It has been a while since I have seen the movies, but was he building a vapor condenser?
I ask because while they were around almost nobody used them. Far more economically to harvest ice in the winter and store it for the summer. I mean today we have jet packs and space rockets but they are not “consumer grade”, like today’s refrigerators or the future Mr. Fusions.
Well, there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong. The ATM machines still look like they are functioning normally from the operations center and the tapes are (normally) only reviewed if they suspect something has gone wrong. It’s not like they have a bank of rent a cops monitoring these things 24/7.
There is a cost to bring a unit online, in terms of wear and tear, resources, grid management, etc. If you need to bring the unit back up in a hour it is not worth the effort to turn it off for a hour – you just let it run. And that was what was happening in HI. Constantly bring units on and off line.
As for diesel bring the primary peak fuel, I am going to have to disagree with you there – I think it is gas. Gas directly turns the turbines and can be brought up / down in minutes. With diesel you boil the water first with the steam turning the turbine. Heating the water to boiling takes time and keeping the water boiling for standby use is expensive. They also tend to come in smaller units to give the operator better control.
Here is a very simple example. You maximum use is 100 megawatts per hour. You have a wind farm and a coal plant that each produces 100 per hour. Can you rely on wind alone? Probably not.
Over the next 12 hours there will probably be a period of time where you usage will outstrip your production, peak usage plus a lull in the winds.
But that is o.k., you have the coal plant as a backup. Expect that coal plants take hours to heat the water to spin up and then hours where it is wasting thermal energy as the water cools down. (gas does better, nuclear does worse) and have a narrow range of optimal performance. If you are going to turn it on you are going to turn it on for a 12 hour period. Anything less than that would not make any sense. So all of your power would be from the coal plant – no need for the wind turbines.
This is a very simple example but it points out the issue with load management. When wind and solar become big components of the energy mix the operators can’t play around at the margins by running generators a little bit over or under optional conditions – they have to in plant size units and if they should be operating them or not.
Going with more granular nimble units (like gas) is helpful but it does increase capital costs, and HI has hit the point of diminishing returns here. Storage is even more granular and nimble but there is nothing economically viable (i.e. cheaper than gas / coal units) today. (tomorrow is another story.). Being able to monkey around with demand would be just as effective but there have been few viable schemes that work.
I think you are off point here.. There is a huge gap between potential and usable electricity. The constraint is not the amount of wind available, it is about load management. The supply of wind does not always equal the demand for electricity. Tossing more wind into the mixture would not reduce the need for more traditional forms of electricity.
On June 16 the electric rate was -100 euros per megawatt hour. i.e. If you were producing electricity you were being charged. I might be wrong on who was paying it but I will stand on that point.
Not sure what you mean by "other plants". If you are implying that other plants can pick up the slack the answer is that they can – when wind / solar is a small part of the mixture. When they are a large part of the mixture then you have to think about if you want to turn on or off large chunks of the supply. If it is a windy day then maybe you don’t have to turn the power plant on. Guess wrong and you get brownouts.
And yes, compared to the rest of the world, Germany is heavily reliant on coal. Coal is cheap. Also, this is partly this is a sop to East Germany, partly to the Green’s stance on fracking and nuclear power.
I have a friend who helped designed the HI power management supply for the grid. As of 3 years ago it was saturated. The limiting factor was not the grid (where it is in some places) but about load management. It takes hours to bring up / down a petroleum power plant. They had to leave a few power plants even when they were not needed because of the lag. Installing more wind / solar would only mean they would have to leave more power plants on. So no net win for society.
This is one of those technical details that separate theory from practice. Besides storage, another possible solution would be for people to be more flexible on when they use electricity – think charging an electric car, but as of today there are few options like that.
No, cost is the primary concern. Specifically, why do some an expensive way when there is a cheaper way of doing it? If reducing C02 is your primary concern there are better ways of doing it. Promote more green energy on the mainland – it does not have the engineering constraints of HI. Insulating buildings, building out mass transit, etc. These options gives you more bang for your buck. Go for the low hanging fruit first.
