They now have the power to prevent Trump from permanently ruining America before he leaves office in 2020. Anything he does by decree can be undone by decree by president Bernie Sanders in 2021.
LOL.. You DO realize that Democrats had the ability to say "NO" to just about anything short of a budget right? Anything that required cloture in the Senate they could simply stop any time they wanted. Having the house doesn't give them any more say about what bills pass in the Senate and the Republicans didn't win enough Senate seats to make a difference either. ALMOST nothing changed in the balance of power...
About the only real thing that changed is Democrats can now impeach if they want and put all sorts of bills into the Senate's inbox for the Republican leadership to ignore (Just like the democrats did for the last term of Obama.) Impeachment would be a huge political mistake (see the historical records of the Clinton impeachment for why), so enjoy stuffing the Senate's inbox with SPAM and getting blamed for nothing happening by your voters. "Do Nothing Congress" strikes again and "throw the bums out" will ensue, only Republicans will continue to pack the courts and Trump will likely get another Supreme pick or two out of the deal... Plus, 2020 will be a presidential election year and we've seen Trump has coattails... Congress may shift right again, especially if somebody tries the impeachment gambit and fails..
They could possibly introduce a bill that has this in it, but unless they throw in enough Republican sweeteners to get it though the senate and past the Whtehouse, the Democrats cannot DO anything.
In reality the past election didn't change much at all. It moved the power of the Democrats to say "NO" a bit towards the House and allowed them to actually get bills onto the Senate, but they cannot force the Senate to debate them or the president to sign them any more than before.
So the balance of power may have moved ever so slightly in that Republicans now cannot get legislation though the house by themselves anymore, but the reality of the situation doesn't change either party's current position beyond a slight shift in news coverage and in the fact the the Democrats can send all the bills they like to the Senate and watch them die.
So no, the Democrats cannot do this on their own come January. All they can possibly do is make a bit of a larger stink about it, pass a House bill to "fix" it, and watch it die waiting to come up for debate in the Senate.
I dare say any EU country isn't much better.
And there you are obviously wrong.
Government runs pretty much everything in Venezuela and it's a total mess.
Last time I checked: they have/had no functional government but are a kind of totalitarian state... so: what is your point? You have on single example of a tyranny and another example as Greece (which has no things government run anyway) and jump to wild conclusions about he EU?
Oh, I've picked extreme examples, to be sure, but they are examples of what happens when you depend on government, the logical destination of where your thinking goes. Venezuela started down this path when it's government made similar promises as you would in support of the EU about 20 years ago. I remember what Venezuela once was and the vibrant economy it had, rich with promise and natural resources.
The EU is far from a perfect place, and Greece is an example of why it simply cannot survive. If Greece and Spain can drag the EU though such turmoil financially, there are fundamental problems with the idea. Unless the EU changes form pretty soon, Venezuela like conditions will spread from Spain and Greece north. Eventually the EU will either break up or become one desperately poor third world region, with just vague memories of it's past glory. My guess is that break up is in the cards, but a breakup coupled with violence and unrest as the blight of socialism and the cost of its programs drive economic conditions into the gutter for most of the member states.
But hey, I might be wrong, history might not repeat itself this time, but I seriously doubt it. Look at France right now. Can a "let the eat cake" analog be far from coming? Hopefully we can avoid the guillotines but revolution seems to be in the wings, waiting to take the stage in Paris right now. All this driven by what exactly? EU regulations? No?
Well, I'm not disagreeing that Uber is not a money making idea for the drivers in general, it DOES provide cash flow. Sometimes cash flow is a good thing, if you are not losing too much in the process. Driving for Uber is stupid, at least it would be for me as they don't pay enough to cover expenses much less actually pay me.
Another thing.. No offense to the service you provide your customers, but if somebody is paying to get their taxes done by some guy in s a strip mall they obviously don't understand business or the implications of tax law on how you run one and are likely not keeping the right records to start with. My guess is that you are not seeing a representative sample of Uber drivers and owner operator truckers. The folks that know what they are doing won't be hiring you, but either doing their own taxes or working with their CPA to get them filed, because they will be big enough and efficient enough to both make a profit and not be forced to darken your door.
No reason? You must not live in Greece then, or Venezuela... Government runs pretty much everything in Venezuela and it's a total mess. I dare say any EU country isn't much better.
Lithium is not a rare element, it is extracted from the salt brine under dry lake beds like Searles Lake near Death Valley. There is lots of it.
Sure, there is lots of it.. But refining it to usable purity takes quite a bit of energy... What kind you ask? Why electricity of course.
Lithium and Aluminum have similar purification processes and both consume a LOT of energy, electrical energy. Where do you suppose all that electricity comes from?
Reminds me of those Hydrogen Economy hawkers who try and claim it solves the carbon dioxide issue because only H2O comes out of the tail pipe while totally ignoring where H2 gas comes from when made in industrial quantities... Where? Oh, I'm glad you asked.. Natural Gas "reforming" which releases more CO2 than just burning it as a motor fuel directly. I laugh... Yea, forget the total end to end emissions of the process and focus on only the parts you like... Don't try the electrolysis gambit either, that's a dead end for life cycle emissions counters too...
