In order to conceive of a zero-carbon world which meets current per capita energy consumption for an dramatically increasing consumer base (think china with air-conditioners and hummers), We cannot take anything off the table - our buildings need to capture Solar energy at high rates of effeciency at competative rates.
Assuming energy demand to be part heat, part A/C, part light, and part electricity, we should ask first how much of that could be extracted from a 40% effecient Solar roof, and second, how can we collect the energy for market cost.
Say we use a fresnel reflection array - a spherical reflector flattened into inexpensive roof panels - then float moving "receivers" in the focal point.
It has some issues - such as astigmatism - but assuming some variation of a flat-array concentrator were possible, and the receiver could provide A/C light and electricity - that would be great - but what about the dangers?
Kid climbs on the roof to chase a ball - goes up in smoke.
So the solution lies in managing the risk with multiple arrays of a safe and smaller size, by protecting the focal zones, and ensuring a fail-safe design.
There is a lot of waste in generating solar energy far from the point of use.
If you need heat - it makes little sense to generate heat - then steam, then electricity - then heat.
So - I'm thinking that we need to find livable solar designs - and the risk is worth considering.
They are pretty dark - Solar Cells are. Even though their effeciency is small 10%-30% The energy which is not converted to electricity is probably converted to heat - and ironically, solar cells become more effecient with more light - but less effecient when the get hot.
They must require a substantial energy difference to operate.
The best solution currently, it to cool the cells with water and use the hot water to take a shower.
Solar energy is really the only renewable that has a positive correlation with Supply/Demand.
Wind and Waves all drop out during peak months.
I'm concerned about the saftey of concentrators in residential settings - I do understand the astimatism of a scewed reflector - how can we be sure that even with astigmatism, the focus will be rendered harmless?
Is there a size limit?
Fires occassionally start because of refractive materials - such as bottles in the wrong position - How can we be safe and have 500 degree solar ovens on our roof?
yeah - this is all a big - why don't we use DC argument.
The answer is this:
Transformers are effecient
Resisters / semiconductors are either A. ineffecient, or B. Noisy - as in producing square waves.
If you don't understand B. then focus on A. like a mantra. scratch it into your screen with a key. Have your mother sing it to you as you drift off to sleep.
The issue was how to get energy from the Niagra falls. People discussed compressed air, DC, and AC, and Westinghouse showed that by jacking up the voltage, he could use a small(er) guage wire.
DC is fine, but at the time, there wasn't any good way to increase the voltage.
Ironically, 50-60 hertz is fairly slow, and not the most effeceint frequency.
Now - with semiconductors, transformers, and high speed transformers (switching Power supplies) we could do better - but there is so much built around 120/60Hz, it would take a revolution to convert.
Any solar collector in the hands of a moron could evaporate a target. You think ants have it bad - wait until your average home solar dish blows a gear and the focal point drifts into something else.
Mirrors have a cost, to use a mirror to reflect the nominal light reflected off of a solar cell back into the solar cell would never be as cost effective as using the same mirror to reflect the much higher energy of direct sunlight onto the cell.
At some point the additional cost of higher effeciency isn't the best use of materials.
30% effeciency is a workable number - and the cost of energy isn't affected as much by doubling this number as it is by other concerns, such as tracking the sun, storing the energy, and injecting into the grid.
The better reuse of PV energy is to cool the solar cell with water and bathe yourself in the outflow.
The risk of a terrorist sneaking into Times Square with enough gasoline strapped to his back to render 10 Blocks deadly, adn uninhabitable for the next 20 years is fairly remote.
Energy Density is an abstract quality of fuels which cannot be ignored.
Fissionable materials such as plutinium has a lethal density and an energy density which place many people at risk - in part because our ability to detect things is highly dependant on the size of the thing.
I'm not so much against reprocessing, as I am against demonstrating to the rest of the world that Nuclear plants are the best solution to supply power.
