I don't quite understand, electric heating CAN be more efficient than direct fire heating, when you use heat pumps. Alot of heatpumps have very good effifcency ratings. Are you saying that France is encouraging using Resistance heating?
Or you could pocket the money you saved on the solar installation, put it into a 20 year bond, and have $40,000 minus the $8000 in electricity for that interval. Just saying.
A big reason why alternative energy is not taking off, is because the economics are not attractive yet. If the economics were attractive, then there would be a massive demand for solar and wind, and that isn't happening very quickly
You're calculations are wrong. If the volt used 110kw to run at 80MPH, it would drain it's 16kwh battery pack in about 6 minutes, giving it a range of about 11 miles.
And plug in the relevant numbers for the volt (0.28cod, 25 sqft frontal area, ~3800lbs) you'll see that the volt only consumes around 24kw cruising at 80MPH.
The main reason cars have multiple hundred horse power engines is because acceleration is power demanding.
As far as I understand, water cannot be created out of nothing, it has to move there and this does so at a pace that nature sets. Thus, the water resources that we have are limited and are being consumed by agriculture, power generation, and domestic use.
We may not be running out of water now, but there are still water tables that are being drained at a rate faster than they are recharged, and when they go then agriculture in the area will suffer. Thus, total water usage is important.
This happened to China, which has to feed 1.3 billion people. The population did not become much larger, but they eventually had to start importing grain due to their agricultural productivity grounded in unsustainable ground water based irrigation.
However, as far as I know, water can always be transformed from it's non drinkable state into a drinkable state by water treatment plants, and more can always be built. If they are not, then other options may be taken, like using shower, tap, or washing-machine water dumped into a holding tank to flush the toilet. That would knock out 25% of domestic water consumption
Point taken and conceded. Perhaps the solution to such people, is just to not build more power plants and let them have their incandescent anyways, and let them experience a few brownouts or blackouts.
Part of me wonders if the water used to shower and or do laundry every day couldn't be diverted into a grey water tank to flush the toilet. Hongkong flushes with seawater, which is another way to solve the problem.
This isn't quite true, the new more efficent toilets have trouble flushing down larger turds.
This time magizine article details the grey market surfacing around buying toilets from Canada, and smuggling them back into the country, to get around the 1.6 gallon flush law.
While I admit that I did not take that into account, you have another angle to look at. Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, I am not a civil engineer and do not have formal education in this arena, but...
When a power plant uses water for cooling, often it's used in an evaporative cooling tower, which means that a great deal of water used in the process of cooling the plant is actually evaporated into the atmosphere. When you take this from a body of water, like a river or a lake, a lot of the water ends up dispersed over the land, ultimately draining that body of it's water.
While I am pro nuclear, this article touches on that point.
"That wouldn’t happen with water used at a nuclear plant. A good portion of it is lost as steam.
Modern nuclear power plants use about 25 million gallons of water a day."
This should be taken in context. However, i'm willing to bet that sewage treatment is a much, much smaller money sink for the average household, than electricity. Especially for households operating a septic tank, where water pumped from the ground is ultimatley returned to it anyways. Thus, I still hold my point valid on the grounds of those observations.
According to this website, the toilet uses about 25% of water in the home.
Thus, by mandating a change to high pressure low flow toilets, if we assume that most people are still using the old toilets (3.5-7 gallon flush) and extrapolating from those figures, toilet water use is roughly 2.5% of american water use. By changing to efficient toilets (80% less water), this could maybe be brought down to 0.5%-1% of american water use.
In contrast, according to above mentioned first website, thermo-electric power generation comprised 52% of water use. So theoretically if America cut power consumption by 4%, it would equal the water savings of more efficient toilets. Since residential counts for about 35% of electrical use, if you saved 12% power in your home, you could save enough (and consequently the water required to generate it) to run a large volume flush toilet. There are also more ways to reduce the water consumption of electrical generation, like wind power, solar power, and hydro power.
It would be 'te ka inochi'. But that has no implied meaning of 'Give me one or you loose the other'. If you wish to say, literally, 'allow me to use your hand, or I will take your life', it would be something like 'te wo tsukawasenakatara korosu yo'. Yes, agglutinating languages can create some monster words.
The process your thinking of to make gasoline from coal is called the Fischer tropsch process and is currently economical however the facilities are not cheap and the end cost is equivalent to fifty dollar a barrel oil. The reason nobody has built them large scale other than south Africa is that once you start producing on a huge scale if it became a threat then the oil companies would probably ramp production crashing the price of oil and putting you out of business.
There are two things that could be done to make this simpler, I think.
A. Have the range extender engines be rentals (with deposit), and have them installed for a nominal fee at the rental place. If you don't take trips frequently, this could be a tenable model. B. Have it be a small trailer, with a very simple hookup that doesn't require complex installation.
I saw some video of a guy once who rigged up a cellphone to a thermite charge in his hard drive, meaning he could blow his laptop at any time. Maybe someday cellphones will have the same thing. But I think the easiest way to do it would be to have a certain text message that you determine (essentially a 160 character pass code) remote wipe the phone.