Yea, right... Again ignorance oozed out... Residential power usage is but a small slice of the pie here.
The issue here is economics, physics and how the technology works. None of that goes away because we wish things where different.
Fossil fuels are the USA's main source of electrical power and that shows no sign of changing anytime soon. Natural Gas supplies have been hugely impacted by fracking technologies, we are the "Saudi Arabia" of Natural Gas right now, which has driven the price of this fuel down, way down. This has driven more expensive fuels into the ash heap, including even Nuclear power, once seen as the low cost, endless supply of cheap energy. Supplies of Natural Gas are not running out and even the most pessimistic of cost projections are saying the cost of this fuel is unlikely to rise appreciably anytime soon, even in the face of increased LNG exporting. We have that much..
So, the fossil fuel ride is far from over... We are going to be largely dependent on Natural Gas here in the USA for the foreseeable future. Unless of course the apparent costs of Natural Gas is artificially raised though government action.
Even if you don't use public transport it benefits you by reducing traffic.
Citation? Something with real numbers and studies of a "before" and "after" public transportation please? How much traffic did it reduce and how much did it cost per car?
Where this might seem obvious, is that a benefit to everybody? My commute is pretty short, doesn't touch even one "highway" as it's all on surface streets. Reducing traffic is not part of my needs or wants.
Actually, I live in a large metro area (Dallas-Fort Worth) and we DO NOT have public transportation in my town at all. DART participation requires that the city sign over a large portion of their sales taxes, and commit to do so for something like 5 years before DART provides any service. The city I live in declined this offer. We don't need or want DART service. And it wouldn't reduce the traffic for me one bit, though it might make crime and such worse. Nope, don't want it.
"You may not be paying for it when you use it, but it's being paid for though taxation. It's not free, far from it. "
Yes, it's like roads, highways, schools and university, all 'free' here as well.
Ah yes, nobody is saying government isn't an answer to problems. I certainly understand that there ARE things that government is best suited to do. I'm just pointing out that "free" at point of use is not exactly "free" of cost for the citizens of the city.
I'm paying for that road I drive to work on though the taxes I pay. I don't directly benefit from the public school system (I homeschooled my kids) but I pay for it too. I use the local universities, though they are NOT free for me or my kids and I've been forking out taxes to build them for decades now. None of these things are "free" even if I'm not paying at point of use, I'm still paying for them.
"Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way.
So is private transportation. Who do you think pays for all those roads? Encouraging more people to use public transportation by making it free will reduce the need to build more roads and save on repair on the ones that are already there.
Whether the benefit is worth the cost requires detailed analysis but in a densely populated country like Luxembourg I suspect the maths is much more in favour of this than in less densely populated countries like Canada where our city council is both considering either making local transit free or increasing the price by ~30%!
LOL.. IF you are thinking they will save money by doing this, I dare say it's unlikely to happen. Are there possible offsets to the increased costs? Sure. But I seriously doubt this is a financial winner for the city.
Government is the least efficient and least effective way to do just about anything you can imagine. Sometimes Government is the only possible solution, such as when providing national defense and law enforcement, or as you point out maintaining infrastructure like roads, bridges, water, sewer treatment and the like. But never be fooled, it's going to cost more than it should, take longer than it should and be less effective than it should when government is tasked to do something. "Public Transportation" is not an exception to this rule.
Storage may be part of the answer and has it's use in modern electrical grids, this Tesla plant demonstrates that. But we are a far cry from a totally renewable solution, even in Australia where Tesla has this plant running. As a short term power source in remote areas, batteries have a place.
However, those who point their finger at this application and say "See! Batteries could make us 100% renewable" are mistaken. Even in the land down under this isn't true. Their power still comes from fossil fuels because it can be scheduled to meet demand. This battery thing is only there to keep things stable enough to keep the grid alive for a short time. This is a far cry from keeping the grid running for hours or days that could be necessary with renewables."
So until we can build batteries that are orders of magnitude larger and can supply the grid for many hours of peak load or come up with a way to make the wind blow or the sun shine on demand, we will need existing technologies like Natural Gas and Coal to keep our electric grids running. It's just an economic necessity regardless of what folks want to dream about.
You may not be paying for it when you use it, but it's being paid for though taxation. It's not free, far from it.
But let's be real. "Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way. Why? Because there is no way it would be possible for the private sector to do this kind of thing at a "reasonable" cost for the average user. The business model is unworkable. The only option is to throw taxpayer funds into it.
No power plant runs 100% of the time, there are all kinds of scheduled and unscheduled outages. We reliably know when the sun will be up and we can generally predict the wind.
Batteries are a good candidate for replacing NG peaker plants, which cost about $300 million to build and run only about 5% of the time.