I believe we have ample energy in renewable and safe sources such as Wind, Waves, and Sun to trully benefit todo el mundo.
WaveBlanket is an inflated mattress which lies on the surface in a long band several miles off the shoreline.
Most of the World could be powered by Waves - but it would require a substantial percentage of the coast to be tapped - particularly in the waning waves of summer. In the winter - we have planty of power, but demand is lower.
The effect of bottom focusing isn't very important if you wrap the entire landmass with a WaveBlanket.
You're right as long as Wave energy is dibble-dabble 20KM at a time, there will be no effect - not on the air or the sea, but if we're serious - we can arrest our carbon emissions - at the cost (or benefit) or reducing coastal erosion.
If you look at their font pages - you will likely see "Small personal windmills" as the focus - while utility scale wind is butting it head against its own tail. In other words - the environmentalists are fighting the environmentalists over the problems with Wind - we need to move quickly to Wave.
does anybody mention the amount of heat generated by all the end uses of the polluting/non-polluting electricity generation?
Renewable energy does not contribute heat to the environment.
In keeping with the conservation of energy, a windmill, or wave energy converter must reduce the dynamic energy of the medium with less friction than the alternative (trees, beaches etc).
This energy is then used - which certainly does create heat - but the heat created is equal or less than the heat which would have been created if the resource had been allowed to terminate naturally in a high friction event.
There are aspects of this which are vague ambiguous or unknown - I am suggesting the principle, and generally believe it to be the case - individual systems can be analysed to better understand the lifecycle impact.
The last time I visited Lawrence Livermore lab, they were using a large laser in an attempt to produce fission, and generally failing to do much more than vaporizing small targets using spectacular amounts of energy - whoopee
By deforesting much of the ground - we have increased the absorbtion of solar energy on land, increasing the diurnal wind cycle, which in turn increases the waves. (In theory - no hard evidence)
I'm not sure we shouldn't extinguish forest fires - not because they are unnatural - but because we have destroyed so many forests that we need to counteract that negative effect by protecting what remains.
All of that said with the caveat that the argument for fires has some merit - but at this juncture - it seems carbon emissions are a high priority, and the merits of unbridled fires may not overcome the merit of avoiding unnecessary emissions, and the loss of carbon sinks.
Additionally, Erosion is in places and in part aggrevated by deforestation of coastal areas, we have also introduced new plants to the coasts which may have a positive or negative effect on preparing the soil to be eroded by the waves - depending on the species they replace etc...
In the end - they are so many small ways in which people can have an accumulative effect on the environment, that we should assume responsability for negative consequences and carefully consider mitigating them when possible.
Dude, the natural world does not "destroy" anything. It changes things. We may like those changes or we may not, but we fool with nature at our peril.
You have justified the care I took in choice of words.
Notice that I did not say erosion is destroying nature, or the planet, or the environment.
I said it has a negative impact on diversity - for two reasons. If we imagine total erosion (without occassional upthrust of new mountains - we arrive again at the primordial soup stage - which is good for some species, but negative for diversity.
On the shorter term - I posited that a rate of erosion in excess of the rate of habitat formation would render some microhabitats largely uninhabitable, at least by mid-scale creatures such as most fish. microorganisms might be ok, and whales might not care, but the folks in the middle need obstacles - some of which grow in the form of kelp, coral, etc and erosion has a negative impact.
to your final point - I agree we should strive to have a minimum impact - but that requires that our positive intervention match our negative impact.
A Tax on gas scales for people who drive hummers - or does the hummer gov actually think that people who drive gas guzzlers should pay the same price as those who drive electric vehicles - that is the concern here. i would tell him to go to hell.
That said - when you drive / rush hour or not - and where in cities or not could address some overuse problems,
but the real solution is limit speed to acceleration:
That hummer can drive only 20 mph - but the pocket rocket can do 120 at the same rate of inertia - and lets face it when you get hit - you care about the inertia, not the speed.
