"Any investigation into doomsday weapons will be colored by these motivations."
Indeed.
It can be argued the cold war ended in the early 1960s when Soviet scientists proposed a _massive_ nuclear bomb - the size of a cargo ship. It would be built into a cargo ship and spend its life cruising up and down the US eastern seaboard. Detonation would wipe out most of the US east coast.
The story goes that Krushev took one look at the plans and forbade any attempt to even try to build it. The Tsar bomba was supposedly a compromise to keep the "bigger is better" factions happy. As mentioned by others it was only detonated at half yield - because at full power there was no way for the aircraft dropping it to get to a safe distance.
"Do you comprehend that it is impossible to win in nuclear war? "
The US military hierarchy does.
The RAND institute published an analysis in the late 1980s of war games simulations run over the previous 20 years and found that nuclear-authorised commanders either refused to use nuclear weapons or if they actually did so, only ever tried them once. In every subsequent run the commanders who attempted to use nukes would use every possible method to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, including surrender _even if the other side tossed one first_ - the alternative was inevitable escalation and mass civilian deaths.
The modern US military does not regard mass casualties of the people it's charged with protecting as a victory, even if they destroy the other side in the process. This isn't an era where everything swings on the ego of a few generals or leaders.
Salted bombs have been banned by treaties for over 50 years (they were banned before they even got as far as being tested) and the days of multi megaton weapons ended in the 1960s when ICBMs got accurate enough to be within 50 metres of target. The vast majority of weapons are in the 50-150kT range - which is still enough to give the world a very bad day due to the firestorms they'd kick up if used on population centres, but certainly not planet killers.
An "intercontinental torpedo" sounds like something from a bad 1920s science fiction story.
If you're going to burn it, you should do it as fuel in a proper environment where the nasties are fully oxidised.
There's an asshole around my neighbourhood who's been regularly burning plastics off copper for more than a decade (only after dark, so hard to trace - sneaky prick). The fumes have been making people sick for a while. He finally got located and identified a couple of weeks ago and the law is in the process of shredding him.
"providing coatings that provably prevent rodents from consuming the insulation over the lifespan of the vehicle."
Just about everything that is "proven to taste disgusting to rodents" - will still be eaten eventually. Keeping vermin out of telco installations is a never-ending battle.
"you want insulation that will last a good ~25 years at minimum and burn off as cleanly as possible"
It's been illegal to burn insulation off wiring in a lot of countries for decades due to the toxic fumes invariably released (noone ever burns them at 1100C)
The approved method is to chop the wiring into microconfetti and use electrostatic separation.
"as an authoritarian regime they can pay next to nothing, ignore the environment and seize land for pennies."
Except they don't. That kind of stuff tends to be done by corrupt developers teaming up with local officials but the central government tends to do things "by the book" and they're cracking down on the corruption.
Even without the chinese blowhard trolls extolling their virtues (They're much like USA blowhard trolls only chinese), the fact is that China's always been an advanced country with a good science base. It may have fallen behind over the last 100 years due to colonialism and not being able to surf the wave of the industrial revolution (not having easy access to the coalfields will do that) but it's caught up with most things over the last 40 years and gotten ahead in a few too - When low cost, safe reliable molten salt nuclear reactors start going into developing countries they'll be chinese and whilst western countries turn their noses up initially I can bet they'll buy them too.
Similarly it's not a great stretch of the imagination to suggest that Russian railways will regauge to 4'8" (and china will pay for it) or that Europe will update its structure gauges to allow chinese goods trains to travel end-to-end without crossloading along the way (there's a secondary advantage that it would mean scandanavian/finnish trains will be able to travel beyond northern Germany) or that the trans-bering strait rail/road tunnel will be owned by the chinese (and US railways might well update structure gauges for the same reasons)
> more accurate to say, if done right it makes things better.
Yup.
A few years back one of the astronomy researchers where I work came to see us oiks in the IT department with a perplexing problem:
Programs which worked perfectly happily on 32-bit OSes were giving wrong answers on 64-bit ones, even on the same hardware (linux but it was the same on windows, we checked)
After a bit of head scratching and some digging we found out what the problem was: _both_ OSes were giving wrong answers.
