Green energy is not worthless. And the idea that it is heavily subsidised is out of date -- Coal, for example, in the US is subsidised and most of it would not be viable without.
You are right about nuclear power in other ways, I think. There is a case for it. But, it's probalby too late now. Nuclear power plants take a long time develop and much of the energy grid is being re-worked so not require single large sources (i.e. make it better for renewables).
Guess we are all dead then. Green energy isn't worthless...there is just far too little of it and its always in the wrong place at the wrong time. The reason folks argue for nuclear is that its the only solution that scales. If you are confused about this fact, do some math and see what it would take to make even an 80% renewable power generation. Then remember that there is another problem called fuel production that is just as big as electricity and can ONLY be solved with nuclear. That's why when folks push solar, wind and tidal we just yawn and roll our eyes. Because those are just feel good solutions that don't actually do anything to reduce GHG emissions. Folks usually do the right thing about trying everything else. Just let me know when you are tired of doing the wrong (well useless anyway) things because you are only making things worse until you do.
It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.
Its really odd that you put the date at which that happened in the mid-90s. The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998 (I should know, I was in that class). So really that can't be true. What you saw in the mid-90s was folks who liked programming but often had degrees in other things plus the occasional CS PhD. The pure CS major undergrads didn't appear in mass for about 10 years (say 2008 or so).
Absolutely. We will need several or many tools to take care of these problems. Economic carrots and sticks are only one method, albeit a proven one, that can help.
Sure, we could hope that a host of technological innovations in battery technology, electric grids, improved solar cells and more efficient turbines can patch together a solution that over time takes the place of fossil fuels at great cost over 30 years (and that doesn't consider fuels or any of the other major sources of CO2 other than electricity). That *could* work even though all the rates of improvements of those technology are nowhere near what we need to replace fossil fuels.
Or we could just use nuclear and take care of all the problems at once doing far less damage to the environment in the process. With nuclear you can cheaply make synthetic fuels to replace gas, diesel and natural gas that renewables can't really do anything about (I like EVs too but that's shifting a significant part the problem). I'm sure ignoring nuclear will make you popular with your less educated greenie friends but really, are you doing anyone any favors by doing that? Are the hard ideological stances of environmentalists groups doing anyone any favors? Or are they ignoring the one technology that can actually scale to take the place of fossil fuels?
It might be the small samples, but it's really expensive to buy sodium too. I'm not sure if the price reflects the energy it takes to produce, the losses in storage, the complexity of safely shipping it, or a little of all of those.
Sodium metal is about $3000-4000/tonne at current market rates. Of course that only matters if we know how much Na metal is needed per MwH of storage this battery needs. There are Sodium-Sulfur batteries which the Japanese use but they have the problems you think they do. They explode and catch fire if damaged which creates problems when trying to build really big storage. I would doubt that this new battery will be even as effective as Sodium-Sulfur. The only way this thing is economical is if there is a carbon tax and the owners of these things get tax credits for burying the baking soda it creates.
Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold the promise of simplicity, effectively unlimited lifetime (since the normal mechanical damage associated with charging can't form in liquid) , and extremely high charge and discharge rates. Of course, operating at temperatures that keep the metals liquid makes them unsuitable for many/most applications, but the grid potential is immense.
Very poor energy density. 1/100th that of Lithium-ion. Basically would require more land than the solar or wind that its backing up per watt hour of storage. Its nice for remote small/cheap solar though and very environmentally friendly.
Check the bottom tank on that page - 700 bar, 52L. Given there are 9.17 MJ/L for compressed hydrogen, that's about 476 MJ of energy. At ~278 Wh per MJ, that is equivalent to a 132 kWh pack - about double a Model 3. So a small, 38 kg tank has the same energy storage as a pair of Model 3 battery packs. Tell me again why batteries are good? Less energy density (by weight or volume), a lot longer to charge, and provably more damaging to the environment (the environmental cost of making a 132 kWh battery pack is huge compared to the electrical energy needed to compress 52L of hydrogen).
Most people don't want their car to blow up. Hydrogen is difficult to store and requires you cooling it so it actively requires continuous input of energy to keep it stored. Its best use is for grid scale storage but requires certain energy market conditions to be profitable. Basically, the energy prices need to swing at least 2x per day due to other intermittent power sources. Good news is that that happens in CA and Germany most days. Bad news is that nobody other than energy traders want the prices to swing that much everyday so its hard to invest in up-front infrastructure costs when you can't be certain such market conditions will continue. Same problem for most other storage schemes, unless you can be certain that energy market will continue to be very volatile, you can't risk such a large amount of capital on something that might become useless at some point in the future. Operating the Helms pumped storage is like printing money for PG&E yet there are no plans for them to build another one. There are 2 private plans for pumped hydro in CA but they are small, years away, and highly speculative as their cost of raising capital was on par with nuclear.
Why large swathes of the desert? What about all the roof space in cities? Say a 3kw system per house, millions of houses means gigawatts of power. Industrial roofing, malls, office blocks, you could build a superstructure over car parks to support panels, all that is a very large space.
Because that only gets you about 10% of the way there. Cities don't actually cover a huge amount of space. So when some says it will take 12% of the land to put solar, you should think that means 2x as much land use by humans and much less for nature. Also, GW are nice but we measure grid level electricity usage in 1,000s of terrawatt hours. Look into the problem yourself and you will start making fun of everyone for their lack of math. Hint, more solar and wind means natural gas.
