In 1950, train control was crude, using giant resistor banks to switch between power levels. These days, high-power electronics make for more efficient conversion.
The 80% is from ARES's website, their press kit has it at 78.3%.
Trains feature the same number of conversion steps as a pumped storage plant. Pumped storage can be retrofitted to existing hydro plants, so it made sense to build pumped storage first. Now that suitable locations for that have been exhausted, it makes sense to look for alternatives. This one, at least, looks a lot more promising than compressed-air storage (where adiabatic losses are huge), and more scalable than flywheel storage.
You have those losses in any electric storage system. Pumped storage: the pump doesn't run at 300 kV either. You get friction losses pumping the water uphill. Evaporation. Batteries: again, conversion losses. Chemical inefficiency.
Again, 80% is pretty good and beats many other storage systems.
Electric storage is becoming more interesting because grid supply is starting to vary more thanks to solar and wind generation. Balancing supply and demand is expensive (gas turbines are popular for this, but they are really inefficient) so it's not surprising people are looking at alternatives.
Pumped water storage has been viable for decades at 70% efficiency. So much so that most places with suitable geology have a pumped storage plant on them already, so scope for expansion is limited there. Rail storage gives scope to build storage in more locations.
Their brochure has more info on their proposed solution. 2 rail yards, 8 miles apart, 70 4-car trains weighing 1000 tons each, capacity 2 MWh per train. Each train is about 60 m long and ~3 m wide. Peak capacity 333 MW. Rail cars weigh 240 tons, mostly concrete. A block of concrete 15*2.5*3 m weighs that much.
The least amount of energy you can store is achieved by parking one train somewhere up the slope. Want to store 200 kWh? Drive 0.8 miles.
Generally, ships use a generator to provide power and heating while the ship is docked. For a large cruise ship this generator needs to be substantial. It also runs on the same fuel as the main engines, and there are no emissions regulations for these ships. So everyone downwind of the docks (i.e. most of Southampton, in this case) gets to sit in a column of smoke for the entire time the ship's docked.
The obvious solution would be to connect the ship to the shore electric grid. This is being worked on (example) but conversion takes time.
Police have been using unmarked cars forever. Some of these (esp. surveillance vans) have been disguised with company names (e.g. utilities seem to be popular) because those are even more 'non-suspect' than a van with no markings at all.
Find me a single instance of a utility being attacked because the FBI used its name on a surveillance van.
What makes you think there's a bias against internal combustion for aircraft? There are several projects aimed at using biofuel for jet engines. There have been commercial flights already that were powered in part by biofuels. The unsolved problem here is the currently very limited supply of biofuels, but that's being worked on as well.
On my car (and many others), the gas cap itself doesn't have a lock. It's behind the filler flap which has a lock actuated by the car's central locking system.
with pumping gasoline is the spillage. In the Netherlands, all gas stations are required to have non-porous paving to make sure spills don't end up in the ground.
The other problem is that it's inefficient. Instead of people filling up at the next station they come across, some guy has to drive everywhere to fill up one customer at a time.
That's not how it works. Those 2200W are advertising numbers, which is why the numbers kept creeping up well into the "ridiculous" range. They sounded like a jet taking off and were horribly inefficient to boot. Product design consisted of "stick a bigger motor in and we're done". The EU regulation forced the manufacturers to start optimizing airflow, and lo and behold, the new 1200 W vacuum cleaners clean just as well as the old 2200 W machines.
Congratulations on not following TFLinks. They did open-source the tools and provide instructions. You also don't need to download the entire 300 TB, the data is divided into batches.
Available on the CERN Open Data Portal - which is built in collaboration with members of CERN's IT Department and Scientific Information Service - the collision data are released into the public domain under the CC0 waiver and come in types: The so-called 'primary datasets' are in the same format used by the CMS Collaboration to perform research. The 'derived datasets' on the other hand require a lot less computing power and can be readily analysed by university or high-school students, and CMS has provided a limited number of datasets in this format.
Notably, CMS is also providing the simulated data generated with the same software version that should be used to analyse the primary datasets. Simulations play a crucial role in particle-physics research and CMS is also making available the protocols for generating the simulations that are provided. The data release is accompanied by analysis tools and code examples tailored to the datasets. A virtual-machine image based on CernVM, which comes preloaded with the software environment needed to analyse the CMS data, can also be downloaded from the portal.
With the desk at least 79 cm (30.7") off the ground this desk is only suitable for giants. The "average" desk height is 75 cm, and I find that uncomfortably high despite being 1m80 tall.
However, lower fuel costs are the main driver of the sea-based landing pads.
No. The sea-based landing pads are used for missions where the rocket doesn't have enough delta-V to get back to the launch site. I.e. landing downrange at sea enables them to launch heavier payloads.
Not a dramatic difference, you say? While satellite imagery is nice, it's only a proxy. Try reading some of the stories told by people who used to live in NK and have fled the country.
People used to use your line when talking about the Soviet Union. Guess what? The wall fell, the USSR collapsed and the situation turned out to have been as bad as we'd been led to believe by "propaganda", if not worse.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1950, train control was crude, using giant resistor banks to switch between power levels. These days, high-power electronics make for more efficient conversion.
The 80% is from ARES's website, their press kit has it at 78.3%.
Trains feature the same number of conversion steps as a pumped storage plant. Pumped storage can be retrofitted to existing hydro plants, so it made sense to build pumped storage first. Now that suitable locations for that have been exhausted, it makes sense to look for alternatives. This one, at least, looks a lot more promising than compressed-air storage (where adiabatic losses are huge), and more scalable than flywheel storage.