"I got hit by a mac truck doing 30" is about the same as "i got hit by a Kia doing 90"
The Vectoring of Nuclear Weapons through "peaceful nuclear energy" is pretty damn well established.
The Nuclear nonproliferation treaty in in essence a trading agreement between nations so they can export nuclear technologies with an agreement that they won't be used for the one thing they are best at - WMD's
N. Korea promised no weapons in exchange for access top nuclear tech. It violated the agreement. Certainly Nuclear technology was imported - by the French seems most likely pakistan USSR are other sources - doesn't really matter where - the point is the only reason to have a nuclear energy program is the WMD angle.
I'm not suggesting we have an oil dependant future - but a nuclear dependant future seems more like a jump from the pan to the fire.
The problem isn't when finland gets nuclear technology, its when they sell that technology to palestine, lybia, sudan, N Korea, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Iran Iraq etc.
Yeah and unfortunately - we gave it to the french would passed it along to Iran and N Korea.
The single most important threat in the World today is that peaceful nuclear materials will be aquired by rogue nations. - you call that relatively undisruptive? You Moron!
Nuclear is more costly than wind or wave. If we INCLUDE the externalities of dirty coal currently used to process the fuel, and the cost of facing a war with a nuclear enemy - the cost goes up astronomically.
"Limiting pollution"
How about limiting proliferation? - that's a kind of pollution as well.
We have an orbital space fusion station generating energy and beaming it to us 24/7 with 99.9999999% reliability. Its called "El Sol", which by pre-Copernicus definition is a satelitte of the earth.
The only thing we need to do is build the collector. The Station uses electromagnetic radiation to heat the the collector plate called (La Aqua) which generates dynamic energy which is then transmitted by a kind of "light pipe" to the shore where we only have to bend over and pick it up.
Nuclear exists because we made a bad discision to subsidize dangerous energy - mistake - needs correcting. Subsidize peace.
The North Koreans have discovered how to recycle their waste - you convert it into weapons.
The reason we don't reprocess spent fuel is because it produces weapons grade fissionable material. Now that may seem like a trivial problem to you - but that's because you're a moron.
There has been a morotorium on reprocessing spent fuel in this country for several decades.
North Carolina has some 300 miles of coastline. At a distance of 3 Kilometers from shore, a 30 meter band of Wave Blanket for the whole 300 miles (less some openings for shipping) would be adequate to supply 100% of the state's electrical needs.
One probably would not see the "inflatable mattress" from shore, and it isn't a threat to boats or wildlife. Shoreline waves would be diminshed substantially - except in dedicated surfing zones.
The system doesn't last forever - maybe 10 years so if its a problem - we move on. Its cheap (think inflatable mattress) and the saving are realized.
The expensive items are turbines (its a compressed air system) sea cables, and the storage aspects - if the WaveBlanket is filled with hydrogen at atmopheric pressure, it can hold 6 months of power, which means it can provide capacity as well as power all year long.
The problem? There is no door in the US which can walk through with a working model for wave exploitation and get started.
The Patent is provisional and already secured - no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to conceive of a zero-carbon world which meets current per capita energy consumption for an dramatically increasing consumer base (think china with air-conditioners and hummers), We cannot take anything off the table - our buildings need to capture Solar energy at high rates of effeciency at competative rates.
Assuming energy demand to be part heat, part A/C, part light, and part electricity, we should ask first how much of that could be extracted from a 40% effecient Solar roof, and second, how can we collect the energy for market cost.
Say we use a fresnel reflection array - a spherical reflector flattened into inexpensive roof panels - then float moving "receivers" in the focal point.
It has some issues - such as astigmatism - but assuming some variation of a flat-array concentrator were possible, and the receiver could provide A/C light and electricity - that would be great - but what about the dangers?
Kid climbs on the roof to chase a ball - goes up in smoke.
