Correct the proposed business scheme (err... "plan") is not one to capture carbon from the air - it is to produce zero net-carbon release hydrocarbon fuel. Unless this synthetic fuel replaces oil (and the oil replaced is then left in the ground) it does nothing to reduce CO2 in the air. More likely the Chevron plan is to pump the oil anyway, and simply use this net-zero-carbon liquid fuel added to the supply chain as cover, or even to extend its supply of hydrocarbon fuel to sell as oil sources are depleted, i.e. to support its continued extraction of oil.
In fact since huge amounts of concentrated free CO2 are available right now for free, being emitted by cement plants, the whole expensive energy consuming "carbon capture" aspect of this hydrocarbon fuel producing plan smacks of just being a "green camouflage" move. If they were serious about produced zero carbon fuel they would be integrating fuel production with cement plants.
The article does not deign to actually explain the capture process completely or with reasonable accuracy, nor discuss whether the whole "fuel making" claim is really relevant to carbon capture.
There are two cycles involved in the capture process, potassium hydroxide dissolved in water (aka "hydroxide-based chemical solution") captures CO2 from air bubbled through it, forming potassium carbonate (chemistry labs everywhere use this reaction to scrub CO2 from air going to reactions where this is a problem). Then the K2CO3 solution is mixed with calcium hydroxide and it is cooked in a pellet reactor to convert the K2CO3 back to KOH, while converting the Ca(OH)2 to CaCO3 (calcium carbonate, aka chalk or limestone). The second cycle heats the CaCO3 in a furnace to convert it to calcium oxide (CaO), releasing CO2. This is also the first step in making cement.
Carbon Engineering then proposes they will make synthetic fuel with a whole bunch of other chemistry, requiring a cheap source of energy that produces hydrogen gas (Carbon Engineering's on-line papers suggest electrolysis using solar power, the BBC article just assumes it exists).
Here is the thing. The cement industry already produces huge amounts of CO2 from roasting limestone to make cement (8% of world CO2 release is from this source). These are large fixed plants, that already are concentrated sources of CO2, which is free - it is currently just dumped in the air. If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
Given the vast source of concentrated free CO2 being dumped from cement plants, this "carbon capture" scheme makes no sense at all, if we don't first capture that really easy to get concentrated CO2 from cement. I suggest that this is not really a serious project, aimed at doing anything useful, but a scheme to divert attention from stopping existing CO2 emissions ("We''ll just capture it later and make more fuel! Win, win!").
Someone was selling those stores plastic bags before. The total amount of plastic going into bags goes way down. Do you think that there are two unrelated plastic bag industries?
My actual experience with a free disposable plastic bag ban (what these measures really are) in California has been entirely positive, I have truly not heard anyone complain about its effects. You can still get plastic bags, if you want them, most places but they charge a dime for them and they are of really nice size quality, and even though these are "disposable" they are truly reusable and I (and most people) do reuse them. But cheap attractive reasonably strong and durable square polyester carrying bags are everywhere. $2 gets you a nice carrying bag anywhere you go, and you just keep a few in your car, they are very handy.
Before when bags are "free" they really aren't free as right-wingers love to point out (until not convenient). The cost of the bag comes out of the retailers margin, who is in stiff competition in a very low margin commodity retail business. It is a forced march to the bottom, and that bag will be very flimsy. In recent years many "free" bags fell below the level of even marginal usability. Bags that tear, or need multiple bagging just drives up the waste.
Oracle has vendor lock-in for major corporations. Getting off of Oracle, with all its SQL customizations, is very expensive and time consuming. This is much harder than swapping Linux for Solaris.
I haven't encountered any recently founded firms (last 15 years is "recent" here) who use Oracle. Who want to be subjected to Oracle's "audits"?
But the long terms savings in not having to ship slabs of corporate revenue off to Larry Ellison's portfolio are considerable.
"Eggs, specially the yolk, are a major source of dietary cholesterol,"
It is the yoke. All of the cholesterol is in the yoke, as it is fat soluble, and the white contains no fat. This whole piece should be specifically talking about "egg yokes", the whites are fine.
It's a win-win: Boeing wins because they reduce R&D and materials costs in getting subpar designs certified that otherwise would be rejected.
The win they went for is much, much bigger than this. It is market opportunity. By "streamlining" (gutting) regulatory oversight they can get their new models to market faster against the still competition of Airbus, and book more sales. That is an enormously larger gain than R&D costs. Every airline that already received one of these has parted with their money. Boeing doesn't give refunds.
