In 2002 or so I wrote a aolserver extension that pulled DEM data from a database and hardware rendered with opengl with a texture, coverterted the output to png and returned it to the browser as an image.
At the time (with what would be very low-end hardware now) it actually performed pretty well and could serve up 100 fps or so from a Nvidia Geforce II card. Aolserver is multithreaded and the tricky part was getting the hardware rendering queueing code stable.
I did a simple html interface for navigation and the response time from the server at 10ms to generate the image was enough that it felt like a static image off a filesystem. This worked really well when there were large amounts of source data in the image and returning the output images was a lot quicker than returning all the source data and rendering on the client.
I would think that with today's video hardware it would be possible to have a client that lets the user trace a path across the earth, have the server render all of the sequencial images and create a mpeg-4 video and return it to the client real time.
I have all of the C/OpenGL/TCL source from what I did before in a dusty box of CD's marked "Things I got bored with once I got them to work" if anyone is interested in it.
The above example uses an abondoned mine for compressed air storage, but the technology used to create Natural Gas Storage caverns has existed for a while.
In a location with salt,limestone or sandstone rock formations, they are dug with non-potable water injection (at 1100m) and pumping the slurry. NETL has a bit on Rock Storage Caverns dug in areas where the geology doesn't allow for water slurry construction.
This idea isn't really storage, it is just lowering usage during peak hours and making up for it in off hours. The idea doesn't seem to align with the mentioned wind power generation. I would think that except for during storms there is less wind at night at most locations, and they are talking about increasing load at night.
Pumped storage could be adapted to wind. Compressed air storage is another idea. The gas turbine generators have clutches in the compressor section and stored compressed air that is compressed in off-peak hours is used rather than the turbine powered compressor. The existing systems use the gas turbines in off-peak hours to compress air, but I would think that using wind powered compressors in a compressed air storage gas turbine plant would be a simple retrofit.
One of the best ideas I have seen is algae for biodiesel with charcoal production from the waste. The charcoal holds the carbon for a long period and is at worst case neutral spread on agricultural land and has some potential to be beneficial.
There were a lot of studies on the idea in the '80's by the DOE, but it was shelved due to low oil prices at the time.
There were a fairly large number of motor vehicles converted to wood gas during oil shortages in and after WWII. FEMA wrote a book in 1989 on how to build your own. I think they had the foresight to realize that the U.S. military will eventually commandeer the available oil supplies again and we can try and figure out how to get to work burning garbage and the trees out of the backyard. /* This is not a Hummer. */
I agree and I don't think you are far off in your estimations.
I just think that the disussion of scaling Ethanol and BioDiesel production to meet current energy needs is one step ahead of the real problem. First, the agricultural and fuel transportation sector need to be moved away from using fossil fuels before Ethanol and BioDiesel will even lower total fossil fuel consumption.
I don't have first hand experience with U.S. farming practices as I do with Canadian. In Saskatchewan we produced ~12 million tonnes of wheat and 4.7 million tonnes of oilseeds last year. This is almost entirely on dryland farming. In most areas irrigation would double the output and there are vast amounts of grassland and wasteland that could produce crops if managed properly.
The problem is that farming isn't currently economically feasible on good land never mind marginal or poor land and the commodity price means it won't support the energy and equipment cost of irrigation, regardless of the productivity improvement. Ethanol from wheat is a growing industry, but the economics both for the ethanol producer and the grain producer are the problem not the technology or ability to supply enough wheat.
We are so far away from producing the quantity of ethanol that would cause a wheat shortage it isn't worth discussion at this point.
The article has some similar ideas to our project. A few comments on the article:
The existing agricultural system is orientated towards edible food production. Growing, handling and storing crops for energy products is an entirely different industry that currently doesn't exist in North America. Using food production numbers for energy product potential isn't very accurate.
If agricultural production of energy products had access to affordable and renewable energy, there is a lot more potential for increased production while improving the land as well as better use of by-products than is feasible with the current fossil fuel powered agricultural sector.
I don't quite understand what the efficiency of Solar PV at night is supposed to conclude.
15% efficiency of Solar PV with no input source for 1/2 of the 24 hour cycle (NM cloudy days) and the silicon shortages mean that for Solar PV to become feasible for anything more than supplementary power generation, they have to become way more efficient at capturing solar energy when the sun is shining. A feasible power storage system needs to be implemented for it to be reliable. These two factors make Solar PV at best a supplementary energy source.
I think it's not really possible to build a system that is "large-scale" relative to the earth and sky. I think that if you could build a system that could actually influence weather, that would really be interesting.
First, thanks to the/. editors for accepting the submission, the increase in email inquiries and interest in the project since the story was posted have been phenomenal.
The design methodology of the project has been to research the deficiencies in current energy sources and to attempt to design a system that overcomes these problems, but the project is still very much in the concept stage.
