Electriq~Global: A Water-Based Fuel for Zero-Emissions Transportation
Will work at mass transportation levels????
The on-board Electriq system generates hydrogen on-demand by controlling the physical interface between the Electriq switch (catalyst) and the fuel. The H2 generated by the fuel is immediately consumed by the fuel-cell and turned into electricity. “As such, the system is safe and does not contain hazardous H2 gas at any given time,” explains Guy N. Michrowski, CEO. Moreover, leftovers from the fuel can be recycled to produce the new one, so that “the footprint of our technology is zero when we use renewable energy to recycle our fuel,” Michrowski states.
and/or petrol powered self charging 100% EV – The NISSAN Note e-POWER – est. $15,000 USD – Engine: 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol – Motor: 40kW Electric motor – Battery: 1.5kWh – a theoretical range of over 1300km (867 Miles) on a single 47-litre (11 Gallon) tank of petrol. That equates to an official fuel consumption figure (JC08) of just 2.9L/100km. https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/nissan-note-e-power-2018-review-111177/
“UN climate talks end with limited progress on emissions targets…” Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns, with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic thrown in for good measure.
Thomassays
Forced Responses?
The current Australian climate, the extensive extreme mega-drought, dry rivers, water supply dams deteriorating, and now the last 2 months of raging Bushfires nationally are surely the classic example of “forced responses” to global warming and climate change impacts today.
Bushfire outlook update makes for more grim reading for summer ahead
ABC Weather Updated about an hour ago
We’re already dealing with a fire season for the record books — crews exhausted, millions of hectares burnt, scores of houses destroyed — but an update of the danger ahead paints an even more ominous picture.
Key points:
The bushfire outlook from August warned of above-normal bushfire conditions for most of the east coast this summer, as well as parts of all states and the ACT
Today’s update expands the above-normal region further north in Queensland, across to northern Victoria and further along the Tasmanian coast
Experts say the only thing that would change this outlook would be widespread rainfall, which is not likely this summer
(takes us up to Feb 2020 – but the fire season can run through to Easter)
The outlook was already bad, with above-normal fire potential for most of the east coast.
Now, the areas considered at greater threat have expanded into northern Victoria, northern Queensland and further along the Tasmanian coast. (see Map incl)
Dr Richard Thornton, chief executive of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC), said the update reinforced its outlook from August.
Yes fires have ben bad before , and were also driven by extreme climate impacts the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires and some, yet still today the key word describing the current situation in weather and bushfires is Unprecedented aka never before has it been like this – ever.
Meanwhile I see the Chile COP located in Madrid has pretty much failed, pushing off the issues until Glascow COP which is the last chance to validate the Paris Agreement targets to 2030 in hard commitments.
I have a prediction – the UNFCCC / COP system is going to collapse. Because now globally everything is getting to the pointy end of dealing with AGW/CC or walking away. Too many nations are going to do a USA and walk away.
Leaving those who are left (at least half serious about it) with nothing to do that makes rational sense. It’s all in or none are in. Therefore it will be the latter by the look at it.
If they do manage to make some commitments in Glasgow (to save the UNFCCC system) they’ll be so weak as not to make a difference anyway. 30 years of wasting time energy and money and tons of science. What a pathetic joke this has been.
Today it’s Australia’s turn in the news, as the next decade unfolds every nation will be so effected in some way shape or form (like the Greece and CA and Canadian and Norwegian and Swedish and Siberian fires) with similar “natural” disasters and their rising costs.
My money is still on September 2025 +/- for the first Blue Ocean Ice Free Summer Arctic Event. Have a peaceful happy Christmas anyway.
Thomassays
We’re not going to be able to contain these fires: NSW RFS Commissioner
40-41 C temps (video 2 mins)
No you don’t belong in this conversation. You are too obnoxious, personal and childish and you constantly miss the point and engage in pedantic attacks on peoples use of terminology. Many of your ideas are just not thought through, and others are just plain silly. The reason alternatives to nitrogen triflouride and sulphur hexachloride are not being used much yet is they are new products and it takes time to get market penetration, doh!
nigeljsays
Kevin McKinney @145, its that definitions thing again. I understand renewables to mean just wind and solar power and no storage, and hydro power is just zero carbon. But I think we are mostly on the same page on the main thing which is the overall composition of a future grid!
Mr. Know It Allsays
Time to comment so I can see comments 136 to 149. It works. Weird!
127 – Al Bundy
“That’s the story of Brexit, a national tragedy. That’s the story of Johnson, the man of no convictions. That’s the story of Trump, who makes puppets of people through manipulation of outrage and disregard for truth…..”
Incorrect. Brexit and Boris are the result of uncontrolled immigration and leftist nut-baggery. Exactly the same things that resulted in Trump. The ‘Muricans and Brits “get it”. Many of the other Europeans are “getting it” also. The movement will spread. The nut-baggery will stop, one way or another. Today I read that India “gets it” – sort comments by “best”:
Do not despair over Boris and Brexit. Boris said in his victory speech that the people voted to be carbon neutral and they would make that happen – listen from 5:10 to 5:30:
133 – Erik Lindeberg
“…There are approximately 10 000 of these unabated CO2 sources all over the world. The only rational option from an economic point of view is to clean up these point sources now for a much smaller cost than to to BECCS in a future when we are desperate…..”