Hydrogen wins when you need to store store truly massively amounts of excess energy
Actually, it is usually not the best solution. Pumped storage and compressed air have better efficiency and need less capital investment. Vanadium-redox will give much better efficiency, and can scale with just a bigger tank.
If hydrogen made sense for grid storage, profit seeking companies would be doing it. They aren't.
Hydrogen storage only makes sense when weight and/or power density are more important than efficiency.
Vanadium redox batteries require about 10 tonnes of Vanadium, an element priced in troy ounces per MWh of capacity. For something small like an island, just call Elon. That's the right scale for Li+. Either that or use a bunch of recycled auto batteries if you really want to save on price.
PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Maybe Tesla can work with them, or with alternative energy companies like East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), to help supply power.
Or Tesla might help large numbers of customers get power off the grid, using their solar panels and power walls. (For that to take off, Tesla should lower their prices.)
Good idea, PG&E won't be bankrupt again for at least a month if you force them to buy even more overpriced power they don't want. CA is already completely oversupplied with power generation and doesn't needs more. PG&E is declaring bankruptcy to get out of liability for all the recent wildfires. They know huge settlements are coming against them from the wildfires. That combined with the sweetheart deals they were forced to sign to buy rather expensive solar and wind at losses and its no surprise they want a reset. And that's what a PG&E bankruptcy is, a reset. They declare bankruptcy on a regular basis for various reasons (3x in the last 20 years) including their own bad management at times (see San Bruno, 2008) but more significantly the regulations that force them to buy renewable power at huge losses.
And I'm sure that Elon is willing to use the entire year's output of a gigafactory to build a battery that could backup CA's grid for an entire hour. The CA grid is entirely too big for battery backups to be useful for anything more than load shifting (which we don't really need in CA). EBCE is a feel good initiative and nothing more. They can't bend the laws of physics any more than PG&E or the regulators can and will likely only make even more of a mess of the situation than the last round of do-gooders did.
oh, you mean molten salt storage needing that rare earth sodium chloride?
we don't need nuclear any more
First, nobody uses NaCl. They do use floride or chloride salts, but not NaCl as if the Na separates from its ionic bonds, its explosive. Second, conversion to and from molten salts is about 45% each way. So it has the same problem with pumped hyrdo, when you do the 2 conversions (from and back to electricity) you get about 16-20% conversion meaning the power needs to increase in value 5-6x from the time its purchased/generated to the time its used. For comparison, in the CA market the daily swings are about 3x.
The choices are nuclear, some magic battery or flywheel technology that doesn't exist and doesn't look like it will in our lifetimes or natural gas. Guess which one you are picking...
It doesn’t need to be batteries. You could for example pump water to a higher plane during the day with surplus energy, and use a turbine at night when you let it flow down.
I understand that something similar is done occasionally with other energy sources.
You understand very little about power apparently. Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion. Electricity to kinetic energy stored in the form of water at a higher elevation. Then capturing back that kinetic energy back to electricity is about 30-40%. So any power you put into your idea, needs to be sold at ~10x the price to make it break even. And that's before you deal with the cost of building an artificial lake and a dam. Even in the warped energy market of CA, price only varies about 3x each day so its not a viable idea either from a physics or business perspective. All of those problem plus you have to destroy a beautiful mountain valley too. That's why nobody is doing it. Its a terrible idea...
Where is the nuclear only crowd? Have we finally found a scenario where they won't recommend a nuclear option?
Ok troll...the Greek island grids are small so we can build batteries large enough to backup their tiny grids. And that's a great solution. Doing the same things for CA (or the US or anywhere on a continent really) would be an entirely different proposition requiring the drastic increase (several fold) in global production of the raw materials for whatever type of battery you build. Learn to do math and do some research and you will find quite quickly how stupid the solar/wind only proposals for large countries really are. As for Greece, its a great place to build a solar/wind/tidal only battery backed grid and you don't need to strip mine most of Chile and Australia to do it. Now that's you've trolled the nuclear folks for the day, go get your paycheck from the natural gas folks greenie...
And California! Non-competes were critical to the development of silicon valley, making California one of the largest economic powerhouses in the world.
This should be modded up. Non-competes are mostly illegal in California, which means people and ideas flow between companies. This has led to the most successful tech industry in the world, the highest salaries, and the biggest profits.
Non-competes are bad for employees, bad for companies (in aggregate they are a prisoner's dilemma), bad for the economy, and by retarding progress, bad for humanity.
You are correct. Its also true that its an aspect of civil code and the CA civil code is huge and most companies have only the vaguest ideas of what the "rules of the road" are. Probably 50% of the CA employment contracts I've reviewed have at least 1 thing in them that violates CA civil code. I've also seen employment contracts without severance clauses which contain mistakes. What does this mean? The contract isn't worth the paper its printed on and even a layperson could get it thrown out of court against any lawyer. The point being, lawyers make mistakes as they are humans (at least they claim so). Also the law changes but businesses might not update their employment contracts. Its probably because these contracts are executed so rarely. Quite often there are cases where a company wants to execute something about an employment contract so they take it to a lawyer who delivers them bad news. Companies are cheap in really stupid ways all the time. This is just another way to be pennywise and pound foolish.
You are completely reinventing the timeline here. Your link says nothing about the parents, the child or her behavior. Its incredibly vague and lays out no facts either supporting or denying your assertions. In fact, it just standard CTS legal boilerplate and is put into about every time CTS has to give kids back to the parents.
