Not at "a slight payload hit". To get the ET up to a reasonable altitude where it won't deorbit shortly would take pretty much the entire OMS fuel budget.
There have been some interesting proposals to use the ETs as the backbone of a station, but they've never made it past review.
"Worth" is a debatable term. But whether gathering it will *cost* around ten million? Yeah, I'd say at least that much. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of contracts granted by thousands of separate entities.
Yes. But there is no "common location and format" laws. All of this data is already available on each state's government's website (or at least should be), but is scattered all over, in completely different formats even within a given state.
If you want to experience this for yourself, use the current recovery.gov site and follow the links for different states and then start scouring them for, say, what roads are getting repaired near a given city. You'll find it's typically doable, but a real mess. It took me about twenty minutes for my state, Iowa. And that was just for roads.
Did it not occur to you that the lion's share of the budget is most likely for *collecting and assembling the information*? There are a huge number of entities involved here, including all 50 states and thousands of individual counties, each with their own data handing mechanisms.
Many Slashdot readers (myself included) write software and/or websites for a living... so... your impression is that the cost is for writing HTML and Javascript, rather than the much more likely case of most of the money being used to compile the vast amount of information from 50 different states + the federal government, each with their own way of handling it?
Just so I know how to direct my rage properly: am I supposed to be mad that the government is going to launch a site to add sunshine to the recovery bill grant process, or that they couldn't make it appear online for free?
Why? It's from Hamlet (from the "To be or not to be" soliloquy -- the same place where we get the phrase "shuffled off this mortal coil" and a couple other phrases). Actually, the original is "there's the rub"; "therein lies" is just a less abrupt way of putting it. "Rub" in this context means "obstacle" (definition #14).
Heck, here in the midwest, I'm in a university building that has central-source-heated steam pipes that not only run across the entire campus, but even cross under a river.
Here you go. I've got a dozen more where that came from, and they're not "best case full sun cell output" numbers. Your "real world" claim wasn't even true in the mid 1980s; I saw a study from 1986 a while back that quoted 7.6 years payback.
As for "battery backed", if you want power at night (which is off peak, by the way), that's what molten salt solar thermal is for. Or HVDC to link areas in different timezones and/or other generating types (EGS, wind, etc) and/or hydro offsetting and/or pumped storage (air or water) and/or flow cells. Not that people should ever fall for the "100%" fallacy in the first place, which is what you're pushing. That is, the notion that if something doesn't address an issue 100%, it's worthless -- when the reality is that, say, cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by the 70% that solar without any kind of energy storage or offsetting whatsoever is capable of would be *way* more than anyone thinks we're actually going to achieve in the next several decades.
why is hydrogen still seen as some sort of viable alternative?
It's not. But when you give out literally billions of dollars to businesses for hydrogen research and investment, you shouldn't be shocked when they fight against the death of that tech. See buggy whips.
Hydrogen articles are going to keep popping up for years.
Not in my town it isn't. We have three coal fired generators and a brand new natural gas generator;
Your town is not an island. Nationwide, on our current grid, according to the DOE, EVs decrease CO2 emissions by 27%, slightly increase PM, keep SOx the same, slightly decrease NOx, nearly eliminate CO and VOCs, and move all emissions away from surface level, right next to where people are breathing it in. Sounds like a win to me.
And therein lies the rub. It's way too expensive and inefficient to recover from natural sources (it makes up ~2% of urine, mixed in with ~3% "other"), so we make it synthetically from ammonia. Which is made via the Haber process. Which in turn use coal or natural gas as feedstocks. Gee, that's really going to solve the efficiency problem right there...
We first just need to build urine collectors for livestock to separate the urine from the other waste. We then need to run this through a urine-tolerant reverse osmosis system and concentrate the solution from the ~5% solution it starts at. We then need to extract the urea from the salts and proteins (which make up more of urine per mass than urea does). We then need to use energy to separate the urea (just not as much with water). And this is supposed to solve an efficiency problem?
Yawn.
Think about it this way: if urea was actually a reasonable energy source, we'd already be concentrating it and burning it for power.
Um, huh? The energy payback time on silicon cells is 1-3 years, while for solar thermal and non-silicon thin-films it's a matter of months. Nanosolar reports under 1 month for energy payback on their CIGS cells.