The real question is, "This is what they have so far, what enhancements to the design are needed to make this feasible?"
The author lives in Saskatchewan where there is an estimated 3.9 billions tonnes of coal. At the current rate of extraction, it will not run out for 390 years. The efficiency of electric vehicles with power generated from coal versus traditional gasoline or diesel engines is more to do with infrastructure and transportation of electricity than with the coal fired generation. If you have to increase the vehicle weight (batteries) over comparable horsepower from a gasoline engine, it is by definition not as efficient. If battery technology gets to the point where equivalent energy per pound of battery weight weight is close to gasoline, the efficiency of driving an electric car will make more sense. Until that happens, generating the electricity from a renewable source removes the amount of fossil fuel required to carry the batteries around, and makes it carbon neutral.
Renewable and portable energy products like Ethanol and BioDiesel now take more fossil fuels to produce the input crops than if the fuel was burned directly. The point I was trying to make is that if agriculture was moved towards using cleanly generated electricity and away from fossil fuels, it lowers the amount of fossil fuels required to produce and deliver consumer Bio-Diesel and Ethanol. I understand that everything from equipment manufacture, fuel delivery and even the transportation of labour to the farm currently requires fossil fuels, but the point is to "fix" agriculture first and as more Bio-Diesel and Ethanol are produced, the required fossil fuels for the rest of the supply chain will eventually lower.
I love love articles like this, submitted by the author as links to their own blog. I don't feel guilty about posting off-topic links to articles I wrote.
Some New Ideas in Indirect Solar Electrical Power Generation, Clean Water Capture and Seasonal Heat Storage
In 1988 I took Marine Radio Operating and obtained a Canadian RGMC which required error free 20 wpm Morse Code send/receive and all of the electronics theory and regulations to be a commercial marine radio operator. The holder of a RGMC also was granted a HAM license from the DOT. I ended up in IT and never did work as a Radio Op., or even use my HAM license, but after a year of training, I never forgot Morse Code. I would imagine I would have to practise for a while to send/receive at 5 wpm (never mind 20wpm) now, but it's one of those learned skills that seems to stick. but if I am ever lost at sea...
D dddd d Ddd d d DdD ddDd dD DdDd D DDD dDd dd ddd dddd ddD Ddd d
The had to be in characters because apparently./ considers any amount of.- as 'junk' and won't allow the post.
I want a cwtext message interface for my cell phone, at least for sending. Has anyone heard of a phone that does that?
Oracle is very cluster focused
on
Oracle Linux?
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· Score: 1
Oracle has a strong push towards grid computing and this same business reason applies to Linux. If the customer spends less on hardware and OS licensing, they can afford more for Oracle licensing for a given project. In an example of more traditional Enterprise Oracle on AIX, Solaris or HPUX on a mid-range 4 CPU server, the hardware/OS cost is close to the Oracle licensing ($40K/cpu Oracle Enterprise, ~$150K server/disk). Oracle's goal is to use commodity hardware, cheaper OS and get a larger slice of the pie. In a Linux/Intel RAC cluster the hardware/OS cost is much less and the idea is to achieve the reliability through clustering and the clustering requires more Oracle per cpu licensing.
The only scalable method of producing renewable and transportable energy products is from agriculturally produced renewable sources. The whole deal lies in removing the fossil fuel dependency in agriculture. Once that is done, renewable and carbon neutral fuels can be produced in the required scale to lower the mobile fossil fuel dependency.
Improving the electrical grid is a good idea and for all of Canada and the northern US, more energy is used by an average family for home heating than personal transportation and home heating can be easily and relatively cheaply converted to electric (electric forced air, radiant heat, etc).
A indirect solar electrical system that is location independent and generating the electricity as close as possible to the market is a much more viable approach and decentrallization of the power generation and grid applies much of the same distributed ideas as the Internet to power generation from a military perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time (with what would be very low-end hardware now) it actually performed pretty well and could serve up 100 fps or so from a Nvidia Geforce II card. Aolserver is multithreaded and the tricky part was getting the hardware rendering queueing code stable.
I did a simple html interface for navigation and the response time from the server at 10ms to generate the image was enough that it felt like a static image off a filesystem. This worked really well when there were large amounts of source data in the image and returning the output images was a lot quicker than returning all the source data and rendering on the client.
I would think that with today's video hardware it would be possible to have a client that lets the user trace a path across the earth, have the server render all of the sequencial images and create a mpeg-4 video and return it to the client real time.
I have all of the C/OpenGL/TCL source from what I did before in a dusty box of CD's marked "Things I got bored with once I got them to work" if anyone is interested in it.
In a location with salt,limestone or sandstone rock formations, they are dug with non-potable water injection (at 1100m) and pumping the slurry. NETL has a bit on Rock Storage Caverns dug in areas where the geology doesn't allow for water slurry construction.
