I'm not so sure that what they've got is very skimpy - this was revealed at a "Solve for X" talk in Feb 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Lockheed Martin doesn't need a public announcement to get partners; they have more trouble keeping things under wraps and have channels to labs, big corporations and governments that we can scarcely conceive.
Look at that table again - the most significant declines for most categories of crime was between 1992 and 2001. It even more dramatic when you consider the growth in population. So the cops have to explain why they're now equipped like they're tank battalions.
It does take up more land to do this - about 2.5 times as much if you use the Japanese system and crop spacing. But you're not killing farmland, you're having a fairly minor impact on crop yield if the land is healthy and current FiTs provide a much better income for most farmers than they'll get from crops alone.
I imagine that you've seen or even been in a Passivhaus - a concept that was born in Canada & America but never took hold despite extremes of temperature that are very unusual or even unheard of in Central or Northern Europe. North America has had so many great efficiency ideas that they simply abandoned because they thought cheap oil is a right, not a privilege.
Solar thermal panels aka solar hot water, something that goes back to the late 19th century, enjoyed, pardon the pun, a brief moment in the sun after the Arab Oil Embargo and when President Carter installed some on the White House. But because some were low quality, some were poorly installed or some customers were fleeced, they fell out of favor and only in the past few years have seen a significant deployment in the USA. Meanwhile, since the early '80s, China, Japan, Israel, TURKEY, some parts of South America have all installed huge numbers with China breaking the 100 GWh installed base and where some complete systems can be had for just a few hundred dollars. But because of the addition to cheap oil, petrol & electricity and the stubborn refusal to take the long view, America has wasted hundreds of billions of gallons and an unimaginable amount of coal with many deleterious & persistent effects.
And the trillions that went into the pockets of OPEC countries earned the USA almost ZERO goodwill and has cost trillions more on the military industrial complex that has helped to keep the cheap crude flowing.
Had energy efficiency, insulation, conservation been pursued as relentlessly as the chase after more horsepower or cheap electronics, North America & the world would be a much different, certainly much better place.
I think you mean "Der Speigel" ( The Mirror ). They're relatively sane by USA RightWingNut standards but they're still pretty far right of center. That's not to say they don't unearth some fantastic scandals. German electricity has been expensive for a long time; long before the Engergiewende was enacted or had achieved significant momentum. And most of that is due to taxes. Also, let's not forget that German homes are wonderfully efficient compared to the average US one - almost 4x as much. But not large enough to comfortably house a unicorn, unlike many (abandoned) ones in the Home of the Brave.
Gee gosh whillickers, would it be anything like controlling a plane in turbulence, a storm or any kind of bad weather? How could we ever manage to account for all those changing variables?
Nobody gives a damn how hard you think it is; we routinely deal with situations as difficult or more so. It's a complicated world. Can we do it better - of course. It seems that some farms are using sub-optimal spacing that hindering production by up to 20%.
But not doing it perfectly is a long way from not being able to do it routinely. There are probably 35 large active turbine makers in the world but there used to be many more prior to the downturn. As for wind farm management, there are companies that sell turnkey addon solutions that'll do most of the work for you.
"500 or....blah, blah" Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. It may be a difficult problem but it's hardly insurmountable and pales in comparison to some of the things that supercomputing tackles as a matter of cours.
You can grow crops that need spacing and don't take much water. One project is growing agave under solar panels. Have a look at what the Japanese are doing. Also your argument implies you couldn't grow anything under trees which would come as a shock to cocoa plantantions.
There's a 4.4 MW solar farm in Texas that uses goats to keep grass & weeds under control. I never implied that you'd get 100% benefit for both panels & plants but the idea that it's all or nothing is equally ludicrous. Before you say it can't be done, look around for people already doing it.
The reflected light is for the grass / plants under the panels; the panels will track the sun. There are a considerable number of edible plants that prefer shade and there have been attempts at making this work in Japan & America
That's why I think battery swap stations will become necessary & popular as EVs become commonplace. I'm glad Tesla built the capability into the Model S and hope they keep it for the Model 3.
Does the Tesla's main battery charge at 12V? But it would take a heck of a lot of power to charge in 2 minutes, on the order of a couple MW which isn't the kind of cable you want on every street corner.