But the problem is that these things do happen sudden. The time frame we are talking about is the time to spin up power plants. In that context, even with better wind forecasts, it is sudden.
FYI, HI electrical grid is not connected to the mainland. It is far, far awat, Heck, I don’t even think the islands are connected together.
Yes, there are lots of technical solutions but none that are decent. Your hydrogen solution is much more expensive than using natural gas. There are a lot of interesting ideas, demonstration plans, etc. Currently, for almost any issue, there is a cheaper method of solving it then the current generation of storage technology. There are quirks and exceptions and the technology is advancing, but none are ready for prime time.
FYI, HI does have an experiential wave plant. It is not a storage solution and it is not ready for prime time.
All of the examples you pointed out are for higher end performance cars. These cars are usually handled in a genital manner. I remember a story where Prince Charles got angry at Di after she sat on the hood of his car at a polo game and left a bum imprint. That is not going to cut it for a “work” truck which is constantly being banged into, sat on, having things tied on, etc.
Personally, I am trying to figure out how these things are going to get repaired. If I understand it correctly, repairing steel parts is very different than aluminum. (FYI, I know quite a few farms who take a DYI attitude towards auto repair. I don’t think they will be happy.)
IIRC there were some demonstration plants that were built in the Gulf of Mexico but I have not heard if the succeeded or failed. Since I have heard nothing I am going to guess failed. The question is not so much “can it be done” but “can it be done economically?” And a quick search of wiki suggests no. Most of the items built seem to have some combination of being government sponsored, having good geography, or special situations.
At this point I think the storage issues is the thing holding back wind and solar. Crack that nut and a whole new world will open up.
Mod parent up – and Hawaii has some specific issues.
Hawaii has basically hit the saturation point of renewable energy until a decent storage system is developed. Renewables output tends to be erratic. If the wind is up or the sun is out the utilities has to bring down their gas generators, wind dies down or the sun sets and they have to bring on the generators. In other parts of the world they could export the electricity but that’s not an option here. Basically they have hit the saturation point. If you added more renewables the utilities would leave the power plants because they could not bring them up fast enough.
Fun fact – Germany this summer charged customers who exported renewable energy onto the grid. They mainly have coal plants which take hours to take off / bring online. A few days of good wind and low demand meant there was nowhere for the electric to go. I think Germany is trying to fix that with more transmission line but it gives you an idea of the problem.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you have predictive power, that it is less than 100% (i.e. weather forecasting), but it is better than flipping a coin (i.e. psychics ). In short, you are not making any statement about its predictive powers. How about this – let’s say that the climate scientist with their models can get with 2 standard deviations – or be about right 5 to 10% of the time. Check out the top chart.
I will point out that most investors and political advisors can get below 2 standard deviations.
As you say, when the model diverges from reality you make adjustments. Or junk the model and try something else. This is something you do with science – in particular in a young and developing field. Not so much with older fields. I was taught Newtonian physics long after Einstein had debunked it.
Personally, I would reference seismologists, not geologist. That is another subject where the science is making huge bounds but has low predicting power of when, and how big, the next earthquake will be. And just because seismologist have poor predictive powers does not mean one should not prepare for earthquakes.
Right – go the source. Artic air temp is the highest it has ever been, ice loss is at its highest in the past 50 years, etc.
The GP then picks a single point of data that covers only 2 years and says “Ha!” At the very least he is cheery picking his data. He is probably misinterpreting the conclusions of the scientist. (Which is not to say that their pronouncements are perfect. Different people can look at the same data and come up with the different results. The problem is taking a single fact out of context.) The deeper problem is that the data actually may indicate a warming trend, not cooling. As it gets warmer the glaciers calf icebergs at a faster rate so you get more surface area covered with ice, not more ice - as this will last as long as the glaciers last.