The problem with nuclear isn't the waste, or the fuel supply, or anything like that. Those are all manageable issues. The real problem is that nuclear has to get its costs down. That's why nobody built any in the US for the past several decades, even with free government insurance, the ability to enforce ridiculous terms on ratepayers, and other such incentives. A lot of big nuclear-proponents try to push the claim that it's protesters who blocked new power plants, but the concept of protesters blocking every last site in the US is just laughable. Wall Street simply has not wanted to invest in them. And how there's this new "nuclear renaissance" being pushed by Areva, promising lower costs, and investors are again starting to put their money into nuclear. But judging by Areva's new way-overbudget reactors, I doubt it's going to last.
Nuclear has one prime issue they need to focus on: radically cutting capital costs without sacrificing safety.
Becuase wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs).
Virtually every study done on the subject disagrees with you. Our current grid supports up to about 20% penetration. With peaking and transmission upgrades, but without large-scale storage, studies in Denmark suggest that 50% is economically realistic.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow
Ugh! Why won't this myth die? There was *one freaking wind farm* that had significant bird kill problems. One -- Altamont Pass. Built in the middle of a flyway. Built without a bird-risk placement study. With turbines that have far faster rotation than anything we use nowadays (the bigger the turbine, the lower the RPM). I mean, come on! The average wind turbine nowadays causes more bird deaths from the transmission wires that take the power to market than die from the turbine itself.
*One* freaking poorly placed, poorly designed wind farm (Altamont Pass) and wind turbines get forever scarred as bird killers. Ugh.
Wind turbines almost everywhere *except* Altamont Pass (one of the first large-scale farms, placed in the middle of a flyway, using small turbines with fast-turning blades, with no study -- something nobody would dream of doing today) have very low bird death rates. The freaking Audubon Society supports wind power because it's impact on birds is much smaller than that of the other generation methods it displaces.
If you actually want to make an impact on bird deaths, spay and neuter your cats, keep them indoors, and stop supporting the construction of glass-curtained buildings. Both kill far more birds than wind farms ever will.
I'll never get this notion of people talking about how wind turbines spoil the beautiful natural landscape. Natural landscape? What natural landscape? We destroyed the natural landscape of the south and midwest in the 1800s. The worst you can say is that it *changes* the *artificial* rural landscape we've become accustomed to. Personally, I like them.
The reality is that the vehicles in the eco-marathon only drive at very slow speeds, so wind resistance is not nearly so major a factor as it is at high speeds (wind drag increases proportional to the velocity squared).
It's not a very practical competition; the requirements for the vehicles are nothing like the requirements for practical, streetlegal vehicles.
I work in the field, and the field is *all about* trying to figure out what is signal and what is noise. We have this massive multi-site study wrapping up involving scanning the same subjects at different sites all over the country, on multiple days for each site, in the same conditions in each scan and each site, and seeing what sort of artifacts show up. And they're significant -- even the scans on the same hardware at the same site on different days, but even moreso for different hardware. But that was known, was expected, and is the reason we have so many analysts studying the data to find algorithmic ways to cancel out the variation and find the true signal.
Classic example of that, the massive aluminum plants in Iceland -- an island nation with no sizable quantities of bauxite of its own to refine. It's cheaper and cleaner to ship freighters of bauxite to Iceland and ship the aluminum out to use its ample cheap, clean electricity than it is to just refine it where it's mined.
Sorry. Those numbers do NOT include energy costs of producing solar cells.
Nor do the costs of farming include of building all of that farm machinery and fuel refineries/storage tanks
Let me know when your panel exceeds 768KWh of output
*Huh*? What are you doing linking to the cost of a hot water panel? If you want to talk photovoltaics, payback times for silicon cells are generally in the 1-3 year range (ranging from amorphous thin film to polycrystaline), and non-silicon thin films are a matter of months (Nanosolar's is under a month).
A fairly simple estimation would favor the panel. It would be a very fine 3' x 5' solar panel that could produce that amount of energy in 25 years. Likely it wouldn't produce that much energy in 35 years.
