Diesel plants are very reliable and don't require much maintenance at this point. Mechanical failures are very rare and the electronic control systems can often indicate if a component is going to fail long before it actually does so.
And I find it funny you still assume uranium is the only possible fuel. There are so much possible reactor designs and fuel cycles. Why do people always insist on comparing solar panels to reactors and technology from the 60s and 70s?
And most of those improvements in efficiency come from using more exotic materials that cause more environmental damage when mined. So you're trading in CO2 statistics for more damage in other areas.
Sure auto-starting generators are nice. But considering it's a large power grid you have redundancy built in no matter what. So your speech about generator efficiency is pointless. And that's not the really the point of this discussion or this post. What this story tried to claim is that using only solar power is sustainable and a good idea. I'll agree it's good enough to run your airco in the middle of a desert or a tropical island. I'll even agree it might work well to power a relatively small load in a remote area. What I don't agree with is claiming it's a green alternative. Cause it just isn't. It's also not the most cost effective way, and certainly not the safest.
The entire point of running large loads at night is to avoid needing larger capacity during the day. The load on the grid is high during the day, but during the night when everybody's sleeping all the consumer equipment is turned off. At that point you're free to use a lot of energy for other things without needing to add to your total maximum capacity. So yes, it's very common to use large loads during the night and power companies will often encourage it by giving better rates for night usage. You wouldn't want to do this with solar power cause you'd have to increase the total amount of batteries. But if you don't you have to increase the total daytime capacity, meaning a larger surface area of solar panels.
And if you're as knowledgeable as you claim to be you'll know how batteries are made and why they're bad for the environment. You'll also know the energy requirements for semiconductor manufacturing, the purity requirements for the materials and the impact of mining and purifying them. Did you also forget about the chemicals we use to manufacture semiconductors? If you have I'm sure we can arrange for you to have a few barrels of etchant, mask, developer and other assorted chemicals shipped to your house. The cylinders with toxic gasses come in the next shipment! Maybe a bit too much cynical remarks for one paragraph.
And here comes the bird... You're forgetting that off-grid locations isn't the target of this article. It's very much about the power grid itself. You're trying to drag in an irrelevant situation to prove a point. Good try sir, better luck next time. But to address your point, yes solar panels do work well for places where getting a cable is tricky like the middle of a desert or space (I would advice not trying it in the Arctic regions though as it might have a severe impact on efficiency). On the other hand if you're working on a 900 MHz (license free) setup I'm going to go on a guess here that you have to provide a power solution for an access point. Unless this access point happens to hook up to a routing backbone in some other wireless way you'll probably be hooking it up to a glass fibre loop somewhere. It's cheaper to just put a cable in the ground together with the fibre. In fact you'll be able to order fibre cables with power cables woven into the shield.
And the maintenance I'm talking about is removing dirt, as it really matters when you try to run an entire grid on solar panels. A slight drop in efficiency on a total capacity of hundreds or thousands of kilowatts will be noticeable. Inverters fail, it's a simple fact. Thyristors aren't flawless and their manufacturers do expect them to fail. Considering the size of an operation like this you'll need thousands of them for a small plant. If you're going to tell me none of them will fail and everything will work as expected a wafer fab out there is playing with witchcraft. You'll have the occasional storm damage as well.
Your power supply will fluctuate with weather conditions. Sadly a lot of loads don't except air condition and heating. Batteries have a limited charge rate and you'll need to fully charge them by the time when darkness settles in. An additional problem with solar power in most current set-ups is its decentralized nature (on roofs, buildings, etc. to save space). The current grid isn't designed to control decentralized power sources. So yes
Your inverters WILL fail. They will need replacement parts. Your solar panels will get dirty and you'll need to clean them. For you it might not make much of a difference. Now try running hundreds or thousands of these panels. A one percent drop in efficiency is noticeable at such a scale. And your inverter is also a semiconductor based device, leading to even more pollution. Now include some storm damage and manufacturing faults.
Yes, initially it might look like you're saving money. But I'd like to see the maintenance bills of this plant in a few years; And they'll have to keep the diesel infrastructure maintained as backup system (redundancy as one of your "friends" pointed out). So how much costs do you really save?
