If a cancer doctor writes an article saying "everybody needs to eat more, and avoid sun exposure", a phys ed coach says "make time to be outdoors more", a pastor says "make more time for prayer and meditation", a self-defense expert says "make more time to learn self-defense", and a financial expert says "make time to write a monthly budget each month, and to review your investments", I won't be surprised, and I won't magically have an extra 8 hours each day to do all of these things. All of those people are trying to be helpful, and they are all focused on what they care about, what THEY think is important. It may be that where I need to spend more time is cuddling with my young child.
> Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess.;)
You only mentioned two organizations by name, so let's look at one those. Here's what the National Geographic Society says their goals are:
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization committed to exploring and protecting our planet. We fund hundreds of research and conservation projects around the world each year
Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric? If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns.
James Hansen director of Goddard Institute, NASA, 1988 by 2008 the West Side Highway will be underwater".
California Energy Commission, 1989 predicted sea level rise of 1.6 to 4.9 feet. Based on this, the National Environmental Trust published a map showing that 3 feet rise puts much of the bay area underwater. The "flooded San Francisco" map "went viral", to use today's terminology.
Some oldies but goodies:
Harvard biologist George Wald claimed that âoecivilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action.
Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich April 1970 âoeat least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.â
Professor Kenneth E.F. Watt at the University of California in 1970: "The world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
More recently:
2005 United Nations Environment Programme: 2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" will flee the Caribbean as islands are inundated with water. (In fact the opposite has occurred - people are moving TO the Caribbean, making it among the fastest growingb regions in the world.)
Also from United Nations Environment Programme, director of the New York office: "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000."
October 2015: Benjamin Strauss, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says Hollywood is a goner by 2025.
2008: James Hansen (NASA/Al Gore Science Advisor) says New York will be flooded in 2015, as portrayed by ABC News (this is probably a case of hyperbole on top of hyperbole, with ABC says stretching what Hansen had already stretched).
2006 You may recall Al Gore's ten-year "Doomesday Clock", which expired last year. Gore is not a scientist, he was the number one leader of the global warming movement.
> most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public
Many scientists try to do a good job. Some scientists think (maybe correctly) that raising awareness and advocating for action is a good thing to do, and they try to do it thoroughly. I don't suppose either of us has evidence of what "most climate scientists" do, so maybe we can agree on this much:
Many climate scientists try to do a good job. All climate scientists are human. Some high-profile climate scientists are passionate about these issues. When humans (including me) are passionate about issues, that affects our judgements. Some (most?) climate scientists are employed by organisations which advocate political positions.
I don't want to get too much into the leaked emails because that'll just cause arguments without accomplishing anything. When the head of the climatic science unit says "I used this trick to hide the reduction in temperature" apparently that's proper scientific procedure. Whatever. Here's an example that's out in the open, there's no argument about taking things out of context:
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist. You can read Professor Tol's full and complete statements in articles he has written.
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist.
> These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Unfortunately, neither side can. That's what's so frustrating - half the time the adjustments are lies, or at least intentionally skewed toward "raising awareness". Various researchers have admitted that in emails that leaked or other documents over and over again, a few publicly and openly. It's really, really difficult to get objective information. 90% of the researchers will tell you their objective is to "raise awareness of AGW" or similar, or they are funded by organizations with that as part of their stated agenda. That doesn't mean they are WRONG, of course. It just makes it difficult to get information you can trust to gauge the scale of the issue. Pretty clearly there *is* an issue, and pretty clearly San Francisco won't actually be underwater by 2020. In between the most extreme claims, it's very hard to know where reality is.
I'm an R-TX and I look at the evidence. Evidence indicates: a) There's been some warming. b) The rate of warming has been at least twice as fast on earth than on Mars and Venus (meaning solar changes are probably NOT the primary cause on earth). c) San Francisco was not underwater in 2010 d) San Francisco probably won't be underwater in 2025 either.