Again, *huh*? Even if that was the number for photovoltaics -- which it's not (it's for a 2 square meter solar water heating panel) -- that's anything but the numbers you give. 3'x5' is 1.4 square meters. In perfect conditions on the surface, the sun bombards a panel with about 1,000 Wh/m^2. Perfect conditions don't exist 24/7. Because of night, angles, clouds, etc, a non-heliostat panel in a fairly good location will get about a 15% capacity factor, while one on a heliostat, about 25%. Particularly good locations can do better, but never mind that. Let's go with only 15%. Polycrystaline silicon panels are now about 20% efficient, and thin films over 10%. Let's go with 10%. 24 hours * 365.24 hours/day * 0.15 capacity factor * 0.10 efficiency * 1kW/m^2 * 1.4 m^2 = 184kWh/year.
What about it? Are you making this argument? And, by the way, those numbers are already out of date; batteries have already improved beyond that point.
Battery energy density has increased by 4.5x in the past 20 years, and only appears to be speeding up. The energy density argument falls flat when you combine that with A) EVs harness almost all of the energy in their batteries, while ICEs only harness a fraction of the energy in their fuel; and B) EVs have a heavy energy store and light motor, while ICEs have a heavy engine and a light energy store. It's an inverted paradigm. The ridiculously powerful Tesla Roadster, for example, is propelled by a motor the size of a watermelon. When you pair heavy with heavy and light with light (i.e., the battery pack competes for bulk and mass with the engine that the vehicle no longer needs), EVs are perhaps 10 years of battery tech away from being on par with your average ICE vehicle in terms of range per vehicle systems mass/volume.
Of course, IMHO, that's a false issue anyway, because the only reason ICE vehicles need such huge fuel tanks is to get around the *inconvenience* of having to stop by the gas station all the time during your everyday life. EVs never have to; you plug in when you get home, and whenever you take off, you've got a full charge. So having such huge ranges is pointless. All that matters is that you be able to drive a reasonable length of time on the highway between stops for those occasional long-distance, and that when you do stop, you can be back on your way in a reasonable length of time. The standard recommendations for safety are not to drive more than 2 hours at a time without a 15 minute break. So, a good minimum range would be, say, 3-4 hours -- about 200-250 miles. We're already at (and will soon be exceeding) that point with commercially-produced EVs. Beyond that, you need to refill your vehicle's energy. And there are several solutions for this. There are three "90% solutions" which all work on today's infrastructure -- PHEVs, range-extending trailers, and ICE-vehicle rental (or ownership as a second vehicle, or other equivalent). In those solutions, you only use gas on those rare cross-country trips, and are pure-electric the rest of the time. The two main "100% solutions", which require new infrastructure, are rapid charging and battery swapping. Rapid charging has been demonstrated up to 300kW (~24 miles range per minute of charging for a moderately light/streamlined electric car -- so a 15 minute meal break yield 360 miles range), and battery swapping takes about 3 minutes.
"Farmed" apparently conjures up misleading imagery for you. You basically want stuff that will grow on land considered less than 'fertile' using only the rain that lands there - grasses, weeds, etc. There's a lot more of that than there is farmland.
Are you aware of how slowly plants grow in the desert? Photosynthesis has three basic requirements: sunlight (check), carbon dioxide (check), and water (missing).
People often cite these impressive yield figures for things like switchgrass and jatropha, and then state that they're drought-tolerant, but conveniently leave off the fact that you don't get both at once (good yields in a dry climate)
You're missing an expensive step in your comparison, since the facts are that right now most vehicle activity can't be powered from batteries (which aren't cheap either), and even in the future only a fraction of it could be.
Wrong. As our nobel-prize-winning Secretary of Energy has stated, electric vehicles are the "inevitable" future of transportation. Almost every single marque has at least one production-volume EV planned, with many having multiple. And the only biggie that doesn't -- Honda -- still has an upcoming electric motorcycle. Or are you trying to claim that our grid can't support it? According to the DOE, our current grid alone could support 84% of our vehicles switched over to electric. Or are you trying to claim that EVs can't haul big loads? Wrong again; for an example, look at the Balqon Nautilus E-30, which hauls 30 ton loads for the Port of Los Angeles.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at "a slight payload hit". To get the ET up to a reasonable altitude where it won't deorbit shortly would take pretty much the entire OMS fuel budget.