Yep, and now you're resorting to insults. Such a pity you can't even have a proper argument on Slashdot any more.
Anyway, inverter failure is common. You're using thyristors, considering the amount of power we're talking about you'll need more than one as well for larger installations. But there's a nasty timing problem when you use multiple of them. Either a very large voltage builds up over one (or more) specific thyristors during a part of the cycle or all the current flows through a single branch causing hotspots on the semiconductor material eventually leading to a breakdown of the thyristor. Both scenarios will decrease thyristor lifetime at the very least. Manufacturers only guarantee that these things work for a set amount of time within certain parameters. And they're very well aware why they do so. Cause in the end all of them fail eventually. The question is if they'll take your solar panel with them or not, cause catastrophic failure is possible.
Now on larger installations you have this problem as well, but instead of causing down time it'll cause a fluctuation in available capacity and high maintenance costs. Cause you know, thyristors aren't what I'd call cheap.
I won't need to give you my address cause the costs will over run the maintenance budget easily. Sure you can keep it going if you throw enough resources at it, and that's exactly what politicians will do to save their face.
If you want long term reliability you go for nuclear power with a current generation reactor design and a diesel backup system for when you need to do reactor maintenance.
You're just plain wrong. Silica is abundant and easy to process. The non-silicon based materials are often rather rare. I like to use gallium as example cause it's a very clear energy hog. Electrolysis isn't known for being energy efficient in the carbon-emissions department. The accompanying arsenide, well I doubt I need to draw a picture of the environmental effects of that lovely substance.
Another fun fact is that batteries don't last forever. Lead-acid is a very effective (and long term) solution, but the green guys didn't want us to use lead in electronic devices any longer. Same deal for cadmium and other heavy metals that'd do well in long term solutions. So the alternatives at hand are lithium or nickel metal hydride based. Lithium, while having the high energy density does have its problems. Especially if it comes to cost and lifetime. NiMH has a nasty habit of losing its charge.
It doesn't get old cause it's true. And I won't for the simple reason that you'll just claim my source is invalid. And the number depends on the exact technology used anyway, like in the case of GaAs (electrolysis is a bitch) it's a lot worse than doped Si. And the ones the manufacturer sometimes does provide are under optimal conditions that never occur. And optimal conditions includes more than just the angle of the sun, spectrum and intensity of light. It also includes temperature, air pressure, etc. . And your number doesn't include the mining and pre-processing energy costs anyway. If it would you'd easily reach 5 years at the very least before it starts making up for itself. Combined with the fact that exposure to the elements deteriorates the quality of these panels combined with manufacturing defects (another thing the manufacturer provided efficiency doesn't take into account). So yes, it's a very relevant argument that is always attacked in the same way as you're displaying right now. I have yet to see a proper counter argument based on independent data from somebody with an EE degree (solid state physics will do as well).
Cost effective is questionable. Solar panels do require a lot of maintenance if you want good performance. Not to mention the inverters tend to break quite often. And "carbon alternatives" is a term I really wouldn't use for solar panels. Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel.
Anyway, I see a few problems with this. They'll depend on batteries during the night. If somebody gets it in his mind to use very large loads during the night the batteries will deplete and the power will fail. On the other hand on a sunny day there will be a lot of excess capacity on the grid causing all sorts of problems as well. This is why solar panels are useless as primary source of power, they're horrible to do demand-load balancing with.
Well, if that's the case I demand that we in engineering were never forced to take all those stupid management and environmental law subjects. Most of us don't need them and we are able to come up with the ideas mentioned in those courses anyway simply by applying some logic.
While we're on the subject of jargon I wish to make a small detour to the realms of physics and reality.
First of all, one sends an electric current through a device/circuit/... not a voltage! Seeing this wrong just annoys me greatly. Another one is "the god particle", How does defining mass turn something into a god? Sure, it sounds far more spectacular but it's just plain wrong from a logical point of view. Another problem is the rampant usage of acronyms. It seems every invention and field of science these days has to come with its own expanded set of acronyms.They twist, cut and shape the name of the project just to be able to make a fancy sounding acronym. Just stop it already, Frankly put, I'm an engineer and I don't understand half the acronyms that I hear at technology conferences. They're probably made up on the spot cause they think it sounds impressive, guess what; It doesn't! So please journalists stop citing acronyms; Cause even the people who are familiar with the technology don't know what they mean. There's a wagon load of alternatives that you can use. And if you really must, do what we do in our articles:
ACRONYM ( WHAT IT REALLY MEANS IN BETWEEN BRACKETS )
Thank you for reading this rant on how idiotic and annoying reporters have gotten.