> He's being bribed with campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry to be a denier.
There's some truth to that, and the hyperbole from the left, the utter bullshit about "X will be underwater by 20yy" hasn't helped. It's easy to call AGW "bullshit" when some people spout so much bullshit in the name of AGW.
In a poll, I bet most people would say jolly old Saint Nick isn't real. He's actually a real guy, but all the fiction layered on top for various reasons has plenty of people thinking the whole Saint Nick thing is fake. There is some similarity to global warming there. If you want peopel to take it seriously, don't make BS claims like San Francisco will be underwater in five or ten years - because five or ten years later, when SF is still there, people think everything you say is complete bollocks.
> To this day, I fail to understand the hypocrisy in supporting the little guy against giants like Apple and Microsoft, but rooting for another giant, IBM, to decimate SCO.
Some of us pay attention to who is right and wrong, rather than deciding absolutely everything based on "big mean corporation."
SCO originally filed for misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair competition. Later, they decided breach of contract might be better. Still later, they decided maybe copyright infringement. Obviously, SCO wasn't so sure exactly what they were complaining about - not nearly as sure as you are.
They claimed that up to 0.0001% of the Linux kernel might have been derived from Unix, but refused to say which parts. As the judge began to strike down their claims unless they identified which code they were talking about, they pointed to some BSD licensed code written by Thompson - code they clearly had no copyright rights to.
When it was pointed out that Novell, not SCO, owned the Unix copyright, SCO tried to buy the copyrights from Novell. Again, Novell clearly wasn't too sure they owned the copyrights, they were trying to buy them from Novell, yet you're sure that they already owned them.
SCO then claimed that the GPL itself is illegal and unconstitutional! Which would of course mean that SCO were themselves unlawfully distributing GPL code! Yeah that annoyed some people.
SCO didn't just lose a case, they were laughed out of court repeatedly. "We're suing you for violating the copyright on Unix, but we're still trying to buy that copyright so can we have a short delay?" What!?!? It was one of the most ridiculous cases ever. That's why people didn't root for SCO, it was because SCO was engaging in ridiculous trolling that made no sense. They argued that the "offending code" was part of the Linux kernel, then argued that it wasn't. They couldn't even make up their mind.
> With "fold" the GPs likely meant that 2 of the 3 blades rotate around the axis and join the third one and all three hang down parallel with the mast and get secured there.
That, and another approach is like an inverted umbrella, an umbrella that has broken due to the wind. The blades swing away from the mast, downwind (with the tips of the blades coming closer to each other).
I'm sure there are other methods too. To me, the details don't matter so much, because the details of the implementation change every few years. I'm more interested in the fundamental limitations, the laws of physics that make it very hard or impossible to do more than X, for any X. Those are limitations to each technology that are unlikely to fundamentally change any time soon. (Compare solar electric in the 1950s-1960s and solar electric in the 1990s-2000's. After a hundred billion dollars in investment, a lot of things changed, and a lot of things didn't - what hasn't changed in 60 years probably won't change any time soon.)
I'm glad you've found my posts interesting. I find the topic interesting.
I'm no expert on wind power, I just read 100-200 pages of technical papers about each type of power production in order to get an idea of how they all fit together, what a reasonable policy overall energy policy would be. I was trying to answer questions such as "roughly what percentage of our energy needs can reasonably be provided by solar electric?" "Roughly how much by wind?" "How reliable are different combinations?" Based on my research, I concluded there are basically two options which provide the energy we need: a) Keep doing what we're doing - with coal, diesel, etc. b) Use a mix of renewables whenever they are available, with nuclear and natural gas providing the other 80%.
The best answer I can give to your question, based on my knowledge, is that I've posted about what the experts are actually doing with wind power. It's reasonable to think that if they could do better, they would. There is also development being done, of course, incrementally increasing the range of velocities over which wind turbines are efficient, but I don't know of any revolutionary new approaches being deployed. The problem itself is fundamental physics, so I don't expect it'll be "fixed" any time soon.
