I don't think the satellite contact is a difficult as you think. Distances will be short -- a few hundred km at most. Ground stations may need to use a bit more power than we're used to -- 10s of watts maybe and bandwidth may not be great if frequency division is used to divide users users. (How would we/they synchronize time division multiplexing?) Directional antennae probably aren't required -- which is a good thing because satellite passes will probably be one or two hundred seconds. The satellite's apparent motion will be very rapid. Directional antennae would constantly be moving all over the sky. Note that in VERY rural areas folks sometimes manage cell phone contacts from 60 km or more from the cell tower so serious RF power probably is not needed on either end of the link.
However the problem of relaying signals to civilization using a satellite constellation whose geometry is changing rapidly seems to me to be substantial. How does one get a signal from a satellite 200km East of Nome Alaska to a ground station with a solid internet connection? Probably needs several satellite to satellite hops, and unless there is some cute solution, the relay satellite configuration will be constantly changing.
Looks to be a "interesting" problem if it is a problem. Glad it's not MY problem.
They'll build scrubbing and polishing pads into the tires.... and make new, high quality soil to use on their artificial islands in the South China Sea from the material the tires pick up off the road.
Many, many years ago I had the opportunity to see an asphalt road after a tank had driven over it. Left a few scratches. I think you probably won't want steel treaded vehicles meandering down your solarized roads.
If they work well enough to care about after a few weeks of ordinary use.
Which seems unlikely.
OTOH, this can't possibly be as crazy an idea as it sounds.
Color me unimpressed. It kicked in a few MW for a short period of time. It'd be shocking if it couldn't do that..
The question is whether Lion batteries can stabilize the South Australian grid for years on end without losing too much capacity or developing other infirmaties. How long until the battery has to be rebuilt/replaced? At what cost? How much do these things really add to the cost of renewable power? And how many are actually needed?
My concern is that Musk is selling what he makes -- which are batteries optimized for transportation. Yes, he makes "powerwalls" for solar storage as part of his attempt to bail out the Solar Cities franchise. But they have no real track record, and I'm far from convinced that if one were designing batteries for grid storage that Lithium-ion would be the technology you'd choose. In point of fact, I think most large scale energy projects with battery storage have used Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) batteries
(Note: I don't think I'd want an NaS battery in my garage. Perhaps Lion has some merit for buffering rooftop solar)
"It's what happened to mortgage backed securities in 2008."
The rest of your post seems right, but what happened to MBSes was a bit different. It's had to describe, but basically, MBSes were pools of mortgages that were carved up into "Tranches" with varying risk. The highest risk tranches could be bought cheaply because it was assumed that the underlying mortgages would default sooner or later. Purchasers were betting on when the defaults would cut off their revenue stream, not if. The low risk tranches had high prices because they were assumed to be safe. The problem was that the assumed risk profile turned out to be seriously wrong and many of the "safe" tranches failed.
Or type 'planet money' and 'toxie' into your favorite search engine. First hit from Google is https://www.npr.org/2010/05/21... It's a fun read and it makes it pretty clear why pretty much nobody understood those monstrosities. (Kind of like cryptocurrencies in that respect)
I thought they quit using gold for IC connections in the 1980s when even thin coatings started to cost too much. I'm pretty sure the gold colored wiring one sees every now and then on electrical circuit boards is some weird beryllium alloy. But yes, there are, or were at least until very recently, said to be places where gold jewelry was (is?) popular because folks don't trust the local currency to maintain purchasing power. .
Who may be much less numerous than folks think. If I were going to set up a scam involving trading in a cryptocurrency, one of the steps might well be to create a number of sock-puppet identities to give the impression of a broader market than actually exists.
Not saying that's happened. Just that it's one of the contingencies anyone involved in this stiff would need to consider.
"I still have two transactions in limbo, from EIGHT DAYS ago."
