year at New Years I wrote "2016" in big letters and threw it into a 2-story-high bonfire just so I could send it to hell personally. Next year I hope 2017 gets a proper burial with honors ;)
I dunno. I live in Iceland and we're a very aggressively metric country, to the point that windspeeds aren't even measured in km/h, but meters per second. In fact, off the top of my head I can only think of one thing at all where imperial measurements are used.
And that thing is screen sizes, in inches. And I understand it's that way in other countries too - for example, I've been told that in Japan, the only two things they use inches for are pizza and screen sizes.
Hmm, now that I think about it, we use inches for pizza also. Hmm, let me do a search to see if I can came up with some others. Let's see... I guess tires too, yeah... Oh, and Subway sells their sandwiches in inches, but they're a US company and all of that stuff is standardized the world over... And I guess if you want to go that far, when working on cars that were made in the US, you have to use imperial-measure tools...
I wish there was a better way to quantify the durability of phones. Something akin to crash test ratings. You can get water resistance and dust resistance for phones... add scientifically measured standardized scratch, bend and shatter resistance tests.
And yes, while I think that it's unfortunate that they're doing this just to feed a hungry 4k screen (I'd much rather just not have the 4k screen), and also that they're shrinking the width ("Meh"), kudos to them for bucking the "must get thinner every time!" trend.
Your headphone example is not only a great example of sacrifice in the pursuit of useless thinness, but it's a great example of the sacrifice of durability, too. I've had many USB ports and USB plugs break over the years, but never in my life had headphone jacks or plugs break. I've had the headphones and their cords break, but never the plug or jack. Because it's a thick solid piece of metal plugging into another thick solid piece of metal. That sort of thing is what I want in my ports, I don't give a rat's arse that it adds half a dozen grams to the device's weight.
And likewise, for that incentive of ditching it - pushing people towards going wireless with their earbuds - for Thor's sake, the last thing I want to have to deal with is another piece of household electronics to charge. You've got my support when you have an long-range wireless charging standard in place that everyone has agreed that they're going to move to. Not a second before then.
And so long as you're wired, it should be kept analog, because that gives you the cheapest earbuds and removes any DRM/lockout/incompatibility/etc fears from users.
Ah yes, Mazda 3, that famous luxury supercar that beats all but a handful of the fastest cars on earth....
A fun thing about solar thermal plants is that it's easy to integrate a peaker directly into them, using natural gas to generate steam when there's not enough solar heat and demand is high. SEGS was the first large scale plant I'm aware that combined both solar and natural gas, although there's a lot of them now.
The odds of the weather across all of North America being cloudy are virtually nonexistent. Power systems don't ever guarantee 100% uptime (not today, not in the future), because that involves planning against events that are finite but absurdly improbable. You plan for whatever 99,9+% uptime targets that you deem appropriate, with plans for how to fail gracefully. A single front does not stretch the entire width and height of North America. But nonetheless, diversity in power sources is good. Low pressure systems tend to bring clouds, but they also bring wind - just like how wind peaks at night, in contrast to solar's daytime peak. Also, peak solar seasons vary a bit from region to region, while wind seasonal peaks vary greatly from region to region (in the US, the west coast has a summer peak, while the central and eastern US have a winter peak).
Don't take my word that you can achieve statistically significant uptime without unrealistic peaking costs - read any of the studies on the subject. There've been a lot of them. It requires no new tech and no storage - although those have the potential to make things even cheaper and easier.
Beyond peaking and storage, you have entire industries where their costs are predominantly driven by electricity costs. Such industries are often quite willing to engage in curtailment agreements with power companies in exchange for cheaper rates. Which basically doubles as peaking. Here in Iceland, for example, we have aluminum and silicon smelters that import all of their raw materials, and export almost all of their products; it's worth it to ship everything to and from a remote island just for the cheap power. And boy do they gobble it up - even the smallest of the aluminum smelters uses more power than all homes and businesses combined. And beyond time-shifting of entire industries, there's timeshifting for particular hardware units in other industries. For example, chillers rarely run 24/7, and can also be timeshifted.
I'll reiterate that I think diversity is important. Picture a 100% solar world in which you have even intercontinental power transmission, ultra-high voltage DC doing hops of thousands of kilometers at a time. All of North America interconnected, running into Siberia and China from Alaska, to South America through Central America, and to Europe through Greenland and then Iceland (where there's already a lot of prep work underway for power lines to the UK). You have the whole planet equallizing you out and timeshifting - virtually no peaking/storage at all required. All well and good!.... until a major volcano goes off. When Laki here went off in 1783, the huge quantities of gases it kicked out altered the global weather so much that the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans. Not from clouds, but a global stratospheric haze layer. There was plenty of wind that year, mind you, but very little sun! Being single-source dependent leaves you vulnerable. Regardless of what that source is.