> Would it therefore not make sense to have some turbines in a wind farm that can deal with high winds (even though they do not turn at all at normal wind speeds) so that power can always be produced?
That's an interesting idea / question. I'd like to ask someone who knows a lot more than I do about wind power, and see what they think. I don't know what the engineering issues would be.
At low winds, there's not much you can do - there is just darn little power there. At high speeds, it *seems* like a few turbines designed for high speed *should* be able to produce roughly the same amount of power as many medium-speed units. That's assuming that the wind speed is roughly equal at each location across the farm, that the high-speed ones get high speed winds at the same time that the medium-speed turbines do.
A gearbox can trade RPM for torque. It doesn't affect power, other than wasting a bit from friction. The issue is that a relatively small change in wind speed is a large change in power.
Consider a child's pin wheel, the kind you buy for a dollar and you blow on it to make it spin. It's very light weight of course. While driving home on the highway, stick the pinwheel out the window. The pinwheel won't spin too fast at 70 MPH, it'll be instantly destroyed, the blades blown off and the stick folded over.
Consider you design a turbine (or fire engine siren) for operation at 70 MPH. It's strong enough to *survive* at 100 MPH. It weighs 22 pounds. You blow on it. What happens? Nothing, of course. Your breath doesn't move it.
Cubing a number makes it grow very quickly, so there's a whole lot more power, more force, to handle with higher winds.
> However, do not delude yourself or anyone else that GOP == "no new taxes", just because W chanted it like an idiot throughout his election cycle most assuredly does not make it true. Look at the historical record, in practice the GOP raises taxes just as much
Let's do look at the historical record. Here are the actual numbers, the average federal tax rate for all households: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org...
You may notice that the total federal tux burden doesn't hasn't actually changed that much since 1979 - they just move things around, without changing the total. Rates for the lowest-income quintile have consistently gone down over the last 25 years, from 8% to 1.5%.
A summary by president for your convenience: Obama: No significant change (but huge debt which will require future taxes) GW Bush: average tax rate reduced from 21% to 17.3% Clinton: No change GHW Bush: No significant change Reagan: Reduced from 22% to 21%
Two presidents have had tax changes of more that half of a percent, GW Bush and Ronald Reagan. Both reduced taxes.
Given that morons still click christmas_card.exe, and some of those click happy morons are executives and sysadmins, I have no need to double my workload by creating more problems to fix. The bad guys and the sloppy users create plenty enough problems.
> Long distance power transmission works just fine. I don't see any reason why you can't use solar power from the other side of the world
There are five regional power grids in the US, and 7,658 power plants. So most people live within 250 miles of the power plants that provide their power. Over that 250 mile distance, 5% of the power (on average) is lost in the line (source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... ).
If you want to get electricity from "the other side of the world", that's 12,000 miles, so you lose 48 times as much. 5% loss over 250 miles times 48 times as far = you lose basically all of the power. Practically none makes it to the user.
Agreed, the comparisons are hard. On safety, it is small numbers for the options.
It's apples and oranges for nuclear and solar though. From my research, it's like trying to decide between cake and frosting. Solar electric is really good, and should definitely be used - on a sunny afternoon. Nuclear is reliable. Both are clean and safe. They work very well together. Natural gas can be quickly throttled up and down to match short-term fluctuations in demand, so the three together meet our needs well.
> We already have a national power grid, it'd be dumb as hell not to use it.
Actually we have five regional grids, and there are reasons for that. For example, in Texas, where I live, ERCOT is most of Texas, while SPP is north Texas and Oklahoma.
I appreciate your passion. It might be helpful to learn just a little bit about how the power grids work, and why they work that way, before you redesign them and declare the engineers who designed them to be "dumb as hell". Specifically you might also want to look up "transmission losses" and learn why the northeast power grid failed and New York was without power for 2-7 days. Then consider what would happen if that had been a national grid, the whole country without power for a week - and we're all relying on electric cars and trucks that suddenly stop running.