You have those losses in any electric storage system. Pumped storage: the pump doesn't run at 300 kV either. You get friction losses pumping the water uphill. Evaporation.
Batteries: again, conversion losses. Chemical inefficiency.
Again, 80% is pretty good and beats many other storage systems.
Electric storage is becoming more interesting because grid supply is starting to vary more thanks to solar and wind generation. Balancing supply and demand is expensive (gas turbines are popular for this, but they are really inefficient) so it's not surprising people are looking at alternatives.
Pumped water storage has been viable for decades at 70% efficiency. So much so that most places with suitable geology have a pumped storage plant on them already, so scope for expansion is limited there. Rail storage gives scope to build storage in more locations.
Entire cycle. Electric motors have pretty amazing efficiencies. And rail has very low friction losses.
Their brochure has more info on their proposed solution. 2 rail yards, 8 miles apart, 70 4-car trains weighing 1000 tons each, capacity 2 MWh per train. Each train is about 60 m long and ~3 m wide. Peak capacity 333 MW.
Rail cars weigh 240 tons, mostly concrete. A block of concrete 15*2.5*3 m weighs that much.
The least amount of energy you can store is achieved by parking one train somewhere up the slope. Want to store 200 kWh? Drive 0.8 miles.
They're already stopping the main engines, running on generators instead.
The declination had more likely to do with cost.
There's an invention that can help with that. You may have heard of it, it's called "brakes".
ARES quotes an energy efficiency of 80% which would outperform pumped water storage (70%), so that's pretty good.
Converting CO2 into carbon is being worked on, but no large-scale efficient process has been found yet.
Generally, ships use a generator to provide power and heating while the ship is docked. For a large cruise ship this generator needs to be substantial. It also runs on the same fuel as the main engines, and there are no emissions regulations for these ships.
So everyone downwind of the docks (i.e. most of Southampton, in this case) gets to sit in a column of smoke for the entire time the ship's docked.
The obvious solution would be to connect the ship to the shore electric grid. This is being worked on (example) but conversion takes time.
I was getting worried I'd have to do without my weekly dose of antinuclear FUD. mdsolar to the rescue yet again!
Solar power (as PV) has not only been practical for years, it's economically viable now in many places, including 55deg N where I live.
Calling that a scam is bordering on delusional.
Nonsense.
Police have been using unmarked cars forever. Some of these (esp. surveillance vans) have been disguised with company names (e.g. utilities seem to be popular) because those are even more 'non-suspect' than a van with no markings at all.
Find me a single instance of a utility being attacked because the FBI used its name on a surveillance van.
What makes you think there's a bias against internal combustion for aircraft?
There are several projects aimed at using biofuel for jet engines. There have been commercial flights already that were powered in part by biofuels.
The unsolved problem here is the currently very limited supply of biofuels, but that's being worked on as well.
I need the doors unlocked to fill the car.
On my car (and many others), the gas cap itself doesn't have a lock. It's behind the filler flap which has a lock actuated by the car's central locking system.
with pumping gasoline is the spillage. In the Netherlands, all gas stations are required to have non-porous paving to make sure spills don't end up in the ground.
The other problem is that it's inefficient. Instead of people filling up at the next station they come across, some guy has to drive everywhere to fill up one customer at a time.
That's not how it works. Those 2200W are advertising numbers, which is why the numbers kept creeping up well into the "ridiculous" range. They sounded like a jet taking off and were horribly inefficient to boot. Product design consisted of "stick a bigger motor in and we're done".
The EU regulation forced the manufacturers to start optimizing airflow, and lo and behold, the new 1200 W vacuum cleaners clean just as well as the old 2200 W machines.
Yes. The bigger question is, why does every fart they make merit a Slashdot article?
Congratulations on not following TFLinks. They did open-source the tools and provide instructions.
You also don't need to download the entire 300 TB, the data is divided into batches.
Available on the CERN Open Data Portal - which is built in collaboration with members of CERN's IT Department and Scientific Information Service - the collision data are released into the public domain under the CC0 waiver and come in types: The so-called 'primary datasets' are in the same format used by the CMS Collaboration to perform research. The 'derived datasets' on the other hand require a lot less computing power and can be readily analysed by university or high-school students, and CMS has provided a limited number of datasets in this format.
Notably, CMS is also providing the simulated data generated with the same software version that should be used to analyse the primary datasets. Simulations play a crucial role in particle-physics research and CMS is also making available the protocols for generating the simulations that are provided. The data release is accompanied by analysis tools and code examples tailored to the datasets. A virtual-machine image based on CernVM, which comes preloaded with the software environment needed to analyse the CMS data, can also be downloaded from the portal.
With the desk at least 79 cm (30.7") off the ground this desk is only suitable for giants.
The "average" desk height is 75 cm, and I find that uncomfortably high despite being 1m80 tall.
As everyone knows, a government can't possibly address more than one issue at a time...
However, lower fuel costs are the main driver of the sea-based landing pads.
No. The sea-based landing pads are used for missions where the rocket doesn't have enough delta-V to get back to the launch site. I.e. landing downrange at sea enables them to launch heavier payloads.
Not a dramatic difference, you say?
While satellite imagery is nice, it's only a proxy. Try reading some of the stories told by people who used to live in NK and have fled the country.
People used to use your line when talking about the Soviet Union. Guess what? The wall fell, the USSR collapsed and the situation turned out to have been as bad as we'd been led to believe by "propaganda", if not worse.
At first glance, a mortality rate of 1% seems lower than average and should not be cause for alarm.
No radio telescope time available at all? Even at the old ones run by amateurs these days (e.g. Bochum and Dwingeloo)?
Coal is a vital ingredient for converting iron into steel. Are there any alternatives for this process?