Don't be daft, you know what I mean by "Schedule generation capacity." Knowing when the wind will blow is not scheduling it.
The problem is we can predict demand and schedule our power generation capacity to match. You cannot tell the sun to shine or the wind to blow when you WANT it to, like when you need the energy. You can predict what your windmills will produce, sure, but you cannot schedule it, as in "tell the wind when to blow" to meet demand.
Say for instance it's a cold calm winter's night and everyone wants to stay warm by running their electric heaters, you KNOW in advance that demand will be high, the wind will not be blowing and the sun won't be shining. You cannot "schedule" your windmills to produce the energy you need, the wind isn't blowing. You cannot schedule the solar farm to give you the energy, the sun isn't shining. But you can schedule the Fossil Fueled plant to produce electricity for you, because WE determine when it will be generating power and when it won't.
See what I mean by "schedule" now? Please don't now dodge the issue with daft statements like that.
Look, you go take an undergraduate course in AC power and call me when you pass and know what the difference is between using the square root of three and the square root of two when discussing AC power systems. You are going to need some basic understanding of transmission lines and power distribution grids or we are wasting our time.
I may be no Westinghouse or Tesla, but there are really good engineering reasons the power grid works as it does and really important economic reasons this isn't going to be changing all that much any time soon. The grid of today works essentially the same way the initial power distribution systems of the early 1900's and apart from the control systems it's going to work on the same principles after the next 100 ears of operation.
We are not going to have some technological advance in power distribution technology that just makes all my objections to your hair brained ideas go away. The engineering principles, physics and economics just don't allow for your dreams to come true. I'm sorry you don't understand, but I don't really have time to make you into an electrical engineer, and if you won't give my arguments their due consideration, I don't really have time.
No one solution is the correct answer. Your 100% renewable pipe dream isn't either.
Base load Natural Gas is currently the cheapest per megawatt that you can get, which is why even the cheap nuclear option is getting squeezed. The proven reserves of natural gas in the USA are literally HUGE and it's cost is projected to remain historically low for decades so building that NG plant is a low risk investment.
The problem with renewables is their unpredictable nature. You cannot schedule generation capacity and expect a windmill to always meet demand. Sure, storage helps with that, but storage is limited and expensive (and don't forget inefficient). Most industrial sized storage solutions struggle to approach 70% efficiency. This means if you need a storage solution that can hold up your power grid over a calm cold night, you will need a LOT of batteries to keep the street lights and space heaters going while adding enough extra generation capacity on the windy days to charge everything up AND account for the 30% conversion loss. It's just not practical financially.
Don't get me wrong, build the renewable options, use battery storage where it makes sense, just don't fool yourself into thinking we are poised to replace all the Fossil Fueled plants with this anytime in the foreseeable future. Natural gas is way too cheap and your solution way too expensive.
For years now we have had fossil fuel shills claiming that wind/solar/etc... will NEVER work (and should not even be looked into) because they do not provide a constant supply of power (when the wind stops, or sun goes down), or provides a peak surge when demand increases.
The success of the Big Battery shows those claims to be false
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work. And you OBVOUSLY don't understand what this battery solution is actually doing.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources. Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale. On an electric grid, every watt of electrical power must be generated the instant it is used or the grid becomes unstable, goes out of frequency spec, voltage specifications and fails. Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that. This is why they keep power plants online, spinning and ready to push power. Another plat may trip, a transmission line may isolate part of the grid and change the local load seen. This reserve capacity is used to keep the grid up because it WILL trip off line if things get out of whack too far.
The Tesla battery is used to mimic this rotating storage, but it has a finite amount of power stored. The purpose is to allow time for the grid operator to bring additional electrical supplies online to make up for equipment failures or unexpected load changes. The battery is located in an area that suffers from being difficult to provide rotating power generation capacity. Giving "time" is the key. The more time the grid operator has, the more it can do to manage the flow of power and keep the grid within specs and providing power to it's customers.
However, that battery provides backup power for a very short time, just long enough to keep the grid stable. Not enough time to make up for the day to day variations of wind and solar or provide a peak load for the grid on a hot cloudy still day.... In order to do that, your battery will need to be a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than what they have now. Remember, you are suggesting that we use batteries to hold the grid up for HOURS or DAYS when wind and solar are not producing enough power to meet demand. Right now, the battery being used is only capable of doing this for tens of min, and only while the grid is being reconfigured to fix what ever problem happened to trigger the event.
So, you insist on moving the goal posts AGAIN? First it was collusion, now it's something more? come on...
What was Mueller supposed to be investigating? As I recall (and just goggled) Mueller is tasked with investigating any relationships between Russians and the Trump campaign (and any crimes uncovered during the investigation). So what is this new crime you speak of?
Your "conspiracy to defraud the American people" means exactly what in this context? And which law are you thinking is involved? When did it happen and who did it?
