There is a difference between a debt and a contract or transaction.
Under the laws of most countries, if you incur a debt then cash money (legal tender in that country) must be accepted by the creditor. (There is usually a limit on the numbers of any one denomination or coinage in most countries, in order to avoid someone paying with $500 of 1c pieces)
In a normal transaction, no debt has been incurred (It's a contract involving an offer, a consideration and acceptance), therefore there is no obligation to accept cash, or particular denominations of cash (Eg, "we refuse to accept £20 notes due to the high degree of counterfeits being passed")
A merchant would be silly to refuse 100% to accept cash (especially given the percentages that payment processors take on small transactions), but it's entirely within their right to do so if they either set a blanket policy or refuse based on a suspicion that the proffered money is counterfeit (US money might be very bland visually but it's a different story under UV lights. The same applies to most currencies)
Refusing because of a customer's colour, religion or gender is covered by a different bunch of discrimination laws and is a hot-button issue in most countries. On the other hand refusing because the customer is an asshole is usually perfectly legal.
"All of these incidence were handled without the net neutrality regulations just removed."
Yes, by litigation and regulatory intervention., which takes time.
In a properly open and free market, Net Neutrality rules aren't needed because customers will vote with their feet/wallets when companies start restricting content to block competition or favour their own services.
Unfortunately across vast tracts of the USA, you have regulated and protected monopoly broadband provision which is anything but an "open and free market". Customers tend to have a choice of one broadband ISP or nothing at all.
You lot do rave on about your freedoms, but the reality is that you don't have many.
"The acting was wooden, the dialogue was ridiculous"
They're SUPPOSED to be.
The Star Wars series is a homage to 1930s space opera, with all of its bad stereotypes.
Remember that the first question the actors asked when given the scripts for episode IV was whether they should camp it up. Lucas' answer was "play it as it's written"
All those predictions made 20-30 years ago didn't take methane clathrate emissions and methane+CO2 from permafrost tundra (swamp) thawing into account.
The Leptav Sea (north of Siberia) has been bubbling out increasingly vast plumes of methane for the last 5-10 years - this was supposed to be impossible as methane emissions would be absorbed by the water, but in 2011 the plumes were reported to be 1km+ wide at the surface. The last global methane survey didn't take oceanic emissions into account as the researchers weren't aware of Leptav emissions. The amount coming out there could easily be a large chunk of the unaccountable "25% more than measured" that was blamed on farming.
Worse, if the continental shelf+margin clathrates are disturbed, at least 1GT of methane would come out instantly, possibly 5, maybe even 10.
Putting that in context, the Storegga Slides released about 5GT of methane and that release is at the knee point of where the last glaciation ended, temperatures spiked 1-3C and sea levels rapidly started increasing. We really do _NOT_ want oceanic methane burps. They could push things over from climate change into an Anoxic Oceanic Event.
One example: If the Gulf Stream was to be interrupted, the _immediate_ effect would be a 3 foot rise in sea level along the entire US east coast seaboard - without changing average global levels one inch. All currents have this kind of localised effect and one of the more interesting ones is that the southern circumpolar current will act as a major buffer against Antarctic melting affecting the rest of the world.
Prevailing winds also cause sea levels to "pile up" against land, so long term changes in wind directions come with changes in sea level too.
Tide gauges are only an indication of local conditions, and only if they're accurate - many aren't, thanks to land movement since installation - particularly along the USA east coast and northern european coastlines where glacial rebound is causing land level to increase in previously glaciated areas and decrease in areas which were just beyond the glaciation.
Renewables are reliable collectively. The problem is production volumes.
Renewables can just about match existing carbon-sourced electricity production.
Electricity only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions.
Replacing those carbon using processes with electrical or other sources will result in a 6-8 fold increase in generation requirements.
How do you propose filling that gap?