Climate science’s predictive powers are poor. Which is the nature of young science, using scant data and unable to run many experiments. The worst case dire predictions make headlines. The hashing out of the important but dull details does not.
This is a good example. The scientist correctly predicted that the artic would warm, but they have tended to underestimate the speed that it has warmed. Asked scientists 10 years ago if the artic would be free of ice in 50 years you would have gotten a resounding “no”. Today? A tentative “yes”.
So, your argument is that we should give massive subsides to the rich so the middle class can get some sloppy seconds? Good freak no!. If you want to give the middle class a break then argue for a tax reduction to the middle class – not one that primarily benefits the wealth.
And I will point out that there is a difference between the rich (who have high earnings) and the wealthy (who have assets.). So let me ask you this, why should a person who earns a middle class income (lets say 100k) but has a million dollars in equity in his home get a tax break verse somebody earning the same amount living in a apartment?
Besides, I don't think that is true. IIRC, most of the benefits skewed to people who had significant property and those who had lived a long time in the same place, with much overlap between the two. Both of these groups tended to have above average wealth
I will agree with you about the subsidized car usage – expect one of the great subsidizes is the property tax.
As you decrease population density in a liner fashion you increase the amount of roads in a exponential fashion, vastly increasing the amount of drive time and killing mass transit. Long time residence in LA face a problem. The economically rational thing to do is to pull down their single family homes and replace it with denser housing. However, if they were to do that their property tax would jump from the ultra low locked in rate to a new market based rate – and that would kill a lot of the economic advantage do doing so.
Do I want people with vast wealth to lose their home because they don't want to pay taxes?
Yes.
If you want to make a argument that the poor and retired should pay lower taxes please do. There are places which reduces property taxes for these people.
Remember, we are talking about people who could afford the taxes when they bought the home. Property taxes raises – roughly – in line with inflation and income growth, so they should still be able to afford the taxes. If you can't it kind of implies you are living beyond your means. Most of the gain goes towards those who already have wealth. It kind of like the mortgage deduction on income taxes – 80% of the benefit goes to the top 1%.Warren Buffet has complained about CA property taxes – that he pays much more in the ways of taxes for his cheaper Omaha home then his CA home.
It is also designed to encourage sprawl, sub-optimal land use, and encourage people to sit motionless in their cars on freeways. In short, it is designed to protect the haves, the insiders, those who have already made it at the expense of the people of tomorrow.
Do they make hardware? I thought they had outsourced most of their manufacturing. And most of their hardware is bought from 3rd parties. CPU, memory, etc.
I am being a bit harsh to point out that most people don't buy Apple for their hardware. They do have more custom stuff in their PCs then Dell. I mean it is nice hardware but it is overpriced. No, the reason why the buy Apples is for the OS.
1. Short sellers don’t make money this way. Everybody knows what is happening so nobody is fooled.
2. RIM has already “taken a bath” for its second quarter earnings. Not to say that they are not taking another one, but there is a probably more truth then falsehood in their news release.
Strategic investment means somebody from the outside taking a big stake in the company.
Fairfax Financial is a insurance company and the biggest owner of BlackBerry shares. The original idea was that FairFax and some partners would do a buy out of all the existing shares for 4.7b and take BlackBerry private – like what Dell did with Dell inc. this year. That fell through when Fairfax couldn’t find any partners who were willing to up the cash. Instead BlackBerry issued 1b in convertible debt (bonds that can be converted to stock – all the downside protection of debt and all of the upside of stock ownership.) with FairFax buying 250m of that debt.
Part of the problem is that there are almost no Science Fiction films out there, so that means people tend to lump science fantasy and fantasy films together.
We need to educate start educating the public people.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been a while since I have seen the movies, but was he building a vapor condenser?
I ask because while they were around almost nobody used them. Far more economically to harvest ice in the winter and store it for the summer. I mean today we have jet packs and space rockets but they are not “consumer grade”, like today’s refrigerators or the future Mr. Fusions.