I saw something similar at some lame environmentalist convention I was forced to attend a few years ago...
Way to claim you innovated something when you really didn't!
A factor of 5 isn't negligible though. If you wish to claim otherwise I advice you to look up the difference between a 1 Tesla magnetic field and a 5 Tesla magnetic field. The former can be produced using neodymium rare earth magnets fairly easily, the latter we tend to resort to super conductors and liquid helium. People often underestimate the difference 1 Tesla can have on the magnetic field and the device used to generate it. So yes, a factor of 5 is very significant in this case.
Not really, 50 Tesla is perfectly doable with current super conductors. 10-12 Tesla is what you'll find in commercial NMR spectroscopy set-ups. So the number you're looking for is actually 2000 times the strength of what we can sustain. (For reference: experimental NMR imaging goes up to 7 Tesla at this point)
The problem with making an opensource camera is actually the imaging sensor, the rest of the hardware is fairly trivial compared to that. Finding a well documented high resolution image sensor is hard at the best of times. Finding an affordable one is even harder.
Yes, but a lot harder to get. If they want to stop hacking the first thing they should do is get rid of bullies really. Every single one of my friends who did any sort of real hacking all had one thing in common as far as I know. They got bullied a lot at school because they had less social skills or weren't interested in sports or other stupid reasons like that. This resulted in girls avoiding them like the plague. So they could actually never get a girlfriend to spend time with. This resulted in them having a few hours a day of time to spend on getting revenge on the world in some way.
It is true that most of the prisons in Europe have a considerable non-European population (in fact here over half the prison population is foreign or of second generation foreign descent). A lot of it being made up out of (former) citizens of African or Middle-Eastern countries. Saying that will get you called a racist but it's simply a fact. The real question is what you do with that information. So yes it does mean that if a crime is committed that has a jail sentence attached to it is statistically far more likely that it's a person that came from one of those particular geographical areas. But you can draw this conclusion out further: they don't adapt well to local customs and do commit criminal activity, the police force is racist, etc. But this is getting rather off-topic I think. And it's a pointless argument anyway
It's simply a fact that many shop keepers and restaurant employees in France aren't very nice people. I stopped visiting France not cause it's not a nice country, and most people are friendly indeed. It's just that all the people who should be happy to get tourists in their business treat them like they're a disease. Going to Germany or the UK is far more pleasant in that aspect.
And McDonalds should very much apologise for this and repair the damage done to the device and in my opinion they should also refund part of the trip cause I doubt they had a pleasant stay afterwards.
How do you feel about the fact that a large portion of the CMS was built by recycling military hardware? Do you see it as a sign that the world is finally moving towards peace and that large scientific projects like the LHC are helping it along that path; Or do you find it disappointing that it was the only option to acquire the necessary materials?
That wasn't the argument made in the original article. He claimed it takes about the same energy to go up from 50 to 100 km/h as it does for something close to 4000 to 4050 km/h (exact value doesn't matter). It's simply not true.
And the same argument can be made for magnetic levitation systems anyway.
The author of the article needs to retake Physics-101 it seems. Energy of an object in motion is 0.5*mass*(velocity squared). It takes a lot more energy to go from 3450 km/h to 3500 km/h than it does to go from 50 km/h to 100km/h. It only takes about 46 times the energy it would but yeah, that's about the same right! To make it clear:
0.5 * 1 kg * (((100 km/h)^2) - ((50 km/h)^2)) = 289.351852 J
0.5 * 1 kg * (((3500 km/h)^2) - ((3450 km/h)^2)) = 13 406.6358 J
Now considering a train tends to weigh a few tons the difference isn't really all that small.
Slashdot Mirror
Your costs just shift really. Replacing the batteries every few years will be a very large cost. Replacing failed components won't be cheap either.
Diesel plants are very reliable and don't require much maintenance at this point. Mechanical failures are very rare and the electronic control systems can often indicate if a component is going to fail long before it actually does so.