I'm sure some of you are ahead of me by now, but it turned out that what was being done as standard practice in the space physics community when iterating multiple orbits or similar stuff was to use the output of the last calculation as the input to the next one - problem being the imprecision in the last decimal place or so rapidly adds up to major errors - and noone had noticed this for 20+ years.
(Sheesh, and I learned how this schoolboy error works 40+ years ago, when I was a schoolboy and using 4 function calculators!)
Changing to more orthodox (but longer winded) methods resulted in both OSes giving the same answers.
Unfortunately they're still slightly wrong: Originally, modelling the orbits of the solar system on 32-bit software would result in it flying apart after 11 million years or so. On the 64-bit machine it would happen in about 8 million years. Now it's more like 30 million years, but it still flies apart.
We're still here, so the calculations need more tweaking...:-)
Unlike every other form of transport, aircraft designs are incredibly sensitive to weight and using less efficient engines (turbines) makes sense when the engine power is higher (so you need fewer of them = less weight) and the reliability is higher (in the days of pistons it was routine for "long-distance" flights to arrive with one engine out and the engines tended to need heavy maintenance every other flight anyway, making turnarounds extremely slow)
Adding extra mass for a big motor/generator and batteries doesn't make sense, especially when you factor in that aircraft engines spend the vast majority of their operating life either idling (warming up, cooling down and taxiing) or at one fixed power level (plus/minus 10%). Hybrids make more sense when the power requirements are continually varying, so the gains you might make from a hybrid system are outweighed by the extra complexity and mass. The same mass penalties are why it's not considered worthwhile adding electric drive to the wheels, especially given the engines need to be running for some period before applying full power/after landing - the benefits simply aren't worthwhile (and designing for extended ground tows adds weight to the undercarriage with its own sets of panalties)
Electric engines are theoretically better than turbines, but battery energy density needs to improve by at least a factor of 10 before they'd be practical for civil transports.
"There ARE dual-standard trains like Öresundstoget though"
There are a lot of multi-standard trainsets around. Every year it gets easier to do and some european international sets have to cope with not only 4 types of power, but also overhead vs track shoe pickups on different parts of the same journey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - and there are electrodisels on top of that (part time diesel engines) (Eurostar runs on 750V DC shoes, 3kVDC overhead or 25kV 50Hz AC overhead, as one example - the 750V is not used on journeys anymore but still needed for maintanence routes - and adding the german system is planned to allow continuous runs into Hamburg. Likewise Germany has multistandard ICEs modified to go all the way to UK 750V stations
The train signalling issue isn't as bad as you make out, with Europe working towards harmonising across the entire continent and all-electronic signals are the targetted norm.
"To this day, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Germany haven't adopted the UIC world standard Kando-system, that is railway traction power taken directly from the national electric grid (50Hz AC in Europe) via simple, low-cost 120/25kV ZBD-type transformers. "
In the old days this had a lot to do with losses in the lines (you need bigger transformers at 16Hz but the losses are lower). DC arcs are self sustaining and at 50/60Hz, 25-50kV arcs can sustain themselves via the ion trail they establish in the air. 16Hz arcs tend to be guaranteed self-extinguishing (and the motors were a lot easier to design in the days of direct-switching power to the motors)
These days it's a lot easier as track segments are only powered up when there's a train using them, but you still need your separated reticulation system, else the national grid operator has to deal with a 10MW load suddenly becoming a 8MW generator as a train crests a hill in one area, with other loads and generators in other areas, resulting in a lot of grid juggling.
New Zealand's North Island Main Trunk Railroad electrification was built this way (government decree) in the 1970s-80s, which in a more competitive and profit oriented envoronment results in the grid operators paying the railway companies to NOT run electric locomotives due to the complexity they induce. Standard electromechanical control systems which have served grid operators well for decades are no longer fast enough - even when high speed computers are interposed. We're at the point where you have to predict the big load and source swings on a second-by-second basis and that needs more complexity and cooperation between the various entities involved - the problem there is that whilst governments are mandating that grids provide connectivity to these kinds of loads and sources, they're not allowing the grid operators sufficient power to control the manner of the connection or raise charges to cover the costs.
