Re:If you can't store it, you can't count on it
on
Google Goes Green
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· Score: 1
In the long run, perhaps (which is why I qualified my comment as being near-term in nature). But I can speak with some small experience to a few of the technologies you mention.
Solar thermal power is an interesting concept that could potentially mitigate dispatchability concerns. (Actually, molten sand is the probable "battery" medium.) There are a couple projects out there worth watching, but none of the research I've seen says that commercial viability is achievable within 15-20 years.
Vanadium is a fascinating idea, and I thank you for pointing it out to me -- I'd not heard of it before. I'd agree that Google should look into it. For utility purposes, the scale issues are pretty daunting. The largest project is about 12MW, about.1% of the peak load for a major city. But for a colocation generating facility, maybe. And it's not like Google can't afford to experiment.
Compressed air isn't really a renewable energy as the term is usually understood -- and the bang-for-buck ratio isn't there even if it were...
Pumped hydro -- we've been doing that for nearly a century (though mostly via fossil fuels) and it does indeed work. Outside of a few very specific geographical locations, however, you're just not going to make it work on a large scale.
The site you reference for Supergrid is giving me a 500 error, so I'm not going to comment except to say that the political and regulatory landscape make such (geographically) extensive cooperation implausible without a major Federal political intervention. (Never mind the potential infrastructure costs.) Hell, this is the same industry that can't even deregulate itself when told to do so.
Anyhoo: This whole thing just makes me shake my head at the fact that no one is seriously talking nuclear.
If you can't store it, you can't count on it
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I work for a major public power company and have worked on some renewables projects in departments concerned with supplying retail load (e.g. you, your aunt, Google, etc.) What so much of this debate forgets -- either deliberatley or inadvertently -- is that electricity can't be stored in any useful quantity. It's unique among commodities.
Thus it follows that the main problem with 99% of renewable energy is that it is not dispatchable. When you're working for the power company and suddenly load spikes, you need to be able to call on a resource immediately. We have dozens of internal procedures (and a load of regulation) that dictate how much "ready to go" energy we must have available at any point.
As a utility I can't count of a solar plant to be there as a reserve -- even in the Southwestern U.S. -- nor wind. (Geothermal is a notable exception -- it's as reliable as coal or nuke -- but is only available in specific locations.) Sure, if I could store the energy produced by a wind farm until I needed it, great, but that's not a possibility.
I doubt that Google (or any business) will be willing to accept the operating risk of not having some form of dispatchable energy ready at hand. So they've got two choices:
Accept that there are just going to be times when they need to deal with the "devil" and receive power from a coal or (more likely) natural gas generating unit; and/or
Sell power into the grid from renewables during periods when they have it available and then use that to offset the power they must pull in from the grid when the renewables are off-line. I believe this is what New Belgium Brewing does with their "We're powered exclusively by wind!" line. No, they're not powered exclusively by wind, unless they send everyone home from work during calm weather.
Utilities, for the most part, regard renewable energy projects as really expensive press release opportunities. Utilities are required to be reliable and, for the most part, are run by men and women who take pride in the fact that when you, Joe Customer, turn on your kid's night light, it comes on. Until someone figures out how to store energy from a wind or solar farm, the energy driving that night light is going to be baseloaded on either fossil or nuclear fuel.
Admiral Jame Stockdale said it better than I ever could, so I quote his Warrior's Triad
Epictetus said everybody should play the game of life. But like most games, you
play it with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball across
the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody much
cares. It's not worth anything. The competition, the game, was the thing.
You play the game with care, making sure you are never making the external a
part of yourself, but merely lavishing your skill in regard to it. The ball was
just "used" to make the game possible, so just roll it under the porch and
forget it, let it wait for the next game. Most important of all, just don't covet
it, don't seek it, don't set your heart on it. It is this latter route that makes
externals dangerous, makes them the route to slavery. First you covet or abhor
"things," and then along comes he who can confer or remove them.
Use your crackberry, your cellphone, you laptop -- hell, enjoy them. But don't fixate on them. Externalities are inconsequential.
Yes, because God knows none of us have ever dealt with a CIO that used gobbledygook business-speak. Technical people are holy, blameless creatures who speak always speak clearly and concisely -- never resorting to technobabble.
Please. I.T. is the business center that gave us such gems as "Our powerful software is flexible, intuitive, scalar, and 100% integration-ready with your other best-of-breed tools. It is robust platform synergistic, as well as Web 2.0 compliant. Your organization can enjoy the enterprise-wide benefits of our world-class object-oriented, data-driven offering. Revolutionize your e-business infrastructure!"
The issue is that businesses are focused outward -- they must be, to make money. I.T. (especially at the CIO level) is focused inward -- cost control, etc. No business is going to choose an inward-focused leader over an outward-focused leader. You only make money by making sales, not by securing a network or negotiating a good deal on enterprise-wide software. Not that those are important tasks -- but they aren't directly focused on moving widgets out the door, except in rare cases.