> Are you including solar in your mix with nuclear and natural gas? I hope not, because nuclear power has a lower carbon footprint, lower cost, and fewer deaths per energy produced than even solar.
Assuming that were all true (and maybe it is, depending on how you choose to calculate your numbers), energy policy isn't decided based primarily on technical factors, on cost and safety. It's decided at least half based on political considerations. Solar + nuclear + (whatever minor sources make sense locally, geothermal or whatever) is a good approach technically which can be supported by a majority of voters after they are informed.
True, if you're very careful (and spend billions of dollars on development), and accept compromises regarding noise levels and other considerations, you can get up around 0.8 mach or slightly higher. My understanding is that a lot of additional engineering goes into planes to get from 0.7 to 0.8 or so.
It's certainly not impossible to operate at 0.85 mach, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's not as simple as "just spin twice as fast".
> So your proposed week of no power production would require an unprecedented weather event of ridiculous proportions and duration
Very frequently, either the west coast or the east coast is cloudy for several days. And people still need to drive to work during cloudy weeks, so you can't cut energy usage by 90%.
I appreciate you doing some math. I think because you'd like it to work, you're being a bit optimistic with your assumptions, but I appreciate you showing your work. For example it's a bit optimistic to pretend that all or most of the west coast isn't covered in clouds pretty regularly - I'll bet that happens this month. It certainly happened last month. Right now, the northeast, a significant portion of the population, is covered by a storm system.
> If you use the average electricity consumption of the US as a baseline
Multiply that by eight if you want to provide for our *energy* needs, if you want electric cars, semi trucks, electric heating, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If a cancer doctor writes an article saying "everybody needs to eat more, and avoid sun exposure", a phys ed coach says "make time to be outdoors more", a pastor says "make more time for prayer and meditation", a self-defense expert says "make more time to learn self-defense", and a financial expert says "make time to write a monthly budget each month, and to review your investments", I won't be surprised, and I won't magically have an extra 8 hours each day to do all of these things. All of those people are trying to be helpful, and they are all focused on what they care about, what THEY think is important. It may be that where I need to spend more time is cuddling with my young child.
Sounds like we agree on a lot.
> Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess. ;)
You only mentioned two organizations by name, so let's look at one those. Here's what the National Geographic Society says their goals are:
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization committed to exploring and protecting our planet. We fund hundreds of research and conservation projects around the world each year
Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric? If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns.
James Hansen director of Goddard Institute, NASA, 1988 by 2008 the West Side Highway will be underwater".
California Energy Commission, 1989 predicted sea level rise of 1.6 to 4.9 feet. Based on this, the National Environmental Trust published a map showing that 3 feet rise puts much of the bay area underwater. The "flooded San Francisco" map "went viral", to use today's terminology.
Some oldies but goodies:
Harvard biologist George Wald claimed that âoecivilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action.
Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich April 1970 âoeat least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.â
Professor Kenneth E.F. Watt at the University of California in 1970:
"The world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
More recently:
2005 United Nations Environment Programme:
2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" will flee the Caribbean as islands are inundated with water. (In fact the opposite has occurred - people are moving TO the Caribbean, making it among the fastest growingb regions in the world.)
Also from United Nations Environment Programme, director of the New York office:
"entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000."
October 2015:
Benjamin Strauss, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says Hollywood is a goner by 2025.
2008:
James Hansen (NASA/Al Gore Science Advisor) says New York will be flooded in 2015, as portrayed by ABC News (this is probably a case of hyperbole on top of hyperbole, with ABC says stretching what Hansen had already stretched).
2006
You may recall Al Gore's ten-year "Doomesday Clock", which expired last year. Gore is not a scientist, he was the number one leader of the global warming movement.