UK wind no longer gets _DIRECT_ subsidies (which is untrue, there are still subsidies to build them, just not to run them)
The _HIDDEN_ subsidies are:
- Grid operators are required to take wind as first choice.
- Grid operators are required to pay an almost 1000% premium over other sources.
- Grid operators are not allowed to refuse windpower even when generation exceeds demand
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators the costs of building the connection to the windfarm (normal powerplants pay for the lines to the grid)
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators for the massive buildout projects required to keep the grid stable in the face of uncontrollable and unstable power sources - projects which are adding massive complexity to management of power flows
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators for individual stabilisation projects such as Elon's Battery Farm
- secondary to the first point, if wind fails and backup generation capacity is required, grid operators are required to take wind when it resumes _even if the startup costs of the backup plant haven't been paid for by the bulk electricity rate_ - leading to peaking plant operators declining to fire up plants, which is what led to one of the two statewide South Australian power outages in 2016.
When wind operators are paid going rates AND are required to install their own battery backup system to smooth outputs AND pay for their own connectivity, then I'll believe that subsidies are going away. In the mean time the main thing that's being farmed by wind and solar operators is subsidies, not electricity.
They probably did. Even with Norway's geography, short haul flights of less than an hour are better done by train and in most countries trains beat aircraft for any journey of less than 3 hours unless there are substantial bodies of water in the way which require long diversions.
Norway is one of the very _few_ countries with oil which didn't go nuts squandering the income. They have very well setup investment funds which will continue paying out long after the oil stops.
By contrast, the UK has spent all of it with precious little to show (most of it went on vote bribery, not on social programs and infrastructure) and then run up debts against future oil income.
"Over the next couple decades we'll see a massive economic downturn as the oil income dries up and the post-WWII generation retires "
Even without the oil income, that wave of retiring Boomers starting to crash on economic shorelines of developed countries worldwide is starting to turn into a tsunami and virtually no government is prepared for it despite 35 years warning.
The UK is currently spending 65% of its net tax income directly on old age pensions, with another 5-10% going via health provision to the elderly, subsidised housing, winter fuel allowances and free public transport - and that's despite pushing out the retirement age from 60 to 65. It will go out to even higher ages but the harsh reality across the world is that governmental pensions liabilities are increasing at the exact same time that personal-income taxation is decreasing, yet there's an increasing reliance on personal income tax to fund the governments and increasing tax breaks given to the corporate and the rich. This won't end well anywhere.
"It requires electricity to take hydrogen out of water but if you have plenty of electricity then it's feasible."
The amount of energy to do this practically (ie, at large volumes) means you need a nuclear power plant - and the temperatures required to do it efficiently means it needs to be a molten-salt plant.
Once you have that amount of energy at your disposal, taking on carbon atoms is relatively easy and heavy liquid synfuels have a lot of advantages over hauling around a low-energy-density gas like Hydrogen. Being synfuels you can tune them for better combustion and also tune the engines for the fuels.
The irony of all this being that the Nuclear Aircraft program would indeed end up powering aircraft from nuclear energy - possibly in a way that Alvin Weinberg would have thought about but certainly not what the US military had in mind 65 years ago.
(We're not going to see directly nuclear powered aircraft. The shielding requirements alone make them too heavy to be practical)
Windmill efficiency hasn't increased, but size has. Reliability is slightly better but they're still catching fire and/or shredding gearboxes at an alarming rate - to the point where they're barely economic even with direct subsidies, "must take" and "inflated buy price" rules. About the only way to be profitable with one is to park it and get paid via the subsidies whilst NOT generating electricity or by the grid operators NOT connect to the grid (this is a big thing in many areas now).
The safety aspects are worth considering too - apart from the noise aspects (which IS a real problem) thrown blades have been known to go over a mile downwind, so you need a large exclusion zone around your units.
Solar is a sucess as long as you don't look at the energy costs of production and the massive environmental problems around the factories.