That was a lucid, well-written, engaging, and informative post. You clearly not only understand the subject, but you also understand how to inform without condescending to your audience.
How dare you post on Slashdot! Be gone, you have no business here!
The Program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm a
ny human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed. This is Asimov's first law of Robotics.
Yes, sir. Nothing is going to make world agressors think twice like pointing out that you got your legal language from a 60 year old Sci-fi novel. Well played.
What, couldn't the authors find any Terry Prachett quotes?
Yes, this ruined the ending of Deep Impact for me.
Actually, I don't think any Deep Impact needed any help ruining itself.
But, back to Asimov, wouldn't the effects you describe depend upon the distance the object is from Earth when our flyboys detonate it? If we shattered the object close to Earth, presumabably the debris would not have the chance to disperse and the scenario you describe would occur. But, if you hit it far enough out (an AU? more?) then wouldn't the debris field begin to disperse/lose kinetic energy? At that point, perhaps such a scheme would work.
Anyhoo, not a big deal. Honestly, we're nitpicking about a single point in a book written 40 years ago for laymen. And thanks, by the way, for referencing Asimov on Astronomy. I read it once when I was a little boy, and now I have to go buy it. I have a little boy at home, now, and I want him to look up at the sky at night the way I did.
I would actually regard this as an unintended benefit of the system. Anything that keeps me from having to sit next to Johnny Rotten during a cross-country flight is Good Thing®.
[S]ad state of affairs, where a company is required by law to do what many consider to be immoral.
Well, that's because they chose to go public. As a privately-held company, Google could do whatever the hell it wanted to. By going public, however, they agreed to play by different rules. They willingly assumed a set of obligations that could easily eventually conflict with their self-imposed obligation of "Do no evil."
Odd that such obviously intelligent people didn't see that train coming down the track. The law isn't the problem, here -- a company's obligations to its shareholders have been very clearly stated for 150 years and, by custom, for centuries before that. The problem was Google's shortsightedness.
Honors over the "first" of anything are usually controversial -- and it's only going to get worse. Historically, there have been many convergences of technological development. This makes sense, if you think about it. Inventors, developers, thinkers are all products of the state of the art at the time they are working. Robert Heinlein, in (I think) The Door into Summer put it something like, "When it time to railroad, people start railroading." That's obviously a little deterministic, but it still true.
Thus, you end up with situations like Bell and Elisha Grey both filing patents for the telephone (on the same day!), Newton and Leibniz simultaneously developing calculus, etc. -- and it continues to this day with controversies about who "invented" the T.V. or the digital computer.
Likely the issue for us is that we are a) closer to the situation, so the mists of time aren't obscuring our vision; and b) record keeping is better now (and we are more interconnected, globally). So, if anything, who deserves credit for future inventions may be even more obfusicated.
That was nicely played. I was going to mod the parent down, but a well-turned reply is better than a harsh mod any day.
C.S. is wonderful, but a four-year degree isn't the Golden Path to brilliance. I work in the utility industry and we've got both types of graduates in our organization. It's fun to watch the college snobs get their nose pushed in by a tech school grad.
Frankly, it's even better when everyone gets past the bullshit and end up at a point of mutual respect. Parochialism is beyond useless in the real world.
It's Friday. This'll kill my karma, but so what? It has to be said.
Quoth the parent:
...think about what that sort of cash would do to help out open software in general terms, all the various neato projects done with a few dollars and a lot of skull sweat....say something small, like 100 million dollars, 1/20th of what MS spends on "security research"
Yes, alas, I do know what it would get the opensource community:
"I'm also surprised that the Slashdot editors let this story be published without correcting it!! What, are story submissions now governed by a perl script?"
Unlikely.
I, for one, have considerable confidence that a fairly simple perl script could at least competently produce basic English spelling and grammar.
This got moderated +5 insightful? The hell? Was someone blinded by the low UID and edgy sounding pseudo-postmodern claptrap? The first paragraph/sentence doesn't even end -- it's a goddamned fragment.
The whole comment reads like some frothy liner note from a Rage Against the Machine album. "Consumerican"?! Holy shit.
Glad to see that freshman Social Psychology class is going so well for you...
Yes, it is. In fact, I checked that same page before posting, just to make sure I remembered the term correctly.
NatasRevol's original post was a straw man argument because it distorted the reality of Apple's periodic iTunes updates in order to argue that they're implementing ever more restrictive DRM.
Oh, I see where you're coming from. I didn't read it that way at all. NatasRevol's post was:
And what happens at the next update? And the one after that?
If you don't like the DRM, buy a version without it. Or whine about the cat & mouse game you're going to keep playing.