The doctor at Tufts you reference was called by the hospital and had no experience with Justina before the case started. At the time CTS was called, the doctor's at children's hadn't even consulted with Justina's docter at Children's who would have backed up the parents story.
Additionally, after Justina had been at Children’s for just three days, her new doctors changed course dramatically. During a tense meeting with Justina’s parents, the Children’s doctors said they believed their daughter’s problems were largely psychiatric, and they would be withdrawing several of the medications that her Tufts doctors had prescribed.
The parents — Linda in person and her husband, Lou, by phone from Connecticut — strongly objected. They complained that despite their repeated requests, Justina had still not been seen by her gastroenterologist. They became furious when the Children’s team informed the parents that they would be prohibited from seeking second opinions, including from Korson.
The next morning, Lou arrived at the hospital, still enraged. After conferring with his wife, he strode over to the ninth-floor neurology nurses’ station and introduced himself as Justina’s father.
“We have standing appointments for her at Tufts,” he said. “Enough is enough. We want her discharged.”
He assumed it was their right as Justina’s parents to remove their daughter and take her to the hospital of their choice. But behind the scenes, Children’s had contacted the state’s child protection agency to discuss filing “medical child abuse” charges, as doctors grew suspicious that the parents were harming Justina by interfering with her medical care and pushing for unnecessary treatments.
Now, as Lou scanned the neurology floor, he noticed that hospital security guards were blocking every exit, focusing their eyes on him.
You are ever bit as bad as the right-wingers you hate. You decided about this case before you ever heard the facts because of who was upset about it. Children's hospital fucked up, deal with it. They fucked up in the most serious way they could. When called on it, they doubled down on their mistakes. What would you do if the CEO of an oil company tried to pull this shit? You are a hypocrite...period
This case was about a child with munchhausen that the parents believed to be real. The child was put in psychiatric care and custody awarded to the state by a judge.
Unless you believe the judge was in on the "hospital making profits", once it goes past a trial, the judge must have had serious proof the parents were both wrong and non-cooperative to award custody to someone else, a judge will demand second opinions from third parties. The hospital can't tell their side of the story to the media so you have to ignore everything the parents say on the topic and look at the outcome.
At least that's a better theory. But consider this, how certain would you have to be to call CPS in such a situation. Wouldn't you at least review the various diagnoses? Wouldn't you contact the patient's doctor? I bet you would. I hope I would. I expect almost anyone would. They didn't...
No sane person thinks the judge was in on it. That different judge reversed the original judge's decision when more facts came to light is seriously damning to the hospital. That's why she is back with her parents. The alleged fact that she required more serious medical treatment after the CPS incident, which is what we will learn in this trial, could be FAR more damning. If it comes out that that is the case, then expect some serious consequences for the hospital and their management.
One of the point if you look around for more balanced article, is that the dr korson at the time had not done a muscle biopsy (one diagnosis which is deemed necessary - and reading what he told over the year about his method of "clumping" versus "scattering" diagnosis this brings up certain doubt about him). And certainly there was no mitochondrial genetic analyzes.
Couple of things: 1) I can tell you are not a parent, 2) most juries are composed mostly of parents
Maybe perhaps the hospital should have done one of those first before resorting to CPS? As for what you say, it seems to be true. Its also true they didn't know any of it when they called in CPS. They would have had to contact the geneticist first for them to know that. They only found this information out after CPS had taken the child. So its more papering over what they did rather than admitting what they did. The fact that they can do this now, and that they are willing to throw a fellow medical researcher under the bus to do it, should tell you what they are willing to do to get out of this one.
The dumbest thing the hospital has done so far (other than the original mistakes) was to not settle immediately. The hospital can quibble and go back and forth about mitochondrial issues and all its going to do is make the jury want to hang them more. Because the simple fact is, they didn't know any of it when they called CPS in the first place. And the fact that there is clearly medical uncertainty here, will count against them. People will quite reasonably have the attitude that "YOU(the hospital) SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURE BEFORE CALLING CPS". Anything that counts against that no matter how complex or smart or medically sound, will get them into even more trouble. Before you take people's kids, you have to be sure. Anything that seems to go against that simple premise will get harshly rebuffed by almost any jury. You want to see an outrageous legal settlement? Argue that you should be able to take people's kids without due processes or even reviewing all the information at hand.
Hospitals and governments don't just take on kids for no reason at all. It typically happens in extremely abusive situations. Mothers especially have exemptions from most abuse and child protection laws, it must go pretty far for a family court to NOT award custody to the mother, let alone, not to either parent or grandparent etc because usually one of them is considered reasonable enough.
I've been on committees that oversaw Jehovah's Witness hospital cases, they'd let their children die over violating their leaders' rules. In most cases, state or hospital custody was a rare and temporary situation only after serious complications of the alternative treatments their own leaders recommended hadn't yet killed the child and as soon as treatment was done, custody was reverted (and in some cases, the parents then dismissed the child from the hospital and flew to a hospital where a religious 'doctor' was present - a few of those doctors later on lost their accreditation).
Thanks for the red herring that has absolutely nothing to do with the case being discussed and in fact is the exact opposite of this case. In your case, it was the parents ignoring science. In this case, it was the hospital ignoring the science and facts. Your outrage to those religious nut parents should be equal to your outrage at a hospital taking a child without doing even the most cursory and easy checks about anything specific to this child's situation.