As for the recycling problem: A conventional 800MWe nuclear plant over its 60-year lifespan produces a a lot of high level waste - enough to fill a single olympic-size swimming pool in fact (compare with the lakes of coal fly ash simmering across the USA - the two largest environmental disasters so far this century have been ash pond dam failures)
A molten salt reactor with inline reprocessing reduces that by 98% on the output side.
-But because it can eat highlevel conventional nuclear waste, it also reduces the conventional waste pile.
-And because it can eat U238, it can also reduces the _input_ waste pile of depleted uranium (enriching natural uranium to 3% U235 results in ~87% of the original uranium to be discarded during the enrichment process)
-And because they eat Thorium and convert it to U233 along the way, they have essentially limitless fuel - there are hundreds of thousands of tons of Thorium sitting in rare earth metal refining waste piles and the USA DOE buried ~30,000 tons in the Utah desert in the 1990s.
The recycling problem is largely self inflicted because of the insistence on using Uranium instead of Thorium and a focus on extracting plutonium for weapons. Molten salt reactors produce so many plutonium isotopes that attempting to make weapons from the output is difficult-to-impossible and whilst you can get U233 from the process, doing so will reduce output so much that any reactor operator doing so will be noticed.
Couple that with blind insistence that all radiation exposure is bad and you have a kneejerk fear response which prevents proper R&D. Look into the radiation exposure of aircrew sometime. They get 10-100 times the allowable dose for nuclear workers and the early death/cancer rate is no higher than the general population - which indicates that the perceived wisdom about radiation exposure is wrong. (Panic over radiation killed 1500+ people around Fukushima. Radiation didn't kill anyone and the worst injuries inflicted were some mild skin burns around the ankles of a few staff trying to stop the water leaks on the reactor vessel.)
China is also building shedloads of nuclear plants.
The coal plants being built are mostly to handle immediate demand or to replace older inefficient ones. Either way the intent is that they won't be running for 60-70 years.
Diesel generators work quite well on natural gas(*) and are more efficient than open cycle turbines, plus handle variable loading better. That's why many utilities keep their ancient creaky standby diesels maintained even though they're only run a few times per year.
(*) Dedicated gas engines are more optimised for this use but diesels can be adapted with only a slight loss of efficiency. It's cheaper to adapt than install new engines for the amount of work these engines are now doing.
Compressed air falls to Boyle's law - in both directions.
What I mean by that is that when you compress gas it gets hot - and at the pressures involved for storage that can be enough to damage components/piping, so you have to toss heat overboard. You'll want to do this anyway to reduce the pressures.
When you decompress it, it gets cold, and cold gas has lower volume, so you lose out substantially on the entire pressurisation cycle (this is why compressed gas cars are a scam)
Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
Open cycle gas turbines can cover the peaks and dips but they're not efficient compared to combined cycle plants.
Conventional nuclear plants can peak-follow if you have enough of them so that you don't dip into neutron poisoning territory or can ride it out.
Molten salt nuclear plants can peak-follow trivially, because neutron poisons (primarily xenon gas) pop out of the fuel salts and can be sequestered until they break down (at that point you can reinject the products for further breakdown or store until saleable.) - and because they're both extremely hot and thermally self-limiting, you have sufficient reserve to safely peak load quickly without worrying about dips.
"Siemens is also reducing steam turbine capacities"
This is a mistake.
The long-term demand is going to be for high capacity steam or other gas turbines driven by molten salt nuclear reactors and in the meantime steam demand is likely to increase due to an increase in the conventional nuclear fleet.
Reasoning: Renewables (Wind and solar PV) are a nice scam, but at best and assuming all planning objections are overrriddden so you build everywhere you can, they can collectively only just match the electrical output of the existing non-nuclear electrical generation fleet.