If your "peaker" was a high capital source like nuclear, yes. But nuclear's not used for peaking, fossil plants are. And the majority of the costs of a fossil plant are the fuel, not the capital costs for the plant. A fossil peaker costs about $1/W in capital costs, compared to about $1,50/W for a new solar or wind plant. How much you can share that peaker depends greatly on your particular power environment, anywhere from 1:1 (every watt of nameplate wind/solar needs a watt of backup) to a tiny fraction of that.
Indeed, and that's exactly what China does. Their HVDC / HVAC lines run almost exclusively from the interior to the coast, bringing power from worthless land to the power hungry urban centres.
Except that your analysis is not based on reality. Most of China's growth to 2030 is expected to be renewables. And the unexpectedly fast drop in the price of solar since that Bloomberg energy analysis was conducted (2013) will only be expected to increase that share.
Wow, variability in the power grid, we've never had to deal with that unsolvable problem before!
No. But it's not prohibitively expensive, generally adding a couple cents per kWh to your total costs**. The amount of peaking/storage required depends on a lot of factors, including climate, diversity of generation (e.g. wind + solar has much higher statistical reliability than just wind or solar, as they tend to run counter to each other), and the amount of long distance transmission (HVDC/HVAC), for 1) geographic diversity of weather, 2) sharing common peaking resources, and 3) timeshifting of loads/generation. A recent study in nature estimates that a nationwide US HVDC network would cost 0,3 cents per kWh but save 1,1 cents per kWh in generation/peaking hardware costs. The cost of peaking (and type) depends on location. Hydroelectric turbine house uprating makes for very cheap peaking where available (transforming baseload hydro into peaking hydro). Pumped hydro can be affordable, but only in limited areas. Batteries are marginal at present, but are likely to become highly competitive over the next decade. In the US, where natural gas is cheap and plentiful, the vast majority of new peaking capacity is NG. In countries where natural gas is expensive, other fossil fuels are used.
Also note that up to a certain level of penetration, solar actually does more to help remove variable generation (load following plants) than it imposes (peaking), as daytime loads are higher than night, and are higher on sunny days than cloudy days.
** - A peaker that's used only several hours a year may charge $2/kWh or so... but you're not buying a lot of kWh from it. A load following plant that's used a bunch every day may only charge $0,1/kWh... but you're buying a lot of kWh from it. It all depends on what sort of power you're needing to buy.
Indeed, and sometimes COPVs designed for other uses have various outer linings or coatings to protect the CF. But this comes with mass penalities. And rocket engineers are anything if not focused on not including any mass that they don't feel that they absolutely have to. And remember, SpaceX had no problem with their COPVs exploding prior to this one event; none of their testing had previously induced an explosion. So it's understandable that they'd have felt that it was fine. But LOX can be a harsh mistress. Not as unpredictable as, say, H2O2, mind you. But reading through past LOX incidents can be enlightening. For example, the Bell X1-D - it ultimately turned out to be that the gaskets had been treated with a softener, and that softener got into the LOX tank - and as soon as the tank started pressurizing, they hit LOX's critical pressure with the chemical and it detonated.
It's worth noting that the prototype ITS LOX tank that they made (also CF) is linerless. No coatings at all, just bare CF. Now, that's a different situation, it's not part of a helium COPV and thus not subject to the exact same failure scenario. But one doesn't have to wrack their brain too hard to come up with other failure scenarios related to transient impact, friction, general heat, bending or shock (all things that can set off LOX reactions). With aluminum, LOX reactions require fairly severe conditions, and generally self extinguish. With CF, that's not the case.
But perhaps I'm too much of a pessimist. I really want SpaceX to prove me wrong here and show that you can make safe, reliable LOX tanks out of CF :)
LOX is unstable in contact with most organics. To the point that with the exception of some fluoropolymers, it's generally considered that all organics have a critical pressure in which they'll spontaneously combust with LOX. For many organics that pressure is below atmospheric pressure (aka hypergolic). For most plastics it is above atmospheric pressure, but not tremendously so. This includes the epoxy binders used in composites.
Yes, CF is the standard abbreviation for carbon fibre.
The LOX is supposed to be squeezed out of the CF as the COPVs pressurize. The COPV are comprised of a non-permeable aluminum inner liner and a permeable carbon fiber overwrap that bears the load. By freezing solid, the LOX was unable to escape the overwrap as the pressure increased as the COPVs were filled, and was correspondingly pressurized inside of it.