And I find it funny you still assume uranium is the only possible fuel. There are so much possible reactor designs and fuel cycles. Why do people always insist on comparing solar panels to reactors and technology from the 60s and 70s?
And most of those improvements in efficiency come from using more exotic materials that cause more environmental damage when mined. So you're trading in CO2 statistics for more damage in other areas.
Sure auto-starting generators are nice. But considering it's a large power grid you have redundancy built in no matter what. So your speech about generator efficiency is pointless. And that's not the really the point of this discussion or this post. What this story tried to claim is that using only solar power is sustainable and a good idea. I'll agree it's good enough to run your airco in the middle of a desert or a tropical island. I'll even agree it might work well to power a relatively small load in a remote area. What I don't agree with is claiming it's a green alternative. Cause it just isn't. It's also not the most cost effective way, and certainly not the safest.
The entire point of running large loads at night is to avoid needing larger capacity during the day. The load on the grid is high during the day, but during the night when everybody's sleeping all the consumer equipment is turned off. At that point you're free to use a lot of energy for other things without needing to add to your total maximum capacity. So yes, it's very common to use large loads during the night and power companies will often encourage it by giving better rates for night usage. You wouldn't want to do this with solar power cause you'd have to increase the total amount of batteries. But if you don't you have to increase the total daytime capacity, meaning a larger surface area of solar panels.
And if you're as knowledgeable as you claim to be you'll know how batteries are made and why they're bad for the environment. You'll also know the energy requirements for semiconductor manufacturing, the purity requirements for the materials and the impact of mining and purifying them. Did you also forget about the chemicals we use to manufacture semiconductors? If you have I'm sure we can arrange for you to have a few barrels of etchant, mask, developer and other assorted chemicals shipped to your house. The cylinders with toxic gasses come in the next shipment! Maybe a bit too much cynical remarks for one paragraph.
And here comes the bird... You're forgetting that off-grid locations isn't the target of this article. It's very much about the power grid itself. You're trying to drag in an irrelevant situation to prove a point. Good try sir, better luck next time. But to address your point, yes solar panels do work well for places where getting a cable is tricky like the middle of a desert or space (I would advice not trying it in the Arctic regions though as it might have a severe impact on efficiency). On the other hand if you're working on a 900 MHz (license free) setup I'm going to go on a guess here that you have to provide a power solution for an access point. Unless this access point happens to hook up to a routing backbone in some other wireless way you'll probably be hooking it up to a glass fibre loop somewhere. It's cheaper to just put a cable in the ground together with the fibre. In fact you'll be able to order fibre cables with power cables woven into the shield.
And the maintenance I'm talking about is removing dirt, as it really matters when you try to run an entire grid on solar panels. A slight drop in efficiency on a total capacity of hundreds or thousands of kilowatts will be noticeable. Inverters fail, it's a simple fact. Thyristors aren't flawless and their manufacturers do expect them to fail. Considering the size of an operation like this you'll need thousands of them for a small plant. If you're going to tell me none of them will fail and everything will work as expected a wafer fab out there is playing with witchcraft. You'll have the occasional storm damage as well.
Your power supply will fluctuate with weather conditions. Sadly a lot of loads don't except air condition and heating. Batteries have a limited charge rate and you'll need to fully charge them by the time when darkness settles in. An additional problem with solar power in most current set-ups is its decentralized nature (on roofs, buildings, etc. to save space). The current grid isn't designed to control decentralized power sources. So yes
Your inverters WILL fail. They will need replacement parts. Your solar panels will get dirty and you'll need to clean them. For you it might not make much of a difference. Now try running hundreds or thousands of these panels. A one percent drop in efficiency is noticeable at such a scale. And your inverter is also a semiconductor based device, leading to even more pollution. Now include some storm damage and manufacturing faults.
Yes, initially it might look like you're saving money. But I'd like to see the maintenance bills of this plant in a few years; And they'll have to keep the diesel infrastructure maintained as backup system (redundancy as one of your "friends" pointed out). So how much costs do you really save?
Yep, and now you're resorting to insults. Such a pity you can't even have a proper argument on Slashdot any more.