Worse, the places you can site them aren't the places where the demand is, so you need to factor in transmission losses (HVDC/HVAC transmission lines top out at about 1MV thanks to corona losses and arcing) and line density requirements (you can't just string heavier lines without decreasing the tower distance and each tower affects the electrical isolation, meaning that increasing capacity of these kinds of lines usually means more parallel transmission lines)
Now factor in that once you come under intense pressure to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions (what we're currently seeing is just tinkering around the edges), you're going to see an increase of electrical demand by a factor of 6-8 - at that point the ONLY viable way forward is nuclear energy and that should be molten salt systems by preference due to the ready availability of Thorium, the fact that you don't need to spend prodigious amounts of energy to enrich it (tossing out 90% of the raw uranium in the process) and you can achieve a utilisation exceeding 95% of the input materials with relatively continuous chemical reprocessing - and that doesn't even start to address the safety issues that water moderated systems have with putting extremely hot, high pressure, acidic water in direct contact with the nuclear sources and inevitable contamination that results, with risk of leaking into the biosphere that comes with it or the difficulties inherent in packing uranium ceramics into a fuel rod and leaving it to break down for 20-30 years, then try to process the resulting mess. Conventional nuclear power is 300,000 times safer than coal, but molten salt provides an opportunity to make it a few (ten) thousand times safer whilst lowering costs dramatically. Most of the costs of conventional nuclear come from the safety systems that are inherent with having a 800-1600MW radioactive steam bomb at their core. If you can separate the steam and the radioactivity you eliminate most of the costs - and as almost all the civil nuclear accidents have revolved around water in some way or another it makes sense to eliminate it. (Chernobyl went prompt-critical and it was the resulting steam explosion which blew the roof off. Everything that followed was a result of that explosion. Snake river was also a prompt-critical incident)
The only way to produce mass quantities of "synthetic" hydrogen is with a nuclear source.
At that point you may as well just go ahead and generate electricity directly, tacking on some carbon atoms to the hydrogen to make synthetic liquid fuels for applications where you need mobility and energy density beyond that which can be provided by batteries (IE: aircraft)
Yes, you could setup hydrogen pipelines or repurpose existing natural gas distribution lines, but raw hydrogen is a bitch to handle due to the embrittlement issues under pressure and its tendency to permeate straight through the container walls means that long-distance losses would be comparable to electrical transportation losses and that's without even taking the conversion losses into account at the far end or its inherent dangers over natural gas when used in most domestic/commercial applications thanks to the nasty properties mentioned above.
~62% is for a combined cycle plant, not a standalone turbine.
The best you can get out of a standalone turbine is about 32%, increasing to about 35% if you add a recuperator (the advantage of a recuperator is that efficiency at part-throttle is vastly improved, making them more applicable for ships than power generation)
CCGT drives steam turbines from the heat of the exhaust stream. You could add Stirling engines to recover energy from what's left after that but cost:benefit falls away rapidly.
"This is a BYOB, as in Bring Your Own Battery, enterprise."
Tesla has been described for many years as a battery company which happens to build cars.
The powerwall and renewables battery farms should underscore that point - they're where the money is.
Cars are merely a way to sell more batteries, which in turn generates enough demand to justify the gigafactory. once it's online, tesla/panasonic will be producing more cells than the rest of the world combined.
Regarding utility capacity: Electricity accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions depending where you are in the world. Transportation about half and domestic heating/cooking(oil+gas) + industrial processes account for the rest.
To eliminate carbon entirely will take a power generation capacity increase of between 6 and 8 fold over current capacity and that's simply not possible with renewables no matter how many way to try to square that circle. Nuclear is the only long term solution, it's just a question of which technology. That said we can't afford to hang around for 40 years whilst MSRs or fusion become viable, we should have been building conventional plants already. The UK is going to need around 60-70 new ones in the next 20 years and right now it hasn't even started building the only one it committed to a decade ago.