If you torture someone and they turn out to be innocent (wrongful conviction), or framed, you've just A. Inflicted a horrible, irreversable punishment on a citizen. Most people who are tortured for extended periods of time, probably don't come out completely sane. B. Given them licence for them to sue the state back into the stone age. (And really, what defense would the state have against that?)
Atleast with life imprisonment, you've essentially given someone their entire life to be found innocent, and freed. And it happens more often than you think. According to this web page the US has executed about ~1200 people since 1976.
Would you be so hard on the plight of retirees who lost their retirement savings and are forced to some measure of desperation because it's too late for them to make it up?
It says in the article that a lot of the funds earmarked for reactor dismantlement were mangled by the economic crisis, my guess is that they had significant funds in the market, which is usually a sure bet to accrue interest in the long term. Then the stock market crash came, and we all know what happened next.
It is the plight of age, your ability to recover from mistakes made late in your existence is diminished.
One thing that was noted in the article is that a lot of the power companies HAD sufficient retirement funds, but a large portion of the value of their funds were wiped out in the economic crash of 2008. They mentioned one reactor's retirement fund crashing from $592m to somewhere north of 200m and even now not breaking 300m.
Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out, continuing to work after retirement to make up for the shortfall in their supposedly secure retirement funds.
As far as I know the energy input and retrieval is still entirely mechanical, but the major advancements in flywheels have been magnetic bearings, and very high vacuums, which dramatically reduce friction losses.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite understand, electric heating CAN be more efficient than direct fire heating, when you use heat pumps. Alot of heatpumps have very good effifcency ratings. Are you saying that France is encouraging using Resistance heating?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_R10_TDI
Audi R10 TDI was the first diesel Audi to win at Le mans.
Or you could pocket the money you saved on the solar installation, put it into a 20 year bond, and have $40,000 minus the $8000 in electricity for that interval. Just saying.
A big reason why alternative energy is not taking off, is because the economics are not attractive yet. If the economics were attractive, then there would be a massive demand for solar and wind, and that isn't happening very quickly
killowatts is still a valid measure of power, so if you want to get technical, it still consumes about 20kw cruising down the highway. ~700w=1HP.
It's just that some of those killowatts are derived from gasoline combustion rather than battery storage.
I concede the point though, I wasn't aware that the volt was on gas power at 80MPH. Had forgotten about it.
Even at the beginning of the word?
rat=at?
rate=ate?
rum=um?
You're calculations are wrong. If the volt used 110kw to run at 80MPH, it would drain it's 16kwh battery pack in about 6 minutes, giving it a range of about 11 miles.
If you use this website
http://www.wallaceracing.com/Calculate%20HP%20For%20Speed.php
And plug in the relevant numbers for the volt (0.28cod, 25 sqft frontal area, ~3800lbs) you'll see that the volt only consumes around 24kw cruising at 80MPH.
The main reason cars have multiple hundred horse power engines is because acceleration is power demanding.
I'm just curious, but why wouldn't cryogenic hydrogen work? It worked for the space shuttle... and it's a much lighter fuel per megajoule.
As far as I understand, water cannot be created out of nothing, it has to move there and this does so at a pace that nature sets. Thus, the water resources that we have are limited and are being consumed by agriculture, power generation, and domestic use.
We may not be running out of water now, but there are still water tables that are being drained at a rate faster than they are recharged, and when they go then agriculture in the area will suffer. Thus, total water usage is important.
This happened to China, which has to feed 1.3 billion people. The population did not become much larger, but they eventually had to start importing grain due to their agricultural productivity grounded in unsustainable ground water based irrigation.
However, as far as I know, water can always be transformed from it's non drinkable state into a drinkable state by water treatment plants, and more can always be built. If they are not, then other options may be taken, like using shower, tap, or washing-machine water dumped into a holding tank to flush the toilet. That would knock out 25% of domestic water consumption
So I see it as the reverse of what you're saying.
Point taken and conceded. Perhaps the solution to such people, is just to not build more power plants and let them have their incandescent anyways, and let them experience a few brownouts or blackouts.
Part of me wonders if the water used to shower and or do laundry every day couldn't be diverted into a grey water tank to flush the toilet. Hongkong flushes with seawater, which is another way to solve the problem.
http://www.csb.gov.hk/english/letter/files/showcasing_wsd_e.pdf
This isn't quite true, the new more efficent toilets have trouble flushing down larger turds.
This time magizine article details the grey market surfacing around buying toilets from Canada, and smuggling them back into the country, to get around the 1.6 gallon flush law.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996507,00.html
The irony is that if you have a low flow toilet, you may need to flush multiple times for particularly gargantuan turds.
While I admit that I did not take that into account, you have another angle to look at. Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, I am not a civil engineer and do not have formal education in this arena, but...
When a power plant uses water for cooling, often it's used in an evaporative cooling tower, which means that a great deal of water used in the process of cooling the plant is actually evaporated into the atmosphere. When you take this from a body of water, like a river or a lake, a lot of the water ends up dispersed over the land, ultimately draining that body of it's water.