Las Vegas currently has a monorail that sort-of connects the major resorts on the east side of the Strip. It started off pretty well in ridership, 7.9 million in 2007, but with the Crash of 2008 ridership collapsed, understandably so, but after the Great Recession ended ridership never recovered. In recent years the ridership has remained stuck in the mid 4 millions (it was originally projected to have 19-20 million riders).
I say "sort-of connected" because does not actually attach or enter resort complex but is outside, separated and behind them, out of view. In one part it is quite far from the closest resorts. If the monorail had been integrated into the resort complexes, so that it could serve as focal point, and provide a "theme ride" type atmosphere, like the Disneyland monorail, then it might have a lot more riders. They probably could boost ridership considerably if they built an extension to the airport that is right next to it, but the bus, limo and cab companies would not have it.
All this is background to this new tunnel scheme.Given that they already have a mass transit system centrally located in what is really a very small city core, which they fail to exploit effectively, what possible role would a new tunnel system provide? This proposed phase just provides a ride from one end of the convention complex to the other, in your car, sort of like what, I don't know, a short road might do, so it is a basically an underground ride attraction for the convention center.
But wait! There's more! It could be extended to go along the Las Vega Strip, along the same route as the monorail, but underground! That is to say, even more out of view than the current underutilized mass transit system following the same route. The conceptual map shows the tunnel connecting to the airport, which has already been repeatedly vetoed for the monorail.
Anyone here want to invest in this project? Hello? Anybody?
Full disclosure - I have ridden on the monorail, and I liked it. I would have liked it a lot more if I didn't have to get off just outside the airport, and wait to board a bus to take me inside the fence to the terminal.
That sentence demonstrates without requiring much thought what the article demonstrates if you think about it -
the author is an idiot.
Bill Gates isn't a successful programmer, he didn't write DOS. He's an incredibly successful business person, he bought and sold DOS and managed a company to turn it into billions.
That's just getting started on the falsehoods with the Gates framing.
From Wikipedia: His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem... at 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school.
Gates was a highly privileged child born into a wealthy, extremely well-connected family. His family, and their friends and acquaintances, bankrolled Gates start-up, and provided him a very cushy safety net. There is nothing "long shot" about Gates.
Due to the inefficient conversion, using hydrogen as storage is not too good idea. We have plenty of great energy storage solutions in use now, all of which are better than storing hydrogen. Pumped hydro and compressed air are used at very large scales and are significantly more efficient than converting electricity into hydrogen.
I repeat: hydrogen is a waste of energy and money UNLESS you can produce it directly from available energy in the environment more efficiently than you can use that energy to produce electricity or other directly and efficiently applicable forms of energy. The technology this article is about is a first in that.
If we use upper end efficiency numbers for everything (to make comparisons fair) electrolysis is 80% efficient, fuel cell conversion back into electricity is 60% efficient (net 48%), compressed air storage is 70% efficient, and battery storage is 90% efficient. This system fixing solar energy as hydrogen at 15% efficiency is equivalent to electrolysis with a 19% efficient cell (this is higher than the market average of 17% but less than the top at 22%).
But efficiency at fixing and storing free energy (the fuel is the sun which costs nothing) isn't everything. Batteries are efficient but are an extremely expensive way to store energy since a battery costs a lot more than the space in a hydrogen or compressed air tank. These hydrogen fixing fuel cells avoid the cost of a separate electrolysis unit. Hydrogen can be transported far more easily than compressed air. Though compressed air vehicles do exist, they don't go far and are tiny niche uses - it is really limited to fixed site storage. It competes with neither hydrogen nor electricity/batteries for power transmission and vehicle propulsion.
Currently, from an energy ROI POV, hydrogen as a fuel is just about useless
If you leave out existing fuel cell powered systems, like the Mirai, that is. But then everything is just about useless if you leave out everything that uses it.
... but this approach is wildly inefficient compared to just using the electricity directly, like we do now.
What size is that unit "wildly"? The stated system has reached 15% efficiency is capturing energy as hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells can reach 60% efficiency, so the overall efficiency of this is 9%. Current solar panels that have an efficiency of 15-17%, the top end is 22%. "Wildly" seems to be a factor ranging from 66% to 240%.
Since PV panels are wildly inefficient (albeit significantly more efficient than photosynthesis)
There's that unit "wildly" again. What size is that unit "significantly"? Photosynthesis is about 1% efficient on average, a low end solar panel currently on the market is 15 times more efficient than plants, so a "significantly" seems to be between 6 times and 22 times larger than a "wildly". Good to know.