By the way, your complaint about the president not testifying under oath is premature. First, there is a lot of precedent that says the president cannot be forced to personally testify in any legal proceeding. He can do it willingly, but it's doubtful you can force it. And the "perjury" trap argument is a valid reason to not agree to answer questions under oath in person, most lawyers would agree it's a dangerous thing to do. I lived though the Clinton thing, I remember all this getting debated but unresolved way back then.
Also, the president HAS provided any requested documentation or materials and HAS provided written answers to Mueller's questions, the latter willingly. He could have chosen to fight having to give answers and tied this up for months as the legal question of forcing a sitting president to testify under oath is far from settled law. However, he has cooperated with Mueller's investigation and provided written answers, I believe before Thanksgiving.
This Mueller thing is about over and it's very possible he found NOTHING of import that implicates Trump in any illegal activity. I don't know, but I'm curious what you are going to do if that's what Mueller reports? Invent some new crime to investigate? Move the goal posts more? Scream at the sky? What?
Such hostility.. I was merely stating the obvious political truth. You know how politics works, the idea is to gain votes, by adopting positions or making statements to please as many voters as you can.
Personally, I know that coal is dying and it's because Natural Gas is cheaper. Heck, Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
All I'm saying is that the battery is used to make the supply of fossil fueled electricity more stable by storing energy near where it is used. A function that would NORMALLY be accomplished by having a fossil fueled plant online to take up the slack. However, the logistics of transporting fuel and generating power is pretty difficult in the middle of the country and there is no water sources available, which makes electricity production even more logistically difficult (and expensive).
The battery solution helps with logistics and costs, the grid can operate with acceptable margins with less cost and less spinning reserve. Fossil fuels are still where the energy comes from. This has not changed and isn't likely to change in the near future.
Why it was chosen in the first place is different from why it is good. The reason film has stayed at 24 FPS for a century isn't technical.
No, perhaps it's not, but it's financial which is a bigger driver than technology in the movie business. If you have millions worth of equipment that uses film, you use it until it doesn't do the job anymore.
16mm film is good enough for old TV, 35 mm film is better than 1080p/i, 70mm is even better than 4K. It runs at 24 FPS though a host of existing processing and editing equipment. Folks know how to use it. It's cheap...
However, that's not to say that new production companies are not being created and equipped with HD video equipment or that the editing chain isn't quickly being converted to digital, it is. The issue is that capture of film is so well understood and high resolution video camera systems and lenses are not as advanced or as inexpensive, yet... I've seen that some of the new media companies (say Netflix) that are producing their own content are dumping film production for the quick turn that digital gives them now that distribution on film isn't as common as it was. But these companies are not producing material to project on a 100' wide screens to start with, so they don't really care about film at all.
So why not just record the movies at 120 frames per second? Then there's nothing to interpolate
It's too fast at 120 FPS. Just drives up costs for no real benefit. You cannot see much more than about 50 FPS at reasonable distances.
Movies to film where traditionally shot at 24 FPS, even IMAX film is shot at that rate. Standard definition TV was 30 FPS interlaced. The biggest issue here is that FILM has way better resolution than Video, but runs as 24 FPS instead of 30 FPS. Translating from 24 to 30 is not an easy bit of math, so there are a number of schemes to deal with it.. Usually you just duplicate film frames every so often to bring 24 FPS up to 30, some just run the film at 30 FPS but it looks weird (think Charlie Chaplin walking in black and white, it's too fast and looks strange because old silent films where shot at even lower FPS.)
I actually find that old "film" based movies don't display well in HD or 4K, even if shot in 70mm. Most of these feature films did not have the production quality to support higher resolutions and I find myself being distracted by the in appropriate set detail or costumes and special effect artifacts that wouldn't be visible on a DVD. I remember the first time I saw the first "Pirates" move in HD from Blu-ray, it was horrible.
Frame rates of 120 FPS are about 3 times what you actually need as a frame rate. You cannot see much more than 40, though eye strain may be an issue. The way to avoid that, is to use 40 FPS frame rate, but scan it at 120 FPS (i.e. show the same frame 3 times). They actually did this with film projectors, where they'd flash the same frame multiple times.
Recording at 120 FPS may sound neat, but the problem is it simply isn't worth going above 40 or 50 regardless of the material. Higher frame rates simply drive streaming bandwidth up, storage sizes up and production costs up, but add no perceived value to the end customer. Resolution though, IS worth it, if not now in the future.
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They now have the power to prevent Trump from permanently ruining America before he leaves office in 2020. Anything he does by decree can be undone by decree by president Bernie Sanders in 2021.
LOL.. You DO realize that Democrats had the ability to say "NO" to just about anything short of a budget right? Anything that required cloture in the Senate they could simply stop any time they wanted. Having the house doesn't give them any more say about what bills pass in the Senate and the Republicans didn't win enough Senate seats to make a difference either. ALMOST nothing changed in the balance of power...