We're rapidly approaching an environmental knee-point which will force the issue on carbon emissions. I strongly suspect that even the current "it's going to be warmer than we though" news is vastly underestimating the impacts, as they're not taking account of what happens if ocean methane clathrate deposits bubble out catastrophically - and it looks like this is about to happen off the Siberian coast line (it's been getting steadily worse since the bubbles started reaching the surface in 2004, with plumes 1km wide reported in 2010). There's a hell of a lot of "mystery methane" in the air that was blamed on farming - but the instruments have only been proven accurate over land. They can't see methane over water at all as the researchers assumed there wasn't any.
If this environmental disaster comes to pass, then Tesla's batteries are going to be paying off handsomely.
At least it's not partner company gearing up for a single massive order, then going bust a couple of years later due to overcapacity and no orders.
Apart from these kinds of blips, the market for batteries is limited by price, not by availability - meaning that if you raise the price then sales drop off in a non-linear fashion, and the same thing happens to the increase when you lower the price - the balancing act is to set the price high enough to make money but not cause a glut which would lower the price, trigger a rush and result in a shortage (and wild oscillations)
"Hydrogen is a lousy, inefficient way to store or transport energy."
Yup, and the day it becomes economic to produce bulk hydrogen from water, it's also economic to tack on enough carbon atoms to make it easier to handle.
Synthetic diesel/kerosene/gasoline burns just as well as the stuff outta the ground and it's still the only practical fuel for aircraft (short or longhaul), however I suspect that the most heavily trafficked routes will fall to electric high speed trains or vacuum trains before long.
The irony about that that the best suited nuclear reactor for making synfuels is the molten salt type (heat levels), which were a direct product of the nuclear aircraft project. It's a long way around to get your nuclear powered aircraft, but we might get there in the end.
(Practical molten salt reactors will make most renewables obsolete overnight too, which is probably a good thing)
China has actually been working pretty hard to bring down carbon emissions. They're uniquely susceptable to sea level rise thanks to the large population on the very low lying coastal plains and the leadership plays a long game when planning.
This is why so much renewables R&D is going on there and also why the chinese are investing so much into nuclear energy research (both fusion and fussion). They're not betting the farm on one technology, they're hedging by trying _everything_.
Bear in mind that the economic power of pretty much all nations can be measured in their access to cheap energy. Whilst the USA has been expending more and more resources to maintain its oil addiction, if the chinese investment works out, they'll be supplying cheap, safe nuclear power (Molten salts, not your grandfather's steamer) all over the world.
The importance of that can't be understated. If the developed world stopped using carbon overnight, the developing countries could easily make up the entire difference and then some in their efforts to play catchup. It's not in anyone's interest to prevent them playing catchup, but neither is it in anyone's interest for carbon to be the cheapest way of them doing it.
"Renewables as the main energy with nuclear as back up "
It's cheaper and more reliable to just run with nuclear. Even old fashioned water moderated nuclear.
And, surprisingly, nuclear produces less waste than the renewables do over their respective lifespans (IF LFTRs can be made viable then nuclear will reduce this by 99% on the output and a further 88% on the input sides.)
Without using AI at all, there have been some impressive results in visual processing.
One example was on the UK's Nimrod maritime patrol craft. When testing the new avionics surveillance package they told it to "show me everything that doesn't look like sea" - and it immediately starting picking out fishing net buoys across the Irish sea. The implications for S&R were obvious.
The problem with bowden cables or anything else you might think of as driving "cheap marionettes" is that means even more clutter/obstructions to cleanup in years to come. if you can't go in there and return/extract the device safely, then don't go in there at all. High radiation levels become low radiation levels in a surprisingly short period of time, with or without human intervention.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a difference between a debt and a contract or transaction.