Now there's an incentive to use blockchain for real currencies. "The check's in the mail" will be replaced by "The payment's in the queue" (Which is currently 14 weeks, 3 days and 33 minutes long)
As I understand it, Bitcoin's only real utility is as way to transfer value with minimum accountability. Handy if you perhaps have a pallet or two of currency that you can't explain to the taxman and you want to convert it into tangibles like a Ferrari, a trophy wife, and a yacht. You buy Bitcoin in your country of residence (how?), cash it out in some handy excuse for a country where taxes are nonexistent and the mordida is light and go on your way. But there are probably lots of ways to do that that do not involve stuff that loses half its value overnight.
You're correct that large scale hydro (30Mw generating capacity and up) are not counted as renewable by California in it's progress toward its energy goals. However, it sure looks to me like SDG&E at least is probably counting all hydro including out of state hydro (Hoover Dam) as "renewable" in its press releases. Not entirely sure as I found myself drowning in fluff reading their stuff and gave up.
BTW the big dams are used for irrigation water, domestic water, and flood control as well as power generation, so using them only for peak power and renewable backup, attractive as the idea is, probably isn't feasible.
You mean everyone doesn't haul out their cell phone and get three bids for emergency room treatment while the paramedics are trying to staunch the bleeding and stabilize their blood pressure? With consumers like that, how can any healthcare system work?
Hmmm. How fast can you bring up a sanely designed nuclear plant? Keep in mind that all thermal power plants take a while -- minutes, hours, days -- to get up to speed. That seems to be a real problem when trying to back up solar or wind. I think that the only backups that can act in tens of seconds are hydro and batteries. And I have my doubts about the latter. Not that one can't (probably) design a battery bank with a good backup profile for grid level wind. But I'm far from convinced that the Lion stuff Elon Musk is peddling is ideal for the application of grid level backup. Musk tends to be big on vision but a little hazy on details.
Actually, the biggest problem with the US's insane healthcare system is probably institutionalized cost shifting. Everybody routinely tries to shift their costs off onto somebody else. Furthermore, the rules of cost shifting are complex and truly archane. For the most part, individuals can't shift costs. They must sign up ahead of time with a player (i.e. an "insurer") who will try to shift their costs to other players who have no desire to pay those costs. Why anyone thinks this makes sense or could possibly work eludes me.
There are many other problems of course. For example, the extremely high costs of medical training in the US means that services must be costly in order for the practicioners to pay off the loans they took out to finance their education.
And the predatory legal system... The US has roughly 1 lawyer for every 300 inhabitants. Japan has 1 lawyer for ever 12,000 inhabitants. Some of those lawyers make a living suing doctors, hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers, drug companies, and anything else who might have deep pockets. Who pays? Ultimately the patients.
The notion that even a government could come up with a worse "system" strikes me as being delusional.
At what cost? Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels, are used to make them appear cost effective.
If you want to end up totally baffled about costs, let me recommend that ultimate source for most of the numbers being batted around. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a... Wonderful document. You can cherry pick just about any answer you want from one or another of the tables. The exception being that there is probably not enough lipstick in the world to make Coal with CCS, Solar-Thermal or offshore Wind look attractive.
I'd also point out that the numbers for non-dispatchable sources -- wind, solar, hydro(as they model it) do NOT include the affect on backup facilities operating costs. I'm pretty sure that's not because the affect on backup costs is unimportant. It's because it's too difficult to calculate in a general manner.
Not hardly. Germany is trying to shut down its nuclear reactors without increasing dependence on Russian natural gas. As a result they are burning a lot of coal and therefore releasing a lot of CO2. France has virtually no fossil fuels, so they built a lot of nukes.
Their energy mixes are NOT comparable.
Personally, I think that Germany's priorities (other than not depending on Russia to stay warm in Winter) are kind of odd. But that's none of my business
No they can't. A nuke plant takes days to ramp up electricity production. A nuke plant is not an instant on by any means.
That's true. But I've read posts elsewhere that sounded sane that argue that the inability to quickly fire up current reactors is an arbitrary design decision, not a fundamental property of fission power. And certainly there's nothing in the basics of fission that prevents ramping up heat pretty quickly. However, IANANE (I am NOT a nuclear engineer). For all I know, the thermal stresses from rapid warm up would distribute the reactor core over an area the size of Guatemala.