NEITHER is sufficient to replace current carbon-sourced electrical generation, let alone the added requirements of replacing oil/gas based heating and transportation systems (which will at minimum quadruple electric requirements, if not octuple them) - even if you were to carpet the countryside with windmills and pave every rooftop with solar panels. There are practical transportation limits for electricity too and in any case you can assume demand within 500 miles will account for almost all production - so don't get ideas about paving the Sahara desert and feeding the output to Europe. It's not going to happen.
The Alpha Electro has a flight duration of approx 1 hour, or less if you're playing around with touch-and-gos or aerobatics (38 mins to 25% capacity at extreme load)
Don't confuse the specs for the gasoline version (which is what you quoted) with the electric. You're not going to go far from your home base in an electric trainer with a practical range of only 100 miles and a 1 hour refuelling time - and if you were to put 2 average adults + 20kg baggage apiece in the thing you're unlikely to even get airborne, let alone go 50 miles.
Electric aeroplanes don't win on efficiency because power to weight ratio is far more important, along with maximum power output
Turbines use 30% more fuel than equivalent piston engines, but they're less than 1/4 the weight AND mechanically simpler (far lower maintenance downtime) AND they can scale up to 30MW output. The largest piston engines ever put on wings were only about 2MW and they were HEAVY as well as needing an overhaul pretty much after every long flight.
Weight is key. Geared turbofans are much more efficient than direct drive ones, but a gearbox capable of handling 20-30MW is necessarily big and heavy - possibly heavier than the gas turbine core powering it. Making it light enough to be practical along with reliable enough not to shred itself is something that's only just starting to happen (LEAP engines, etc)
Aviation is all about tradeoffs. Yes you can probably build an electric aircraft that will carry passengers on a 90 minute flight but the battery mass pretty much ensures they won't have any baggage allowance and the turnaround time will require a nuclear power station or 3 right next to the airport simply to handle aircraft requirements (Sorry, the airport's closed for the next 6 months whilst we recore the fuel supplies)
And both are far more explosive than Kerosene, which is one of the reasons that airline safety improved when piston engine airliners became a thing of the past - and why there's a constant interest in aeromotive diesel engines despite the weight penalties.
"then you have to make tanks that can withstand the pressure"
Making tanks that can handle the pressure is relatively easy.
Making tanks that can stand constant deep pressure _cycling_ is another matter.
There's a reason that no car manufacturer has actually sold any H2 vehicles yet. They don't want the liabilities that accrue when tanks get old or are poorly maintained (and that WILL happen). By keeping the cars on leases they can control the life cycles of the tanks.
Yes, yes, I know: "Metal Hydrides". People have been working on those for 40 years and whilst they work, you're not going to sell a car where the fuel tank is worth more than the entire rest of the vehicle and takes 6 hours to fill up. That's just Range Anxiety under a different banner.
Have you seen the fuel tanks for compressed H2? And the stresses they undergo?
Methane is less aggressive about the way it attacks metals but the number of tanks that blow due to pressure cycling is still scary.
If you were to power aircraft from H2, then it must be LH2 or the risk from exploding tanks and consequent maintenance downtime will ensure airlines won't touch it - and if it's LH2 then you need to have enough insulation to ensure that it doesn't all boil off before the end of your flight (You don't need massive cryogenics, just enough to protect from cold embrittlement and ensure the LH2 lasts the flight)
That said, H2 is a bitch of a substance to work with. Even at room temperature and pressure it embrittles metals and organic compounds like rubber, making sealing an absolute cow (inflate a toy balloon with hydrogen and leave it for 3-5 days, then deflate and see what condition it's in. Do the same with another one and see what happens when you try to light it.) If you pressurise it, the stuff permeates through most metals relatively quickly, so leakage and explosive gas buildups are a constant danger.
If you have the energy to make H2 "fuel" (from water vs stripping it from natural gas) then you have enough energy and can take the time to tack on some carbon atoms making it easier to handle. There's far more hydrogen in a litre of kerosene/diesel/gasoline than a litre of liquid hydrogen and there's far more in LH2 than there is in a litre of compressed hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
"Any investigation into doomsday weapons will be colored by these motivations."
Indeed.
It can be argued the cold war ended in the early 1960s when Soviet scientists proposed a _massive_ nuclear bomb - the size of a cargo ship. It would be built into a cargo ship and spend its life cruising up and down the US eastern seaboard. Detonation would wipe out most of the US east coast.