There have been some interesting proposals to use the ETs as the backbone of a station, but they've never made it past review.
"Worth" is a debatable term. But whether gathering it will *cost* around ten million? Yeah, I'd say at least that much. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of contracts granted by thousands of separate entities.
All of which are bound by open records laws, no?
Yes. But there is no "common location and format" laws. All of this data is already available on each state's government's website (or at least should be), but is scattered all over, in completely different formats even within a given state.
If you want to experience this for yourself, use the current recovery.gov site and follow the links for different states and then start scouring them for, say, what roads are getting repaired near a given city. You'll find it's typically doable, but a real mess. It took me about twenty minutes for my state, Iowa. And that was just for roads.
Did it not occur to you that the lion's share of the budget is most likely for *collecting and assembling the information*? There are a huge number of entities involved here, including all 50 states and thousands of individual counties, each with their own data handing mechanisms.
Many Slashdot readers (myself included) write software and/or websites for a living ... so... your impression is that the cost is for writing HTML and Javascript, rather than the much more likely case of most of the money being used to compile the vast amount of information from 50 different states + the federal government, each with their own way of handling it?
Just so I know how to direct my rage properly: am I supposed to be mad that the government is going to launch a site to add sunshine to the recovery bill grant process, or that they couldn't make it appear online for free?
So what about "grasping the power of urine" have we not been able to do? Concentrate solids? Isolate urea from the solids?
All this "new tech" is is simply electrolysis of urea; it has nothing to do with urea recovery.
Why? It's from Hamlet (from the "To be or not to be" soliloquy -- the same place where we get the phrase "shuffled off this mortal coil" and a couple other phrases). Actually, the original is "there's the rub"; "therein lies" is just a less abrupt way of putting it. "Rub" in this context means "obstacle" (definition #14).
What about #1?
Heck, here in the midwest, I'm in a university building that has central-source-heated steam pipes that not only run across the entire campus, but even cross under a river.
Here you go. I've got a dozen more where that came from, and they're not "best case full sun cell output" numbers. Your "real world" claim wasn't even true in the mid 1980s; I saw a study from 1986 a while back that quoted 7.6 years payback.
As for "battery backed", if you want power at night (which is off peak, by the way), that's what molten salt solar thermal is for. Or HVDC to link areas in different timezones and/or other generating types (EGS, wind, etc) and/or hydro offsetting and/or pumped storage (air or water) and/or flow cells. Not that people should ever fall for the "100%" fallacy in the first place, which is what you're pushing. That is, the notion that if something doesn't address an issue 100%, it's worthless -- when the reality is that, say, cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by the 70% that solar without any kind of energy storage or offsetting whatsoever is capable of would be *way* more than anyone thinks we're actually going to achieve in the next several decades.
why is hydrogen still seen as some sort of viable alternative?
It's not. But when you give out literally billions of dollars to businesses for hydrogen research and investment, you shouldn't be shocked when they fight against the death of that tech. See buggy whips.
Hydrogen articles are going to keep popping up for years.
Not in my town it isn't. We have three coal fired generators and a brand new natural gas generator;
Your town is not an island. Nationwide, on our current grid, according to the DOE, EVs decrease CO2 emissions by 27%, slightly increase PM, keep SOx the same, slightly decrease NOx, nearly eliminate CO and VOCs, and move all emissions away from surface level, right next to where people are breathing it in. Sounds like a win to me.
I agree with you about busses, mind you.
And therein lies the rub. It's way too expensive and inefficient to recover from natural sources (it makes up ~2% of urine, mixed in with ~3% "other"), so we make it synthetically from ammonia. Which is made via the Haber process. Which in turn use coal or natural gas as feedstocks. Gee, that's really going to solve the efficiency problem right there...
We first just need to build urine collectors for livestock to separate the urine from the other waste. We then need to run this through a urine-tolerant reverse osmosis system and concentrate the solution from the ~5% solution it starts at. We then need to extract the urea from the salts and proteins (which make up more of urine per mass than urea does). We then need to use energy to separate the urea (just not as much with water). And this is supposed to solve an efficiency problem?
Yawn.
Think about it this way: if urea was actually a reasonable energy source, we'd already be concentrating it and burning it for power.