> most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public
Many scientists try to do a good job. Some scientists think (maybe correctly) that raising awareness and advocating for action is a good thing to do, and they try to do it thoroughly. I don't suppose either of us has evidence of what "most climate scientists" do, so maybe we can agree on this much:
Many climate scientists try to do a good job.
All climate scientists are human.
Some high-profile climate scientists are passionate about these issues.
When humans (including me) are passionate about issues, that affects our judgements.
Some (most?) climate scientists are employed by organisations which advocate political positions.
Agreed?
I don't want to get too much into the leaked emails because that'll just cause arguments without accomplishing anything. When the head of the climatic science unit says "I used this trick to hide the reduction in temperature" apparently that's proper scientific procedure. Whatever. Here's an example that's out in the open, there's no argument about taking things out of context:
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist. You can read Professor Tol's full and complete statements in articles he has written.
> When an actual climate scientist says ...
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist.
> These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Unfortunately, neither side can. That's what's so frustrating - half the time the adjustments are lies, or at least intentionally skewed toward "raising awareness". Various researchers have admitted that in emails that leaked or other documents over and over again, a few publicly and openly. It's really, really difficult to get objective information. 90% of the researchers will tell you their objective is to "raise awareness of AGW" or similar, or they are funded by organizations with that as part of their stated agenda. That doesn't mean they are WRONG, of course. It just makes it difficult to get information you can trust to gauge the scale of the issue. Pretty clearly there *is* an issue, and pretty clearly San Francisco won't actually be underwater by 2020. In between the most extreme claims, it's very hard to know where reality is.
> The 'R-TX' should be a hint.
I'm an R-TX and I look at the evidence. Evidence indicates:
a) There's been some warming.
b) The rate of warming has been at least twice as fast on earth than on Mars and Venus (meaning solar changes are probably NOT the primary cause on earth).
c) San Francisco was not underwater in 2010
d) San Francisco probably won't be underwater in 2025 either.
> He's being bribed with campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry to be a denier.
There's some truth to that, and the hyperbole from the left, the utter bullshit about "X will be underwater by 20yy" hasn't helped. It's easy to call AGW "bullshit" when some people spout so much bullshit in the name of AGW.
In a poll, I bet most people would say jolly old Saint Nick isn't real. He's actually a real guy, but all the fiction layered on top for various reasons has plenty of people thinking the whole Saint Nick thing is fake. There is some similarity to global warming there. If you want peopel to take it seriously, don't make BS claims like San Francisco will be underwater in five or ten years - because five or ten years later, when SF is still there, people think everything you say is complete bollocks.
You are not wrong
> To this day, I fail to understand the hypocrisy in supporting the little guy against giants like Apple and Microsoft, but rooting for another giant, IBM, to decimate SCO.
Some of us pay attention to who is right and wrong, rather than deciding absolutely everything based on "big mean corporation."
SCO originally filed for misappropriation of trade secrets and unfair competition. Later, they decided breach of contract might be better. Still later, they decided maybe copyright infringement. Obviously, SCO wasn't so sure exactly what they were complaining about - not nearly as sure as you are.
They claimed that up to 0.0001% of the Linux kernel might have been derived from Unix, but refused to say which parts. As the judge began to strike down their claims unless they identified which code they were talking about, they pointed to some BSD licensed code written by Thompson - code they clearly had no copyright rights to.
When it was pointed out that Novell, not SCO, owned the Unix copyright, SCO tried to buy the copyrights from Novell. Again, Novell clearly wasn't too sure they owned the copyrights, they were trying to buy them from Novell, yet you're sure that they already owned them.
SCO then claimed that the GPL itself is illegal and unconstitutional! Which would of course mean that SCO were themselves unlawfully distributing GPL code! Yeah that annoyed some people.