This is how the situation is going to play out over the next decade, because this is what is already happening and the coal producers have already factored into their business plans:
Natural gas is replacing coal everywhere, and will complete the coal phase out around 2030. The coal industry has not only not been bidding on new coal leases for several years, they have been returning ones they already have because they know they will never mine the coal in them. Except for metallurgical coal (the use of which is also declining) there will be no demand for coal, or use for electricity production.
The current rate of wind and solar deployment is 1% a year of total capacity, and renewable production in 2020 will be 20%, the same as nuclear. In 2030, and this is just with current trends, the grid will be 50% non-carbon emitting and 50% natural gas (which in modern combined cycle plants emits roughly half the CO2 of coal).
In attempting to replace all CO2 emission from the grid you do hit a problem when the proportion of non-nuclear, non-hydro power exceeds 80% (that is to say, the present mix of 20% nuclear, 8% hydro and with 58% solar/wind, 86% of all power generation is non-carbon emitting) due to the periods where weather conditions over the entire North American continent conspire to create inadequate insolation and wind for a period of more than a day (up to that point shipping power in HVDC lines can handle it).
What to do then? Notice that we are talking about a time a few decades out now, if we increase the current rate of wind and solar deployment to 2.5 times the present level we reach that point in 2040. So even with a greatly accelerated deployment LynwoodRooster's "the renewable sky is falling" rants don't even become an issue for 20 years.
If we then go to 100% non-carbon emitting for regular production, then the 72% from wind and solar would need supplemental power 20% of the time - from either excess wind and solar capacity, storage... or natural gas backup. This last one does not take you to 100% non-carbon emitting, but as a cheap half-way measure, as part of the mix, it gets you a lot closer while advanced storage options are deployed over time. We can then consider the cheapest ways to phase out this last bit of fossil fuel power.
Also notice that the natural gas plants and pipelines that have been already built, but phased out of regular production. If half of that that last 20% of 72% is natural gas, then we are down to 92.5% total non-carbon-emitting power, without any sky having fallen.
And we can expect some pretty good storage options to be available over the next 30 years. Sodium ion batteries which are under development, the cheap abundant cousin of lithium ion batteries, look quite promising.
Natural gas is in the process of replacing coal. That cake is baked. Replacing natural gas will then be the challenge, but it can be reduced to a small fraction of total annual production, without even having to pull in storage technologies, and that not for maybe 30 years. In reality storage will be deployed much sooner than that at some level, and eventually natural gas can be taken out entirely whenever we decide to spend the money to do it.
See Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States, Matthew R. Shaner, Steven J. Davis, Nathan S. Lewis, Ken Caldeira (Energy & Environmental Science, 2018; DOI: 10.1039/c7ee03029k) for an analysis of the effects of renewable production variability. Their analysis is based on only wind and solar grids, ignoring existing conventional hydro and nuclear entirely.
Interesting work with the best message to get out of this; don't rely on what's obvious, test what you think is true.
Yes, testing common sense systematically is a valuable undertaking that will always get blow-hards here opining that "so what, it is obvious/unimportant/blah-blah".
But my intuition for this question would have been Mercury since it is so close to the Sun, on the far side of its orbit it would never get as far away as Venus would, even if it never gets as close on its closest approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone here remember Ludwig Plutonium? He was all over the early Internet with his delusions he called "theories".
... I've been happily using Windows 8.1 for years...
People do that?
Who knew?
Pretty much this. Once the desktop UI issue was solved they need to just leave it alone, or at most offer truly optional add-ons or mods.
Here is a link with a picture of the explosive unit used for this experiment (don't know what happened with the first link paste-in). And an even cooler video of the test impact.
Here is a link with a picture of the explosive unit used for this experiment. It is a copper self-forging projectile (using HMX as the explosive I have read elsewhere) made by SCI Pyrotechnics. Here are some cool pictures of it being tested. The 2.5 kg pure copper liner is fired at 2 km/s.
Correct the proposed business scheme (err... "plan") is not one to capture carbon from the air - it is to produce zero net-carbon release hydrocarbon fuel. Unless this synthetic fuel replaces oil (and the oil replaced is then left in the ground) it does nothing to reduce CO2 in the air. More likely the Chevron plan is to pump the oil anyway, and simply use this net-zero-carbon liquid fuel added to the supply chain as cover, or even to extend its supply of hydrocarbon fuel to sell as oil sources are depleted, i.e. to support its continued extraction of oil.