Um, huh? The energy payback time on silicon cells is 1-3 years, while for solar thermal and non-silicon thin-films it's a matter of months. Nanosolar reports under 1 month for energy payback on their CIGS cells.
Beat that with nuclear.
The problem with nuclear isn't the waste, or the fuel supply, or anything like that. Those are all manageable issues. The real problem is that nuclear has to get its costs down. That's why nobody built any in the US for the past several decades, even with free government insurance, the ability to enforce ridiculous terms on ratepayers, and other such incentives. A lot of big nuclear-proponents try to push the claim that it's protesters who blocked new power plants, but the concept of protesters blocking every last site in the US is just laughable. Wall Street simply has not wanted to invest in them. And how there's this new "nuclear renaissance" being pushed by Areva, promising lower costs, and investors are again starting to put their money into nuclear. But judging by Areva's new way-overbudget reactors, I doubt it's going to last.
Nuclear has one prime issue they need to focus on: radically cutting capital costs without sacrificing safety.
Becuase wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs).
Virtually every study done on the subject disagrees with you. Our current grid supports up to about 20% penetration. With peaking and transmission upgrades, but without large-scale storage, studies in Denmark suggest that 50% is economically realistic.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow
Ugh! Why won't this myth die? There was *one freaking wind farm* that had significant bird kill problems. One -- Altamont Pass. Built in the middle of a flyway. Built without a bird-risk placement study. With turbines that have far faster rotation than anything we use nowadays (the bigger the turbine, the lower the RPM). I mean, come on! The average wind turbine nowadays causes more bird deaths from the transmission wires that take the power to market than die from the turbine itself.
*One* freaking poorly placed, poorly designed wind farm (Altamont Pass) and wind turbines get forever scarred as bird killers. Ugh.
Wind turbines almost everywhere *except* Altamont Pass (one of the first large-scale farms, placed in the middle of a flyway, using small turbines with fast-turning blades, with no study -- something nobody would dream of doing today) have very low bird death rates. The freaking Audubon Society supports wind power because it's impact on birds is much smaller than that of the other generation methods it displaces.
If you actually want to make an impact on bird deaths, spay and neuter your cats, keep them indoors, and stop supporting the construction of glass-curtained buildings. Both kill far more birds than wind farms ever will.
I'll never get this notion of people talking about how wind turbines spoil the beautiful natural landscape. Natural landscape? What natural landscape? We destroyed the natural landscape of the south and midwest in the 1800s. The worst you can say is that it *changes* the *artificial* rural landscape we've become accustomed to. Personally, I like them.
The reality is that the vehicles in the eco-marathon only drive at very slow speeds, so wind resistance is not nearly so major a factor as it is at high speeds (wind drag increases proportional to the velocity squared).
It's not a very practical competition; the requirements for the vehicles are nothing like the requirements for practical, streetlegal vehicles.
I work in the field, and the field is *all about* trying to figure out what is signal and what is noise. We have this massive multi-site study wrapping up involving scanning the same subjects at different sites all over the country, on multiple days for each site, in the same conditions in each scan and each site, and seeing what sort of artifacts show up. And they're significant -- even the scans on the same hardware at the same site on different days, but even moreso for different hardware. But that was known, was expected, and is the reason we have so many analysts studying the data to find algorithmic ways to cancel out the variation and find the true signal.
Classic example of that, the massive aluminum plants in Iceland -- an island nation with no sizable quantities of bauxite of its own to refine. It's cheaper and cleaner to ship freighters of bauxite to Iceland and ship the aluminum out to use its ample cheap, clean electricity than it is to just refine it where it's mined.
Sorry. Those numbers do NOT include energy costs of producing solar cells.
Nor do the costs of farming include of building all of that farm machinery and fuel refineries/storage tanks
Let me know when your panel exceeds 768KWh of output
*Huh*? What are you doing linking to the cost of a hot water panel? If you want to talk photovoltaics, payback times for silicon cells are generally in the 1-3 year range (ranging from amorphous thin film to polycrystaline), and non-silicon thin films are a matter of months (Nanosolar's is under a month).
A fairly simple estimation would favor the panel. It would be a very fine 3' x 5' solar panel that could produce that amount of energy in 25 years. Likely it wouldn't produce that much energy in 35 years.