The system was not "designed so that it has areas which are likely to detonate". The LOX was supposed to be squeezed out of the overwrap, not become trapped in it as SOX.
None of their statements that I've come across mentioned "heating". They did, however, mention that the solidification of the LOX led to a pressure buildup. I've read quite a few LOX handing guidebooks (for working on a project involving LOX), and LOX pressurized against carbon fiber is considered an explosion hazard. You don't even store LOX in composite containers in low pressure conditions long-term. You know the main differences between a LOX dewar and a LN2 dewar? The latter often has either no lid and/or contains plastic or composite or silicone components. The former always has a lid and does not contain (non-fluorinated) plastic or composite components, and rarely silicone (fluoropolymers are usually okay). Also some metals don't work with LOX either.
It's not a case of "you say detonation, I say combustion". The spontaneous pressure-induced reaction of LOX and CF is a detonation. The rocket as a whole however was primarily consumed by a deflagration (non-supersonic combustion) between LOX and RP-1.
Nowehere in anything that I've seen from them were "sparks" mentioned.
Your "sparks" and "temperature" comments are directly in contradiction to SpaceX's comments about the conditions causing the formation of SOX and preventing the egress of LOX from the overwrap.
... to actually get to see a detailed breakdown of the cause of the last explosion, rather than having to piece it together from bits and pieces of what's been said so far.
So far, it seems that there was (expected) supercooled liquid oxygen seeped into the CF reinforcing fibers on the helium COPVs (as was expected), which was just above its freezing point. They then began loading cold helium. Had the oxygen stayed liquid, it would have squeezed out (expected behavior). Rather, the oxygen wasn't able to seep out fast enough, and the increasing pressure caused some of it to solidify, blocking the escape of oxygen from the CF. LOX is inherently unstable in contact with organics, including carbon fibre, and can detonate under high temperatures, high pressures, shocks, etc; it has to be handled gingerly. In this case, the pressure continued to rise as the COPVs filled, until the LOX reached a critical pressure and detonated - thus rupturing the COPV reinforcement, thus the COPVs, thus the second stage and destroying the vehicle.
That's what it sounds like happened. But it'd be nice to get that confirmed or corrected if inaccurate. If this is correct, there's a number of things they could do to remedy it; I'd think the most likely would be to fill the COPVs before loading LOX.
As a side note, I'm really uncomfortable with their plan to make IPS entirely out of carbon fibre. As they're finding out (and has others have found out in the past), it's really difficult to use LOX with composites. And perhaps most importantly, inconsistently difficult. And the failure modes can be catastrophic - instant explosive rupture at the point of failure. Aluminum is not only light, but (by pure coincidence) one of the easiest things to work with LOX, as the oxide layer does a good job protecting the metal (even still, aluminum can detonate in contact with LOX in the right temperature/pressure/shock conditions, but said explosions are only self-propagating under significantly elevated pressure conditions). Also coincidentally, aluminum-lithium is even more resistant to reaction with LOX than lithium-free aluminum alloys. Basically, rocket manufacturers have been "having it easy" working with LOX by virtue of making rockets out of aluminum. You give that up when you go to composites.
But.... it's their rocket company, I guess we'll see how it goes.
There is news. Just today they announced that the next launch is planned for 8 Jan.
As for crew, SpaceX has contrarily argued that even if the risk of an explosion is lower hours after fueling vs. during fueling, it still exists, and the last place you want astronauts during an explosion is in the tower on their way into the spacecraft. The safest place for the crew to be, apart from "nowhere near the rocket at all", is "inside the capsule". Crew in the tower during a sudden explosion would have basically no chance of survival.
SpaceX has something which the Shuttle didn't - a near instantaneous abort system. They argue, and from an outsider's perspective I'd say they are probably correct, that even in the sort of catastrophic pad failure that occurred, the abort system would have saved the crew. There's no way that the Dragon could have suffered too much heat load during the brief period it would have been exposed to the fireball (this is a craft designed to survive launch and especially reentry heating), and the exploding stage just didn't have that much "ripping" power. This can be seen in many ways - for example, how the hydrazine tanks on the satellite didn't explode until the satellite hit the ground (after falling through the fireball). And the crewed dragon is a lot better protected than AMOS-6 was.
I'd imagine that NASA would insist that they prove it, mind you, before they allow crew onboard. But then again, NASA's hardly one to speak, having approved the Shuttle with no launch abort system at all.
If NASA refused to approve the current design for some reason, SpaceX can always go back to non-supercooled propellant. But they'd likely have to respond by lengthening their tanks; there would be a testing and reapproval phase.