Well, there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong. The ATM machines still look like they are functioning normally from the operations center and the tapes are (normally) only reviewed if they suspect something has gone wrong. It’s not like they have a bank of rent a cops monitoring these things 24/7.
There is a cost to bring a unit online, in terms of wear and tear, resources, grid management, etc. If you need to bring the unit back up in a hour it is not worth the effort to turn it off for a hour – you just let it run. And that was what was happening in HI. Constantly bring units on and off line.
As for diesel bring the primary peak fuel, I am going to have to disagree with you there – I think it is gas. Gas directly turns the turbines and can be brought up / down in minutes. With diesel you boil the water first with the steam turning the turbine. Heating the water to boiling takes time and keeping the water boiling for standby use is expensive. They also tend to come in smaller units to give the operator better control.
Here is a very simple example. You maximum use is 100 megawatts per hour. You have a wind farm and a coal plant that each produces 100 per hour. Can you rely on wind alone? Probably not.
Over the next 12 hours there will probably be a period of time where you usage will outstrip your production, peak usage plus a lull in the winds.
But that is o.k., you have the coal plant as a backup. Expect that coal plants take hours to heat the water to spin up and then hours where it is wasting thermal energy as the water cools down. (gas does better, nuclear does worse) and have a narrow range of optimal performance. If you are going to turn it on you are going to turn it on for a 12 hour period. Anything less than that would not make any sense. So all of your power would be from the coal plant – no need for the wind turbines.
This is a very simple example but it points out the issue with load management. When wind and solar become big components of the energy mix the operators can’t play around at the margins by running generators a little bit over or under optional conditions – they have to in plant size units and if they should be operating them or not.
Going with more granular nimble units (like gas) is helpful but it does increase capital costs, and HI has hit the point of diminishing returns here. Storage is even more granular and nimble but there is nothing economically viable (i.e. cheaper than gas / coal units) today. (tomorrow is another story.). Being able to monkey around with demand would be just as effective but there have been few viable schemes that work.
I think you are off point here.. There is a huge gap between potential and usable electricity. The constraint is not the amount of wind available, it is about load management. The supply of wind does not always equal the demand for electricity. Tossing more wind into the mixture would not reduce the need for more traditional forms of electricity.
On June 16 the electric rate was -100 euros per megawatt hour. i.e. If you were producing electricity you were being charged. I might be wrong on who was paying it but I will stand on that point.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros
Not sure what you mean by "other plants". If you are implying that other plants can pick up the slack the answer is that they can – when wind / solar is a small part of the mixture. When they are a large part of the mixture then you have to think about if you want to turn on or off large chunks of the supply. If it is a windy day then maybe you don’t have to turn the power plant on. Guess wrong and you get brownouts.
And yes, compared to the rest of the world, Germany is heavily reliant on coal. Coal is cheap. Also, this is partly this is a sop to East Germany, partly to the Green’s stance on fracking and nuclear power.
I have a friend who helped designed the HI power management supply for the grid. As of 3 years ago it was saturated. The limiting factor was not the grid (where it is in some places) but about load management. It takes hours to bring up / down a petroleum power plant. They had to leave a few power plants even when they were not needed because of the lag. Installing more wind / solar would only mean they would have to leave more power plants on. So no net win for society.
This is one of those technical details that separate theory from practice. Besides storage, another possible solution would be for people to be more flexible on when they use electricity – think charging an electric car, but as of today there are few options like that.
No, cost is the primary concern. Specifically, why do some an expensive way when there is a cheaper way of doing it? If reducing C02 is your primary concern there are better ways of doing it. Promote more green energy on the mainland – it does not have the engineering constraints of HI. Insulating buildings, building out mass transit, etc. These options gives you more bang for your buck. Go for the low hanging fruit first.