So the solution lies in managing the risk with multiple arrays of a safe and smaller size, by protecting the focal zones, and ensuring a fail-safe design.
There is a lot of waste in generating solar energy far from the point of use.
If you need heat - it makes little sense to generate heat - then steam, then electricity - then heat.
So - I'm thinking that we need to find livable solar designs - and the risk is worth considering.
AIK
They are pretty dark - Solar Cells are. Even though their effeciency is small 10%-30% The energy which is not converted to electricity is probably converted to heat - and ironically, solar cells become more effecient with more light - but less effecient when the get hot.
They must require a substantial energy difference to operate.
The best solution currently, it to cool the cells with water and use the hot water to take a shower.
AIK
First - I'm not anti-Solar.
Solar energy is really the only renewable that has a positive correlation with Supply/Demand.
Wind and Waves all drop out during peak months.
I'm concerned about the saftey of concentrators in residential settings - I do understand the astimatism of a scewed reflector - how can we be sure that even with astigmatism, the focus will be rendered harmless?
Is there a size limit?
Fires occassionally start because of refractive materials - such as bottles in the wrong position - How can we be safe and have 500 degree solar ovens on our roof?
AIK
yeah - this is all a big - why don't we use DC argument.
The answer is this:
Transformers are effecient
Resisters / semiconductors are either A. ineffecient, or B. Noisy - as in producing square waves.
If you don't understand B. then focus on A. like a mantra. scratch it into your screen with a key. Have your mother sing it to you as you drift off to sleep.
AIK
Sure - Edison lost to Westinghouse.
The issue was how to get energy from the Niagra falls. People discussed compressed air, DC, and AC, and Westinghouse showed that by jacking up the voltage, he could use a small(er) guage wire.
DC is fine, but at the time, there wasn't any good way to increase the voltage.
Ironically, 50-60 hertz is fairly slow, and not the most effeceint frequency.
Now - with semiconductors, transformers, and high speed transformers (switching Power supplies) we could do better - but there is so much built around 120/60Hz, it would take a revolution to convert.
AIK
One irony,
Effecient solar energy is dangerous.
Any solar collector in the hands of a moron could evaporate a target. You think ants have it bad - wait until your average home solar dish blows a gear and the focal point drifts into something else.
BAM
AIK
Mirrors have a cost, to use a mirror to reflect the nominal light reflected off of a solar cell back into the solar cell would never be as cost effective as using the same mirror to reflect the much higher energy of direct sunlight onto the cell.
At some point the additional cost of higher effeciency isn't the best use of materials.
30% effeciency is a workable number - and the cost of energy isn't affected as much by doubling this number as it is by other concerns, such as tracking the sun, storing the energy, and injecting into the grid.
The better reuse of PV energy is to cool the solar cell with water and bathe yourself in the outflow.
AIK
The risk of a terrorist sneaking into Times Square with enough gasoline strapped to his back to render 10 Blocks deadly, adn uninhabitable for the next 20 years is fairly remote.
Energy Density is an abstract quality of fuels which cannot be ignored.
Fissionable materials such as plutinium has a lethal density and an energy density which place many people at risk - in part because our ability to detect things is highly dependant on the size of the thing.
I'm not so much against reprocessing, as I am against demonstrating to the rest of the world that Nuclear plants are the best solution to supply power.
I believe we have ample energy in renewable and safe sources such as Wind, Waves, and Sun to trully benefit todo el mundo.
AIK
WaveBlanket is an inflated mattress which lies on the surface in a long band several miles off the shoreline.
Most of the World could be powered by Waves - but it would require a substantial percentage of the coast to be tapped - particularly in the waning waves of summer. In the winter - we have planty of power, but demand is lower.
The effect of bottom focusing isn't very important if you wrap the entire landmass with a WaveBlanket.
You're right as long as Wave energy is dibble-dabble 20KM at a time, there will be no effect - not on the air or the sea, but if we're serious - we can arrest our carbon emissions - at the cost (or benefit) or reducing coastal erosion.