There is a reason you were asked to weight in on the ethical situations you discussed. In this case, that didn't happen. That's the problem. That's why people are pissed...
one the right wing press ran with heavily. It's not an uncommon thing and I can't tell if there's anything to the stories. Too often when you've got a kid not getting treatment it's because of religious parents who want to take them home and pray until they die. There's a sizeable portion of folks on the right wing that support allowing this. Some of them are insane but well meaning but there's quite a few who are just using it as one more distraction and one more thing to get the rubes worked up about.
Its kinda amazing that we got so many comments without anybody bringing up the case that kicked this all off. Its an extremely emotional case that was played up in the media for sure. But the thing that always troubled me about that case is that the hospital initiated a legal action to take Justina without doing any medical due diligence. Apparently, this is a problem for folks that have the kind of mitochondrial condition that she had.
I think the hospital was worried about was a Munchausen by proxy situation. But, the parents had verifiable genetic proof that Justina had a specific medical condition and the hospital could have verified this with a single phone call. We know they didn't bother to verify this until after they had already completed legal action to take Justina due to the testimony of the geneticist (who was at the same university as the child abuse expert they called instead).
Nobody is claiming that the parents are religious nuts. They looked emotional distraught during the media coverage but wouldn't you be if the government had just effectively kidnapped your child and was refusing to give necessary medical care to her? Seriously, most parents would feel like burning down buildings in that situation.
I want to hear some sort of cogent hypothesis for WTF the hospital was thinking when they initiated (and completed) a legal action to take a child without doing even the most cursory due diligence to ensure a mistake wasn't taking place. Somehow, that sort of lack of judgement should be criminal and most folks would probably be OK with those who are convicted of such a crime being put to death. Given all of this, its disingenuous to act as if the hospital didn't make a huge mistake and is probably covering up their actions. That being said, DOS'ing the hospital is hardly the right response given the high chance you will kill innocent sick kids in the process. So fuck this guy but don't let the hospital off the hook for their huge mistake either.
lolz, we're not going to go nuclear, get it out of your head. spouting idealistic nonsense that won't cut it in the real world is waste of time.
Replacing coal with natgas does reduce emissions.
Agressive pursuit of totally non-polluting alternatives will take decades to implement, that's reality.
Replacing anything with solar or wind increases natural gas and thus CO2. That's the point of this article. And the CO2 trends we are seeing around the world over the last several years show this same result over and over again. Madness is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. That's exactly what you are doing right now. People tend to do the right thing after trying everything else.
Natural gas produces 50-60% less CO2 than a coal plant for the same amount of energy. That means a lot of new capacity has been added to the grid.
The 50-60% only relates to combustion. You also need to factor in direct methane emissions from drilling, pipelines, etc. (a.k.a., fugitive emissions). Methane is a much stronger green house gas. Natural gas is probably slightly better, but not nearly as good as trumpeted:
-https://www.nature.com/news/methane-leaks-erode-green-credentials-of-natural-gas-1.12123
-https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas
So yes, theoretically natural gas could be a lot better. However, to add insult to injury, regulations on minimizing direct methane emissions are part of what Trump has been working so hard to roll back.
Only if you are happy for India and China to look at the US and say "meh, they aren't making any effort, let's double/triple out per capita output and adopt their lifestyle too". Maybe you think that's okay, most scientists think it would be a global catastrophe.
This increase in CO2 is the result of what the electrical engineers who run the grid have been warning about for years. The intermittent nature of solar and wind mean that as more is deployed, you need larger and larger backup systems. Since we don't have grid scale backup from batteries or flywheels, we back it up with natural gas. And the constant spinning up and down of the gas fired plants is wasteful and inefficient but its done to prevent brown-outs and black-outs. That's why the CO2 is up even though we are constantly adding to the wind and solar deployment.
All the conservation in the world won't prevent this from happening if we continue with this same path. The second law of thermodynamics is a bitch and efficiency only takes you so far. At some point, either we make grid scale backup of some type (batteries or flywheels) or we have to go nuclear. Batteries are expensive and are several orders of magnitude in scale less than we need. Flywheels only store power for about 6hrs which limits their usefulness. So its either nuclear or natural gas. Your choice...
Even though emissions from passenger cars was down, emissions from planes and trucks are up. Hopefully the Tesla push to electrify trucking will come into reality on the market soon.
Did someone hijack your account? You are one of the biggest Elon-haters I've ever seen and now you are depending on him? Maybe I just had a stroke...
Anyway, the solution for bulk transportation isn't electrics. EVs are great for personal transport and trucking. But fuel is just too energy dense for batteries to make a dent in things like shipping and air transport. Diesel-Electric Trains are one of the most efficient ways to move things across land but they are still getting all their energy from fossil fuels.
To actually solve the CO2 issues for transport, you need synthetic fuels made with the high heat you get from MSRs (or other more modern nuclear reactors). The feed-stock for those synthetic fuels is the hard part as that would have to be something grown but natural grasses should be able to be used (as opposed to coal which is traditionally the feed-stock for syn fuels). Its much easier than replacing all the ICEs but still has some of the particulate issues that fossil fuels have. But its a big improvement.
I still need oil and coal to do my work. So you can go stuff it.
Um, what? You do know that you can make synthetic fuels with nuclear power right? What exactly do you need oil pulled from the ground for? Why can't it be man-made? Unless your work is pulling the oil from the ground, you should be fine.
And note: this is why the alt-right is gaining ground slowly, but steadily.
No, they aren't. You tell yourself that they are because you need to belong to a group to feel validated and feel your identity secure in a world where your life is nothing but insecurity and your personal sense of self worth in the toilet.
Um, you just proved his point. And Trump's election proves his point even more. And so do the proceedings discussed in the article. You just don't seem to be self-aware enough to realize it.