In fact since huge amounts of concentrated free CO2 are available right now for free, being emitted by cement plants, the whole expensive energy consuming "carbon capture" aspect of this hydrocarbon fuel producing plan smacks of just being a "green camouflage" move. If they were serious about produced zero carbon fuel they would be integrating fuel production with cement plants.
The article does not deign to actually explain the capture process completely or with reasonable accuracy, nor discuss whether the whole "fuel making" claim is really relevant to carbon capture.
There are two cycles involved in the capture process, potassium hydroxide dissolved in water (aka "hydroxide-based chemical solution") captures CO2 from air bubbled through it, forming potassium carbonate (chemistry labs everywhere use this reaction to scrub CO2 from air going to reactions where this is a problem). Then the K2CO3 solution is mixed with calcium hydroxide and it is cooked in a pellet reactor to convert the K2CO3 back to KOH, while converting the Ca(OH)2 to CaCO3 (calcium carbonate, aka chalk or limestone). The second cycle heats the CaCO3 in a furnace to convert it to calcium oxide (CaO), releasing CO2. This is also the first step in making cement.
Carbon Engineering then proposes they will make synthetic fuel with a whole bunch of other chemistry, requiring a cheap source of energy that produces hydrogen gas (Carbon Engineering's on-line papers suggest electrolysis using solar power, the BBC article just assumes it exists).
Here is the thing. The cement industry already produces huge amounts of CO2 from roasting limestone to make cement (8% of world CO2 release is from this source). These are large fixed plants, that already are concentrated sources of CO2, which is free - it is currently just dumped in the air. If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
Given the vast source of concentrated free CO2 being dumped from cement plants, this "carbon capture" scheme makes no sense at all, if we don't first capture that really easy to get concentrated CO2 from cement. I suggest that this is not really a serious project, aimed at doing anything useful, but a scheme to divert attention from stopping existing CO2 emissions ("We''ll just capture it later and make more fuel! Win, win!").
You can use them again as, say, trash bags, or to hold your dirty shoes when you travel, etc.
Why is the left is so myopic and un-creative?
Single use?! No wonder leftists are always in debt!
Because you do this with every one of your disposable bags. Sure.
Someone was selling those stores plastic bags before. The total amount of plastic going into bags goes way down. Do you think that there are two unrelated plastic bag industries?
My actual experience with a free disposable plastic bag ban (what these measures really are) in California has been entirely positive, I have truly not heard anyone complain about its effects. You can still get plastic bags, if you want them, most places but they charge a dime for them and they are of really nice size quality, and even though these are "disposable" they are truly reusable and I (and most people) do reuse them. But cheap attractive reasonably strong and durable square polyester carrying bags are everywhere. $2 gets you a nice carrying bag anywhere you go, and you just keep a few in your car, they are very handy.
Before when bags are "free" they really aren't free as right-wingers love to point out (until not convenient). The cost of the bag comes out of the retailers margin, who is in stiff competition in a very low margin commodity retail business. It is a forced march to the bottom, and that bag will be very flimsy. In recent years many "free" bags fell below the level of even marginal usability. Bags that tear, or need multiple bagging just drives up the waste.
And if you paid attention to how they handled the lay-off announcements, it is an excellent reason never to interview at Oracle.
Oracle has vendor lock-in for major corporations. Getting off of Oracle, with all its SQL customizations, is very expensive and time consuming. This is much harder than swapping Linux for Solaris.
I haven't encountered any recently founded firms (last 15 years is "recent" here) who use Oracle. Who want to be subjected to Oracle's "audits"?
But the long terms savings in not having to ship slabs of corporate revenue off to Larry Ellison's portfolio are considerable.
pop ate 3 eggs a day for 80 years, more or less, and that was just breakfast. Not counting enormous amounts of baked goods. He died at 94
Yep. I agree citing an isolated, unverified anecdote really is bad science.
"Eggs, specially the yolk, are a major source of dietary cholesterol,"
It is the yoke. All of the cholesterol is in the yoke, as it is fat soluble, and the white contains no fat. This whole piece should be specifically talking about "egg yokes", the whites are fine.
It's a win-win: Boeing wins because they reduce R&D and materials costs in getting subpar designs certified that otherwise would be rejected.