But the problem is that these things do happen sudden. The time frame we are talking about is the time to spin up power plants. In that context, even with better wind forecasts, it is sudden.
FYI, HI electrical grid is not connected to the mainland. It is far, far awat, Heck, I don’t even think the islands are connected together.
Yes, there are lots of technical solutions but none that are decent. Your hydrogen solution is much more expensive than using natural gas. There are a lot of interesting ideas, demonstration plans, etc. Currently, for almost any issue, there is a cheaper method of solving it then the current generation of storage technology. There are quirks and exceptions and the technology is advancing, but none are ready for prime time.
FYI, HI does have an experiential wave plant. It is not a storage solution and it is not ready for prime time.
You are kind of missing the point.
All of the examples you pointed out are for higher end performance cars. These cars are usually handled in a genital manner. I remember a story where Prince Charles got angry at Di after she sat on the hood of his car at a polo game and left a bum imprint. That is not going to cut it for a “work” truck which is constantly being banged into, sat on, having things tied on, etc.
Personally, I am trying to figure out how these things are going to get repaired. If I understand it correctly, repairing steel parts is very different than aluminum. (FYI, I know quite a few farms who take a DYI attitude towards auto repair. I don’t think they will be happy.)
That requires you to pump water uphill, and HI has very little fresh water.
No, you want something more like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Float#Central_Hydraulic_Tower
IIRC there were some demonstration plants that were built in the Gulf of Mexico but I have not heard if the succeeded or failed. Since I have heard nothing I am going to guess failed. The question is not so much “can it be done” but “can it be done economically?” And a quick search of wiki suggests no. Most of the items built seem to have some combination of being government sponsored, having good geography, or special situations.
At this point I think the storage issues is the thing holding back wind and solar. Crack that nut and a whole new world will open up.
Mod parent up – and Hawaii has some specific issues.
Hawaii has basically hit the saturation point of renewable energy until a decent storage system is developed. Renewables output tends to be erratic. If the wind is up or the sun is out the utilities has to bring down their gas generators, wind dies down or the sun sets and they have to bring on the generators. In other parts of the world they could export the electricity but that’s not an option here. Basically they have hit the saturation point. If you added more renewables the utilities would leave the power plants because they could not bring them up fast enough.
Fun fact – Germany this summer charged customers who exported renewable energy onto the grid. They mainly have coal plants which take hours to take off / bring online. A few days of good wind and low demand meant there was nowhere for the electric to go. I think Germany is trying to fix that with more transmission line but it gives you an idea of the problem.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you have predictive power, that it is less than 100% (i.e. weather forecasting), but it is better than flipping a coin (i.e. psychics ). In short, you are not making any statement about its predictive powers. How about this – let’s say that the climate scientist with their models can get with 2 standard deviations – or be about right 5 to 10% of the time. Check out the top chart.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
I will point out that most investors and political advisors can get below 2 standard deviations.
As you say, when the model diverges from reality you make adjustments. Or junk the model and try something else. This is something you do with science – in particular in a young and developing field. Not so much with older fields. I was taught Newtonian physics long after Einstein had debunked it.
Personally, I would reference seismologists, not geologist. That is another subject where the science is making huge bounds but has low predicting power of when, and how big, the next earthquake will be. And just because seismologist have poor predictive powers does not mean one should not prepare for earthquakes.
Right – go the source. Artic air temp is the highest it has ever been, ice loss is at its highest in the past 50 years, etc.
The GP then picks a single point of data that covers only 2 years and says “Ha!” At the very least he is cheery picking his data. He is probably misinterpreting the conclusions of the scientist. (Which is not to say that their pronouncements are perfect. Different people can look at the same data and come up with the different results. The problem is taking a single fact out of context.) The deeper problem is that the data actually may indicate a warming trend, not cooling. As it gets warmer the glaciers calf icebergs at a faster rate so you get more surface area covered with ice, not more ice - as this will last as long as the glaciers last.
No, not yet.