Slashdot Mirror
Green energy is not worthless. And the idea that it is heavily subsidised is out of date -- Coal, for example, in the US is subsidised and most of it would not be viable without.
You are right about nuclear power in other ways, I think. There is a case for it. But, it's probalby too late now. Nuclear power plants take a long time develop and much of the energy grid is being re-worked so not require single large sources (i.e. make it better for renewables).
Guess we are all dead then. Green energy isn't worthless...there is just far too little of it and its always in the wrong place at the wrong time. The reason folks argue for nuclear is that its the only solution that scales. If you are confused about this fact, do some math and see what it would take to make even an 80% renewable power generation. Then remember that there is another problem called fuel production that is just as big as electricity and can ONLY be solved with nuclear. That's why when folks push solar, wind and tidal we just yawn and roll our eyes. Because those are just feel good solutions that don't actually do anything to reduce GHG emissions. Folks usually do the right thing about trying everything else. Just let me know when you are tired of doing the wrong (well useless anyway) things because you are only making things worse until you do.
It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.
Its really odd that you put the date at which that happened in the mid-90s. The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998 (I should know, I was in that class). So really that can't be true. What you saw in the mid-90s was folks who liked programming but often had degrees in other things plus the occasional CS PhD. The pure CS major undergrads didn't appear in mass for about 10 years (say 2008 or so).
Absolutely. We will need several or many tools to take care of these problems. Economic carrots and sticks are only one method, albeit a proven one, that can help.
Sure, we could hope that a host of technological innovations in battery technology, electric grids, improved solar cells and more efficient turbines can patch together a solution that over time takes the place of fossil fuels at great cost over 30 years (and that doesn't consider fuels or any of the other major sources of CO2 other than electricity). That *could* work even though all the rates of improvements of those technology are nowhere near what we need to replace fossil fuels.
Or we could just use nuclear and take care of all the problems at once doing far less damage to the environment in the process. With nuclear you can cheaply make synthetic fuels to replace gas, diesel and natural gas that renewables can't really do anything about (I like EVs too but that's shifting a significant part the problem). I'm sure ignoring nuclear will make you popular with your less educated greenie friends but really, are you doing anyone any favors by doing that? Are the hard ideological stances of environmentalists groups doing anyone any favors? Or are they ignoring the one technology that can actually scale to take the place of fossil fuels?
It might be the small samples, but it's really expensive to buy sodium too. I'm not sure if the price reflects the energy it takes to produce, the losses in storage, the complexity of safely shipping it, or a little of all of those.
Sodium metal is about $3000-4000/tonne at current market rates. Of course that only matters if we know how much Na metal is needed per MwH of storage this battery needs. There are Sodium-Sulfur batteries which the Japanese use but they have the problems you think they do. They explode and catch fire if damaged which creates problems when trying to build really big storage. I would doubt that this new battery will be even as effective as Sodium-Sulfur. The only way this thing is economical is if there is a carbon tax and the owners of these things get tax credits for burying the baking soda it creates.
Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold the promise of simplicity, effectively unlimited lifetime (since the normal mechanical damage associated with charging can't form in liquid) , and extremely high charge and discharge rates. Of course, operating at temperatures that keep the metals liquid makes them unsuitable for many/most applications, but the grid potential is immense.
Very poor energy density. 1/100th that of Lithium-ion. Basically would require more land than the solar or wind that its backing up per watt hour of storage. Its nice for remote small/cheap solar though and very environmentally friendly.
Check the bottom tank on that page - 700 bar, 52L. Given there are 9.17 MJ/L for compressed hydrogen, that's about 476 MJ of energy. At ~278 Wh per MJ, that is equivalent to a 132 kWh pack - about double a Model 3. So a small, 38 kg tank has the same energy storage as a pair of Model 3 battery packs. Tell me again why batteries are good? Less energy density (by weight or volume), a lot longer to charge, and provably more damaging to the environment (the environmental cost of making a 132 kWh battery pack is huge compared to the electrical energy needed to compress 52L of hydrogen).
Most people don't want their car to blow up. Hydrogen is difficult to store and requires you cooling it so it actively requires continuous input of energy to keep it stored. Its best use is for grid scale storage but requires certain energy market conditions to be profitable. Basically, the energy prices need to swing at least 2x per day due to other intermittent power sources. Good news is that that happens in CA and Germany most days. Bad news is that nobody other than energy traders want the prices to swing that much everyday so its hard to invest in up-front infrastructure costs when you can't be certain such market conditions will continue. Same problem for most other storage schemes, unless you can be certain that energy market will continue to be very volatile, you can't risk such a large amount of capital on something that might become useless at some point in the future. Operating the Helms pumped storage is like printing money for PG&E yet there are no plans for them to build another one. There are 2 private plans for pumped hydro in CA but they are small, years away, and highly speculative as their cost of raising capital was on par with nuclear.
Why large swathes of the desert? What about all the roof space in cities? Say a 3kw system per house, millions of houses means gigawatts of power. Industrial roofing, malls, office blocks, you could build a superstructure over car parks to support panels, all that is a very large space.
Because that only gets you about 10% of the way there. Cities don't actually cover a huge amount of space. So when some says it will take 12% of the land to put solar, you should think that means 2x as much land use by humans and much less for nature. Also, GW are nice but we measure grid level electricity usage in 1,000s of terrawatt hours. Look into the problem yourself and you will start making fun of everyone for their lack of math. Hint, more solar and wind means natural gas.
