Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply."
Of about a bit less than half of ONE DAY of oil consumption for just the United States.
It's nice to harvest the waste stream and all (although coffee grounds are also really great fertilizer), but this is not in any way a "sustainable" solution to anything. There's a scale mismatch to the problem they claim to be addressing.
Gov Lingle is taking all the credit, but if she actually wants to make a difference in oil consumption in the islands she needs to get large scale wind and solar projects pushed through first."
This isn't necessarily true. Solar and (especially) wind generation technologies are developed and being deployed. The barriers in this case are political and secondarily economic, but once those barriers fall (due to cost of fuel, or due to political changes), adoption can be relatively rapid. Deploying large-scale wind is an understood problem.
Electric cars, on the other hand, are likely to require a much longer adoption curve. For one thing, they are private vehicles, subject to private decisionmaking and biases. For another, there still isn't a really good, affordable electric car on the market. Third, they will require a well-established infrastructure before anyone but the early adopters will use them.
So IMO it makes sense for them to focus on electric cars now, and on wind/solar tomorrow, because the leadtime on cars is going to be long. On the other hand, the benefit of moving to renewable electricity will hit the bottom line much faster, so they have an incentive to be working that angle actively too.
Play with fire all you want. You have every right to take risks on your own behalf. But releasing a fertile, open-pollinated GMO crop is effectively making that risk decision for everyone else. Does Monsanto have the right to do that, in pursuit of profit. I think not.
But of course we understand genetics and the dynamics of genome development well enough that it's perfectly reasonable for us to manipulate the genes of our primary food crops and release them into the wild. No problem there.
Yeah, well said. But let me point out that increase in ability to operate independently at every level from national to individual, while a very real benefit (to society) of solar power is NOT seen as an advantage by the powers-that-be. The energy industry is still fixed on the big-central-plant-generation/regulated-utility-dis tribution model, and there is a lot of money and many careers that depend on the continuation of that model. Solar and other forms of small scale, distributed generation, not all of which is even renewable (e.g. cogeneration, aka. combined heat and power), are a very real threat to those vested interests. Which is one reason (of many) that adoption of these technologies has been so slow.
The guys over at RealClimate have a pretty detailed rundown on what actually happened. Apparently the source of the error was a mis-synchronization between two data sets. The corrected data data does rearrange the ranking of warmest years (for the US only), but the actual changes are tiny, ~0.1C and within the error bars. The overall temperature trend is unchanged. So, basically, the change has high media value and essentially no scientific relevance.
From experience, this sort of thing happens all the time in all scientific fields. Errors get made, they get caught, and they get fixed. If the subject was anything at all other than global warming, no one outside of the field would have noticed or cared.
The Gaggia Carezza is the cheapest pump-driven espresso machine that I have found. I have one, and it makes excellent coffee. Of course, "cheap" is relative.
This report generated quite a buzz in the green blogosphere when it was released (last year). There are someseriousquestions about the validity of the report.
2 MW really isn't all that much, in terms of enterprise-level power systems. That would run about 1000 homes, or a smallish skyscaper.
However, thinking of the power source in terms of the number of computers you can run is missing a very important part of the picture: COOLING. Refridgeration can account for half or more of the power requirements for modern datacenters. That's the downside to the drive towards more computation in a smaller footprint: much higher cooling requirements. And these buildings are not typically built (nor are the racks typically arranged) for optimal cooling. Far from it. There are enormous efficiency benefits to be had, if the designers would just slow down long enough to think things through.
Rocky Mountain Institute's Design Recommendations for High Performance Data Centers offers up a number of suggestions that could drop computing power requirements by a factor of four using current technology more intelligently deployed. With the development of new servers designed for efficiency, they forcast a potential for 10x energy savings. (Granted, this is vs. 2003 technology, but even so.) That translates into much reduced cooling requirements.
They also suggest designing the data centers to generate their power on site, using high-duty-cycle generators or solid-oxide fuel cells, and use the grid as a backup. Then you can capture the waste heat from the generation system, and use it to drive an adsorption chiller to provide a large part of your cooling needs (which have been greatly reduced by aforementioned efficiecy measures). The end result is higher reliability, lower capital costs, and MUCH lower operating costs.
Rocky Mountain Institute did a charrette (design intensive) on energy efficient data centers a few years ago. Some of the points are a little out of date, but there's still some very good stuff there. They outline a set of techniques to reduce the energy consumption by nearly a factor of 10 while increasing reliability and without impacting performance.
It's one heck of a design problem. I was originally an aerospace engineer, but I've shifted my focus to work on precisely this problem. It's both the most challenging and the most important problem facing us right now.
