...to become an intermittent source of renewable power. They are probably doing the project harm with the "Potentially Our Cheapest Energy Source. We Don't Need Oil!" and "Key to Energy Independence and Arresting Global Warming" claims their website, but they do have something that could at least become a supplementary energy source. It's hard to tell if the PITA factor of managing these over a wind turbine on a fixed tower is worth the much higher output.
This could make a great historical demonstration of Ben Franklin's lightning/kite experiment when lightning "improves" the efficiency of the system by finding the shortest path to ground by dropping 500MW for 1 sec down a 40MW cable. (Don't touch the key hanging on the end). The instant heating to 28,000C might also cause a few issues. Lightning can be formed in man circumstances, so watching out for cumulo nimbus clouds and pulling down the system isn't a sure bet.
The only thing I could find on lightning in their information was in the pdf:
"Generator and tether performance depend on a good lightning storm detection system. Surge protection schemes and hardening of the control systems are also under examination."
EROEI - Energy Returned Over Energy Invested is the problem with Solar PV, not the theoretical efficiency. There is a lot of electricity involved in refining semiconductor grade silicon and the major portion of the cost of manufacture of solar PV is input electricity. Although it is theoretically possible to produce a Solar PV panel that has a higher efficiency than solar thermal, in practice if you subtract the electricity it took to manufacture the semiconductor, solar PV takes a long time to recover the manufacturing input electricity. The no-moving-parts and low maintenance makes Solar PV attractive for remote power and some special situations, but the EROEI of manufacture makes the real world efficiency very low. The panels degrade over time and aren't serviceable, so in practice there is a limited number of year where the Solar PV panel is actually energy positive at all.
Subsidies offset the economics of Solar PV, but not the EROEI.
But current is only half the equation. To generate electricity, a cell has to churn out voltage as well.
And so far, that's where Ready's invention has fallen short.
they have a higher current lower voltage cell. There is no mention that it actually puts out more power.
I wrote an essay that attempts to give the reader some tools in evaluating renewable energy ideas without a predisposed bias.
My predisposed opinion is that if you take the time to evaluate the possibilities, solar thermal electrical generation systems built from common materials supplemented with 10-20% wind turbines have the best potential for feasible scalability.
The main design criteria for a massively scalable system has to be availability of materials, location independence and base load reliability. Energy transport media like bio-fuels have short term ease of implementation, but the very low solar conversion efficiency, cost of processing plants and availability and logistics of input media as well as the low efficiency of internal combustion engines don't make them a long term scalable solution. Nuclear suffers from NIMBY and uranium has availability constraints (and just took a 40% price jump). New hydroelectric is very limited in North America. Any of the biomass ideas are useful if the input media is being discarded, but there isn't a scalable biomass source that comes anywhere close to meeting energy demands.
IMO the endless arguments over climate change/global warming, peak oil, energy driven politics and war are just a distraction.
Does anyone believe that we can continue to use fossil fuels like we have over the past century until the end of time? Does it matter exactly when or why we cut down or quit using them? We need to quit discussing the theories and symptoms and concentrate on developing renewable and clean energy sources.
I wrote an essay that I think objectively gives the reader some tools to evaluate renewable energy systems.
I take it back. Contrary to the newspapers regarding previously filed returns, my return that was eFile'd on Feb. 25 was processed and the refund was just direct deposited.
I love you Unknown CCRA IT Guy! smmmooochie woooochie!
Apologies to the Beach Boys: We'll have fun, fun, fun 'cause I got my tax refund today. Aaaawooooo Awooohoohoohoohoo
Revenue Canada has been saying that there is a mess up in data parsing of the.TAX text file. It seems a little coincidental that we patched all of our servers for the DST changes on the same weekend as Revenue Canada did "maintenance".
Does it seem reasonable that I.T. at Revenue Canada would apply code changes at this time unless they were forced to? Generally, the system is only used for a few months of the year. What they are saying doesn't make much sense from the I.T. Operations point of view.
We have change freezes during any busy periods.
Of course, this statement could be influenced by my large refund that was already filed being put on hold and my distaste for tying H.A. systems into Windows boxes. _grin_
IMO discussing whether climate change is happening and if it is whether it's caused by fossil fuel usage or not isn't very important. Although Michael Crichton's State of Fear is fiction, it's a good read on hype on the issue.