Also, there are posts in this thread that suggest that if one decides to use nuclear to back up intermittent renewables, the cost of nuclear fuel is so low that there is no need for the wind turbines and solar panels.
You're absolutely correct of course. The evidence is overwhelming. Privatized healthcare works only a few limited domains -- dentistry, optometry, cosmetic surgery. For most things, governments consistently deliver healthcare comparable to the US with costs between half and two thirds those of the US.
Go with what works. Governments should run healthcare. Capitalists should run department stores.
However, I should warn you, that logic and data have no affect on Americans at either political extreme -- either conservative or liberal. They are just as impervious to both as are the inhabitants of the Middle East.
If I read that right, you're suggesting that once you commit to building nuclear power plants with sufficient capacity to cover a bad wind/sun day, there's no point in cluttering up the landscape with wind turbines? Interesting. I'm not a big fan of nuclear, but I'll go off and think about it.
"And I don't like any nuclear design that can serve more than 5,000 houses."
I think there's a subtle logical flaw there. There's not a lot of data, but what I've seen suggests that nuclear plant power output won't be a major variable in accident magnitude -- which is to say that a 30Mw facility supplying 5,000 houses (Numbers I got off the the Internet without a lot of checking) is about as likely to have a huge accident as a 1Gw power plant. If that's true, we'd want a few BIG power plants, not a lot of small ones.
It'd be interesting to know. But maybe, it'd be better not to find out by the let's_try_it_and_see_what_happens method.
1. It has good points -- It's only mildly ecologically disastrous. Unlike batteries, it doesn't require nasty chemicals, self-immolate, lose capacity over time, etc. If nothing else, folks can probably fish, swim, and water ski in the pools.
2. It needs lots of water. California doesn't always HAVE lots of water. It's possible to use salt water of course, but that would suggest siting close to the coast.
3. It's surprisingly hard to find good sites for pumped storage. Typically you need to find two large basins close to each other and separated vertically by several hundred meters.
4. It's not very efficient. 70-75% round trip efficiency seems typical in practice. That's put 400MwHr in, get 300MwHr back.
5. It's cheap. It wouldn't be used if it weren't. But in order for it to be cheap, you need to feed it cheap electricity and use it a lot -- typically daily. If you try to use it with power that cycles with weather patterns that repeat every three days, costs will go up substantially
Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.
Yes nuclear doesn't release CO2, but >>>
1. California's geology is not well suited to nuclear -- a patchwork of fault lines. At this time, no one knows where they all are, much less which are active. No one wants to build a multibillion dollar nuclear facility, then find out they've built on top of a blind thrust fault. (i.e. a fault with no surface indication).
2. Current, proven designs are steam boilers that need lots of water. For the most part, California doesn't have lots of long term reliable water inland. There's lots of coastline of course, but virtually none of it looks to be guaranteed to be stable.
3. The California culture is strongly antinuclear and costs will surely be exacerbated by endless lawsuits.
4. Recent nuclear plants in the developed world have had MAJOR problems with cost and schedule.
5. If you look at the historical costs of nuclear accidents, they show signs of having a highly skewed ("paretto" / "power-law") distribution. i.e. occasional industrial accidents whose costs can sanely be covered by an insurance pool... and occasional catastrophic accidents with costs comparable to a war.
My feeling, and you're surely free to disagree. The world can be powered by wind. solar and nuclear. But the nuclear part may genuinely be risky.
As it happens I have one of Amazon's individual padded packages sitting on my table here. No way this material is biodegradable. It's possibly not even recyclable as it seems to have a paper(?) label grafted on. From an envionmental POV,I think cardboard -- which is both biodegradable and recyclable is probably vastly superior..