About the only real thing that changed is Democrats can now impeach if they want and put all sorts of bills into the Senate's inbox for the Republican leadership to ignore (Just like the democrats did for the last term of Obama.) Impeachment would be a huge political mistake (see the historical records of the Clinton impeachment for why), so enjoy stuffing the Senate's inbox with SPAM and getting blamed for nothing happening by your voters. "Do Nothing Congress" strikes again and "throw the bums out" will ensue, only Republicans will continue to pack the courts and Trump will likely get another Supreme pick or two out of the deal... Plus, 2020 will be a presidential election year and we've seen Trump has coattails... Congress may shift right again, especially if somebody tries the impeachment gambit and fails..
No.
They could possibly introduce a bill that has this in it, but unless they throw in enough Republican sweeteners to get it though the senate and past the Whtehouse, the Democrats cannot DO anything.
In reality the past election didn't change much at all. It moved the power of the Democrats to say "NO" a bit towards the House and allowed them to actually get bills onto the Senate, but they cannot force the Senate to debate them or the president to sign them any more than before.
So the balance of power may have moved ever so slightly in that Republicans now cannot get legislation though the house by themselves anymore, but the reality of the situation doesn't change either party's current position beyond a slight shift in news coverage and in the fact the the Democrats can send all the bills they like to the Senate and watch them die.
So no, the Democrats cannot do this on their own come January. All they can possibly do is make a bit of a larger stink about it, pass a House bill to "fix" it, and watch it die waiting to come up for debate in the Senate.
I dare say any EU country isn't much better. And there you are obviously wrong.
Government runs pretty much everything in Venezuela and it's a total mess. Last time I checked: they have/had no functional government but are a kind of totalitarian state ... so: what is your point? You have on single example of a tyranny and another example as Greece (which has no things government run anyway) and jump to wild conclusions about he EU?
Oh, I've picked extreme examples, to be sure, but they are examples of what happens when you depend on government, the logical destination of where your thinking goes. Venezuela started down this path when it's government made similar promises as you would in support of the EU about 20 years ago. I remember what Venezuela once was and the vibrant economy it had, rich with promise and natural resources.
The EU is far from a perfect place, and Greece is an example of why it simply cannot survive. If Greece and Spain can drag the EU though such turmoil financially, there are fundamental problems with the idea. Unless the EU changes form pretty soon, Venezuela like conditions will spread from Spain and Greece north. Eventually the EU will either break up or become one desperately poor third world region, with just vague memories of it's past glory. My guess is that break up is in the cards, but a breakup coupled with violence and unrest as the blight of socialism and the cost of its programs drive economic conditions into the gutter for most of the member states.
But hey, I might be wrong, history might not repeat itself this time, but I seriously doubt it. Look at France right now. Can a "let the eat cake" analog be far from coming? Hopefully we can avoid the guillotines but revolution seems to be in the wings, waiting to take the stage in Paris right now. All this driven by what exactly? EU regulations? No?
Well, I'm not disagreeing that Uber is not a money making idea for the drivers in general, it DOES provide cash flow. Sometimes cash flow is a good thing, if you are not losing too much in the process. Driving for Uber is stupid, at least it would be for me as they don't pay enough to cover expenses much less actually pay me.
Another thing.. No offense to the service you provide your customers, but if somebody is paying to get their taxes done by some guy in s a strip mall they obviously don't understand business or the implications of tax law on how you run one and are likely not keeping the right records to start with. My guess is that you are not seeing a representative sample of Uber drivers and owner operator truckers. The folks that know what they are doing won't be hiring you, but either doing their own taxes or working with their CPA to get them filed, because they will be big enough and efficient enough to both make a profit and not be forced to darken your door.
I'm so glad I am not an Uber driver. No arbitration for me!
You sure about that? I mean, have you read any of the ELUA's you've agreed to lately?
Arbitration is now so common as to be conspicuous if it's absent in most terms of service, licenses and user agreements.
No reason? You must not live in Greece then, or Venezuela... Government runs pretty much everything in Venezuela and it's a total mess. I dare say any EU country isn't much better.
It wasn't me.. I swear! And I have both my socks still on.
Lithium is not a rare element, it is extracted from the salt brine under dry lake beds like Searles Lake near Death Valley. There is lots of it.
Sure, there is lots of it.. But refining it to usable purity takes quite a bit of energy... What kind you ask? Why electricity of course.
Lithium and Aluminum have similar purification processes and both consume a LOT of energy, electrical energy. Where do you suppose all that electricity comes from?
Reminds me of those Hydrogen Economy hawkers who try and claim it solves the carbon dioxide issue because only H2O comes out of the tail pipe while totally ignoring where H2 gas comes from when made in industrial quantities... Where? Oh, I'm glad you asked.. Natural Gas "reforming" which releases more CO2 than just burning it as a motor fuel directly. I laugh... Yea, forget the total end to end emissions of the process and focus on only the parts you like... Don't try the electrolysis gambit either, that's a dead end for life cycle emissions counters too...
Yea, right... Again ignorance oozed out... Residential power usage is but a small slice of the pie here.