If you look at Iraq and Afganistan or Athabasca Tar Sands you can see some more obvious environmental changes caused by fossil fuel dependency. Not that wars and massive environmental damage are limited to energy products and are different than over-fishing, clear cutting, continuous cropping, etc.
The Peak Oil Theory is another pointless discussion. It's like discussion on 'Peak Diamonds'. Have we reached the diamond peak? If we have and we run out of diamonds, how are future young couples going to get engaged and married? Oh, they are doubling the retail price of diamonds, I can understand that, they are past "peak" production.
As a parent I try and teach my children to share their toys, not waste their supplies, to save some of their candy for another day and to clean up after themselves. These aren't hard concepts to grasp, even for a 3 year old.
If you feeling a bit out of shape and bored of sitting behind a desk, you can come and help me build some massive towers out of stone blocks. If the convection towers were built from stone, it will take some up-front human labor, but in the end you can say you put together part of a megawatt renewable power station that in the worst case will leave people wondering what we were up to a few centuries from now like we do about Stonehenge.
I used to install C band residential satellite dishes and we used a radar detector mounted in the front of a wok to measure microwave interference from ground towers when evaluating customer installation locatations.
I understand methane from manure systems are fairly common in Europe, but this is a North American example of a methane from pig manure system, installed in 2001.
I want a corn cob and pig manure powered Ferrari.:)
I too started out my IT career as a Novell CNA and we even ran Oracle 8 on Netware for a while at a small startup in 1998-99. The company I am at now replaced the Novell servers with win32 a few years ago, but the brand is well known. The Linux servers we do have are Redhat, but that is due to the Suse/Novell deal coming late in the game.
The adoption of Linux for Oracle database servers at my company has a few major obstacles, and none of them are to due with the branding or the support behind a Linux distro.
An attempt to lower the number of OS's we are supporting and running Oracle on (currently AIX,HP and Solaris), consolidating on AIX.
The little-endian/big-endian issue of having a x86 and RISC environment and overhead with Oracle transportable tablespaces and physical database copying/moving between byte formats.
The effect Linux has had on traditional Unix and medium iron is there currently is a relatively competitive price from IBM, HP and Solaris. This is especially true when you are loading servers with 32GB or 64GB of RAM. The hardware/OS cost of x86/Linux vs. RISC/Unix doesn't have that much of a gap when you look at TCO across the server lifetime. The Oracle licensing per processor makes the TCO of the servers high, the savings on x86/Linux becomes a small fraction of the total database server capital and maintenance cost.
These aren't "show-stoppers" and with 10G we will be doing some Linux.
Having attended Oracle Openworld this year and being an Oracle DBA in a large AIX/HP/Solaris environment, I don't think the Oracle Linux support offering is negative for Red Hat or Linux in general. Oracle is attempting to get Linux buy-in from larger corporations that are traditional Unix shops with the idea that offering the same level of support for the OS as the DB on servers that are usually running databases exclusively is a reason to switch from traditional Unix.
I don't think that there will be many customers that are already running Linux and purchasing support from Red Hat switching to Oracle Linux support, but I think the Oracle support of Linux and their IP indemnification of Linux is overall good for Linux adoption in the enterprise.
Re:Are we doing option 3 now?
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Funny
My Waffle Recipe:
1 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup water 6 eggs
2.5 cups flour 2 tsp white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 cup milk
Put the cup of cornmeal in a 2 cup bowl or measuring cup and enough
water to make 2 cups total and let soak.
Mix flour, baking powder, salt, sugar in large bowl and set aside.
Separate eggs. Beat whites in a large bowl until stiff and fluffy (but
not dry) and set aside.
Beat yolks and oil until smooth and beat in milk. (I use a one of those
Tupperware shaker things and shake the yolks, oil and milk together).
Add yolk mixture and cornmeal to flour and stir. I add milk or flour as
needed to this to get a pourable batter consistency (about the same a
pancake batter). Fold this into the egg whites and stir as little as
possible to get an even mixture without losing all the bubbles.
Are we doing option 3 now?
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 4, Funny
When I skimmed over the article, 2 things popped into my head.