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I don't think the satellite contact is a difficult as you think. Distances will be short -- a few hundred km at most. Ground stations may need to use a bit more power than we're used to -- 10s of watts maybe and bandwidth may not be great if frequency division is used to divide users users. (How would we/they synchronize time division multiplexing?) Directional antennae probably aren't required -- which is a good thing because satellite passes will probably be one or two hundred seconds. The satellite's apparent motion will be very rapid. Directional antennae would constantly be moving all over the sky. Note that in VERY rural areas folks sometimes manage cell phone contacts from 60 km or more from the cell tower so serious RF power probably is not needed on either end of the link.
However the problem of relaying signals to civilization using a satellite constellation whose geometry is changing rapidly seems to me to be substantial. How does one get a signal from a satellite 200km East of Nome Alaska to a ground station with a solid internet connection? Probably needs several satellite to satellite hops, and unless there is some cute solution, the relay satellite configuration will be constantly changing.
Looks to be a "interesting" problem if it is a problem. Glad it's not MY problem.
"How could you convince China or Comcast"
Don't know about China, but my experience was that one does not communicate with or to Comcast. It is an institution with no input ports.
They'll build scrubbing and polishing pads into the tires. ... and make new, high quality soil to use on their artificial islands in the South China Sea from the material the tires pick up off the road.
"What will happen when the road is all covered up with bumper to bumper traffic?"
They'll put solar panels on top of the vehicles to power lights on the bottom?
Many, many years ago I had the opportunity to see an asphalt road after a tank had driven over it. Left a few scratches. I think you probably won't want steel treaded vehicles meandering down your solarized roads.
If they work well enough to care about after a few weeks of ordinary use.
Which seems unlikely.
OTOH, this can't possibly be as crazy an idea as it sounds.
"It managed to stabilize the frequency..."
Color me unimpressed. It kicked in a few MW for a short period of time. It'd be shocking if it couldn't do that..
The question is whether Lion batteries can stabilize the South Australian grid for years on end without losing too much capacity or developing other infirmaties. How long until the battery has to be rebuilt/replaced? At what cost? How much do these things really add to the cost of renewable power? And how many are actually needed?
My concern is that Musk is selling what he makes -- which are batteries optimized for transportation. Yes, he makes "powerwalls" for solar storage as part of his attempt to bail out the Solar Cities franchise. But they have no real track record, and I'm far from convinced that if one were designing batteries for grid storage that Lithium-ion would be the technology you'd choose. In point of fact, I think most large scale energy projects with battery storage have used Sodium-Sulfur (NaS) batteries
(Note: I don't think I'd want an NaS battery in my garage. Perhaps Lion has some merit for buffering rooftop solar)
Time and experience will sort all that out.
"It's what happened to mortgage backed securities in 2008."
The rest of your post seems right, but what happened to MBSes was a bit different. It's had to describe, but basically, MBSes were pools of mortgages that were carved up into "Tranches" with varying risk. The highest risk tranches could be bought cheaply because it was assumed that the underlying mortgages would default sooner or later. Purchasers were betting on when the defaults would cut off their revenue stream, not if. The low risk tranches had high prices because they were assumed to be safe. The problem was that the assumed risk profile turned out to be seriously wrong and many of the "safe" tranches failed.
Here's a link that explains it. http://analytics-magazine.org/...
Or type 'planet money' and 'toxie' into your favorite search engine. First hit from Google is https://www.npr.org/2010/05/21... It's a fun read and it makes it pretty clear why pretty much nobody understood those monstrosities. (Kind of like cryptocurrencies in that respect)
I thought they quit using gold for IC connections in the 1980s when even thin coatings started to cost too much. I'm pretty sure the gold colored wiring one sees every now and then on electrical circuit boards is some weird beryllium alloy. But yes, there are, or were at least until very recently, said to be places where gold jewelry was (is?) popular because folks don't trust the local currency to maintain purchasing power. .
"coins concentrated in a few hats"
Who may be much less numerous than folks think. If I were going to set up a scam involving trading in a cryptocurrency, one of the steps might well be to create a number of sock-puppet identities to give the impression of a broader market than actually exists.
Not saying that's happened. Just that it's one of the contingencies anyone involved in this stiff would need to consider.
"I still have two transactions in limbo, from EIGHT DAYS ago."