The story goes that Krushev took one look at the plans and forbade any attempt to even try to build it. The Tsar bomba was supposedly a compromise to keep the "bigger is better" factions happy. As mentioned by others it was only detonated at half yield - because at full power there was no way for the aircraft dropping it to get to a safe distance.
"Do you comprehend that it is impossible to win in nuclear war? "
The US military hierarchy does.
The RAND institute published an analysis in the late 1980s of war games simulations run over the previous 20 years and found that nuclear-authorised commanders either refused to use nuclear weapons or if they actually did so, only ever tried them once. In every subsequent run the commanders who attempted to use nukes would use every possible method to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, including surrender _even if the other side tossed one first_ - the alternative was inevitable escalation and mass civilian deaths.
The modern US military does not regard mass casualties of the people it's charged with protecting as a victory, even if they destroy the other side in the process. This isn't an era where everything swings on the ego of a few generals or leaders.
Yup.
Salted bombs have been banned by treaties for over 50 years (they were banned before they even got as far as being tested) and the days of multi megaton weapons ended in the 1960s when ICBMs got accurate enough to be within 50 metres of target. The vast majority of weapons are in the 50-150kT range - which is still enough to give the world a very bad day due to the firestorms they'd kick up if used on population centres, but certainly not planet killers.
An "intercontinental torpedo" sounds like something from a bad 1920s science fiction story.
if the earth was flat, we could just push rockets over the edge.
Are soy seats tastier than hoomans?
If you're going to burn it, you should do it as fuel in a proper environment where the nasties are fully oxidised.
There's an asshole around my neighbourhood who's been regularly burning plastics off copper for more than a decade (only after dark, so hard to trace - sneaky prick). The fumes have been making people sick for a while. He finally got located and identified a couple of weeks ago and the law is in the process of shredding him.
"providing coatings that provably prevent rodents from consuming the insulation over the lifespan of the vehicle."
Just about everything that is "proven to taste disgusting to rodents" - will still be eaten eventually. Keeping vermin out of telco installations is a never-ending battle.
"you want insulation that will last a good ~25 years at minimum and burn off as cleanly as possible"
It's been illegal to burn insulation off wiring in a lot of countries for decades due to the toxic fumes invariably released (noone ever burns them at 1100C)
The approved method is to chop the wiring into microconfetti and use electrostatic separation.
"as an authoritarian regime they can pay next to nothing, ignore the environment and seize land for pennies."
Except they don't. That kind of stuff tends to be done by corrupt developers teaming up with local officials but the central government tends to do things "by the book" and they're cracking down on the corruption.
Even without the chinese blowhard trolls extolling their virtues (They're much like USA blowhard trolls only chinese), the fact is that China's always been an advanced country with a good science base. It may have fallen behind over the last 100 years due to colonialism and not being able to surf the wave of the industrial revolution (not having easy access to the coalfields will do that) but it's caught up with most things over the last 40 years and gotten ahead in a few too - When low cost, safe reliable molten salt nuclear reactors start going into developing countries they'll be chinese and whilst western countries turn their noses up initially I can bet they'll buy them too.
Similarly it's not a great stretch of the imagination to suggest that Russian railways will regauge to 4'8" (and china will pay for it) or that Europe will update its structure gauges to allow chinese goods trains to travel end-to-end without crossloading along the way (there's a secondary advantage that it would mean scandanavian/finnish trains will be able to travel beyond northern Germany) or that the trans-bering strait rail/road tunnel will be owned by the chinese (and US railways might well update structure gauges for the same reasons)
The best patents are for things that weren't obvious beforehand but are obvious afterwards.
The question becomes "Why had noone implemented it in hardware before?" (ie, had it been suggested and thought too hard?)
> more accurate to say, if done right it makes things better.
Yup.
A few years back one of the astronomy researchers where I work came to see us oiks in the IT department with a perplexing problem:
Programs which worked perfectly happily on 32-bit OSes were giving wrong answers on 64-bit ones, even on the same hardware (linux but it was the same on windows, we checked)
After a bit of head scratching and some digging we found out what the problem was: _both_ OSes were giving wrong answers.