Climate science’s predictive powers are poor. Which is the nature of young science, using scant data and unable to run many experiments. The worst case dire predictions make headlines. The hashing out of the important but dull details does not.
This is a good example. The scientist correctly predicted that the artic would warm, but they have tended to underestimate the speed that it has warmed. Asked scientists 10 years ago if the artic would be free of ice in 50 years you would have gotten a resounding “no”. Today? A tentative “yes”.
So, your argument is that we should give massive subsides to the rich so the middle class can get some sloppy seconds? Good freak no!. If you want to give the middle class a break then argue for a tax reduction to the middle class – not one that primarily benefits the wealth.
And I will point out that there is a difference between the rich (who have high earnings) and the wealthy (who have assets.). So let me ask you this, why should a person who earns a middle class income (lets say 100k) but has a million dollars in equity in his home get a tax break verse somebody earning the same amount living in a apartment?
Besides, I don't think that is true. IIRC, most of the benefits skewed to people who had significant property and those who had lived a long time in the same place, with much overlap between the two. Both of these groups tended to have above average wealth
I will agree with you about the subsidized car usage – expect one of the great subsidizes is the property tax.
As you decrease population density in a liner fashion you increase the amount of roads in a exponential fashion, vastly increasing the amount of drive time and killing mass transit. Long time residence in LA face a problem. The economically rational thing to do is to pull down their single family homes and replace it with denser housing. However, if they were to do that their property tax would jump from the ultra low locked in rate to a new market based rate – and that would kill a lot of the economic advantage do doing so.
Do I want people with vast wealth to lose their home because they don't want to pay taxes?
Yes.
If you want to make a argument that the poor and retired should pay lower taxes please do. There are places which reduces property taxes for these people.
Remember, we are talking about people who could afford the taxes when they bought the home. Property taxes raises – roughly – in line with inflation and income growth, so they should still be able to afford the taxes. If you can't it kind of implies you are living beyond your means. Most of the gain goes towards those who already have wealth. It kind of like the mortgage deduction on income taxes – 80% of the benefit goes to the top 1%.Warren Buffet has complained about CA property taxes – that he pays much more in the ways of taxes for his cheaper Omaha home then his CA home.
It is also designed to encourage sprawl, sub-optimal land use, and encourage people to sit motionless in their cars on freeways. In short, it is designed to protect the haves, the insiders, those who have already made it at the expense of the people of tomorrow.
Do they make hardware? I thought they had outsourced most of their manufacturing. And most of their hardware is bought from 3rd parties. CPU, memory, etc.
I am being a bit harsh to point out that most people don't buy Apple for their hardware. They do have more custom stuff in their PCs then Dell. I mean it is nice hardware but it is overpriced. No, the reason why the buy Apples is for the OS.
Yeah, but back then Apple was #2 in computer OS and holding steady. BB is what – 4th? – and falling.
Actually, not that bad. 6% for 7 years, strike somewhere at 7 CN. I mean not great but I have seen a lot worse.
1. Short sellers don’t make money this way. Everybody knows what is happening so nobody is fooled.
2. RIM has already “taken a bath” for its second quarter earnings. Not to say that they are not taking another one, but there is a probably more truth then falsehood in their news release.
Strategic investment means somebody from the outside taking a big stake in the company.
Fairfax Financial is a insurance company and the biggest owner of BlackBerry shares. The original idea was that FairFax and some partners would do a buy out of all the existing shares for 4.7b and take BlackBerry private – like what Dell did with Dell inc. this year. That fell through when Fairfax couldn’t find any partners who were willing to up the cash. Instead BlackBerry issued 1b in convertible debt (bonds that can be converted to stock – all the downside protection of debt and all of the upside of stock ownership.) with FairFax buying 250m of that debt.
Part of the problem is that there are almost no Science Fiction films out there, so that means people tend to lump science fantasy and fantasy films together.
We need to educate start educating the public people.