Again, *huh*? Even if that was the number for photovoltaics -- which it's not (it's for a 2 square meter solar water heating panel) -- that's anything but the numbers you give. 3'x5' is 1.4 square meters. In perfect conditions on the surface, the sun bombards a panel with about 1,000 Wh/m^2. Perfect conditions don't exist 24/7. Because of night, angles, clouds, etc, a non-heliostat panel in a fairly good location will get about a 15% capacity factor, while one on a heliostat, about 25%. Particularly good locations can do better, but never mind that. Let's go with only 15%. Polycrystaline silicon panels are now about 20% efficient, and thin films over 10%. Let's go with 10%. 24 hours * 365.24 hours/day * 0.15 capacity factor * 0.10 efficiency * 1kW/m^2 * 1.4 m^2 = 184kWh/year.
What about it? Are you making this argument? And, by the way, those numbers are already out of date; batteries have already improved beyond that point.
Battery energy density has increased by 4.5x in the past 20 years, and only appears to be speeding up. The energy density argument falls flat when you combine that with A) EVs harness almost all of the energy in their batteries, while ICEs only harness a fraction of the energy in their fuel; and B) EVs have a heavy energy store and light motor, while ICEs have a heavy engine and a light energy store. It's an inverted paradigm. The ridiculously powerful Tesla Roadster, for example, is propelled by a motor the size of a watermelon. When you pair heavy with heavy and light with light (i.e., the battery pack competes for bulk and mass with the engine that the vehicle no longer needs), EVs are perhaps 10 years of battery tech away from being on par with your average ICE vehicle in terms of range per vehicle systems mass/volume.
Of course, IMHO, that's a false issue anyway, because the only reason ICE vehicles need such huge fuel tanks is to get around the *inconvenience* of having to stop by the gas station all the time during your everyday life. EVs never have to; you plug in when you get home, and whenever you take off, you've got a full charge. So having such huge ranges is pointless. All that matters is that you be able to drive a reasonable length of time on the highway between stops for those occasional long-distance, and that when you do stop, you can be back on your way in a reasonable length of time. The standard recommendations for safety are not to drive more than 2 hours at a time without a 15 minute break. So, a good minimum range would be, say, 3-4 hours -- about 200-250 miles. We're already at (and will soon be exceeding) that point with commercially-produced EVs. Beyond that, you need to refill your vehicle's energy. And there are several solutions for this. There are three "90% solutions" which all work on today's infrastructure -- PHEVs, range-extending trailers, and ICE-vehicle rental (or ownership as a second vehicle, or other equivalent). In those solutions, you only use gas on those rare cross-country trips, and are pure-electric the rest of the time. The two main "100% solutions", which require new infrastructure, are rapid charging and battery swapping. Rapid charging has been demonstrated up to 300kW (~24 miles range per minute of charging for a moderately light/streamlined electric car -- so a 15 minute meal break yield 360 miles range), and battery swapping takes about 3 minutes.
"Farmed" apparently conjures up misleading imagery for you. You basically want stuff that will grow on land considered less than 'fertile' using only the rain that lands there - grasses, weeds, etc. There's a lot more of that than there is farmland.
Are you aware of how slowly plants grow in the desert? Photosynthesis has three basic requirements: sunlight (check), carbon dioxide (check), and water (missing).
People often cite these impressive yield figures for things like switchgrass and jatropha, and then state that they're drought-tolerant, but conveniently leave off the fact that you don't get both at once (good yields in a dry climate)
You're missing an expensive step in your comparison, since the facts are that right now most vehicle activity can't be powered from batteries (which aren't cheap either), and even in the future only a fraction of it could be.
Wrong. As our nobel-prize-winning Secretary of Energy has stated, electric vehicles are the "inevitable" future of transportation. Almost every single marque has at least one production-volume EV planned, with many having multiple. And the only biggie that doesn't -- Honda -- still has an upcoming electric motorcycle. Or are you trying to claim that our grid can't support it? According to the DOE, our current grid alone could support 84% of our vehicles switched over to electric. Or are you trying to claim that EVs can't haul big loads? Wrong again; for an example, look at the Balqon Nautilus E-30, which hauls 30 ton loads for the Port of Los Angeles.
Or did I miss your argument in the above?