Now there's an incentive to use blockchain for real currencies. "The check's in the mail" will be replaced by "The payment's in the queue" (Which is currently 14 weeks, 3 days and 33 minutes long)
As I understand it, Bitcoin's only real utility is as way to transfer value with minimum accountability. Handy if you perhaps have a pallet or two of currency that you can't explain to the taxman and you want to convert it into tangibles like a Ferrari, a trophy wife, and a yacht. You buy Bitcoin in your country of residence (how?), cash it out in some handy excuse for a country where taxes are nonexistent and the mordida is light and go on your way. But there are probably lots of ways to do that that do not involve stuff that loses half its value overnight.
You're correct that large scale hydro (30Mw generating capacity and up) are not counted as renewable by California in it's progress toward its energy goals. However, it sure looks to me like SDG&E at least is probably counting all hydro including out of state hydro (Hoover Dam) as "renewable" in its press releases. Not entirely sure as I found myself drowning in fluff reading their stuff and gave up.
BTW the big dams are used for irrigation water, domestic water, and flood control as well as power generation, so using them only for peak power and renewable backup, attractive as the idea is, probably isn't feasible.
You mean everyone doesn't haul out their cell phone and get three bids for emergency room treatment while the paramedics are trying to staunch the bleeding and stabilize their blood pressure? With consumers like that, how can any healthcare system work?
Hmmm. How fast can you bring up a sanely designed nuclear plant? Keep in mind that all thermal power plants take a while -- minutes, hours, days -- to get up to speed. That seems to be a real problem when trying to back up solar or wind. I think that the only backups that can act in tens of seconds are hydro and batteries. And I have my doubts about the latter. Not that one can't (probably) design a battery bank with a good backup profile for grid level wind. But I'm far from convinced that the Lion stuff Elon Musk is peddling is ideal for the application of grid level backup. Musk tends to be big on vision but a little hazy on details.
Actually, the biggest problem with the US's insane healthcare system is probably institutionalized cost shifting. Everybody routinely tries to shift their costs off onto somebody else. Furthermore, the rules of cost shifting are complex and truly archane. For the most part, individuals can't shift costs. They must sign up ahead of time with a player (i.e. an "insurer") who will try to shift their costs to other players who have no desire to pay those costs. Why anyone thinks this makes sense or could possibly work eludes me.
There are many other problems of course. For example, the extremely high costs of medical training in the US means that services must be costly in order for the practicioners to pay off the loans they took out to finance their education.
And the predatory legal system ... The US has roughly 1 lawyer for every 300 inhabitants. Japan has 1 lawyer for ever 12,000 inhabitants. Some of those lawyers make a living suing doctors, hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers, drug companies, and anything else who might have deep pockets. Who pays? Ultimately the patients.
The notion that even a government could come up with a worse "system" strikes me as being delusional.
If you want to end up totally baffled about costs, let me recommend that ultimate source for most of the numbers being batted around. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a... Wonderful document. You can cherry pick just about any answer you want from one or another of the tables. The exception being that there is probably not enough lipstick in the world to make Coal with CCS, Solar-Thermal or offshore Wind look attractive.
I'd also point out that the numbers for non-dispatchable sources -- wind, solar, hydro(as they model it) do NOT include the affect on backup facilities operating costs. I'm pretty sure that's not because the affect on backup costs is unimportant. It's because it's too difficult to calculate in a general manner.
"Case closed."
Not hardly. Germany is trying to shut down its nuclear reactors without increasing dependence on Russian natural gas. As a result they are burning a lot of coal and therefore releasing a lot of CO2. France has virtually no fossil fuels, so they built a lot of nukes.
Their energy mixes are NOT comparable.
Personally, I think that Germany's priorities (other than not depending on Russia to stay warm in Winter) are kind of odd. But that's none of my business
That's true. But I've read posts elsewhere that sounded sane that argue that the inability to quickly fire up current reactors is an arbitrary design decision, not a fundamental property of fission power. And certainly there's nothing in the basics of fission that prevents ramping up heat pretty quickly. However, IANANE (I am NOT a nuclear engineer). For all I know, the thermal stresses from rapid warm up would distribute the reactor core over an area the size of Guatemala.