I took that as more a comment that this "update war" will just keep going -- Apple updates, Hymn updates, etc., etc. I don't see a point in there about the DRM getting more restrictive. Just a comment on the annoyance factor in the whole deal for everyone else.
Read your way, yes, it's a straw man since we've no evidence that Apple will implement more restrive DRM.
I see your point, but I -- sorta -- disagree. At any rate, NatasRevol's point certainly isn't a straw man argument.
I agree that, for now, "the only people caught in this "game" are those who use Hymn to break the DRM, in willful violation of the iTMS license." But it does matter to the rest of us. See, if this shit keeps up, Apple may need to develop a much more restrictive DRM, just to appease the RIAA.
There's that old SNL sketch called something like "They Ruined it for Everyone" (I think), where they interview the first bum who pissed all over a public toliet, the first hitchhiker who raped and murdered the person who gave him a ride, etc. This is roughly analagous. We've got a Good Thing going with the iTMS, in my opinion, I'd hate to see it ruined for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
In the long run, perhaps (which is why I qualified my comment as being near-term in nature). But I can speak with some small experience to a few of the technologies you mention.
Anyhoo: This whole thing just makes me shake my head at the fact that no one is seriously talking nuclear.
I work for a major public power company and have worked on some renewables projects in departments concerned with supplying retail load (e.g. you, your aunt, Google, etc.) What so much of this debate forgets -- either deliberatley or inadvertently -- is that electricity can't be stored in any useful quantity. It's unique among commodities.
Thus it follows that the main problem with 99% of renewable energy is that it is not dispatchable. When you're working for the power company and suddenly load spikes, you need to be able to call on a resource immediately. We have dozens of internal procedures (and a load of regulation) that dictate how much "ready to go" energy we must have available at any point.
As a utility I can't count of a solar plant to be there as a reserve -- even in the Southwestern U.S. -- nor wind. (Geothermal is a notable exception -- it's as reliable as coal or nuke -- but is only available in specific locations.) Sure, if I could store the energy produced by a wind farm until I needed it, great, but that's not a possibility.
I doubt that Google (or any business) will be willing to accept the operating risk of not having some form of dispatchable energy ready at hand. So they've got two choices:
Utilities, for the most part, regard renewable energy projects as really expensive press release opportunities. Utilities are required to be reliable and, for the most part, are run by men and women who take pride in the fact that when you, Joe Customer, turn on your kid's night light, it comes on. Until someone figures out how to store energy from a wind or solar farm, the energy driving that night light is going to be baseloaded on either fossil or nuclear fuel.
Admiral Jame Stockdale said it better than I ever could, so I quote his Warrior's Triad
Use your crackberry, your cellphone, you laptop -- hell, enjoy them. But don't fixate on them. Externalities are inconsequential.
Yes, because God knows none of us have ever dealt with a CIO that used gobbledygook business-speak. Technical people are holy, blameless creatures who speak always speak clearly and concisely -- never resorting to technobabble.
Please. I.T. is the business center that gave us such gems as "Our powerful software is flexible, intuitive, scalar, and 100% integration-ready with your other best-of-breed tools. It is robust platform synergistic, as well as Web 2.0 compliant. Your organization can enjoy the enterprise-wide benefits of our world-class object-oriented, data-driven offering. Revolutionize your e-business infrastructure!"
The issue is that businesses are focused outward -- they must be, to make money. I.T. (especially at the CIO level) is focused inward -- cost control, etc. No business is going to choose an inward-focused leader over an outward-focused leader. You only make money by making sales, not by securing a network or negotiating a good deal on enterprise-wide software. Not that those are important tasks -- but they aren't directly focused on moving widgets out the door, except in rare cases.
Sir,
That was a lucid, well-written, engaging, and informative post. You clearly not only understand the subject, but you also understand how to inform without condescending to your audience.
How dare you post on Slashdot! Be gone, you have no business here!
Part of the added language reads:
Yes, sir. Nothing is going to make world agressors think twice like pointing out that you got your legal language from a 60 year old Sci-fi novel. Well played.
What, couldn't the authors find any Terry Prachett quotes?
Before I ask my question, one point:
Actually, I don't think any Deep Impact needed any help ruining itself.
But, back to Asimov, wouldn't the effects you describe depend upon the distance the object is from Earth when our flyboys detonate it? If we shattered the object close to Earth, presumabably the debris would not have the chance to disperse and the scenario you describe would occur. But, if you hit it far enough out (an AU? more?) then wouldn't the debris field begin to disperse/lose kinetic energy? At that point, perhaps such a scheme would work.
Anyhoo, not a big deal. Honestly, we're nitpicking about a single point in a book written 40 years ago for laymen. And thanks, by the way, for referencing Asimov on Astronomy. I read it once when I was a little boy, and now I have to go buy it. I have a little boy at home, now, and I want him to look up at the sky at night the way I did.