Anyway, inverter failure is common. You're using thyristors, considering the amount of power we're talking about you'll need more than one as well for larger installations. But there's a nasty timing problem when you use multiple of them. Either a very large voltage builds up over one (or more) specific thyristors during a part of the cycle or all the current flows through a single branch causing hotspots on the semiconductor material eventually leading to a breakdown of the thyristor. Both scenarios will decrease thyristor lifetime at the very least. Manufacturers only guarantee that these things work for a set amount of time within certain parameters. And they're very well aware why they do so. Cause in the end all of them fail eventually. The question is if they'll take your solar panel with them or not, cause catastrophic failure is possible.
Now on larger installations you have this problem as well, but instead of causing down time it'll cause a fluctuation in available capacity and high maintenance costs. Cause you know, thyristors aren't what I'd call cheap.
I won't need to give you my address cause the costs will over run the maintenance budget easily. Sure you can keep it going if you throw enough resources at it, and that's exactly what politicians will do to save their face.
If you want long term reliability you go for nuclear power with a current generation reactor design and a diesel backup system for when you need to do reactor maintenance.
You're just plain wrong. Silica is abundant and easy to process. The non-silicon based materials are often rather rare. I like to use gallium as example cause it's a very clear energy hog. Electrolysis isn't known for being energy efficient in the carbon-emissions department. The accompanying arsenide, well I doubt I need to draw a picture of the environmental effects of that lovely substance.
Another fun fact is that batteries don't last forever. Lead-acid is a very effective (and long term) solution, but the green guys didn't want us to use lead in electronic devices any longer. Same deal for cadmium and other heavy metals that'd do well in long term solutions. So the alternatives at hand are lithium or nickel metal hydride based. Lithium, while having the high energy density does have its problems. Especially if it comes to cost and lifetime. NiMH has a nasty habit of losing its charge.
So where is this pay-off you're talking about?
It doesn't get old cause it's true. And I won't for the simple reason that you'll just claim my source is invalid. And the number depends on the exact technology used anyway, like in the case of GaAs (electrolysis is a bitch) it's a lot worse than doped Si. And the ones the manufacturer sometimes does provide are under optimal conditions that never occur. And optimal conditions includes more than just the angle of the sun, spectrum and intensity of light. It also includes temperature, air pressure, etc. . And your number doesn't include the mining and pre-processing energy costs anyway. If it would you'd easily reach 5 years at the very least before it starts making up for itself. Combined with the fact that exposure to the elements deteriorates the quality of these panels combined with manufacturing defects (another thing the manufacturer provided efficiency doesn't take into account). So yes, it's a very relevant argument that is always attacked in the same way as you're displaying right now. I have yet to see a proper counter argument based on independent data from somebody with an EE degree (solid state physics will do as well).
Cost effective is questionable. Solar panels do require a lot of maintenance if you want good performance. Not to mention the inverters tend to break quite often. And "carbon alternatives" is a term I really wouldn't use for solar panels. Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel.
Anyway, I see a few problems with this. They'll depend on batteries during the night. If somebody gets it in his mind to use very large loads during the night the batteries will deplete and the power will fail. On the other hand on a sunny day there will be a lot of excess capacity on the grid causing all sorts of problems as well. This is why solar panels are useless as primary source of power, they're horrible to do demand-load balancing with.
Well, if that's the case I demand that we in engineering were never forced to take all those stupid management and environmental law subjects. Most of us don't need them and we are able to come up with the ideas mentioned in those courses anyway simply by applying some logic.
While we're on the subject of jargon I wish to make a small detour to the realms of physics and reality.
First of all, one sends an electric current through a device/circuit/... not a voltage! Seeing this wrong just annoys me greatly. Another one is "the god particle", How does defining mass turn something into a god? Sure, it sounds far more spectacular but it's just plain wrong from a logical point of view. Another problem is the rampant usage of acronyms. It seems every invention and field of science these days has to come with its own expanded set of acronyms.They twist, cut and shape the name of the project just to be able to make a fancy sounding acronym. Just stop it already, Frankly put, I'm an engineer and I don't understand half the acronyms that I hear at technology conferences. They're probably made up on the spot cause they think it sounds impressive, guess what; It doesn't! So please journalists stop citing acronyms; Cause even the people who are familiar with the technology don't know what they mean. There's a wagon load of alternatives that you can use. And if you really must, do what we do in our articles:
ACRONYM ( WHAT IT REALLY MEANS IN BETWEEN BRACKETS )
Thank you for reading this rant on how idiotic and annoying reporters have gotten.