Under the laws of most countries, if you incur a debt then cash money (legal tender in that country) must be accepted by the creditor. (There is usually a limit on the numbers of any one denomination or coinage in most countries, in order to avoid someone paying with $500 of 1c pieces)
In a normal transaction, no debt has been incurred (It's a contract involving an offer, a consideration and acceptance), therefore there is no obligation to accept cash, or particular denominations of cash (Eg, "we refuse to accept £20 notes due to the high degree of counterfeits being passed")
A merchant would be silly to refuse 100% to accept cash (especially given the percentages that payment processors take on small transactions), but it's entirely within their right to do so if they either set a blanket policy or refuse based on a suspicion that the proffered money is counterfeit (US money might be very bland visually but it's a different story under UV lights. The same applies to most currencies)
Refusing because of a customer's colour, religion or gender is covered by a different bunch of discrimination laws and is a hot-button issue in most countries. On the other hand refusing because the customer is an asshole is usually perfectly legal.
"All of these incidence were handled without the net neutrality regulations just removed."
Yes, by litigation and regulatory intervention., which takes time.
In a properly open and free market, Net Neutrality rules aren't needed because customers will vote with their feet/wallets when companies start restricting content to block competition or favour their own services.
Unfortunately across vast tracts of the USA, you have regulated and protected monopoly broadband provision which is anything but an "open and free market". Customers tend to have a choice of one broadband ISP or nothing at all.
You lot do rave on about your freedoms, but the reality is that you don't have many.
"The acting was wooden, the dialogue was ridiculous"
They're SUPPOSED to be.
The Star Wars series is a homage to 1930s space opera, with all of its bad stereotypes.
Remember that the first question the actors asked when given the scripts for episode IV was whether they should camp it up. Lucas' answer was "play it as it's written"
All those predictions made 20-30 years ago didn't take methane clathrate emissions and methane+CO2 from permafrost tundra (swamp) thawing into account.
The Leptav Sea (north of Siberia) has been bubbling out increasingly vast plumes of methane for the last 5-10 years - this was supposed to be impossible as methane emissions would be absorbed by the water, but in 2011 the plumes were reported to be 1km+ wide at the surface. The last global methane survey didn't take oceanic emissions into account as the researchers weren't aware of Leptav emissions. The amount coming out there could easily be a large chunk of the unaccountable "25% more than measured" that was blamed on farming.
Worse, if the continental shelf+margin clathrates are disturbed, at least 1GT of methane would come out instantly, possibly 5, maybe even 10.
Putting that in context, the Storegga Slides released about 5GT of methane and that release is at the knee point of where the last glaciation ended, temperatures spiked 1-3C and sea levels rapidly started increasing. We really do _NOT_ want oceanic methane burps. They could push things over from climate change into an Anoxic Oceanic Event.
Sea levels are regional at best.
One example: If the Gulf Stream was to be interrupted, the _immediate_ effect would be a 3 foot rise in sea level along the entire US east coast seaboard - without changing average global levels one inch. All currents have this kind of localised effect and one of the more interesting ones is that the southern circumpolar current will act as a major buffer against Antarctic melting affecting the rest of the world.
Prevailing winds also cause sea levels to "pile up" against land, so long term changes in wind directions come with changes in sea level too.
Tide gauges are only an indication of local conditions, and only if they're accurate - many aren't, thanks to land movement since installation - particularly along the USA east coast and northern european coastlines where glacial rebound is causing land level to increase in previously glaciated areas and decrease in areas which were just beyond the glaciation.
"I am comparing actual data to their dire predictions made 20 years ago"
The dire predictions were made by doom and gloom sayers based on what science was projecting as a worst possible case.
The "most probable outcome" predictions have actually started arriving earlier than expected.
Renewables are reliable collectively. The problem is production volumes.
Renewables can just about match existing carbon-sourced electricity production.
Electricity only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions.
Replacing those carbon using processes with electrical or other sources will result in a 6-8 fold increase in generation requirements.
How do you propose filling that gap?
As for the recycling problem: A conventional 800MWe nuclear plant over its 60-year lifespan produces a a lot of high level waste - enough to fill a single olympic-size swimming pool in fact (compare with the lakes of coal fly ash simmering across the USA - the two largest environmental disasters so far this century have been ash pond dam failures)
A molten salt reactor with inline reprocessing reduces that by 98% on the output side.