I'm sure some of you are ahead of me by now, but it turned out that what was being done as standard practice in the space physics community when iterating multiple orbits or similar stuff was to use the output of the last calculation as the input to the next one - problem being the imprecision in the last decimal place or so rapidly adds up to major errors - and noone had noticed this for 20+ years.
(Sheesh, and I learned how this schoolboy error works 40+ years ago, when I was a schoolboy and using 4 function calculators!)
Changing to more orthodox (but longer winded) methods resulted in both OSes giving the same answers.
Unfortunately they're still slightly wrong: Originally, modelling the orbits of the solar system on 32-bit software would result in it flying apart after 11 million years or so. On the 64-bit machine it would happen in about 8 million years. Now it's more like 30 million years, but it still flies apart.
We're still here, so the calculations need more tweaking... :-)
"Why not a hybrid system?"
To sum it up in one word: Weight.
To sum it up in two words: Weight & reliability
Unlike every other form of transport, aircraft designs are incredibly sensitive to weight and using less efficient engines (turbines) makes sense when the engine power is higher (so you need fewer of them = less weight) and the reliability is higher (in the days of pistons it was routine for "long-distance" flights to arrive with one engine out and the engines tended to need heavy maintenance every other flight anyway, making turnarounds extremely slow)
Adding extra mass for a big motor/generator and batteries doesn't make sense, especially when you factor in that aircraft engines spend the vast majority of their operating life either idling (warming up, cooling down and taxiing) or at one fixed power level (plus/minus 10%). Hybrids make more sense when the power requirements are continually varying, so the gains you might make from a hybrid system are outweighed by the extra complexity and mass. The same mass penalties are why it's not considered worthwhile adding electric drive to the wheels, especially given the engines need to be running for some period before applying full power/after landing - the benefits simply aren't worthwhile (and designing for extended ground tows adds weight to the undercarriage with its own sets of panalties)
Electric engines are theoretically better than turbines, but battery energy density needs to improve by at least a factor of 10 before they'd be practical for civil transports.
"There ARE dual-standard trains like Öresundstoget though"
There are a lot of multi-standard trainsets around. Every year it gets easier to do and some european international sets have to cope with not only 4 types of power, but also overhead vs track shoe pickups on different parts of the same journey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - and there are electrodisels on top of that (part time diesel engines) (Eurostar runs on 750V DC shoes, 3kVDC overhead or 25kV 50Hz AC overhead, as one example - the 750V is not used on journeys anymore but still needed for maintanence routes - and adding the german system is planned to allow continuous runs into Hamburg. Likewise Germany has multistandard ICEs modified to go all the way to UK 750V stations
The train signalling issue isn't as bad as you make out, with Europe working towards harmonising across the entire continent and all-electronic signals are the targetted norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"To this day, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Germany haven't adopted the UIC world standard Kando-system, that is railway traction power taken directly from the national electric grid (50Hz AC in Europe) via simple, low-cost 120/25kV ZBD-type transformers. "
In the old days this had a lot to do with losses in the lines (you need bigger transformers at 16Hz but the losses are lower). DC arcs are self sustaining and at 50/60Hz, 25-50kV arcs can sustain themselves via the ion trail they establish in the air. 16Hz arcs tend to be guaranteed self-extinguishing (and the motors were a lot easier to design in the days of direct-switching power to the motors)
These days it's a lot easier as track segments are only powered up when there's a train using them, but you still need your separated reticulation system, else the national grid operator has to deal with a 10MW load suddenly becoming a 8MW generator as a train crests a hill in one area, with other loads and generators in other areas, resulting in a lot of grid juggling.
New Zealand's North Island Main Trunk Railroad electrification was built this way (government decree) in the 1970s-80s, which in a more competitive and profit oriented envoronment results in the grid operators paying the railway companies to NOT run electric locomotives due to the complexity they induce. Standard electromechanical control systems which have served grid operators well for decades are no longer fast enough - even when high speed computers are interposed. We're at the point where you have to predict the big load and source swings on a second-by-second basis and that needs more complexity and cooperation between the various entities involved - the problem there is that whilst governments are mandating that grids provide connectivity to these kinds of loads and sources, they're not allowing the grid operators sufficient power to control the manner of the connection or raise charges to cover the costs.