AIK
Pro-Wind lobby has been marginalized.
If you look at their font pages - you will likely see "Small personal windmills" as the focus - while utility scale wind is butting it head against its own tail. In other words - the environmentalists are fighting the environmentalists over the problems with Wind - we need to move quickly to Wave.
AIK
Thanks Leo,
I deserve the pointed correction.
Rogue would be the proper term.
its actually a good idea.
We can get some support from coastal preservationists, and as you suggest - from border controls.
Thanks
does anybody mention the amount of heat generated by all the end uses of the polluting/non-polluting electricity generation?
Renewable energy does not contribute heat to the environment.
In keeping with the conservation of energy, a windmill, or wave energy converter must reduce the dynamic energy of the medium with less friction than the alternative (trees, beaches etc).
This energy is then used - which certainly does create heat - but the heat created is equal or less than the heat which would have been created if the resource had been allowed to terminate naturally in a high friction event.
There are aspects of this which are vague ambiguous or unknown - I am suggesting the principle, and generally believe it to be the case - individual systems can be analysed to better understand the lifecycle impact.
AIK
I missed that.
The last time I visited Lawrence Livermore lab, they were using a large laser in an attempt to produce fission, and generally failing to do much more than vaporizing small targets using spectacular amounts of energy - whoopee
This has changed?
AIK
By deforesting much of the ground - we have increased the absorbtion of solar energy on land, increasing the diurnal wind cycle, which in turn increases the waves. (In theory - no hard evidence)
I'm not sure we shouldn't extinguish forest fires - not because they are unnatural - but because we have destroyed so many forests that we need to counteract that negative effect by protecting what remains.
All of that said with the caveat that the argument for fires has some merit - but at this juncture - it seems carbon emissions are a high priority, and the merits of unbridled fires may not overcome the merit of avoiding unnecessary emissions, and the loss of carbon sinks.
Additionally, Erosion is in places and in part aggrevated by deforestation of coastal areas, we have also introduced new plants to the coasts which may have a positive or negative effect on preparing the soil to be eroded by the waves - depending on the species they replace etc...
In the end - they are so many small ways in which people can have an accumulative effect on the environment, that we should assume responsability for negative consequences and carefully consider mitigating them when possible.
AIK
Dude, the natural world does not "destroy" anything. It changes things. We may like those changes or we may not, but we fool with nature at our peril.
You have justified the care I took in choice of words.
Notice that I did not say erosion is destroying nature, or the planet, or the environment.
I said it has a negative impact on diversity - for two reasons. If we imagine total erosion (without occassional upthrust of new mountains - we arrive again at the primordial soup stage - which is good for some species, but negative for diversity.
On the shorter term - I posited that a rate of erosion in excess of the rate of habitat formation would render some microhabitats largely uninhabitable, at least by mid-scale creatures such as most fish. microorganisms might be ok, and whales might not care, but the folks in the middle need obstacles - some of which grow in the form of kelp, coral, etc and erosion has a negative impact.
to your final point - I agree we should strive to have a minimum impact - but that requires that our positive intervention match our negative impact.
There is no option of do-nothing.
AIK
I just think that we need to consider the WMD risk and its link to "peaceful nuclear plants"
Others have said on this thread that nuclear is cost justified - only if you share the capital costs with weaponization goals.
AIK
Why is this better than a gas tax.
A Tax on gas scales for people who drive hummers - or does the hummer gov actually think that people who drive gas guzzlers should pay the same price as those who drive electric vehicles - that is the concern here. i would tell him to go to hell.
That said - when you drive / rush hour or not - and where in cities or not could address some overuse problems,
but the real solution is limit speed to acceleration:
That hummer can drive only 20 mph - but the pocket rocket can do 120 at the same rate of inertia - and lets face it when you get hit - you care about the inertia, not the speed.