While I am pro nuclear, this article touches on that point.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/nov/14/nevada-nuclear-raises-touchy-issues/
From the article
"That wouldn’t happen with water used at a nuclear plant. A good portion of it is lost as steam.
Modern nuclear power plants use about 25 million gallons of water a day."
This should be taken in context. However, i'm willing to bet that sewage treatment is a much, much smaller money sink for the average household, than electricity. Especially for households operating a septic tank, where water pumped from the ground is ultimatley returned to it anyways. Thus, I still hold my point valid on the grounds of those observations.
http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/water/a_wateruse.html
According to this website public water supply domestic water use (85% of domestic water use) is about 11% of american water consumption
http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html
According to this website, the toilet uses about 25% of water in the home.
Thus, by mandating a change to high pressure low flow toilets, if we assume that most people are still using the old toilets (3.5-7 gallon flush) and extrapolating from those figures, toilet water use is roughly 2.5% of american water use. By changing to efficient toilets (80% less water), this could maybe be brought down to 0.5%-1% of american water use.
In contrast, according to above mentioned first website, thermo-electric power generation comprised 52% of water use. So theoretically if America cut power consumption by 4%, it would equal the water savings of more efficient toilets. Since residential counts for about 35% of electrical use, if you saved 12% power in your home, you could save enough (and consequently the water required to generate it) to run a large volume flush toilet. There are also more ways to reduce the water consumption of electrical generation, like wind power, solar power, and hydro power.
If i'm not mistaken, Portgual was on the bleeding edge of maritime tech and exploration back in the 1500s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_discoveries
It would be 'te ka inochi'. But that has no implied meaning of 'Give me one or you loose the other'. If you wish to say, literally, 'allow me to use your hand, or I will take your life', it would be something like 'te wo tsukawasenakatara korosu yo'. Yes, agglutinating languages can create some monster words.
The process your thinking of to make gasoline from coal is called the Fischer tropsch process and is currently economical however the facilities are not cheap and the end cost is equivalent to fifty dollar a barrel oil. The reason nobody has built them large scale other than south Africa is that once you start producing on a huge scale if it became a threat then the oil companies would probably ramp production crashing the price of oil and putting you out of business.
There are two things that could be done to make this simpler, I think.
A. Have the range extender engines be rentals (with deposit), and have them installed for a nominal fee at the rental place. If you don't take trips frequently, this could be a tenable model.
B. Have it be a small trailer, with a very simple hookup that doesn't require complex installation.
I saw some video of a guy once who rigged up a cellphone to a thermite charge in his hard drive, meaning he could blow his laptop at any time. Maybe someday cellphones will have the same thing. But I think the easiest way to do it would be to have a certain text message that you determine (essentially a 160 character pass code) remote wipe the phone.
If you torture someone and they turn out to be innocent (wrongful conviction), or framed, you've just
A. Inflicted a horrible, irreversable punishment on a citizen. Most people who are tortured for extended periods of time, probably don't come out completely sane.
B. Given them licence for them to sue the state back into the stone age. (And really, what defense would the state have against that?)
Atleast with life imprisonment, you've essentially given someone their entire life to be found innocent, and freed. And it happens more often than you think.
According to this web page the US has executed about ~1200 people since 1976.
http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/usexecute.htm
And according to wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_inmates
140 people have been exonerated.
Now, just going on my own intuition, looking at those 2, it looks like about 10% of all death row inmates have been exonerated.
Are you okay knowing that in your system about 10% of all people you'd be torturing likely didn't do it?
Would you be so hard on the plight of retirees who lost their retirement savings and are forced to some measure of desperation because it's too late for them to make it up?
It says in the article that a lot of the funds earmarked for reactor dismantlement were mangled by the economic crisis, my guess is that they had significant funds in the market, which is usually a sure bet to accrue interest in the long term. Then the stock market crash came, and we all know what happened next.
It is the plight of age, your ability to recover from mistakes made late in your existence is diminished.
One thing that was noted in the article is that a lot of the power companies HAD sufficient retirement funds, but a large portion of the value of their funds were wiped out in the economic crash of 2008. They mentioned one reactor's retirement fund crashing from $592m to somewhere north of 200m and even now not breaking 300m.
Thus, it's the economic turbulence weathering the vulnerable investments made on the retirement funds. This is not too far from a bunch of seniors who just had their retirement income wiped out, continuing to work after retirement to make up for the shortfall in their supposedly secure retirement funds.
1. Buy gold with electronic currency. (Perfectly legal)
2. Melt it down just to be safe. Don't want any identifying marks.
3. Exchange slab of gold for drug.
4. Drug dealer goes to a gold purchasing outfit and gets electronic cash back.
5. Suspicion largely averted.
Can also be executed with silver, platinum, copper, gasoline, or whatever.
....the Yen?
Quick update just found out that beacon power is working on a shaftless design which would eliminate mechanical linkages.
http://machinedesign.com/article/reinventing-the-flywheel-0811
As far as I know the energy input and retrieval is still entirely mechanical, but the major advancements in flywheels have been magnetic bearings, and very high vacuums, which dramatically reduce friction losses.