The relativity principle that gravitational and inertial mass are equal when they don't have to be makes me think that possibly there is no such thing as gravity and we are just accellerating in a 4th dimension at 1G and when this is presented to us in 3 dimensions the effect appears as gravity.
Corn meal waffles would taste good on a Sunday morning.
The analogy that helped me understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics was the hydroelectric dam.
In a hydroelectric dam, you can convert a portion of the potential energy of water flowing downhill into work. You can only convert the energy when the water is flowing downhill and you cannot convert all of the energy because that would stop the water from flowing. The maximum efficiency is the head difference (high and low water points). Unless the low point of the dam is at sea level, you are not getting all of the potential energy out of the water.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and Carnot Efficiency have the same major points. You can only convert some of the heat to other work while it is moving from hot to cold and the maximum efficiency is the difference in the high and low temperatures relative to absolute zero.
As the parent post pointed out, power stations attempt to exhaust condensation heat as close as possible to ambient temperatures and there isn't much "waste" heat to recover. If there was an efficient thermocouple device like the article, its use would be in all the industrial waste heat from sources that are currently too small to justify existing heat recovery systems.
There is nothing "wrong" with the existing renewable energy sources, the ones that are in use all have merits. There are also drawbacks in reliability (i.e. direct sunlight or windy days only), location dependence, non-renewable construction materials and high energy input of construction.
As an example: In my location in Canada, the solar isolation in the summer is relatively high at around 5kWh/day due to clear skies and long daylight hours at the 52nd parallel. But, in winter we have only 8 hours of daylight and the isolation is less than 1kWh/day. Solar PV isn't viable here for more than specific small remote power applications. That doesn't doesn't mean that Solar PV isn't a viable option in other locations, but it's not a universal solution.
If you have something specific that is incorrect in the calculations or economics, please inform me.
The energytower.org project is not-for-profit and is about collecting ideas on a scalable and location independent renewable energy source, presented to draw positive input from others. All of the individual components of the system are in use commercially, but not in a complete system.
Many engineers and physics experts have looked at the energytower idea. Negative critism from a/. reader didn't RTFA isn't exactly "debunking" a system.
Slashdot is a slashvertisement for Linux and open source. If you want the $6.36 I have made from Google adsense, give me your pay-pal account and I will send it right along.
There is a eweek article on DC power in the computer room saving 15%. On the POTS/PSTN side of the company everything is 48v DC. I think the AC data center is more due to vendor hardware availability and the expense on non-commodity power supplies. There is convergence of the PSTN and IP networks happening in the industry and maybe there will be more on the Server and POTS equipment. I think currently the systems are separate and Telco/Hosting companies maintain both the 48v DC supplies for the POTS/PSTN and the AC supplies for the IT systems.
I believe that the financials on this will start changing in the near future. Hosting is so competitive and as the environmental focus increases, I think that an environmentally responsible data center will start to be the deciding factor in a customer choosing a hosting provider. Most of the other factors are equal across data centers and the customers are starting to implement their own environmental plans.
There was about 25 years of research into algae done by the U.S. DOE, as well as some renewed interest from MIT. I put a page together with a drawing of the idea.
Virtualization is starting to happen. We have somewhere around 1000 servers in the data center and due to different business units, service levels, OS requirements, etc, the applications are deployed on separate servers, but the utilization on many of them is very low. They are planning to move many of these systems to virtual servers. Our previous High Availability database environment was Active/Passive clustering (HACMP or MC/ServiceGuard) where there was an entire failover server sitting idle in case of an outage. In the high end Unix environment, the active node almost never fails and in one of the clusters we recently replaced, the primary node didn't have a hardware failure for it's 5 year deployment. This meant that the failover node ran for that entire period without ever being used. This environment is being moved to an Active/Active cluster system.
Slashdot Mirror
This could make a great historical demonstration of Ben Franklin's lightning/kite experiment when lightning "improves" the efficiency of the system by finding the shortest path to ground by dropping 500MW for 1 sec down a 40MW cable. (Don't touch the key hanging on the end). The instant heating to 28,000C might also cause a few issues. Lightning can be formed in man circumstances, so watching out for cumulo nimbus clouds and pulling down the system isn't a sure bet.
The only thing I could find on lightning in their information was in the pdf:
I am a proponent of Open, Renewable and Baseload Reliable systems.