-But because it can eat highlevel conventional nuclear waste, it also reduces the conventional waste pile.
-And because it can eat U238, it can also reduces the _input_ waste pile of depleted uranium (enriching natural uranium to 3% U235 results in ~87% of the original uranium to be discarded during the enrichment process)
-And because they eat Thorium and convert it to U233 along the way, they have essentially limitless fuel - there are hundreds of thousands of tons of Thorium sitting in rare earth metal refining waste piles and the USA DOE buried ~30,000 tons in the Utah desert in the 1990s.
The recycling problem is largely self inflicted because of the insistence on using Uranium instead of Thorium and a focus on extracting plutonium for weapons. Molten salt reactors produce so many plutonium isotopes that attempting to make weapons from the output is difficult-to-impossible and whilst you can get U233 from the process, doing so will reduce output so much that any reactor operator doing so will be noticed.
Couple that with blind insistence that all radiation exposure is bad and you have a kneejerk fear response which prevents proper R&D. Look into the radiation exposure of aircrew sometime. They get 10-100 times the allowable dose for nuclear workers and the early death/cancer rate is no higher than the general population - which indicates that the perceived wisdom about radiation exposure is wrong. (Panic over radiation killed 1500+ people around Fukushima. Radiation didn't kill anyone and the worst injuries inflicted were some mild skin burns around the ankles of a few staff trying to stop the water leaks on the reactor vessel.)
The key is in the name. Adibiatic means it's pulling/pushing heat from somewhere (presumably a river?)
China is also building shedloads of nuclear plants.
The coal plants being built are mostly to handle immediate demand or to replace older inefficient ones. Either way the intent is that they won't be running for 60-70 years.
Diesel generators work quite well on natural gas(*) and are more efficient than open cycle turbines, plus handle variable loading better. That's why many utilities keep their ancient creaky standby diesels maintained even though they're only run a few times per year.
(*) Dedicated gas engines are more optimised for this use but diesels can be adapted with only a slight loss of efficiency. It's cheaper to adapt than install new engines for the amount of work these engines are now doing.
Compressed air falls to Boyle's law - in both directions.
What I mean by that is that when you compress gas it gets hot - and at the pressures involved for storage that can be enough to damage components/piping, so you have to toss heat overboard. You'll want to do this anyway to reduce the pressures.
When you decompress it, it gets cold, and cold gas has lower volume, so you lose out substantially on the entire pressurisation cycle (this is why compressed gas cars are a scam)
Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
Open cycle gas turbines can cover the peaks and dips but they're not efficient compared to combined cycle plants.
Conventional nuclear plants can peak-follow if you have enough of them so that you don't dip into neutron poisoning territory or can ride it out.
Molten salt nuclear plants can peak-follow trivially, because neutron poisons (primarily xenon gas) pop out of the fuel salts and can be sequestered until they break down (at that point you can reinject the products for further breakdown or store until saleable.) - and because they're both extremely hot and thermally self-limiting, you have sufficient reserve to safely peak load quickly without worrying about dips.
"Siemens is also reducing steam turbine capacities"
This is a mistake.
The long-term demand is going to be for high capacity steam or other gas turbines driven by molten salt nuclear reactors and in the meantime steam demand is likely to increase due to an increase in the conventional nuclear fleet.
Reasoning: Renewables (Wind and solar PV) are a nice scam, but at best and assuming all planning objections are overrriddden so you build everywhere you can, they can collectively only just match the electrical output of the existing non-nuclear electrical generation fleet.