Hydrogen wins when you need to store store truly massively amounts of excess energy
Actually, it is usually not the best solution. Pumped storage and compressed air have better efficiency and need less capital investment. Vanadium-redox will give much better efficiency, and can scale with just a bigger tank.
If hydrogen made sense for grid storage, profit seeking companies would be doing it. They aren't.
Hydrogen storage only makes sense when weight and/or power density are more important than efficiency.
Vanadium redox batteries require about 10 tonnes of Vanadium, an element priced in troy ounces per MWh of capacity. For something small like an island, just call Elon. That's the right scale for Li+. Either that or use a bunch of recycled auto batteries if you really want to save on price.
PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Maybe Tesla can work with them, or with alternative energy companies like East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), to help supply power.
Or Tesla might help large numbers of customers get power off the grid, using their solar panels and power walls. (For that to take off, Tesla should lower their prices.)
Good idea, PG&E won't be bankrupt again for at least a month if you force them to buy even more overpriced power they don't want. CA is already completely oversupplied with power generation and doesn't needs more. PG&E is declaring bankruptcy to get out of liability for all the recent wildfires. They know huge settlements are coming against them from the wildfires. That combined with the sweetheart deals they were forced to sign to buy rather expensive solar and wind at losses and its no surprise they want a reset. And that's what a PG&E bankruptcy is, a reset. They declare bankruptcy on a regular basis for various reasons (3x in the last 20 years) including their own bad management at times (see San Bruno, 2008) but more significantly the regulations that force them to buy renewable power at huge losses.
And I'm sure that Elon is willing to use the entire year's output of a gigafactory to build a battery that could backup CA's grid for an entire hour. The CA grid is entirely too big for battery backups to be useful for anything more than load shifting (which we don't really need in CA). EBCE is a feel good initiative and nothing more. They can't bend the laws of physics any more than PG&E or the regulators can and will likely only make even more of a mess of the situation than the last round of do-gooders did.
oh, you mean molten salt storage needing that rare earth sodium chloride?
we don't need nuclear any more
First, nobody uses NaCl. They do use floride or chloride salts, but not NaCl as if the Na separates from its ionic bonds, its explosive. Second, conversion to and from molten salts is about 45% each way. So it has the same problem with pumped hyrdo, when you do the 2 conversions (from and back to electricity) you get about 16-20% conversion meaning the power needs to increase in value 5-6x from the time its purchased/generated to the time its used. For comparison, in the CA market the daily swings are about 3x.
The choices are nuclear, some magic battery or flywheel technology that doesn't exist and doesn't look like it will in our lifetimes or natural gas. Guess which one you are picking...
It doesn’t need to be batteries. You could for example pump water to a higher plane during the day with surplus energy, and use a turbine at night when you let it flow down. I understand that something similar is done occasionally with other energy sources.
You understand very little about power apparently. Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion. Electricity to kinetic energy stored in the form of water at a higher elevation. Then capturing back that kinetic energy back to electricity is about 30-40%. So any power you put into your idea, needs to be sold at ~10x the price to make it break even. And that's before you deal with the cost of building an artificial lake and a dam. Even in the warped energy market of CA, price only varies about 3x each day so its not a viable idea either from a physics or business perspective. All of those problem plus you have to destroy a beautiful mountain valley too. That's why nobody is doing it. Its a terrible idea...
Where is the nuclear only crowd? Have we finally found a scenario where they won't recommend a nuclear option?
Ok troll...the Greek island grids are small so we can build batteries large enough to backup their tiny grids. And that's a great solution. Doing the same things for CA (or the US or anywhere on a continent really) would be an entirely different proposition requiring the drastic increase (several fold) in global production of the raw materials for whatever type of battery you build. Learn to do math and do some research and you will find quite quickly how stupid the solar/wind only proposals for large countries really are. As for Greece, its a great place to build a solar/wind/tidal only battery backed grid and you don't need to strip mine most of Chile and Australia to do it. Now that's you've trolled the nuclear folks for the day, go get your paycheck from the natural gas folks greenie...
And California! Non-competes were critical to the development of silicon valley, making California one of the largest economic powerhouses in the world.
This should be modded up. Non-competes are mostly illegal in California, which means people and ideas flow between companies. This has led to the most successful tech industry in the world, the highest salaries, and the biggest profits.
Non-competes are bad for employees, bad for companies (in aggregate they are a prisoner's dilemma), bad for the economy, and by retarding progress, bad for humanity.
You are correct. Its also true that its an aspect of civil code and the CA civil code is huge and most companies have only the vaguest ideas of what the "rules of the road" are. Probably 50% of the CA employment contracts I've reviewed have at least 1 thing in them that violates CA civil code. I've also seen employment contracts without severance clauses which contain mistakes. What does this mean? The contract isn't worth the paper its printed on and even a layperson could get it thrown out of court against any lawyer. The point being, lawyers make mistakes as they are humans (at least they claim so). Also the law changes but businesses might not update their employment contracts. Its probably because these contracts are executed so rarely. Quite often there are cases where a company wants to execute something about an employment contract so they take it to a lawyer who delivers them bad news. Companies are cheap in really stupid ways all the time. This is just another way to be pennywise and pound foolish.
From here
Additionally, after Justina had been at Children’s for just three days, her new doctors changed course dramatically. During a tense meeting with Justina’s parents, the Children’s doctors said they believed their daughter’s problems were largely psychiatric, and they would be withdrawing several of the medications that her Tufts doctors had prescribed.