The short answer, I believe, lies with biomimicry and a respect for the limitations of natural systems. Nature designs for the long term, and we can learn from those techniques.
For additional references, I would point you to the links on my home page.
As a final note, I would suggest that a design horizon of 100 years is a bit on the short side. 100 years really isn't a very long time, and I think there's a decent chance we could muddle through the next 100 years doing more or less what we have been doing. Thing is, if we do that, we won't make it through the next hundred years.
it's just fine if the energy ratio is approximately 1
Totally false. If the EROEI is 1, then it takes one unit of energy to make one unit of energy. You can do that forever, if the system isn't leaky. But you'll be running in place, without producing a surplus for use to other purposes.
We don't have a shortage of energy.
We don't have an overall energy shortage, in the same sense that we have a pending oil shortage. But we don't have a vast surplus of available energy either.
Domestic natural gas production has peaked, and moving LNG is a huge pain in the ass.
Coal is vastly ecologically destructive in the extraction, and in the combustion. Clean coal technologies? Yeah, maybe, but they also come with an energy penalty.
Nuclear has a very long lead time, and has never been economic without vast government support. It's a boondoggle.
Solar and wind are dandy, but they are capital intensive and slow to ramp up. There's a worldwide shortage of high-purity silicon right now, due to the demand for solar panels. And you're never going to get more than about 1000 watts/sq.m. from solar, no matter how good your PV technology gets.
We're not yet feeling the pinch on other energy supplies the way we do on oil, but watch natural gas prices in the next few years. They're going to go up, not down.
What we don't have is the ability to add generation facilities to produce three times our current use of oil energy, just so that we can keep using as much oil as we're using RIGHT NOW, which is what an EROEI of 1.3:1 would require.
Also, there's the fact that most of the energy inputs to producing corn are either liquid fuels (to run farm equipment) or natural gas (which is used directly to make fertilzer).
And of course there's the ultimate problem of exponential growth of energy use. When your demand increases by 3-5% per year, there's never any such thing as enough.
It's a straw man argument, but I'm not the one setting up the straw man.
The politicians who like to rah-rah ethanol are justifying their position (and the subsidies)by implication -- or even direct, explicit statement -- that corn-based ethanol will lead us to independence from foreign oil, freedom from high gas prices, and will allow us to maintain our energy-intensive, auto-centric lifestyle in a world that no longer has cheap and readily available oil. It's a viciously deceptive lie that allows them to pass on big bucks to Aurther Daniels Midland and other agribusiness lobbies.
Pimental may be overly pessimistic, but it really doesn't matter in the final analysis. Whether the EROEI is 0.8:1 or 1.3:1, neither one is a winner relative to our current consumption of energy. The EROEI of oil production ranged from 5:1 to 25:1, so corn-based ethanol falls short by an order of magnitude.
To put it another way, even if the return on corn ethanol was a very optimistic 1.5:1, we would have to increase the total system energy throughput by ~10x our present consumption to effectively displace petroleum as a liquid fuel source. And we simply don't have the means to do that, especially not if we're going to try to avoid a global climate disaster while we're at it.
Why do so many Mac users insist on this fantasy that Windows users really hate Windows and would switch to the Mac OS in a flash if only they had a chance to touch it's brushed chrome goodness?
In fact, I am a long, long-time Windows user. Many would consider me a power user. And I hate Windows. I have sunk more hours than I even care to begin contemplating into making my Windows machine behave. As far as I'm concerned, Gates owes me several extra years of life, for the time I've wasted using his software which is so godawful and yet dominates the market.
So, no, this isn't just a Mac user fantasy. It's a reality for many of us. Of course, maybe you have a point. Because I am now a Mac user. Thanks, Steve!
I'm getting ready to buy a Powerbook, and I'm wondering how much real impact on performance the upgrade from DDR RAM to DDR2 RAM is likely to have. I can buy a nearly-new used unit for several hundred dollars less than a new-new unit from Apple. But the extra performance granted by faster RAM might be worth a bit more cash.
I wish I had mod points today, because I would love to promote this post and the product it references. I too have drunk the Predixis koolaid. It's a great product, and has made my music listening experience much more enjoyable, because I now listen to songs that I would never have thought to pick on my own. And it's available for the Mac!
Slashdot Mirror
Read TFA. The annual supply of coffee would provide less than one day's supply of fuel.
Not a scalable solution. Which fact is the weak point of most biofuel solutions.
Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply."
Of about a bit less than half of ONE DAY of oil consumption for just the United States.
It's nice to harvest the waste stream and all (although coffee grounds are also really great fertilizer), but this is not in any way a "sustainable" solution to anything. There's a scale mismatch to the problem they claim to be addressing.