Worse, the places you can site them aren't the places where the demand is, so you need to factor in transmission losses (HVDC/HVAC transmission lines top out at about 1MV thanks to corona losses and arcing) and line density requirements (you can't just string heavier lines without decreasing the tower distance and each tower affects the electrical isolation, meaning that increasing capacity of these kinds of lines usually means more parallel transmission lines)
Now factor in that once you come under intense pressure to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions (what we're currently seeing is just tinkering around the edges), you're going to see an increase of electrical demand by a factor of 6-8 - at that point the ONLY viable way forward is nuclear energy and that should be molten salt systems by preference due to the ready availability of Thorium, the fact that you don't need to spend prodigious amounts of energy to enrich it (tossing out 90% of the raw uranium in the process) and you can achieve a utilisation exceeding 95% of the input materials with relatively continuous chemical reprocessing - and that doesn't even start to address the safety issues that water moderated systems have with putting extremely hot, high pressure, acidic water in direct contact with the nuclear sources and inevitable contamination that results, with risk of leaking into the biosphere that comes with it or the difficulties inherent in packing uranium ceramics into a fuel rod and leaving it to break down for 20-30 years, then try to process the resulting mess. Conventional nuclear power is 300,000 times safer than coal, but molten salt provides an opportunity to make it a few (ten) thousand times safer whilst lowering costs dramatically. Most of the costs of conventional nuclear come from the safety systems that are inherent with having a 800-1600MW radioactive steam bomb at their core. If you can separate the steam and the radioactivity you eliminate most of the costs - and as almost all the civil nuclear accidents have revolved around water in some way or another it makes sense to eliminate it. (Chernobyl went prompt-critical and it was the resulting steam explosion which blew the roof off. Everything that followed was a result of that explosion. Snake river was also a prompt-critical incident)
The only way to produce mass quantities of "synthetic" hydrogen is with a nuclear source.
At that point you may as well just go ahead and generate electricity directly, tacking on some carbon atoms to the hydrogen to make synthetic liquid fuels for applications where you need mobility and energy density beyond that which can be provided by batteries (IE: aircraft)
Yes, you could setup hydrogen pipelines or repurpose existing natural gas distribution lines, but raw hydrogen is a bitch to handle due to the embrittlement issues under pressure and its tendency to permeate straight through the container walls means that long-distance losses would be comparable to electrical transportation losses and that's without even taking the conversion losses into account at the far end or its inherent dangers over natural gas when used in most domestic/commercial applications thanks to the nasty properties mentioned above.
~62% is for a combined cycle plant, not a standalone turbine.
The best you can get out of a standalone turbine is about 32%, increasing to about 35% if you add a recuperator (the advantage of a recuperator is that efficiency at part-throttle is vastly improved, making them more applicable for ships than power generation)
CCGT drives steam turbines from the heat of the exhaust stream. You could add Stirling engines to recover energy from what's left after that but cost:benefit falls away rapidly.
"This is a BYOB, as in Bring Your Own Battery, enterprise."
Tesla has been described for many years as a battery company which happens to build cars.
The powerwall and renewables battery farms should underscore that point - they're where the money is.
Cars are merely a way to sell more batteries, which in turn generates enough demand to justify the gigafactory. once it's online, tesla/panasonic will be producing more cells than the rest of the world combined.
Regarding utility capacity: Electricity accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions depending where you are in the world. Transportation about half and domestic heating/cooking(oil+gas) + industrial processes account for the rest.
To eliminate carbon entirely will take a power generation capacity increase of between 6 and 8 fold over current capacity and that's simply not possible with renewables no matter how many way to try to square that circle. Nuclear is the only long term solution, it's just a question of which technology. That said we can't afford to hang around for 40 years whilst MSRs or fusion become viable, we should have been building conventional plants already. The UK is going to need around 60-70 new ones in the next 20 years and right now it hasn't even started building the only one it committed to a decade ago.
We're rapidly approaching an environmental knee-point which will force the issue on carbon emissions. I strongly suspect that even the current "it's going to be warmer than we though" news is vastly underestimating the impacts, as they're not taking account of what happens if ocean methane clathrate deposits bubble out catastrophically - and it looks like this is about to happen off the Siberian coast line (it's been getting steadily worse since the bubbles started reaching the surface in 2004, with plumes 1km wide reported in 2010). There's a hell of a lot of "mystery methane" in the air that was blamed on farming - but the instruments have only been proven accurate over land. They can't see methane over water at all as the researchers assumed there wasn't any.