UK wind no longer gets _DIRECT_ subsidies (which is untrue, there are still subsidies to build them, just not to run them)
The _HIDDEN_ subsidies are:
- Grid operators are required to take wind as first choice.
- Grid operators are required to pay an almost 1000% premium over other sources.
- Grid operators are not allowed to refuse windpower even when generation exceeds demand
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators the costs of building the connection to the windfarm (normal powerplants pay for the lines to the grid)
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators for the massive buildout projects required to keep the grid stable in the face of uncontrollable and unstable power sources - projects which are adding massive complexity to management of power flows
- Grid operators are not allowed to charge wind operators for individual stabilisation projects such as Elon's Battery Farm
- secondary to the first point, if wind fails and backup generation capacity is required, grid operators are required to take wind when it resumes _even if the startup costs of the backup plant haven't been paid for by the bulk electricity rate_ - leading to peaking plant operators declining to fire up plants, which is what led to one of the two statewide South Australian power outages in 2016.
When wind operators are paid going rates AND are required to install their own battery backup system to smooth outputs AND pay for their own connectivity, then I'll believe that subsidies are going away. In the mean time the main thing that's being farmed by wind and solar operators is subsidies, not electricity.
They probably did. Even with Norway's geography, short haul flights of less than an hour are better done by train and in most countries trains beat aircraft for any journey of less than 3 hours unless there are substantial bodies of water in the way which require long diversions.
I'll add this:
Norway is one of the very _few_ countries with oil which didn't go nuts squandering the income. They have very well setup investment funds which will continue paying out long after the oil stops.
By contrast, the UK has spent all of it with precious little to show (most of it went on vote bribery, not on social programs and infrastructure) and then run up debts against future oil income.
"Over the next couple decades we'll see a massive economic downturn as the oil income dries up and the post-WWII generation retires "
Even without the oil income, that wave of retiring Boomers starting to crash on economic shorelines of developed countries worldwide is starting to turn into a tsunami and virtually no government is prepared for it despite 35 years warning.
The UK is currently spending 65% of its net tax income directly on old age pensions, with another 5-10% going via health provision to the elderly, subsidised housing, winter fuel allowances and free public transport - and that's despite pushing out the retirement age from 60 to 65. It will go out to even higher ages but the harsh reality across the world is that governmental pensions liabilities are increasing at the exact same time that personal-income taxation is decreasing, yet there's an increasing reliance on personal income tax to fund the governments and increasing tax breaks given to the corporate and the rich. This won't end well anywhere.
"It requires electricity to take hydrogen out of water but if you have plenty of electricity then it's feasible."
The amount of energy to do this practically (ie, at large volumes) means you need a nuclear power plant - and the temperatures required to do it efficiently means it needs to be a molten-salt plant.
Once you have that amount of energy at your disposal, taking on carbon atoms is relatively easy and heavy liquid synfuels have a lot of advantages over hauling around a low-energy-density gas like Hydrogen. Being synfuels you can tune them for better combustion and also tune the engines for the fuels.
The irony of all this being that the Nuclear Aircraft program would indeed end up powering aircraft from nuclear energy - possibly in a way that Alvin Weinberg would have thought about but certainly not what the US military had in mind 65 years ago.
(We're not going to see directly nuclear powered aircraft. The shielding requirements alone make them too heavy to be practical)
"They did it with wind, they did it with solar"
Windmill efficiency hasn't increased, but size has. Reliability is slightly better but they're still catching fire and/or shredding gearboxes at an alarming rate - to the point where they're barely economic even with direct subsidies, "must take" and "inflated buy price" rules. About the only way to be profitable with one is to park it and get paid via the subsidies whilst NOT generating electricity or by the grid operators NOT connect to the grid (this is a big thing in many areas now).
The safety aspects are worth considering too - apart from the noise aspects (which IS a real problem) thrown blades have been known to go over a mile downwind, so you need a large exclusion zone around your units.
Solar is a sucess as long as you don't look at the energy costs of production and the massive environmental problems around the factories.