I used to work for TransGas and they operate 901 million cubic meters of gas storage facilities. I toured the cavern facility at Regina, SK Canada a few years ago, it's a few miles from my house.
I sleep like a baby on a -20C winter night knowing there is 3 or 4 Penta Joules of gas tucked away there.
I did a drawing of the Compressed Air Wind Electrical Generation System idea.
Other grid energy storage
Pumped storage could be adapted to wind.
Compressed air storage is another idea. The gas turbine generators have clutches in the compressor section and stored compressed air that is compressed in off-peak hours is used rather than the turbine powered compressor. The existing systems use the gas turbines in off-peak hours to compress air, but I would think that using wind powered compressors in a compressed air storage gas turbine plant would be a simple retrofit.
There were a lot of studies on the idea in the '80's by the DOE, but it was shelved due to low oil prices at the time.
There were a fairly large number of motor vehicles converted to wood gas during oil shortages in and after WWII.
FEMA wrote a book in 1989 on how to build your own. I think they had the foresight to realize that the U.S. military will eventually commandeer the available oil supplies again and we can try and figure out how to get to work burning garbage and the trees out of the backyard.
/* This is not a Hummer. */
(2004): The Onion: "F*** Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
(2006): Gillete Fusion: Breakthough in Technology (5 blades)
The Seawater Greenhouse is another idea in solar powered clean water supply. So is this.
I just think that the disussion of scaling Ethanol and BioDiesel production to meet current energy needs is one step ahead of the real problem. First, the agricultural and fuel transportation sector need to be moved away from using fossil fuels before Ethanol and BioDiesel will even lower total fossil fuel consumption.
I wrote a bit about this.
The problem is that farming isn't currently economically feasible on good land never mind marginal or poor land and the commodity price means it won't support the energy and equipment cost of irrigation, regardless of the productivity improvement. Ethanol from wheat is a growing industry, but the economics both for the ethanol producer and the grain producer are the problem not the technology or ability to supply enough wheat.
We are so far away from producing the quantity of ethanol that would cause a wheat shortage it isn't worth discussion at this point.
Calculations for a moderate climate installation of a controlled wind/thermal storage system.
15% efficiency of Solar PV with no input source for 1/2 of the 24 hour cycle (NM cloudy days) and the silicon shortages mean that for Solar PV to become feasible for anything more than supplementary power generation, they have to become way more efficient at capturing solar energy when the sun is shining. A feasible power storage system needs to be implemented for it to be reliable. These two factors make Solar PV at best a supplementary energy source.
I think it's not really possible to build a system that is "large-scale" relative to the earth and sky. I think that if you could build a system that could actually influence weather, that would really be interesting.
The design methodology of the project has been to research the deficiencies in current energy sources and to attempt to design a system that overcomes these problems, but the project is still very much in the concept stage.
The real question is, "This is what they have so far, what enhancements to the design are needed to make this feasible?"
Saskatchewan Coal Info
It a bit of a tough sell to build a high capital investment clean energy system in an area that has that much coal.
Drake Landing Solar Community is an example of seasonal thermal storage.
Combining Several Low Gradient Heat Source Power Generation Ideas
Some New Ideas in Indirect Solar Electrical Power Generation, Clean Water Capture and Seasonal Heat Storage
NM, posting it as "code" worked a bit better
.... . -.. . . -.- ..-. .-.-.-. - --- .-. .. ... .... ..- -.. .
-
I want a cwtext message interface for my cell phone, at least for sending. Has anyone heard of a phone that does that?
Oracle has a strong push towards grid computing and this same business reason applies to Linux. If the customer spends less on hardware and OS licensing, they can afford more for Oracle licensing for a given project. In an example of more traditional Enterprise Oracle on AIX, Solaris or HPUX on a mid-range 4 CPU server, the hardware/OS cost is close to the Oracle licensing ($40K/cpu Oracle Enterprise, ~$150K server/disk). Oracle's goal is to use commodity hardware, cheaper OS and get a larger slice of the pie. In a Linux/Intel RAC cluster the hardware/OS cost is much less and the idea is to achieve the reliability through clustering and the clustering requires more Oracle per cpu licensing.
The only scalable method of producing renewable and transportable energy products is from agriculturally produced renewable sources. The whole deal lies in removing the fossil fuel dependency in agriculture. Once that is done, renewable and carbon neutral fuels can be produced in the required scale to lower the mobile fossil fuel dependency.
Improving the electrical grid is a good idea and for all of Canada and the northern US, more energy is used by an average family for home heating than personal transportation and home heating can be easily and relatively cheaply converted to electric (electric forced air, radiant heat, etc).
A indirect solar electrical system that is location independent and generating the electricity as close as possible to the market is a much more viable approach and decentrallization of the power generation and grid applies much of the same distributed ideas as the Internet to power generation from a military perspective.