SCO didn't just lose a case, they were laughed out of court repeatedly. "We're suing you for violating the copyright on Unix, but we're still trying to buy that copyright so can we have a short delay?" What!?!? It was one of the most ridiculous cases ever. That's why people didn't root for SCO, it was because SCO was engaging in ridiculous trolling that made no sense. They argued that the "offending code" was part of the Linux kernel, then argued that it wasn't. They couldn't even make up their mind.
> With "fold" the GPs likely meant that 2 of the 3 blades rotate around the axis and join the third one and all three hang down parallel with the mast and get secured there.
That, and another approach is like an inverted umbrella, an umbrella that has broken due to the wind. The blades swing away from the mast, downwind (with the tips of the blades coming closer to each other).
I'm sure there are other methods too. To me, the details don't matter so much, because the details of the implementation change every few years. I'm more interested in the fundamental limitations, the laws of physics that make it very hard or impossible to do more than X, for any X. Those are limitations to each technology that are unlikely to fundamentally change any time soon. (Compare solar electric in the 1950s-1960s and solar electric in the 1990s-2000's. After a hundred billion dollars in investment, a lot of things changed, and a lot of things didn't - what hasn't changed in 60 years probably won't change any time soon.)
I'm glad you've found my posts interesting. I find the topic interesting.
I'm no expert on wind power, I just read 100-200 pages of technical papers about each type of power production in order to get an idea of how they all fit together, what a reasonable policy overall energy policy would be. I was trying to answer questions such as "roughly what percentage of our energy needs can reasonably be provided by solar electric?" "Roughly how much by wind?" "How reliable are different combinations?" Based on my research, I concluded there are basically two options which provide the energy we need:
a) Keep doing what we're doing - with coal, diesel, etc.
b) Use a mix of renewables whenever they are available, with nuclear and natural gas providing the other 80%.
The best answer I can give to your question, based on my knowledge, is that I've posted about what the experts are actually doing with wind power. It's reasonable to think that if they could do better, they would. There is also development being done, of course, incrementally increasing the range of velocities over which wind turbines are efficient, but I don't know of any revolutionary new approaches being deployed. The problem itself is fundamental physics, so I don't expect it'll be "fixed" any time soon.
> Would it therefore not make sense to have some turbines in a wind farm that can deal with high winds (even though they do not turn at all at normal wind speeds) so that power can always be produced?
That's an interesting idea / question. I'd like to ask someone who knows a lot more than I do about wind power, and see what they think. I don't know what the engineering issues would be.
At low winds, there's not much you can do - there is just darn little power there. At high speeds, it *seems* like a few turbines designed for high speed *should* be able to produce roughly the same amount of power as many medium-speed units. That's assuming that the wind speed is roughly equal at each location across the farm, that the high-speed ones get high speed winds at the same time that the medium-speed turbines do.
A gearbox can trade RPM for torque. It doesn't affect power, other than wasting a bit from friction. The issue is that a relatively small change in wind speed is a large change in power.
Consider a child's pin wheel, the kind you buy for a dollar and you blow on it to make it spin. It's very light weight of course. While driving home on the highway, stick the pinwheel out the window. The pinwheel won't spin too fast at 70 MPH, it'll be instantly destroyed, the blades blown off and the stick folded over.
Consider you design a turbine (or fire engine siren) for operation at 70 MPH. It's strong enough to *survive* at 100 MPH. It weighs 22 pounds. You blow on it. What happens? Nothing, of course. Your breath doesn't move it.
Cubing a number makes it grow very quickly, so there's a whole lot more power, more force, to handle with higher winds.
Once again you're confusing energy and electricity.
I'm just curious why you think it is the voltage isn't already ten times higher, if you can just increase the voltage at will with no problems.
> However, do not delude yourself or anyone else that GOP == "no new taxes", just because W chanted it like an idiot throughout his election cycle most assuredly does not make it true. Look at the historical record, in practice the GOP raises taxes just as much
Let's do look at the historical record. Here are the actual numbers, the average federal tax rate for all households:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org...