Also, there are posts in this thread that suggest that if one decides to use nuclear to back up intermittent renewables, the cost of nuclear fuel is so low that there is no need for the wind turbines and solar panels.
You're absolutely correct of course. The evidence is overwhelming. Privatized healthcare works only a few limited domains -- dentistry, optometry, cosmetic surgery. For most things, governments consistently deliver healthcare comparable to the US with costs between half and two thirds those of the US.
Go with what works. Governments should run healthcare. Capitalists should run department stores.
However, I should warn you, that logic and data have no affect on Americans at either political extreme -- either conservative or liberal. They are just as impervious to both as are the inhabitants of the Middle East.
If I read that right, you're suggesting that once you commit to building nuclear power plants with sufficient capacity to cover a bad wind/sun day, there's no point in cluttering up the landscape with wind turbines? Interesting. I'm not a big fan of nuclear, but I'll go off and think about it.
"And I don't like any nuclear design that can serve more than 5,000 houses."
I think there's a subtle logical flaw there. There's not a lot of data, but what I've seen suggests that nuclear plant power output won't be a major variable in accident magnitude -- which is to say that a 30Mw facility supplying 5,000 houses (Numbers I got off the the Internet without a lot of checking) is about as likely to have a huge accident as a 1Gw power plant. If that's true, we'd want a few BIG power plants, not a lot of small ones.
It'd be interesting to know. But maybe, it'd be better not to find out by the let's_try_it_and_see_what_happens method.
Pumped storage is a proven technology. BUT ...
1. It has good points -- It's only mildly ecologically disastrous. Unlike batteries, it doesn't require nasty chemicals, self-immolate, lose capacity over time, etc. If nothing else, folks can probably fish, swim, and water ski in the pools.
2. It needs lots of water. California doesn't always HAVE lots of water. It's possible to use salt water of course, but that would suggest siting close to the coast.
3. It's surprisingly hard to find good sites for pumped storage. Typically you need to find two large basins close to each other and separated vertically by several hundred meters.
4. It's not very efficient. 70-75% round trip efficiency seems typical in practice. That's put 400MwHr in, get 300MwHr back.
5. It's cheap. It wouldn't be used if it weren't. But in order for it to be cheap, you need to feed it cheap electricity and use it a lot -- typically daily. If you try to use it with power that cycles with weather patterns that repeat every three days, costs will go up substantially
Yes nuclear doesn't release CO2, but >>>
1. California's geology is not well suited to nuclear -- a patchwork of fault lines. At this time, no one knows where they all are, much less which are active. No one wants to build a multibillion dollar nuclear facility, then find out they've built on top of a blind thrust fault. (i.e. a fault with no surface indication).
2. Current, proven designs are steam boilers that need lots of water. For the most part, California doesn't have lots of long term reliable water inland. There's lots of coastline of course, but virtually none of it looks to be guaranteed to be stable.
3. The California culture is strongly antinuclear and costs will surely be exacerbated by endless lawsuits.
4. Recent nuclear plants in the developed world have had MAJOR problems with cost and schedule.
5. If you look at the historical costs of nuclear accidents, they show signs of having a highly skewed ("paretto" / "power-law") distribution. i.e. occasional industrial accidents whose costs can sanely be covered by an insurance pool ... and occasional catastrophic accidents with costs comparable to a war.
My feeling, and you're surely free to disagree. The world can be powered by wind. solar and nuclear. But the nuclear part may genuinely be risky.
I suppose that specifying both -- e.g. "Mutant Maruspial(v13.03)" -- is too complicated a concept for software-mongers?
As it happens I have one of Amazon's individual padded packages sitting on my table here. No way this material is biodegradable. It's possibly not even recyclable as it seems to have a paper(?) label grafted on. From an envionmental POV,I think cardboard -- which is both biodegradable and recyclable is probably vastly superior..