I would actually regard this as an unintended benefit of the system. Anything that keeps me from having to sit next to Johnny Rotten during a cross-country flight is Good Thing®.
Well, that's because they chose to go public. As a privately-held company, Google could do whatever the hell it wanted to. By going public, however, they agreed to play by different rules. They willingly assumed a set of obligations that could easily eventually conflict with their self-imposed obligation of "Do no evil."
Odd that such obviously intelligent people didn't see that train coming down the track. The law isn't the problem, here -- a company's obligations to its shareholders have been very clearly stated for 150 years and, by custom, for centuries before that. The problem was Google's shortsightedness.
Honors over the "first" of anything are usually controversial -- and it's only going to get worse. Historically, there have been many convergences of technological development. This makes sense, if you think about it. Inventors, developers, thinkers are all products of the state of the art at the time they are working. Robert Heinlein, in (I think) The Door into Summer put it something like, "When it time to railroad, people start railroading." That's obviously a little deterministic, but it still true.
Thus, you end up with situations like Bell and Elisha Grey both filing patents for the telephone (on the same day!), Newton and Leibniz simultaneously developing calculus, etc. -- and it continues to this day with controversies about who "invented" the T.V. or the digital computer.
Likely the issue for us is that we are a) closer to the situation, so the mists of time aren't obscuring our vision; and b) record keeping is better now (and we are more interconnected, globally). So, if anything, who deserves credit for future inventions may be even more obfusicated.
Didn't we already know that?
One small point. You said:
The Religious Right is not 57% of Oregon.
Agreed...
It's not 59% of Michigan.
Sure, well said...
It's not 73% of North Dakota
Oh, man. Have you ever been to N. Dakota?!
(Laugh, it's funny.)
Ob. MST3k line:
Oh, you're a Calvinist.
That was nicely played. I was going to mod the parent down, but a well-turned reply is better than a harsh mod any day.
C.S. is wonderful, but a four-year degree isn't the Golden Path to brilliance. I work in the utility industry and we've got both types of graduates in our organization. It's fun to watch the college snobs get their nose pushed in by a tech school grad.
Frankly, it's even better when everyone gets past the bullshit and end up at a point of mutual respect. Parochialism is beyond useless in the real world.
Good point; to avoid increasing the potential for damage, let's stick to the current procedure of shooting the driver.
I kid! I kid because I love!
Great. A cylon running BSD. As if the whole "now they look like Victoria's Secret models" wasn't enough.
Bastards.
It's Friday. This'll kill my karma, but so what? It has to be said.
Quoth the parent:
Yes, alas, I do know what it would get the opensource community:
Updating Free Software in the Enterprise?
I mean, I dunno; I never gave it much thought. I just always sorta figured that Mr. Scott handled it, or maybe one of his crew chiefs.
Wait -- what?
"I'm also surprised that the Slashdot editors let this story be published without correcting it!! What, are story submissions now governed by a perl script?"
Unlikely.
I, for one, have considerable confidence that a fairly simple perl script could at least competently produce basic English spelling and grammar.
Every one is.
This got moderated +5 insightful? The hell? Was someone blinded by the low UID and edgy sounding pseudo-postmodern claptrap? The first paragraph/sentence doesn't even end -- it's a goddamned fragment.
The whole comment reads like some frothy liner note from a Rage Against the Machine album. "Consumerican"?! Holy shit.
Glad to see that freshman Social Psychology class is going so well for you...
No, no. You picked the wrong statement out of the writeup. The truely amazing line is:
Why? Because it implies that /. editors have some knowledge of what stories they've run in the recent past.
I know that was quite a shock to me.
Well, yes, because that would actually be possible.
Oh, I see where you're coming from. I didn't read it that way at all. NatasRevol's post was:
I took that as more a comment that this "update war" will just keep going -- Apple updates, Hymn updates, etc., etc. I don't see a point in there about the DRM getting more restrictive. Just a comment on the annoyance factor in the whole deal for everyone else.
Read your way, yes, it's a straw man since we've no evidence that Apple will implement more restrive DRM.
I see your point, but I -- sorta -- disagree. At any rate, NatasRevol's point certainly isn't a straw man argument.
I agree that, for now, "the only people caught in this "game" are those who use Hymn to break the DRM, in willful violation of the iTMS license." But it does matter to the rest of us. See, if this shit keeps up, Apple may need to develop a much more restrictive DRM, just to appease the RIAA.
There's that old SNL sketch called something like "They Ruined it for Everyone" (I think), where they interview the first bum who pissed all over a public toliet, the first hitchhiker who raped and murdered the person who gave him a ride, etc. This is roughly analagous. We've got a Good Thing going with the iTMS, in my opinion, I'd hate to see it ruined for everyone.