Subsidies offset the economics of Solar PV, but not the EROEI.
An essay on evaluating renewable energy systems.
The article just says that
they have a higher current lower voltage cell. There is no mention that it actually puts out more power.How SHPEGS works.
My predisposed opinion is that if you take the time to evaluate the possibilities, solar thermal electrical generation systems built from common materials supplemented with 10-20% wind turbines have the best potential for feasible scalability.
The main design criteria for a massively scalable system has to be availability of materials, location independence and base load reliability. Energy transport media like bio-fuels have short term ease of implementation, but the very low solar conversion efficiency, cost of processing plants and availability and logistics of input media as well as the low efficiency of internal combustion engines don't make them a long term scalable solution. Nuclear suffers from NIMBY and uranium has availability constraints (and just took a 40% price jump). New hydroelectric is very limited in North America. Any of the biomass ideas are useful if the input media is being discarded, but there isn't a scalable biomass source that comes anywhere close to meeting energy demands.
Reliable, IP free, Location Independent Solar Thermal Power Generation.
Does anyone believe that we can continue to use fossil fuels like we have over the past century until the end of time? Does it matter exactly when or why we cut down or quit using them? We need to quit discussing the theories and symptoms and concentrate on developing renewable and clean energy sources.
I wrote an essay that I think objectively gives the reader some tools to evaluate renewable energy systems.
I love you Unknown CCRA IT Guy! smmmooochie woooochie!
Apologies to the Beach Boys:
We'll have fun, fun, fun 'cause I got my tax refund today. Aaaawooooo Awooohoohoohoohoo
I didn't see the previous comments on DST pathes due to having my threshold turned up. Kudos to the earlier poster and whoever modded them up
Does it seem reasonable that I.T. at Revenue Canada would apply code changes at this time unless they were forced to? Generally, the system is only used for a few months of the year. What they are saying doesn't make much sense from the I.T. Operations point of view.
We have change freezes during any busy periods.
Of course, this statement could be influenced by my large refund that was already filed being put on hold and my distaste for tying H.A. systems into Windows boxes. _grin_
If you look at Iraq and Afganistan or Athabasca Tar Sands you can see some more obvious environmental changes caused by fossil fuel dependency. Not that wars and massive environmental damage are limited to energy products and are different than over-fishing, clear cutting, continuous cropping, etc.
The Peak Oil Theory is another pointless discussion. It's like discussion on 'Peak Diamonds'. Have we reached the diamond peak? If we have and we run out of diamonds, how are future young couples going to get engaged and married? Oh, they are doubling the retail price of diamonds, I can understand that, they are past "peak" production.
As a parent I try and teach my children to share their toys, not waste their supplies, to save some of their candy for another day and to clean up after themselves. These aren't hard concepts to grasp, even for a 3 year old.
I think as individuals we are born with a sense that we should "Take what ya' need and you leave the rest" as Robbie Robertson put it.
End of discussion.
If you feeling a bit out of shape and bored of sitting behind a desk, you can come and help me build some massive towers out of stone blocks. If the convection towers were built from stone, it will take some up-front human labor, but in the end you can say you put together part of a megawatt renewable power station that in the worst case will leave people wondering what we were up to a few centuries from now like we do about Stonehenge.
I used to install C band residential satellite dishes and we used a radar detector mounted in the front of a wok to measure microwave interference from ground towers when evaluating customer installation locatations.
I want a corn cob and pig manure powered Ferrari. :)
The adoption of Linux for Oracle database servers at my company has a few major obstacles, and none of them are to due with the branding or the support behind a Linux distro.
- An attempt to lower the number of OS's we are supporting and running Oracle on (currently AIX,HP and Solaris), consolidating on AIX.
- The little-endian/big-endian issue of having a x86 and RISC environment and overhead with Oracle transportable tablespaces and physical database copying/moving between byte formats.
- The effect Linux has had on traditional Unix and medium iron is there currently is a relatively competitive price from IBM, HP and Solaris. This is especially true when you are loading servers with 32GB or 64GB of RAM. The hardware/OS cost of x86/Linux vs. RISC/Unix doesn't have that much of a gap when you look at TCO across the server lifetime. The Oracle licensing per processor makes the TCO of the servers high, the savings on x86/Linux becomes a small fraction of the total database server capital and maintenance cost.