The parents — Linda in person and her husband, Lou, by phone from Connecticut — strongly objected. They complained that despite their repeated requests, Justina had still not been seen by her gastroenterologist. They became furious when the Children’s team informed the parents that they would be prohibited from seeking second opinions, including from Korson.
The next morning, Lou arrived at the hospital, still enraged. After conferring with his wife, he strode over to the ninth-floor neurology nurses’ station and introduced himself as Justina’s father.
“We have standing appointments for her at Tufts,” he said. “Enough is enough. We want her discharged.”
He assumed it was their right as Justina’s parents to remove their daughter and take her to the hospital of their choice. But behind the scenes, Children’s had contacted the state’s child protection agency to discuss filing “medical child abuse” charges, as doctors grew suspicious that the parents were harming Justina by interfering with her medical care and pushing for unnecessary treatments.
Now, as Lou scanned the neurology floor, he noticed that hospital security guards were blocking every exit, focusing their eyes on him.
You are ever bit as bad as the right-wingers you hate. You decided about this case before you ever heard the facts because of who was upset about it. Children's hospital fucked up, deal with it. They fucked up in the most serious way they could. When called on it, they doubled down on their mistakes. What would you do if the CEO of an oil company tried to pull this shit? You are a hypocrite...period
This case was about a child with munchhausen that the parents believed to be real. The child was put in psychiatric care and custody awarded to the state by a judge.
Unless you believe the judge was in on the "hospital making profits", once it goes past a trial, the judge must have had serious proof the parents were both wrong and non-cooperative to award custody to someone else, a judge will demand second opinions from third parties. The hospital can't tell their side of the story to the media so you have to ignore everything the parents say on the topic and look at the outcome.
At least that's a better theory. But consider this, how certain would you have to be to call CPS in such a situation. Wouldn't you at least review the various diagnoses? Wouldn't you contact the patient's doctor? I bet you would. I hope I would. I expect almost anyone would. They didn't...
No sane person thinks the judge was in on it. That different judge reversed the original judge's decision when more facts came to light is seriously damning to the hospital. That's why she is back with her parents. The alleged fact that she required more serious medical treatment after the CPS incident, which is what we will learn in this trial, could be FAR more damning. If it comes out that that is the case, then expect some serious consequences for the hospital and their management.
One of the point if you look around for more balanced article, is that the dr korson at the time had not done a muscle biopsy (one diagnosis which is deemed necessary - and reading what he told over the year about his method of "clumping" versus "scattering" diagnosis this brings up certain doubt about him). And certainly there was no mitochondrial genetic analyzes.
Couple of things: 1) I can tell you are not a parent, 2) most juries are composed mostly of parents
Maybe perhaps the hospital should have done one of those first before resorting to CPS? As for what you say, it seems to be true. Its also true they didn't know any of it when they called in CPS. They would have had to contact the geneticist first for them to know that. They only found this information out after CPS had taken the child. So its more papering over what they did rather than admitting what they did. The fact that they can do this now, and that they are willing to throw a fellow medical researcher under the bus to do it, should tell you what they are willing to do to get out of this one.
The dumbest thing the hospital has done so far (other than the original mistakes) was to not settle immediately. The hospital can quibble and go back and forth about mitochondrial issues and all its going to do is make the jury want to hang them more. Because the simple fact is, they didn't know any of it when they called CPS in the first place. And the fact that there is clearly medical uncertainty here, will count against them. People will quite reasonably have the attitude that "YOU(the hospital) SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURE BEFORE CALLING CPS". Anything that counts against that no matter how complex or smart or medically sound, will get them into even more trouble. Before you take people's kids, you have to be sure. Anything that seems to go against that simple premise will get harshly rebuffed by almost any jury. You want to see an outrageous legal settlement? Argue that you should be able to take people's kids without due processes or even reviewing all the information at hand.
Hospitals and governments don't just take on kids for no reason at all. It typically happens in extremely abusive situations. Mothers especially have exemptions from most abuse and child protection laws, it must go pretty far for a family court to NOT award custody to the mother, let alone, not to either parent or grandparent etc because usually one of them is considered reasonable enough.
I've been on committees that oversaw Jehovah's Witness hospital cases, they'd let their children die over violating their leaders' rules. In most cases, state or hospital custody was a rare and temporary situation only after serious complications of the alternative treatments their own leaders recommended hadn't yet killed the child and as soon as treatment was done, custody was reverted (and in some cases, the parents then dismissed the child from the hospital and flew to a hospital where a religious 'doctor' was present - a few of those doctors later on lost their accreditation).
Thanks for the red herring that has absolutely nothing to do with the case being discussed and in fact is the exact opposite of this case. In your case, it was the parents ignoring science. In this case, it was the hospital ignoring the science and facts. Your outrage to those religious nut parents should be equal to your outrage at a hospital taking a child without doing even the most cursory and easy checks about anything specific to this child's situation.
There is a reason you were asked to weight in on the ethical situations you discussed. In this case, that didn't happen. That's the problem. That's why people are pissed...
one the right wing press ran with heavily. It's not an uncommon thing and I can't tell if there's anything to the stories. Too often when you've got a kid not getting treatment it's because of religious parents who want to take them home and pray until they die. There's a sizeable portion of folks on the right wing that support allowing this. Some of them are insane but well meaning but there's quite a few who are just using it as one more distraction and one more thing to get the rubes worked up about.