Lifting the panels higher off the ground should alleviate that. And in my example, I did mention grazing. You also get a lot of reflected light which plants are perfectly capable of using.
The fact that some arrays were done in a way that's incompatible with farming doesn't mean that it can't be done. And a lot of "high quality farmland" in many places has been and is being used to alleviate the vast condo,housing & shopping center shortage that's been such a burden on modern society. I'll take the wind turbines & solar panels over yet-another-Walmart
Newsflash - the panels aren't lying on the ground and there's space inbetween and beneath. There are livestock farms where the animals happily graze among the solar installation.
What??
I thought the whole problem with wind was how disruptive it is to baseload plants and that only gas & hydro can cope. If integration with coal plants is not big deal then the USA should be able to go to 50% wind in no time at all.
Heartbleed & Shellshock have impacted for-profit companies quite significantly. I don't have an objection to them using opensource within the boundaries of the license but should THEY not be vetting before rolling it into a commercial product? No one company has to do it all alone - it can be done through a team effort & foundation, just like OpenStack.
Your average modern car has dozens of processors and up to 100 million lines of code - that's a lot of IP.
A modern wind turbine is a long way from your great-grandpa's old windmill but its not really that complicated; and if you think it's more complicated than a car, you're smoking some seriously bad crack.
I think things aren't going as smoothly as Sadoway hoped but even if he succeeds, it'll probably still be too expensive for very large scale storage. I'm hoping that Isentropic's PHES techs pans out but Ambri's will probably be better for voltage-regulation or when you need a very quick cut-in and cut-out.
Now, wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it is hotter to areas where it is cooler. That is what wind is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I am not saying that is going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale--I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something. You can't transfer that heat and the heat goes up. It is just something to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
How fucking hard is that.
Damned bleeding-heart environmentalists screwing up good old traditions!!
I'm not so sure that what they've got is very skimpy - this was revealed at a "Solve for X" talk in Feb 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Lockheed Martin doesn't need a public announcement to get partners; they have more trouble keeping things under wraps and have channels to labs, big corporations and governments that we can scarcely conceive.
Look at that table again - the most significant declines for most categories of crime was between 1992 and 2001. It even more dramatic when you consider the growth in population.
So the cops have to explain why they're now equipped like they're tank battalions.
Did you discuss it with these chaps?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/20...
It does take up more land to do this - about 2.5 times as much if you use the Japanese system and crop spacing.
But you're not killing farmland, you're having a fairly minor impact on crop yield if the land is healthy and current FiTs provide a much better income for most farmers than they'll get from crops alone.
Think you'll have to rely on your sales of dessicated dihydrogen monoxide
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
I imagine that you've seen or even been in a Passivhaus - a concept that was born in Canada & America but never took hold despite extremes of temperature that are very unusual or even unheard of in Central or Northern Europe. North America has had so many great efficiency ideas that they simply abandoned because they thought cheap oil is a right, not a privilege.
Solar thermal panels aka solar hot water, something that goes back to the late 19th century, enjoyed, pardon the pun, a brief moment in the sun after the Arab Oil Embargo and when President Carter installed some on the White House.
But because some were low quality, some were poorly installed or some customers were fleeced, they fell out of favor and only in the past few years have seen a significant deployment in the USA.
Meanwhile, since the early '80s, China, Japan, Israel, TURKEY, some parts of South America have all installed huge numbers with China breaking the 100 GWh installed base and where some complete systems can be had for just a few hundred dollars.
But because of the addition to cheap oil, petrol & electricity and the stubborn refusal to take the long view, America has wasted hundreds of billions of gallons and an unimaginable amount of coal with many deleterious & persistent effects.
And the trillions that went into the pockets of OPEC countries earned the USA almost ZERO goodwill and has cost trillions more on the military industrial complex that has helped to keep the cheap crude flowing.
Had energy efficiency, insulation, conservation been pursued as relentlessly as the chase after more horsepower or cheap electronics, North America & the world would be a much different, certainly much better place.
I think you mean "Der Speigel" ( The Mirror ). They're relatively sane by USA RightWingNut standards but they're still pretty far right of center.
That's not to say they don't unearth some fantastic scandals.
German electricity has been expensive for a long time; long before the Engergiewende was enacted or had achieved significant momentum.