These aren't "show-stoppers" and with 10G we will be doing some Linux.I don't think that there will be many customers that are already running Linux and purchasing support from Red Hat switching to Oracle Linux support, but I think the Oracle support of Linux and their IP indemnification of Linux is overall good for Linux adoption in the enterprise.
1 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup water 6 eggs
2.5 cups flour 2 tsp white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 cup milk
Put the cup of cornmeal in a 2 cup bowl or measuring cup and enough water to make 2 cups total and let soak.
Mix flour, baking powder, salt, sugar in large bowl and set aside.
Separate eggs. Beat whites in a large bowl until stiff and fluffy (but not dry) and set aside.
Beat yolks and oil until smooth and beat in milk. (I use a one of those Tupperware shaker things and shake the yolks, oil and milk together).
Add yolk mixture and cornmeal to flour and stir. I add milk or flour as needed to this to get a pourable batter consistency (about the same a pancake batter). Fold this into the egg whites and stir as little as possible to get an even mixture without losing all the bubbles.
In a hydroelectric dam, you can convert a portion of the potential energy of water flowing downhill into work. You can only convert the energy when the water is flowing downhill and you cannot convert all of the energy because that would stop the water from flowing. The maximum efficiency is the head difference (high and low water points). Unless the low point of the dam is at sea level, you are not getting all of the potential energy out of the water.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and Carnot Efficiency have the same major points. You can only convert some of the heat to other work while it is moving from hot to cold and the maximum efficiency is the difference in the high and low temperatures relative to absolute zero.
As the parent post pointed out, power stations attempt to exhaust condensation heat as close as possible to ambient temperatures and there isn't much "waste" heat to recover. If there was an efficient thermocouple device like the article, its use would be in all the industrial waste heat from sources that are currently too small to justify existing heat recovery systems.
Conservation Ideas
- D.C. rather than A.C. power mains
- Waste heat recovery for structures or cottage industries
- Power saving features in server hardware
- Server Virtualization
- Better High Availability/Redundancy resource management
Generation IdeasThere is nothing "wrong" with the existing renewable energy sources, the ones that are in use all have merits. There are also drawbacks in reliability (i.e. direct sunlight or windy days only), location dependence, non-renewable construction materials and high energy input of construction.
As an example: In my location in Canada, the solar isolation in the summer is relatively high at around 5kWh/day due to clear skies and long daylight hours at the 52nd parallel. But, in winter we have only 8 hours of daylight and the isolation is less than 1kWh/day. Solar PV isn't viable here for more than specific small remote power applications. That doesn't doesn't mean that Solar PV isn't a viable option in other locations, but it's not a universal solution.
There is a eweek article on DC power in the computer room saving 15%. On the POTS/PSTN side of the company everything is 48v DC. I think the AC data center is more due to vendor hardware availability and the expense on non-commodity power supplies. There is convergence of the PSTN and IP networks happening in the industry and maybe there will be more on the Server and POTS equipment. I think currently the systems are separate and Telco/Hosting companies maintain both the 48v DC supplies for the POTS/PSTN and the AC supplies for the IT systems.
I believe that the financials on this will start changing in the near future. Hosting is so competitive and as the environmental focus increases, I think that an environmentally responsible data center will start to be the deciding factor in a customer choosing a hosting provider. Most of the other factors are equal across data centers and the customers are starting to implement their own environmental plans.
There was about 25 years of research into algae done by the U.S. DOE, as well as some renewed interest from MIT. I put a page together with a drawing of the idea.
Virtualization is starting to happen. We have somewhere around 1000 servers in the data center and due to different business units, service levels, OS requirements, etc, the applications are deployed on separate servers, but the utilization on many of them is very low. They are planning to move many of these systems to virtual servers.
Our previous High Availability database environment was Active/Passive clustering (HACMP or MC/ServiceGuard) where there was an entire failover server sitting idle in case of an outage. In the high end Unix environment, the active node almost never fails and in one of the clusters we recently replaced, the primary node didn't have a hardware failure for it's 5 year deployment. This meant that the failover node ran for that entire period without ever being used. This environment is being moved to an Active/Active cluster system.