Its kinda amazing that we got so many comments without anybody bringing up the case that kicked this all off. Its an extremely emotional case that was played up in the media for sure. But the thing that always troubled me about that case is that the hospital initiated a legal action to take Justina without doing any medical due diligence. Apparently, this is a problem for folks that have the kind of mitochondrial condition that she had.
I think the hospital was worried about was a Munchausen by proxy situation. But, the parents had verifiable genetic proof that Justina had a specific medical condition and the hospital could have verified this with a single phone call. We know they didn't bother to verify this until after they had already completed legal action to take Justina due to the testimony of the geneticist (who was at the same university as the child abuse expert they called instead).
Nobody is claiming that the parents are religious nuts. They looked emotional distraught during the media coverage but wouldn't you be if the government had just effectively kidnapped your child and was refusing to give necessary medical care to her? Seriously, most parents would feel like burning down buildings in that situation.
I want to hear some sort of cogent hypothesis for WTF the hospital was thinking when they initiated (and completed) a legal action to take a child without doing even the most cursory due diligence to ensure a mistake wasn't taking place. Somehow, that sort of lack of judgement should be criminal and most folks would probably be OK with those who are convicted of such a crime being put to death. Given all of this, its disingenuous to act as if the hospital didn't make a huge mistake and is probably covering up their actions. That being said, DOS'ing the hospital is hardly the right response given the high chance you will kill innocent sick kids in the process. So fuck this guy but don't let the hospital off the hook for their huge mistake either.
Still 25 years away, always. Except in Canada we have a company doing it that's only 5 years away, always.
You guys are 5 years away from having materials that can harness 1,000,000C heat efficiently? Really? I want in on that...
lolz, we're not going to go nuclear, get it out of your head. spouting idealistic nonsense that won't cut it in the real world is waste of time.
Replacing coal with natgas does reduce emissions.
Agressive pursuit of totally non-polluting alternatives will take decades to implement, that's reality.
Replacing anything with solar or wind increases natural gas and thus CO2. That's the point of this article. And the CO2 trends we are seeing around the world over the last several years show this same result over and over again. Madness is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. That's exactly what you are doing right now. People tend to do the right thing after trying everything else.
Natural gas produces 50-60% less CO2 than a coal plant for the same amount of energy. That means a lot of new capacity has been added to the grid.
The 50-60% only relates to combustion. You also need to factor in direct methane emissions from drilling, pipelines, etc. (a.k.a., fugitive emissions). Methane is a much stronger green house gas. Natural gas is probably slightly better, but not nearly as good as trumpeted: -https://www.nature.com/news/methane-leaks-erode-green-credentials-of-natural-gas-1.12123 -https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas
So yes, theoretically natural gas could be a lot better. However, to add insult to injury, regulations on minimizing direct methane emissions are part of what Trump has been working so hard to roll back.
There is also the fact that the Sierra Club was getting funding from natural gas. Don't get in the way of the gravy train...
Only if you are happy for India and China to look at the US and say "meh, they aren't making any effort, let's double/triple out per capita output and adopt their lifestyle too". Maybe you think that's okay, most scientists think it would be a global catastrophe.
This increase in CO2 is the result of what the electrical engineers who run the grid have been warning about for years. The intermittent nature of solar and wind mean that as more is deployed, you need larger and larger backup systems. Since we don't have grid scale backup from batteries or flywheels, we back it up with natural gas. And the constant spinning up and down of the gas fired plants is wasteful and inefficient but its done to prevent brown-outs and black-outs. That's why the CO2 is up even though we are constantly adding to the wind and solar deployment.
All the conservation in the world won't prevent this from happening if we continue with this same path. The second law of thermodynamics is a bitch and efficiency only takes you so far. At some point, either we make grid scale backup of some type (batteries or flywheels) or we have to go nuclear. Batteries are expensive and are several orders of magnitude in scale less than we need. Flywheels only store power for about 6hrs which limits their usefulness. So its either nuclear or natural gas. Your choice...
Even though emissions from passenger cars was down, emissions from planes and trucks are up. Hopefully the Tesla push to electrify trucking will come into reality on the market soon.
Did someone hijack your account? You are one of the biggest Elon-haters I've ever seen and now you are depending on him? Maybe I just had a stroke...
Anyway, the solution for bulk transportation isn't electrics. EVs are great for personal transport and trucking. But fuel is just too energy dense for batteries to make a dent in things like shipping and air transport. Diesel-Electric Trains are one of the most efficient ways to move things across land but they are still getting all their energy from fossil fuels.
To actually solve the CO2 issues for transport, you need synthetic fuels made with the high heat you get from MSRs (or other more modern nuclear reactors). The feed-stock for those synthetic fuels is the hard part as that would have to be something grown but natural grasses should be able to be used (as opposed to coal which is traditionally the feed-stock for syn fuels). Its much easier than replacing all the ICEs but still has some of the particulate issues that fossil fuels have. But its a big improvement.
I still need oil and coal to do my work. So you can go stuff it.
Um, what? You do know that you can make synthetic fuels with nuclear power right? What exactly do you need oil pulled from the ground for? Why can't it be man-made? Unless your work is pulling the oil from the ground, you should be fine.
And note: this is why the alt-right is gaining ground slowly, but steadily. No, they aren't. You tell yourself that they are because you need to belong to a group to feel validated and feel your identity secure in a world where your life is nothing but insecurity and your personal sense of self worth in the toilet.
Um, you just proved his point. And Trump's election proves his point even more. And so do the proceedings discussed in the article. You just don't seem to be self-aware enough to realize it.