"I got hit by a mac truck doing 30" is about the same as "i got hit by a Kia doing 90"
AIK
Just looked - One - is real it generates electricity and it is dangerous.
The other is imaginary, has never occured in a controlled environment, but has been used to create even bigger bombs.
I used to think Nuclear was the only sane alternative - now that I've run the numbers on Wave energy, my eyes are opened.
Perhaps you would consider stepping outside the cave?
AIK
The Vectoring of Nuclear Weapons through "peaceful nuclear energy" is pretty damn well established.
The Nuclear nonproliferation treaty in in essence a trading agreement between nations so they can export nuclear technologies with an agreement that they won't be used for the one thing they are best at - WMD's
N. Korea promised no weapons in exchange for access top nuclear tech. It violated the agreement. Certainly Nuclear technology was imported - by the French seems most likely pakistan USSR are other sources - doesn't really matter where - the point is the only reason to have a nuclear energy program is the WMD angle.
I'm not suggesting we have an oil dependant future - but a nuclear dependant future seems more like a jump from the pan to the fire.
how about peacefull green energy?
AIK
The problem isn't when finland gets nuclear technology, its when they sell that technology to palestine, lybia, sudan, N Korea, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Iran Iraq etc.
Certainly the French were happy to do this.
AIK
Yeah foolish people think that nuclear materials will end up in the hands of people like Mr. Kim of North Korea - just plaint ignorant dismal people.
An energy primer for Morons:
1. We invented nuclear power
2. We sold it to the French
3. French sold it to Korea under NPT
4. Korea made a Bomb
This is now being touted as green clean and safe by the ignorant irrationally exuberant pin-heads.
AIK
"We have the technoloy"
Yeah and unfortunately - we gave it to the french would passed it along to Iran and N Korea.
The single most important threat in the World today is that peaceful nuclear materials will be aquired by rogue nations. - you call that relatively undisruptive? You Moron!
Nuclear is more costly than wind or wave.
If we INCLUDE the externalities of dirty coal currently used to process the fuel, and the cost of facing a war with a nuclear enemy - the cost goes up astronomically.
"Limiting pollution"
How about limiting proliferation? - that's a kind of pollution as well.
We have an orbital space fusion station generating energy and beaming it to us 24/7 with 99.9999999% reliability. Its called "El Sol", which by pre-Copernicus definition is a satelitte of the earth.
The only thing we need to do is build the collector. The Station uses electromagnetic radiation to heat the the collector plate called (La Aqua) which generates dynamic energy which is then transmitted by a kind of "light pipe" to the shore where we only have to bend over and pick it up.
Nuclear exists because we made a bad discision to subsidize dangerous energy - mistake - needs correcting. Subsidize peace.
AIK
The North Koreans have discovered how to recycle their waste - you convert it into weapons.
The reason we don't reprocess spent fuel is because it produces weapons grade fissionable material. Now that may seem like a trivial problem to you - but that's because you're a moron.
There has been a morotorium on reprocessing spent fuel in this country for several decades.
AIK
No - the math is quite good.
North Carolina has some 300 miles of coastline. At a distance of 3 Kilometers from shore, a 30 meter band of Wave Blanket for the whole 300 miles (less some openings for shipping) would be adequate to supply 100% of the state's electrical needs.
One probably would not see the "inflatable mattress" from shore, and it isn't a threat to boats or wildlife. Shoreline waves would be diminshed substantially - except in dedicated surfing zones.
The system doesn't last forever - maybe 10 years so if its a problem - we move on. Its cheap (think inflatable mattress) and the saving are realized.
The expensive items are turbines (its a compressed air system) sea cables, and the storage aspects - if the WaveBlanket is filled with hydrogen at atmopheric pressure, it can hold 6 months of power, which means it can provide capacity as well as power all year long.
The problem? There is no door in the US which can walk through with a working model for wave exploitation and get started.
The Patent is provisional and already secured - no problem.
AIK