You may notice that the total federal tux burden doesn't hasn't actually changed that much since 1979 - they just move things around, without changing the total. Rates for the lowest-income quintile have consistently gone down over the last 25 years, from 8% to 1.5%.
A summary by president for your convenience:
Obama: No significant change (but huge debt which will require future taxes)
GW Bush: average tax rate reduced from 21% to 17.3%
Clinton: No change
GHW Bush: No significant change
Reagan: Reduced from 22% to 21%
Two presidents have had tax changes of more that half of a percent, GW Bush and Ronald Reagan. Both reduced taxes.
Given that morons still click christmas_card.exe, and some of those click happy morons are executives and sysadmins, I have no need to double my workload by creating more problems to fix. The bad guys and the sloppy users create plenty enough problems.
> Long distance power transmission works just fine. I don't see any reason why you can't use solar power from the other side of the world
There are five regional power grids in the US, and 7,658 power plants. So most people live within 250 miles of the power plants that provide their power. Over that 250 mile distance, 5% of the power (on average) is lost in the line (source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... ).
If you want to get electricity from "the other side of the world", that's 12,000 miles, so you lose 48 times as much. 5% loss over 250 miles times 48 times as far = you lose basically all of the power. Practically none makes it to the user.
Agreed, the comparisons are hard. On safety, it is small numbers for the options.
It's apples and oranges for nuclear and solar though. From my research, it's like trying to decide between cake and frosting. Solar electric is really good, and should definitely be used - on a sunny afternoon. Nuclear is reliable. Both are clean and safe. They work very well together. Natural gas can be quickly throttled up and down to match short-term fluctuations in demand, so the three together meet our needs well.
Some people actually need their meds, and some people don't. You start talking crazy when you're off your meds.
> We already have a national power grid, it'd be dumb as hell not to use it.
Actually we have five regional grids, and there are reasons for that. For example, in Texas, where I live, ERCOT is most of Texas, while SPP is north Texas and Oklahoma.
I appreciate your passion. It might be helpful to learn just a little bit about how the power grids work, and why they work that way, before you redesign them and declare the engineers who designed them to be "dumb as hell". Specifically you might also want to look up "transmission losses" and learn why the northeast power grid failed and New York was without power for 2-7 days. Then consider what would happen if that had been a national grid, the whole country without power for a week - and we're all relying on electric cars and trucks that suddenly stop running.
> Are you including solar in your mix with nuclear and natural gas? I hope not, because nuclear power has a lower carbon footprint, lower cost, and fewer deaths per energy produced than even solar.
Assuming that were all true (and maybe it is, depending on how you choose to calculate your numbers), energy policy isn't decided based primarily on technical factors, on cost and safety. It's decided at least half based on political considerations. Solar + nuclear + (whatever minor sources make sense locally, geothermal or whatever) is a good approach technically which can be supported by a majority of voters after they are informed.
True, if you're very careful (and spend billions of dollars on development), and accept compromises regarding noise levels and other considerations, you can get up around 0.8 mach or slightly higher. My understanding is that a lot of additional engineering goes into planes to get from 0.7 to 0.8 or so.
It's certainly not impossible to operate at 0.85 mach, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's not as simple as "just spin twice as fast".
> So your proposed week of no power production would require an unprecedented weather event of ridiculous proportions and duration
Very frequently, either the west coast or the east coast is cloudy for several days. And people still need to drive to work during cloudy weeks, so you can't cut energy usage by 90%.
I appreciate you doing some math. I think because you'd like it to work, you're being a bit optimistic with your assumptions, but I appreciate you showing your work. For example it's a bit optimistic to pretend that all or most of the west coast isn't covered in clouds pretty regularly - I'll bet that happens this month. It certainly happened last month. Right now, the northeast, a significant portion of the population, is covered by a storm system.
> If you use the average electricity consumption of the US as a baseline
Multiply that by eight if you want to provide for our *energy* needs, if you want electric cars, semi trucks, electric heating, etc.