If this environmental disaster comes to pass, then Tesla's batteries are going to be paying off handsomely.
At least it's not partner company gearing up for a single massive order, then going bust a couple of years later due to overcapacity and no orders.
Apart from these kinds of blips, the market for batteries is limited by price, not by availability - meaning that if you raise the price then sales drop off in a non-linear fashion, and the same thing happens to the increase when you lower the price - the balancing act is to set the price high enough to make money but not cause a glut which would lower the price, trigger a rush and result in a shortage (and wild oscillations)
"Hydrogen is a lousy, inefficient way to store or transport energy."
Yup, and the day it becomes economic to produce bulk hydrogen from water, it's also economic to tack on enough carbon atoms to make it easier to handle.
Synthetic diesel/kerosene/gasoline burns just as well as the stuff outta the ground and it's still the only practical fuel for aircraft (short or longhaul), however I suspect that the most heavily trafficked routes will fall to electric high speed trains or vacuum trains before long.
The irony about that that the best suited nuclear reactor for making synfuels is the molten salt type (heat levels), which were a direct product of the nuclear aircraft project. It's a long way around to get your nuclear powered aircraft, but we might get there in the end.
(Practical molten salt reactors will make most renewables obsolete overnight too, which is probably a good thing)
China has actually been working pretty hard to bring down carbon emissions. They're uniquely susceptable to sea level rise thanks to the large population on the very low lying coastal plains and the leadership plays a long game when planning.
This is why so much renewables R&D is going on there and also why the chinese are investing so much into nuclear energy research (both fusion and fussion). They're not betting the farm on one technology, they're hedging by trying _everything_.
Bear in mind that the economic power of pretty much all nations can be measured in their access to cheap energy. Whilst the USA has been expending more and more resources to maintain its oil addiction, if the chinese investment works out, they'll be supplying cheap, safe nuclear power (Molten salts, not your grandfather's steamer) all over the world.
The importance of that can't be understated. If the developed world stopped using carbon overnight, the developing countries could easily make up the entire difference and then some in their efforts to play catchup. It's not in anyone's interest to prevent them playing catchup, but neither is it in anyone's interest for carbon to be the cheapest way of them doing it.
The problem becomes that the higher it goes, the more publicity it gets and the more you start getting granny investors being sucked into the bubble.
The adage in the 1920s was when the elevator boy is giving stock tips, it's time to get out.
Given what the Winkelvoss twins have been up to, I'd imagine this is exactly what's going on.
"If you truely believe the stock market is a zero sum game"
If you're treating it like a casino (day trading, etc) then yes, it _is_ a zero sum game.
Which is not what it's there for, nor its actual intended use.
There does need to be some brake on abusive rapid trading. Electronic noise or something injected into the timings (jitter, etc).
"Renewables as the main energy with nuclear as back up "
It's cheaper and more reliable to just run with nuclear. Even old fashioned water moderated nuclear.
And, surprisingly, nuclear produces less waste than the renewables do over their respective lifespans (IF LFTRs can be made viable then nuclear will reduce this by 99% on the output and a further 88% on the input sides.)
Without using AI at all, there have been some impressive results in visual processing.
One example was on the UK's Nimrod maritime patrol craft. When testing the new avionics surveillance package they told it to "show me everything that doesn't look like sea" - and it immediately starting picking out fishing net buoys across the Irish sea. The implications for S&R were obvious.
standard silica fibre, perhaps, but there _are_ rad-resistant fibres.
https://www.fujikura.co.uk/pro...
The problem with bowden cables or anything else you might think of as driving "cheap marionettes" is that means even more clutter/obstructions to cleanup in years to come. if you can't go in there and return/extract the device safely, then don't go in there at all. High radiation levels become low radiation levels in a surprisingly short period of time, with or without human intervention.