The win they went for is much, much bigger than this. It is market opportunity. By "streamlining" (gutting) regulatory oversight they can get their new models to market faster against the still competition of Airbus, and book more sales. That is an enormously larger gain than R&D costs. Every airline that already received one of these has parted with their money. Boeing doesn't give refunds.
Las Vegas currently has a monorail that sort-of connects the major resorts on the east side of the Strip. It started off pretty well in ridership, 7.9 million in 2007, but with the Crash of 2008 ridership collapsed, understandably so, but after the Great Recession ended ridership never recovered. In recent years the ridership has remained stuck in the mid 4 millions (it was originally projected to have 19-20 million riders).
I say "sort-of connected" because does not actually attach or enter resort complex but is outside, separated and behind them, out of view. In one part it is quite far from the closest resorts. If the monorail had been integrated into the resort complexes, so that it could serve as focal point, and provide a "theme ride" type atmosphere, like the Disneyland monorail, then it might have a lot more riders. They probably could boost ridership considerably if they built an extension to the airport that is right next to it, but the bus, limo and cab companies would not have it.
All this is background to this new tunnel scheme. Given that they already have a mass transit system centrally located in what is really a very small city core, which they fail to exploit effectively, what possible role would a new tunnel system provide? This proposed phase just provides a ride from one end of the convention complex to the other, in your car, sort of like what, I don't know, a short road might do, so it is a basically an underground ride attraction for the convention center.
But wait! There's more! It could be extended to go along the Las Vega Strip, along the same route as the monorail, but underground! That is to say, even more out of view than the current underutilized mass transit system following the same route. The conceptual map shows the tunnel connecting to the airport, which has already been repeatedly vetoed for the monorail.
Anyone here want to invest in this project? Hello? Anybody?
Full disclosure - I have ridden on the monorail, and I liked it. I would have liked it a lot more if I didn't have to get off just outside the airport, and wait to board a bus to take me inside the fence to the terminal.
That sentence demonstrates without requiring much thought what the article demonstrates if you think about it - the author is an idiot.
Bill Gates isn't a successful programmer, he didn't write DOS. He's an incredibly successful business person, he bought and sold DOS and managed a company to turn it into billions.
That's just getting started on the falsehoods with the Gates framing.
From Wikipedia: His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem... at 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school.
Gates was a highly privileged child born into a wealthy, extremely well-connected family. His family, and their friends and acquaintances, bankrolled Gates start-up, and provided him a very cushy safety net. There is nothing "long shot" about Gates.
Due to the inefficient conversion, using hydrogen as storage is not too good idea. We have plenty of great energy storage solutions in use now, all of which are better than storing hydrogen. Pumped hydro and compressed air are used at very large scales and are significantly more efficient than converting electricity into hydrogen.
I repeat: hydrogen is a waste of energy and money UNLESS you can produce it directly from available energy in the environment more efficiently than you can use that energy to produce electricity or other directly and efficiently applicable forms of energy. The technology this article is about is a first in that.
If we use upper end efficiency numbers for everything (to make comparisons fair) electrolysis is 80% efficient, fuel cell conversion back into electricity is 60% efficient (net 48%), compressed air storage is 70% efficient, and battery storage is 90% efficient. This system fixing solar energy as hydrogen at 15% efficiency is equivalent to electrolysis with a 19% efficient cell (this is higher than the market average of 17% but less than the top at 22%).
But efficiency at fixing and storing free energy (the fuel is the sun which costs nothing) isn't everything. Batteries are efficient but are an extremely expensive way to store energy since a battery costs a lot more than the space in a hydrogen or compressed air tank. These hydrogen fixing fuel cells avoid the cost of a separate electrolysis unit. Hydrogen can be transported far more easily than compressed air. Though compressed air vehicles do exist, they don't go far and are tiny niche uses - it is really limited to fixed site storage. It competes with neither hydrogen nor electricity/batteries for power transmission and vehicle propulsion.
There is a place for all of these technologies.
Currently, from an energy ROI POV, hydrogen as a fuel is just about useless
If you leave out existing fuel cell powered systems, like the Mirai, that is. But then everything is just about useless if you leave out everything that uses it.
... but this approach is wildly inefficient compared to just using the electricity directly, like we do now.
What size is that unit "wildly"? The stated system has reached 15% efficiency is capturing energy as hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells can reach 60% efficiency, so the overall efficiency of this is 9%. Current solar panels that have an efficiency of 15-17%, the top end is 22%. "Wildly" seems to be a factor ranging from 66% to 240%.