Gov Lingle is taking all the credit, but if she actually wants to make a difference in oil consumption in the islands she needs to get large scale wind and solar projects pushed through first."
This isn't necessarily true. Solar and (especially) wind generation technologies are developed and being deployed. The barriers in this case are political and secondarily economic, but once those barriers fall (due to cost of fuel, or due to political changes), adoption can be relatively rapid. Deploying large-scale wind is an understood problem.
Electric cars, on the other hand, are likely to require a much longer adoption curve. For one thing, they are private vehicles, subject to private decisionmaking and biases. For another, there still isn't a really good, affordable electric car on the market. Third, they will require a well-established infrastructure before anyone but the early adopters will use them.
So IMO it makes sense for them to focus on electric cars now, and on wind/solar tomorrow, because the leadtime on cars is going to be long. On the other hand, the benefit of moving to renewable electricity will hit the bottom line much faster, so they have an incentive to be working that angle actively too.
Play with fire all you want. You have every right to take risks on your own behalf. But releasing a fertile, open-pollinated GMO crop is effectively making that risk decision for everyone else. Does Monsanto have the right to do that, in pursuit of profit. I think not.
Note that the greatest hazard of GMO crops is not the poorly studied potential dangers of the GM organism itself: it's the danger of running afoul of Monsanto's intellectual property.
But of course we understand genetics and the dynamics of genome development well enough that it's perfectly reasonable for us to manipulate the genes of our primary food crops and release them into the wild. No problem there.
Yeah, well said. But let me point out that increase in ability to operate independently at every level from national to individual, while a very real benefit (to society) of solar power is NOT seen as an advantage by the powers-that-be. The energy industry is still fixed on the big-central-plant-generation/regulated-utility-dis tribution model, and there is a lot of money and many careers that depend on the continuation of that model. Solar and other forms of small scale, distributed generation, not all of which is even renewable (e.g. cogeneration, aka. combined heat and power), are a very real threat to those vested interests. Which is one reason (of many) that adoption of these technologies has been so slow.
How about this?
I've been there, and it's super cool. Their heating system is a woodstove, which they use occasionally.
The guys over at RealClimate have a pretty detailed rundown on what actually happened. Apparently the source of the error was a mis-synchronization between two data sets. The corrected data data does rearrange the ranking of warmest years (for the US only), but the actual changes are tiny, ~0.1C and within the error bars. The overall temperature trend is unchanged. So, basically, the change has high media value and essentially no scientific relevance.
From experience, this sort of thing happens all the time in all scientific fields. Errors get made, they get caught, and they get fixed. If the subject was anything at all other than global warming, no one outside of the field would have noticed or cared.
The Gaggia Carezza is the cheapest pump-driven espresso machine that I have found. I have one, and it makes excellent coffee. Of course, "cheap" is relative.
This report generated quite a buzz in the green blogosphere when it was released (last year). There are some serious questions about the validity of the report.
Robert Rapier is a chemist with a background in biofuels and renewable energy. He also writes a very technically informative blog on energy.
Here is one of the many things he has to say about the energy balance of ethanol, and why the whole thing is a crock.
2 MW really isn't all that much, in terms of enterprise-level power systems. That would run about 1000 homes, or a smallish skyscaper.
However, thinking of the power source in terms of the number of computers you can run is missing a very important part of the picture: COOLING. Refridgeration can account for half or more of the power requirements for modern datacenters. That's the downside to the drive towards more computation in a smaller footprint: much higher cooling requirements. And these buildings are not typically built (nor are the racks typically arranged) for optimal cooling. Far from it. There are enormous efficiency benefits to be had, if the designers would just slow down long enough to think things through.
Rocky Mountain Institute's Design Recommendations for High Performance Data Centers offers up a number of suggestions that could drop computing power requirements by a factor of four using current technology more intelligently deployed. With the development of new servers designed for efficiency, they forcast a potential for 10x energy savings. (Granted, this is vs. 2003 technology, but even so.) That translates into much reduced cooling requirements.
They also suggest designing the data centers to generate their power on site, using high-duty-cycle generators or solid-oxide fuel cells, and use the grid as a backup. Then you can capture the waste heat from the generation system, and use it to drive an adsorption chiller to provide a large part of your cooling needs (which have been greatly reduced by aforementioned efficiecy measures). The end result is higher reliability, lower capital costs, and MUCH lower operating costs.
Rocky Mountain Institute did a charrette (design intensive) on energy efficient data centers a few years ago. Some of the points are a little out of date, but there's still some very good stuff there. They outline a set of techniques to reduce the energy consumption by nearly a factor of 10 while increasing reliability and without impacting performance.