The issue here is economics, physics and how the technology works. None of that goes away because we wish things where different.
Fossil fuels are the USA's main source of electrical power and that shows no sign of changing anytime soon. Natural Gas supplies have been hugely impacted by fracking technologies, we are the "Saudi Arabia" of Natural Gas right now, which has driven the price of this fuel down, way down. This has driven more expensive fuels into the ash heap, including even Nuclear power, once seen as the low cost, endless supply of cheap energy. Supplies of Natural Gas are not running out and even the most pessimistic of cost projections are saying the cost of this fuel is unlikely to rise appreciably anytime soon, even in the face of increased LNG exporting. We have that much..
So, the fossil fuel ride is far from over... We are going to be largely dependent on Natural Gas here in the USA for the foreseeable future. Unless of course the apparent costs of Natural Gas is artificially raised though government action.
Even if you don't use public transport it benefits you by reducing traffic.
Citation? Something with real numbers and studies of a "before" and "after" public transportation please? How much traffic did it reduce and how much did it cost per car?
Where this might seem obvious, is that a benefit to everybody? My commute is pretty short, doesn't touch even one "highway" as it's all on surface streets. Reducing traffic is not part of my needs or wants.
Actually, I live in a large metro area (Dallas-Fort Worth) and we DO NOT have public transportation in my town at all. DART participation requires that the city sign over a large portion of their sales taxes, and commit to do so for something like 5 years before DART provides any service. The city I live in declined this offer. We don't need or want DART service. And it wouldn't reduce the traffic for me one bit, though it might make crime and such worse. Nope, don't want it.
"You may not be paying for it when you use it, but it's being paid for though taxation. It's not free, far from it. "
Yes, it's like roads, highways, schools and university, all 'free' here as well.
Ah yes, nobody is saying government isn't an answer to problems. I certainly understand that there ARE things that government is best suited to do. I'm just pointing out that "free" at point of use is not exactly "free" of cost for the citizens of the city.
I'm paying for that road I drive to work on though the taxes I pay. I don't directly benefit from the public school system (I homeschooled my kids) but I pay for it too. I use the local universities, though they are NOT free for me or my kids and I've been forking out taxes to build them for decades now. None of these things are "free" even if I'm not paying at point of use, I'm still paying for them.
"Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way.
So is private transportation. Who do you think pays for all those roads? Encouraging more people to use public transportation by making it free will reduce the need to build more roads and save on repair on the ones that are already there. Whether the benefit is worth the cost requires detailed analysis but in a densely populated country like Luxembourg I suspect the maths is much more in favour of this than in less densely populated countries like Canada where our city council is both considering either making local transit free or increasing the price by ~30%!
LOL.. IF you are thinking they will save money by doing this, I dare say it's unlikely to happen. Are there possible offsets to the increased costs? Sure. But I seriously doubt this is a financial winner for the city.
Government is the least efficient and least effective way to do just about anything you can imagine. Sometimes Government is the only possible solution, such as when providing national defense and law enforcement, or as you point out maintaining infrastructure like roads, bridges, water, sewer treatment and the like. But never be fooled, it's going to cost more than it should, take longer than it should and be less effective than it should when government is tasked to do something. "Public Transportation" is not an exception to this rule.
Dream on...
Storage may be part of the answer and has it's use in modern electrical grids, this Tesla plant demonstrates that. But we are a far cry from a totally renewable solution, even in Australia where Tesla has this plant running. As a short term power source in remote areas, batteries have a place.
However, those who point their finger at this application and say "See! Batteries could make us 100% renewable" are mistaken. Even in the land down under this isn't true. Their power still comes from fossil fuels because it can be scheduled to meet demand. This battery thing is only there to keep things stable enough to keep the grid alive for a short time. This is a far cry from keeping the grid running for hours or days that could be necessary with renewables."
So until we can build batteries that are orders of magnitude larger and can supply the grid for many hours of peak load or come up with a way to make the wind blow or the sun shine on demand, we will need existing technologies like Natural Gas and Coal to keep our electric grids running. It's just an economic necessity regardless of what folks want to dream about.
You may not be paying for it when you use it, but it's being paid for though taxation. It's not free, far from it.
But let's be real. "Public transportation" is ALWAYS taxpayer funded in some way. Why? Because there is no way it would be possible for the private sector to do this kind of thing at a "reasonable" cost for the average user. The business model is unworkable. The only option is to throw taxpayer funds into it.
No power plant runs 100% of the time, there are all kinds of scheduled and unscheduled outages. We reliably know when the sun will be up and we can generally predict the wind. Batteries are a good candidate for replacing NG peaker plants, which cost about $300 million to build and run only about 5% of the time.
Don't be daft, you know what I mean by "Schedule generation capacity." Knowing when the wind will blow is not scheduling it.
The problem is we can predict demand and schedule our power generation capacity to match. You cannot tell the sun to shine or the wind to blow when you WANT it to, like when you need the energy. You can predict what your windmills will produce, sure, but you cannot schedule it, as in "tell the wind when to blow" to meet demand.