Read the part "forced". You're not always free to choose what to spend your time on.
I saw something similar at some lame environmentalist convention I was forced to attend a few years ago...
Way to claim you innovated something when you really didn't!
A factor of 5 isn't negligible though. If you wish to claim otherwise I advice you to look up the difference between a 1 Tesla magnetic field and a 5 Tesla magnetic field. The former can be produced using neodymium rare earth magnets fairly easily, the latter we tend to resort to super conductors and liquid helium. People often underestimate the difference 1 Tesla can have on the magnetic field and the device used to generate it. So yes, a factor of 5 is very significant in this case.
Not really, 50 Tesla is perfectly doable with current super conductors. 10-12 Tesla is what you'll find in commercial NMR spectroscopy set-ups. So the number you're looking for is actually 2000 times the strength of what we can sustain. (For reference: experimental NMR imaging goes up to 7 Tesla at this point)
Then do explain to me why I never run into problems like that anywhere else?
The problem with making an opensource camera is actually the imaging sensor, the rest of the hardware is fairly trivial compared to that. Finding a well documented high resolution image sensor is hard at the best of times. Finding an affordable one is even harder.
Yes, but a lot harder to get. If they want to stop hacking the first thing they should do is get rid of bullies really. Every single one of my friends who did any sort of real hacking all had one thing in common as far as I know. They got bullied a lot at school because they had less social skills or weren't interested in sports or other stupid reasons like that. This resulted in girls avoiding them like the plague. So they could actually never get a girlfriend to spend time with. This resulted in them having a few hours a day of time to spend on getting revenge on the world in some way.
I've encountered the same behaviour in every single French city I've been to.
Ah yes, the problem with that being that I speak fluent French and didn't even have a camera with me. So what were you saying?
It is true that most of the prisons in Europe have a considerable non-European population (in fact here over half the prison population is foreign or of second generation foreign descent). A lot of it being made up out of (former) citizens of African or Middle-Eastern countries. Saying that will get you called a racist but it's simply a fact. The real question is what you do with that information. So yes it does mean that if a crime is committed that has a jail sentence attached to it is statistically far more likely that it's a person that came from one of those particular geographical areas. But you can draw this conclusion out further: they don't adapt well to local customs and do commit criminal activity, the police force is racist, etc. But this is getting rather off-topic I think. And it's a pointless argument anyway
It's simply a fact that many shop keepers and restaurant employees in France aren't very nice people. I stopped visiting France not cause it's not a nice country, and most people are friendly indeed. It's just that all the people who should be happy to get tourists in their business treat them like they're a disease. Going to Germany or the UK is far more pleasant in that aspect.
And McDonalds should very much apologise for this and repair the damage done to the device and in my opinion they should also refund part of the trip cause I doubt they had a pleasant stay afterwards.
How do you feel about the fact that a large portion of the CMS was built by recycling military hardware? Do you see it as a sign that the world is finally moving towards peace and that large scientific projects like the LHC are helping it along that path; Or do you find it disappointing that it was the only option to acquire the necessary materials?
That wasn't the argument made in the original article. He claimed it takes about the same energy to go up from 50 to 100 km/h as it does for something close to 4000 to 4050 km/h (exact value doesn't matter). It's simply not true.
And the same argument can be made for magnetic levitation systems anyway.
The author of the article needs to retake Physics-101 it seems. Energy of an object in motion is 0.5*mass*(velocity squared). It takes a lot more energy to go from 3450 km/h to 3500 km/h than it does to go from 50 km/h to 100km/h. It only takes about 46 times the energy it would but yeah, that's about the same right! To make it clear:
0.5 * 1 kg * (((100 km/h)^2) - ((50 km/h)^2)) = 289.351852 J
0.5 * 1 kg * (((3500 km/h)^2) - ((3450 km/h)^2)) = 13 406.6358 J
Now considering a train tends to weigh a few tons the difference isn't really all that small.