What if God Smoked Cannabis
It's one heck of a design problem. I was originally an aerospace engineer, but I've shifted my focus to work on precisely this problem. It's both the most challenging and the most important problem facing us right now.
The short answer, I believe, lies with biomimicry and a respect for the limitations of natural systems. Nature designs for the long term, and we can learn from those techniques.
For additional references, I would point you to the links on my home page.
As a final note, I would suggest that a design horizon of 100 years is a bit on the short side. 100 years really isn't a very long time, and I think there's a decent chance we could muddle through the next 100 years doing more or less what we have been doing. Thing is, if we do that, we won't make it through the next hundred years.
It appears that the public values the illusion of security over privacy.
it's just fine if the energy ratio is approximately 1
Totally false. If the EROEI is 1, then it takes one unit of energy to make one unit of energy. You can do that forever, if the system isn't leaky. But you'll be running in place, without producing a surplus for use to other purposes.
We don't have a shortage of energy.
We don't have an overall energy shortage, in the same sense that we have a pending oil shortage. But we don't have a vast surplus of available energy either.
Domestic natural gas production has peaked, and moving LNG is a huge pain in the ass.
Coal is vastly ecologically destructive in the extraction, and in the combustion. Clean coal technologies? Yeah, maybe, but they also come with an energy penalty.
Nuclear has a very long lead time, and has never been economic without vast government support. It's a boondoggle.
Solar and wind are dandy, but they are capital intensive and slow to ramp up. There's a worldwide shortage of high-purity silicon right now, due to the demand for solar panels. And you're never going to get more than about 1000 watts/sq.m. from solar, no matter how good your PV technology gets.
We're not yet feeling the pinch on other energy supplies the way we do on oil, but watch natural gas prices in the next few years. They're going to go up, not down.
What we don't have is the ability to add generation facilities to produce three times our current use of oil energy, just so that we can keep using as much oil as we're using RIGHT NOW, which is what an EROEI of 1.3:1 would require.
Also, there's the fact that most of the energy inputs to producing corn are either liquid fuels (to run farm equipment) or natural gas (which is used directly to make fertilzer).
And of course there's the ultimate problem of exponential growth of energy use. When your demand increases by 3-5% per year, there's never any such thing as enough.
It's a straw man argument, but I'm not the one setting up the straw man.
The politicians who like to rah-rah ethanol are justifying their position (and the subsidies)by implication -- or even direct, explicit statement -- that corn-based ethanol will lead us to independence from foreign oil, freedom from high gas prices, and will allow us to maintain our energy-intensive, auto-centric lifestyle in a world that no longer has cheap and readily available oil. It's a viciously deceptive lie that allows them to pass on big bucks to Aurther Daniels Midland and other agribusiness lobbies.
Pimental may be overly pessimistic, but it really doesn't matter in the final analysis. Whether the EROEI is 0.8:1 or 1.3:1, neither one is a winner relative to our current consumption of energy. The EROEI of oil production ranged from 5:1 to 25:1, so corn-based ethanol falls short by an order of magnitude.
To put it another way, even if the return on corn ethanol was a very optimistic 1.5:1, we would have to increase the total system energy throughput by ~10x our present consumption to effectively displace petroleum as a liquid fuel source. And we simply don't have the means to do that, especially not if we're going to try to avoid a global climate disaster while we're at it.
Why do so many Mac users insist on this fantasy that Windows users really hate Windows and would switch to the Mac OS in a flash if only they had a chance to touch it's brushed chrome goodness?
In fact, I am a long, long-time Windows user. Many would consider me a power user. And I hate Windows. I have sunk more hours than I even care to begin contemplating into making my Windows machine behave. As far as I'm concerned, Gates owes me several extra years of life, for the time I've wasted using his software which is so godawful and yet dominates the market.
So, no, this isn't just a Mac user fantasy. It's a reality for many of us. Of course, maybe you have a point. Because I am now a Mac user. Thanks, Steve!
Correlation is not causation.
It's Caltech. Not CalTech, nor Cal Tech. One word, one captial letter.
I'm getting ready to buy a Powerbook, and I'm wondering how much real impact on performance the upgrade from DDR RAM to DDR2 RAM is likely to have. I can buy a nearly-new used unit for several hundred dollars less than a new-new unit from Apple. But the extra performance granted by faster RAM might be worth a bit more cash.
Opinions?
I wish I had mod points today, because I would love to promote this post and the product it references. I too have drunk the Predixis koolaid. It's a great product, and has made my music listening experience much more enjoyable, because I now listen to songs that I would never have thought to pick on my own. And it's available for the Mac!
That's because that is what they are.