Say for instance it's a cold calm winter's night and everyone wants to stay warm by running their electric heaters, you KNOW in advance that demand will be high, the wind will not be blowing and the sun won't be shining. You cannot "schedule" your windmills to produce the energy you need, the wind isn't blowing. You cannot schedule the solar farm to give you the energy, the sun isn't shining. But you can schedule the Fossil Fueled plant to produce electricity for you, because WE determine when it will be generating power and when it won't.
See what I mean by "schedule" now? Please don't now dodge the issue with daft statements like that.
So much ignorance.. So little time..
Look, you go take an undergraduate course in AC power and call me when you pass and know what the difference is between using the square root of three and the square root of two when discussing AC power systems. You are going to need some basic understanding of transmission lines and power distribution grids or we are wasting our time.
I may be no Westinghouse or Tesla, but there are really good engineering reasons the power grid works as it does and really important economic reasons this isn't going to be changing all that much any time soon. The grid of today works essentially the same way the initial power distribution systems of the early 1900's and apart from the control systems it's going to work on the same principles after the next 100 ears of operation.
We are not going to have some technological advance in power distribution technology that just makes all my objections to your hair brained ideas go away. The engineering principles, physics and economics just don't allow for your dreams to come true. I'm sorry you don't understand, but I don't really have time to make you into an electrical engineer, and if you won't give my arguments their due consideration, I don't really have time.
No one solution is the correct answer. Your 100% renewable pipe dream isn't either.
Base load Natural Gas is currently the cheapest per megawatt that you can get, which is why even the cheap nuclear option is getting squeezed. The proven reserves of natural gas in the USA are literally HUGE and it's cost is projected to remain historically low for decades so building that NG plant is a low risk investment.
The problem with renewables is their unpredictable nature. You cannot schedule generation capacity and expect a windmill to always meet demand. Sure, storage helps with that, but storage is limited and expensive (and don't forget inefficient). Most industrial sized storage solutions struggle to approach 70% efficiency. This means if you need a storage solution that can hold up your power grid over a calm cold night, you will need a LOT of batteries to keep the street lights and space heaters going while adding enough extra generation capacity on the windy days to charge everything up AND account for the 30% conversion loss. It's just not practical financially.
Don't get me wrong, build the renewable options, use battery storage where it makes sense, just don't fool yourself into thinking we are poised to replace all the Fossil Fueled plants with this anytime in the foreseeable future. Natural gas is way too cheap and your solution way too expensive.
For years now we have had fossil fuel shills claiming that wind/solar/etc... will NEVER work (and should not even be looked into) because they do not provide a constant supply of power (when the wind stops, or sun goes down), or provides a peak surge when demand increases.
The success of the Big Battery shows those claims to be false
It's obvious you don't know either the argument being made nor how a power grid has to work. And you OBVOUSLY don't understand what this battery solution is actually doing.
The PROBLEM with Wind and Solar is that they are unreliable, you cannot schedule them to meet demand, you have to take the power and use it, store it or throw it away when it is generated from these sources. Sure, you could dump it into batteries and use it later, but this is extremely inefficient and expensive to do on an industrial scale. On an electric grid, every watt of electrical power must be generated the instant it is used or the grid becomes unstable, goes out of frequency spec, voltage specifications and fails. Currently there is reserve capacity provided by mechanically rotating machines, to keep things stable and in specifications, this reserve covers for instantaneous demand changes, transmission line failure induced transients and things like that. This is why they keep power plants online, spinning and ready to push power. Another plat may trip, a transmission line may isolate part of the grid and change the local load seen. This reserve capacity is used to keep the grid up because it WILL trip off line if things get out of whack too far.
The Tesla battery is used to mimic this rotating storage, but it has a finite amount of power stored. The purpose is to allow time for the grid operator to bring additional electrical supplies online to make up for equipment failures or unexpected load changes. The battery is located in an area that suffers from being difficult to provide rotating power generation capacity. Giving "time" is the key. The more time the grid operator has, the more it can do to manage the flow of power and keep the grid within specs and providing power to it's customers.
However, that battery provides backup power for a very short time, just long enough to keep the grid stable. Not enough time to make up for the day to day variations of wind and solar or provide a peak load for the grid on a hot cloudy still day.... In order to do that, your battery will need to be a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than what they have now. Remember, you are suggesting that we use batteries to hold the grid up for HOURS or DAYS when wind and solar are not producing enough power to meet demand. Right now, the battery being used is only capable of doing this for tens of min, and only while the grid is being reconfigured to fix what ever problem happened to trigger the event.
So, you insist on moving the goal posts AGAIN? First it was collusion, now it's something more? come on...
What was Mueller supposed to be investigating? As I recall (and just goggled) Mueller is tasked with investigating any relationships between Russians and the Trump campaign (and any crimes uncovered during the investigation). So what is this new crime you speak of?