Since PV panels are wildly inefficient (albeit significantly more efficient than photosynthesis)
There's that unit "wildly" again. What size is that unit "significantly"? Photosynthesis is about 1% efficient on average, a low end solar panel currently on the market is 15 times more efficient than plants, so a "significantly" seems to be between 6 times and 22 times larger than a "wildly". Good to know.
One year, a hundred million years, what's the difference? Its all just "years". Exactly the same. Yeah, right.
In rough, round numbers we are burning oil a million times faster than it formed. Same with coal.
Do you think you are "renewing" your bank account when you put back one penny for every $10,000 you spend?
Oh, and wood is currently maxed out as a source of energy production, at about 1% of total world energy.
So solar panels are not "renewable" because it is humans that renew (make) them? Unlike coal power plants that grow out of the ground by themselves?
This is how the situation is going to play out over the next decade, because this is what is already happening and the coal producers have already factored into their business plans:
Natural gas is replacing coal everywhere, and will complete the coal phase out around 2030. The coal industry has not only not been bidding on new coal leases for several years, they have been returning ones they already have because they know they will never mine the coal in them. Except for metallurgical coal (the use of which is also declining) there will be no demand for coal, or use for electricity production.
The current rate of wind and solar deployment is 1% a year of total capacity, and renewable production in 2020 will be 20%, the same as nuclear. In 2030, and this is just with current trends, the grid will be 50% non-carbon emitting and 50% natural gas (which in modern combined cycle plants emits roughly half the CO2 of coal).
In attempting to replace all CO2 emission from the grid you do hit a problem when the proportion of non-nuclear, non-hydro power exceeds 80% (that is to say, the present mix of 20% nuclear, 8% hydro and with 58% solar/wind, 86% of all power generation is non-carbon emitting) due to the periods where weather conditions over the entire North American continent conspire to create inadequate insolation and wind for a period of more than a day (up to that point shipping power in HVDC lines can handle it).
What to do then? Notice that we are talking about a time a few decades out now, if we increase the current rate of wind and solar deployment to 2.5 times the present level we reach that point in 2040. So even with a greatly accelerated deployment LynwoodRooster's "the renewable sky is falling" rants don't even become an issue for 20 years.
If we then go to 100% non-carbon emitting for regular production, then the 72% from wind and solar would need supplemental power 20% of the time - from either excess wind and solar capacity, storage... or natural gas backup. This last one does not take you to 100% non-carbon emitting, but as a cheap half-way measure, as part of the mix, it gets you a lot closer while advanced storage options are deployed over time. We can then consider the cheapest ways to phase out this last bit of fossil fuel power.
Also notice that the natural gas plants and pipelines that have been already built, but phased out of regular production. If half of that that last 20% of 72% is natural gas, then we are down to 92.5% total non-carbon-emitting power, without any sky having fallen.
And we can expect some pretty good storage options to be available over the next 30 years. Sodium ion batteries which are under development, the cheap abundant cousin of lithium ion batteries, look quite promising.
Natural gas is in the process of replacing coal. That cake is baked. Replacing natural gas will then be the challenge, but it can be reduced to a small fraction of total annual production, without even having to pull in storage technologies, and that not for maybe 30 years. In reality storage will be deployed much sooner than that at some level, and eventually natural gas can be taken out entirely whenever we decide to spend the money to do it.
See Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States, Matthew R. Shaner, Steven J. Davis, Nathan S. Lewis, Ken Caldeira (Energy & Environmental Science, 2018; DOI: 10.1039/c7ee03029k) for an analysis of the effects of renewable production variability. Their analysis is based on only wind and solar grids, ignoring existing conventional hydro and nuclear entirely.
Some people do videoconferencing for actual work.
Now the Shepherd's Pi song can be extended from one million hours (derived from one billion Pi digits) to 30 billion hours, or 3.5 million years!
Elevator music for geological ages!
Interesting work with the best message to get out of this; don't rely on what's obvious, test what you think is true.
Yes, testing common sense systematically is a valuable undertaking that will always get blow-hards here opining that "so what, it is obvious/unimportant/blah-blah".
But my intuition for this question would have been Mercury since it is so close to the Sun, on the far side of its orbit it would never get as far away as Venus would, even if it never gets as close on its closest approach.
". A postdoc teaches you that nobody else does either."
How about put your money where your mouth is. Go to your boss and tell him before everyone else: "You know nothing"
That's what i thought.
That hardly means it isn't true.