NEITHER is sufficient to replace current carbon-sourced electrical generation, let alone the added requirements of replacing oil/gas based heating and transportation systems (which will at minimum quadruple electric requirements, if not octuple them) - even if you were to carpet the countryside with windmills and pave every rooftop with solar panels. There are practical transportation limits for electricity too and in any case you can assume demand within 500 miles will account for almost all production - so don't get ideas about paving the Sahara desert and feeding the output to Europe. It's not going to happen.
The Alpha Electro has a flight duration of approx 1 hour, or less if you're playing around with touch-and-gos or aerobatics (38 mins to 25% capacity at extreme load)
Don't confuse the specs for the gasoline version (which is what you quoted) with the electric. You're not going to go far from your home base in an electric trainer with a practical range of only 100 miles and a 1 hour refuelling time - and if you were to put 2 average adults + 20kg baggage apiece in the thing you're unlikely to even get airborne, let alone go 50 miles.
Electric aeroplanes don't win on efficiency because power to weight ratio is far more important, along with maximum power output
Turbines use 30% more fuel than equivalent piston engines, but they're less than 1/4 the weight AND mechanically simpler (far lower maintenance downtime) AND they can scale up to 30MW output. The largest piston engines ever put on wings were only about 2MW and they were HEAVY as well as needing an overhaul pretty much after every long flight.
Weight is key. Geared turbofans are much more efficient than direct drive ones, but a gearbox capable of handling 20-30MW is necessarily big and heavy - possibly heavier than the gas turbine core powering it. Making it light enough to be practical along with reliable enough not to shred itself is something that's only just starting to happen (LEAP engines, etc)
Aviation is all about tradeoffs. Yes you can probably build an electric aircraft that will carry passengers on a 90 minute flight but the battery mass pretty much ensures they won't have any baggage allowance and the turnaround time will require a nuclear power station or 3 right next to the airport simply to handle aircraft requirements (Sorry, the airport's closed for the next 6 months whilst we recore the fuel supplies)
"Gasoline is more explosive than hydrogen"
And both are far more explosive than Kerosene, which is one of the reasons that airline safety improved when piston engine airliners became a thing of the past - and why there's a constant interest in aeromotive diesel engines despite the weight penalties.
"then you have to make tanks that can withstand the pressure"
Making tanks that can handle the pressure is relatively easy.
Making tanks that can stand constant deep pressure _cycling_ is another matter.
There's a reason that no car manufacturer has actually sold any H2 vehicles yet. They don't want the liabilities that accrue when tanks get old or are poorly maintained (and that WILL happen). By keeping the cars on leases they can control the life cycles of the tanks.
Yes, yes, I know: "Metal Hydrides". People have been working on those for 40 years and whilst they work, you're not going to sell a car where the fuel tank is worth more than the entire rest of the vehicle and takes 6 hours to fill up. That's just Range Anxiety under a different banner.
Have you seen the fuel tanks for compressed H2? And the stresses they undergo?
Methane is less aggressive about the way it attacks metals but the number of tanks that blow due to pressure cycling is still scary.
If you were to power aircraft from H2, then it must be LH2 or the risk from exploding tanks and consequent maintenance downtime will ensure airlines won't touch it - and if it's LH2 then you need to have enough insulation to ensure that it doesn't all boil off before the end of your flight (You don't need massive cryogenics, just enough to protect from cold embrittlement and ensure the LH2 lasts the flight)
That said, H2 is a bitch of a substance to work with. Even at room temperature and pressure it embrittles metals and organic compounds like rubber, making sealing an absolute cow (inflate a toy balloon with hydrogen and leave it for 3-5 days, then deflate and see what condition it's in. Do the same with another one and see what happens when you try to light it.) If you pressurise it, the stuff permeates through most metals relatively quickly, so leakage and explosive gas buildups are a constant danger.
If you have the energy to make H2 "fuel" (from water vs stripping it from natural gas) then you have enough energy and can take the time to tack on some carbon atoms making it easier to handle. There's far more hydrogen in a litre of kerosene/diesel/gasoline than a litre of liquid hydrogen and there's far more in LH2 than there is in a litre of compressed hydrogen.