And most of that is due to taxes.
Also, let's not forget that German homes are wonderfully efficient compared to the average US one - almost 4x as much. But not large enough to comfortably house a unicorn, unlike many (abandoned) ones in the Home of the Brave.
Gee gosh whillickers, would it be anything like controlling a plane in turbulence, a storm or any kind of bad weather? How could we ever manage to account for all those changing variables?
Nobody gives a damn how hard you think it is; we routinely deal with situations as difficult or more so. It's a complicated world.
Can we do it better - of course. It seems that some farms are using sub-optimal spacing that hindering production by up to 20%.
But not doing it perfectly is a long way from not being able to do it routinely.
There are probably 35 large active turbine makers in the world but there used to be many more prior to the downturn.
As for wind farm management, there are companies that sell turnkey addon solutions that'll do most of the work for you.
"500 or ....blah, blah"
Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. It may be a difficult problem but it's hardly insurmountable and pales in comparison to some of the things that supercomputing tackles as a matter of cours.
You can grow crops that need spacing and don't take much water. One project is growing agave under solar panels.
Have a look at what the Japanese are doing. Also your argument implies you couldn't grow anything under trees which would come as a shock to cocoa plantantions.
There's a 4.4 MW solar farm in Texas that uses goats to keep grass & weeds under control.
I never implied that you'd get 100% benefit for both panels & plants but the idea that it's all or nothing is equally ludicrous.
Before you say it can't be done, look around for people already doing it.
The reflected light is for the grass / plants under the panels; the panels will track the sun. There are a considerable number of edible plants that prefer shade and there have been attempts at making this work in Japan & America
http://www.treehugger.com/sust...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...
That's why I think battery swap stations will become necessary & popular as EVs become commonplace.
I'm glad Tesla built the capability into the Model S and hope they keep it for the Model 3.
That's probably why they stop or slow down at 70% - too much heat buildup.
Does the Tesla's main battery charge at 12V?
But it would take a heck of a lot of power to charge in 2 minutes, on the order of a couple MW which isn't the kind of cable you want on every street corner.
Lifting the panels higher off the ground should alleviate that. And in my example, I did mention grazing.
You also get a lot of reflected light which plants are perfectly capable of using.
The fact that some arrays were done in a way that's incompatible with farming doesn't mean that it can't be done.
And a lot of "high quality farmland" in many places has been and is being used to alleviate the vast condo,housing & shopping center shortage that's been such a burden on modern society. I'll take the wind turbines & solar panels over yet-another-Walmart
Not at all. But anyone who uses F/OSS IS a member of the community and that includes companies who chose to use it in commercial products.
Congrats on winning today's "Dickhead of the Day" award.
Newsflash - the panels aren't lying on the ground and there's space inbetween and beneath. There are livestock farms where the animals happily graze among the solar installation.
What??
I thought the whole problem with wind was how disruptive it is to baseload plants and that only gas & hydro can cope.
If integration with coal plants is not big deal then the USA should be able to go to 50% wind in no time at all.
Heartbleed & Shellshock have impacted for-profit companies quite significantly. I don't have an objection to them using opensource within the boundaries of the license but should THEY not be vetting before rolling it into a commercial product?
No one company has to do it all alone - it can be done through a team effort & foundation, just like OpenStack.
Your average modern car has dozens of processors and up to 100 million lines of code - that's a lot of IP.
A modern wind turbine is a long way from your great-grandpa's old windmill but its not really that complicated; and if you think it's more complicated than a car, you're smoking some seriously bad crack.
I think things aren't going as smoothly as Sadoway hoped but even if he succeeds, it'll probably still be too expensive for very large scale storage.
I'm hoping that Isentropic's PHES techs pans out but Ambri's will probably be better for voltage-regulation or when you need a very quick cut-in and cut-out.
http://www.isentropic.co.uk/ou...
Did you even try looking?? Took all of 15 seconds with Teh Googleh.
Go to page 91 on linked PDF
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Now, wind is God's way of balancing
heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it is
hotter to areas where it is cooler. That is what wind is.
Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we
mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite
resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the
temperature to go up? Now, I am not saying that is going to
happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the
massive scale--I mean, it does make some sense. You stop
something. You can't transfer that heat and the heat goes
up. It is just something to think about.