Cinema Sins ripped into the original trilogy worse than they've ever ripped into any other movies, and a lot of their criticisms I found ot be dead on.
* It was a constant violation of the rule "Show, Don't Tell". They're constantly describing events that happened off camera that sound a lot more interesting than what they actually showed, which was awkward forced "romance", politics, and badly done CG battles.
* Everybody's beliefs and motivations were so constantly shifting that it was as if they decided what they needed someone to believe for the plot and rolled a die to determine which Jedi it would apply to. Obi Wan thinks it's good to train Anakin, then he thinks it's too dangerous, then keeps switching throughout the three movies, arguing with other Jedi whose positions likewise constantly flip with no obvious explanation as to why. He's constantly switching from scolding Anakin for being reckless, and then doing things even more reckless than him and scolding him for not doing actions that would have been reckless. The "Force is clouding the Jedi's vision" only when it would be harmful to the plot for them to see the future, but stops clouding their vision whenever the plot needs it to (and not just in line with what would be most advantageous for Sidious). And on and on. It's like they had a list of key points that they wanted to happen, and spent far too little time trying to figure out the in-between in a realistic manner.
* Anakin and Padme's romance is one of the most unrealistic ever to appear in a major movie. The lines are awful and forced; you actually feel bad for the actors having to say them. Padme's entire character is transformed from "strong and bold warrior queen" to "sniveling lovesick damsel" with no explanation. She has no reaction whatsoever to the many times that Anakin presents himself to be an immature asshole. Just terrible writing. But again - they had the "this must happen" plot points they wanted to fill, and everything in-between was half-arsed.
* Lucas's obsession with special effects (perhaps most exemplified IMHO with the "Anakin passing Padme a piece of poorly done CG fruit with the force" scene, as if hanging a freaking piece of fruit on a wire was somehow too hard to do any more) always bothers people, and Cinema Sins really nailed why. In the Phantom Menace, there's a scene on the Trade Federation vessel where the Jedi are attacked by a bunch of droids. After a big battle, they've defeated the droids, and you see... a couple dead droids on the ground, a couple cut off heads/limbs, and otherwise everything else is exactly as it was. No blaster shots on the walls. No scratches on the floors. No burns. No shrapnel. No soot. No little bits of debris everywhere. It's like a hospital ward, immediately after a battle. even if you can't specifically put your finger on it while you're watching the movie, this sort of stuff immediately grates on you. If you physically act out the scene, with puppet droids being destroyed by pyrotechnics and the like, you actually do mess up your set like you would in a battle. But in the prequels bad CGI, that just didn't happen.
* And on a more basic level, the CG characters often just look bad compared to the puppets. Don't get me wrong, some of the original trilogy's puppets were pretty bad - static or poorly articulated or poorly designed or whatnot. But a lot were excellent. My favorite example is comparing 1983 Jabba with 1999 Phantom Menace Jabba. Not. even. close. 1983 Jabba looked pretty good - not perfect, but good. Phantom Menace Jabba looked like what you get when a teenager has just gotten through his lesson on texturing in a Blender tutorial.
It's not that CG effects are inherently bad and puppets inherently good. CG can be great. Puppets can be terrible. But when you fill an entire trilogy with bad CG, expect people to hate you for it. As an example of how bad the trilogy's CG was, play Final Fantasy: The Spiri
He pretended not to recognize them at all.
Except that he didn't. Read the earlier scripts. Luke's dad was "The Starkiller" and was a major figure in the Rebellion. Vader was the First Knight of the Sith, the Sith being an organization of thuggish force users hired by the emperor Cos Dashit (who was not himself a Sith).
It's not clear when the precise moment of time was that it was decided that Vader would be Luke's father. But the character of Darth Vader was created and named while someone else was supposed to be Luke's father.
My favorite retcon is that Obi Wan was personally involved in the deaths of Owen and Beru.
We'd known from early on that he was a total manipulative liar. Telling Luke, for example, that Vader killed his father, convincing him of precisely the opposite of the truth, and then layer gaslighting Luke as if it was Luke's fault for not understanding his lie. After the original trilogy came out, it gets way worse. He lies about having never seen the droids before. He sees no reason to mention that he personally chopped up Luke's dad and left him for dead. His whole purpose for being near Luke on Tatooine is to "watch over him" "until the time is right" to recruit him into the rebellion.
So we know his motivation going into this. To recruit Luke into the rebellion. It's essential to him, for the fate of the galaxy. And we know the guy is a horribly manipulative liar. And let's face it, Luke is a moron. The guy is given a light saber for the first time and he nearly accidentally stabs Obi Wan when he turns it on.