Your "conspiracy to defraud the American people" means exactly what in this context? And which law are you thinking is involved? When did it happen and who did it?
By the way, your complaint about the president not testifying under oath is premature. First, there is a lot of precedent that says the president cannot be forced to personally testify in any legal proceeding. He can do it willingly, but it's doubtful you can force it. And the "perjury" trap argument is a valid reason to not agree to answer questions under oath in person, most lawyers would agree it's a dangerous thing to do. I lived though the Clinton thing, I remember all this getting debated but unresolved way back then.
Also, the president HAS provided any requested documentation or materials and HAS provided written answers to Mueller's questions, the latter willingly. He could have chosen to fight having to give answers and tied this up for months as the legal question of forcing a sitting president to testify under oath is far from settled law. However, he has cooperated with Mueller's investigation and provided written answers, I believe before Thanksgiving.
This Mueller thing is about over and it's very possible he found NOTHING of import that implicates Trump in any illegal activity. I don't know, but I'm curious what you are going to do if that's what Mueller reports? Invent some new crime to investigate? Move the goal posts more? Scream at the sky? What?
Such hostility.. I was merely stating the obvious political truth. You know how politics works, the idea is to gain votes, by adopting positions or making statements to please as many voters as you can.
Personally, I know that coal is dying and it's because Natural Gas is cheaper. Heck, Natural Gas is so cheap, even nuclear plants are too expensive now.
who said that?
All I'm saying is that the battery is used to make the supply of fossil fueled electricity more stable by storing energy near where it is used. A function that would NORMALLY be accomplished by having a fossil fueled plant online to take up the slack. However, the logistics of transporting fuel and generating power is pretty difficult in the middle of the country and there is no water sources available, which makes electricity production even more logistically difficult (and expensive).
The battery solution helps with logistics and costs, the grid can operate with acceptable margins with less cost and less spinning reserve. Fossil fuels are still where the energy comes from. This has not changed and isn't likely to change in the near future.
But, but, but the US President says that coal is both clean and beautiful...
And it IS if you are looking to get blue collar votes from West Virginia and Ohio ....
"Where's the tailpipe though, it can't work without a tailpipe, Daddy says!"
That tail pipe you seek is over there... See? Where the logistics for transporting the fossil fuels is cheaper... Over there, near the coast.
Why it was chosen in the first place is different from why it is good. The reason film has stayed at 24 FPS for a century isn't technical.
No, perhaps it's not, but it's financial which is a bigger driver than technology in the movie business. If you have millions worth of equipment that uses film, you use it until it doesn't do the job anymore.
16mm film is good enough for old TV, 35 mm film is better than 1080p/i, 70mm is even better than 4K. It runs at 24 FPS though a host of existing processing and editing equipment. Folks know how to use it. It's cheap...
However, that's not to say that new production companies are not being created and equipped with HD video equipment or that the editing chain isn't quickly being converted to digital, it is. The issue is that capture of film is so well understood and high resolution video camera systems and lenses are not as advanced or as inexpensive, yet... I've seen that some of the new media companies (say Netflix) that are producing their own content are dumping film production for the quick turn that digital gives them now that distribution on film isn't as common as it was. But these companies are not producing material to project on a 100' wide screens to start with, so they don't really care about film at all.
So why not just record the movies at 120 frames per second? Then there's nothing to interpolate
It's too fast at 120 FPS. Just drives up costs for no real benefit. You cannot see much more than about 50 FPS at reasonable distances.
Movies to film where traditionally shot at 24 FPS, even IMAX film is shot at that rate. Standard definition TV was 30 FPS interlaced. The biggest issue here is that FILM has way better resolution than Video, but runs as 24 FPS instead of 30 FPS. Translating from 24 to 30 is not an easy bit of math, so there are a number of schemes to deal with it.. Usually you just duplicate film frames every so often to bring 24 FPS up to 30, some just run the film at 30 FPS but it looks weird (think Charlie Chaplin walking in black and white, it's too fast and looks strange because old silent films where shot at even lower FPS.)
I actually find that old "film" based movies don't display well in HD or 4K, even if shot in 70mm. Most of these feature films did not have the production quality to support higher resolutions and I find myself being distracted by the in appropriate set detail or costumes and special effect artifacts that wouldn't be visible on a DVD. I remember the first time I saw the first "Pirates" move in HD from Blu-ray, it was horrible.
Frame rates of 120 FPS are about 3 times what you actually need as a frame rate. You cannot see much more than 40, though eye strain may be an issue. The way to avoid that, is to use 40 FPS frame rate, but scan it at 120 FPS (i.e. show the same frame 3 times). They actually did this with film projectors, where they'd flash the same frame multiple times.
Recording at 120 FPS may sound neat, but the problem is it simply isn't worth going above 40 or 50 regardless of the material. Higher frame rates simply drive streaming bandwidth up, storage sizes up and production costs up, but add no perceived value to the end customer. Resolution though, IS worth it, if not now in the future.