So Obi Wan tells him this yarn about Vader murdering his father, rather than... well, Obi Wan's attempted murder of him. And then they head out and find the sand crawler, and Obi Wan insists that it had to have been attacked by the Empire because, why again? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise." Which we all know to be unadulterated BS. If it's precise, there's no way in hell storm troopers did it. And there's no way Obi Wan would think that they did. So he knows he's lying. Which means that he was probably involved in it in some way. Which means that he would have likewise been involved in the related attack on Owen and Beru. The very thing that, shock of all shocks, motivates Luke to go with and join the Rebellion, just as Obi Wan could easily have foreseen.
And there's no shortage of people he could have hired to carry out the attack, on a planet as lawless as Tatooine. Heck, I couldn't rule out him working with the Tuskan raiders themselves. Let's not forget, Obi Wan "coincidentally" showed up right on time to "rescue" Luke from said Tuskan raiders just moments before. They just ran off when he arrived and alerted them... I'm sorry, "scared them off", with a Krayt Dragon impersonation that wouldn't fool anyone. It wouldn't be the first time they had worked with a Jedi (Sharad Hett) - and Obi Wan had tried to kill the guy who slaughtered one of their villages years prior. And beyond the Tuskan Raiders, there's a whole bar full of bounty hunters and violent thugs in town who could have suited the bill Heck, he could have done it all himself, having arrived to "save" Luke on his way back from burning the homestead and sandcrawler while Luke was out searching for R2D2; all it would have taken was a landspeeder, and they're not exactly unattainable.
Is that a joke? The New Hope light sabers were terrible. Very inconsistently rotoscoped. Came across as a serious rush job - unlike in Empire and Jedi.
Seriously, a lot of the original trilogy special effects were just bad. Come on, defend the use of this hologram. Don't get me wrong, a lot - I'd say most - of their special effects worked. It's amazing how much worse Phantom Menace Jabba looks than RotJ Jabba, for example, over a decade earlier. Not. Even. Close. But just because Lucas made a habit of inserting bad digital effects is no reason to excuse places where the original trilogy screwed up. In a New Hope you can very clearly see a wire running from Obiwan's light saber into his robe. Vader's motions don't line up with his voice at one point, leaving him looking like he's doing sign language. In Empire you can clearly see the stick used to topple one of the AT-ATs. There's lots of things like this that are just simply mistakes.
And yes, sorry, but if you're going to show a storm trooper hitting his head on camera, it should make a sound. Own up to your errors.
I agree with Cinema Sins that even worse than making Han shoot first is making Greedo (who let's not forget is a professional bounty hunter) be such a terrible shot that he can shoot at Han (who isn't moving) from less than a meter away and not even be close to hitting him.
Not all of the changes were bad - just most of them. Replacing the cardboard cutouts of rebels at the awards ceremony at the end with real people, for example. Or replacing the terrible hologram of the emperor in Empire with a proper one, for another. Or fixing the low quality light saber effect in A New Hope and editing out the wires. The clank when storm trooper hits his head was also a nice touch.
Honestly though, more than that, I'd love to see the version 2 script of A New Hope ("Adventures of the Starkiller") made into a movie - with the characters looking as much like they did the actual A New Hope, just to enhance the mindfuck effect. Because it had so much that was the same, but so much that was utterly different. Leia wasn't Luke's sister; she was Owen and Beru's daughter, who had a crush on Luke that made him uncomfortable. The capital of the empire wasn't Coruscant, it was Alderaan, but looked like Cloud City. C3P0 fired the shot that destroyed the Death Star. The Emperor isn't a Sith, he just hired the Sith as muscle - and his name is Cos Dashit (seriously). Storm troopers had silver shields and light sabers. Tuskans ride landspeeders and spy for the Empire. Grand Moff Tarkin is a "birdlike" rebel commander. Luke (Starkiller, not Skywalker) is a wannabe-archaeologist with a magic crystal. Seriously, look it up. Somebody totally needs to make it, it'd be hilarious.
There is one thing that they changed from the 2nd draft to the final draft that I actually think might have been better left in. In the 2nd draft, Han agrees to take Luke to Aldaraan for a high fee as before, but then it turns out in the next scene that he doesn't actually own the Millennium Falcon like he claims; he's just a low-ranking crewman to the main pirate/smuggler. So he fakes a reactor leak on the Falcon to get the others to leave, then steals it, without letting on to his passengers what he's just done. Chewy is in on the plot, as is an android science officer (glad they got rid of the latter).