This sounds promising. Has this been done for any existing plants? Do we know costs for design, equipment, installation, maintenance, etc? Do we know power requirements and whether it impacts plant output?
Mr. Know It Allsays
146 – Kevin McKinney
“… In particular, it fails to count the savings the plan would achieve,….”
Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc. Perhaps in SC you are not as aware of the problems as we are in the Western US? It is a world-wide problem – see Brexit, see India riots today, Chinese detention camps, see many EU nations very unhappy over uncontrolled immigration. It does not work, for a lot of reasons. Ask Boris Johnson and President Trump how they know I am right. ;)
Al Bundysays
nigelj: Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns, with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic thrown in for good measure.
AB: Eh, here in the USA we’re burning the deck chairs to make pretty bonfires. Party as if it were 1999.
_________
MRKIA: Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.
AB: Your facts are wrong but you do point to the Big Concern. “Leave it to Beaver” is leaving the building, both from a whiteness standpoint and a staidness standpoint. Your problem is that the change is inevitable and ongoing. Currently your side can still steal elections through gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation campaigns, and whatnot. But that era is ending. Look at voting patterns by age cohorts. GOPpers are dying off and every time a “White” dates a “non-White” (and especially if a baby results) your team just shrank. Neither of the kids are going to be slightly impressed with, “Look at My African American!” Tokenism and allusion to ownership all wrapped up with a not-so-pretty bow.
The USA is going through a demographic shift. I get it. I’ve walked into places where I was the minority and the feeling isn’t pleasant, especially when you can’t even understand the language. It takes effort to find connections that overcome your tribal instincts.
You can’t win against the genetic merging that under the “one drop” rule means They get larger and you shrink. Now couple that with the human instinct where reproduction is inversely related to security and success. The marginalized always out-reproduce the mainstream.
So you have a couple of options: you can give up your tribalism or you can go all-in with genocide or involuntary sterilization or 3/5ths rules or all of the above. (I think the Palestinians should start begging to become 3/5ths of a human, to get 3/5th of a vote, kinda like old time USA slaves.)
Or, as GOPpers seem to be choosing, you can say “Ef ’em all” and burn the planet to the ground.
Ray Ladburysays
Mr. KIA seems to be relying heavily on Faux News for his alternative facts.
Here in the real Universe the facts are as follows:
1) Immigrants generally commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born US citizens.
2) Immigrants are no more likely to be drug users or drug sellers than native-born citizens.
3) The US is a culture developed by immigrants. It seems to me much more likely that we undermine US culture by excluding immigrants than by welcoming them.
4) Pray, how is US sovereignty lost by allowing immigrants into the country. Talk about nonsequiturs.
5) As to lowering of wages, there is an effect here, but only at the very bottom of the wage scale, and the effects can be overcome by raising minimum wage and enforcing employment protections for citizens and noncitizens alike.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @137
thank’s for the detailed response on nuclear energy options. I don’t have time to comment too much, just acknowledging I read it, but here are a couple of random thoughts that jumped out:
Right now a lot of countries are going down the renewables route and relying on gas fired power to deal with intermittency issues, hoping it will become economic to replace this with storage. If it isnt then nuclear power will become an inevitable sort of option anyway. However the other viable pathway is nuclear power from day one. The important thing is zero carbon energy, one way or the other.
The key is the safety issue, You guys probably need to better explain levels of risk with nuclear power and without rubbishing the critics, or cherry picking information, because that will just make them more stubborn. As far as I can tell the linear no threshold model looks at least partly out of date. I have briefly looked at it, and the risks of very low level radiation look non existent for most people, and look like they would be confined to people with compromised immune systems from illnesses, and young children. But even these risks appear small, and children are far more at risk from a hundred other things in daily life. That’s my take anyway.
“It doesn’t need much brain power or imagination to see this, or maybe it does. Providing we target that assistance carefully, and control how its spent somehow.”
“That was called “colonialism”, and it is distinctly out of fashion. De-colonization shows just how wrong you are. Prosperous first-world Rhodesia is now starving Zimbabwe, dependent on food aid and unable to keep the lights on even with coal plants. These people are not going to build nukes.”
That’s stetching things. Colonialism is in the past and was something else entirely different from international aid. Colonialism was always destined to end because it was forced on people, and this conflicts with basic notions about individual liberty ,subscribed to by most people on both left and right.
Unfortunately some African countries have fools for leaders, like in Zimbabwe, but some other countries are doing ok.
It’s more about what we do NOW in relation to Africa as I pointed out. Theres no much point in arguing endlessly about the past or solutions that have no real chance of working like going back to colonialism.
I think immigration is a net positive, providing its regulated and numbers are capped. But its too off topic to go into.
“those nuclear power stations look huge and are built like fortresses.”
“That’s just because it’s all in one place, and they put it to good use. Being all in one place is a GOOD thing, as it affects far less of the landscape. We should use as little from nature as we can, because there are just too many of us now. Using things nature doesn’t have a use for should be our organizing principle.”
Yes the comment on resource use is one thing in favour off nuclear power. Wind power is increasingly going offshore which deals with the appearance issue.
Sorry if I appear to be arguing both sides of the issue simultaneously. I’m currently living alone and I tend to argue with myself as a result, taking both sides of things sometimes.
nigeljsays
Mr KIA @159 says “Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.’
This is just so completely crazy. The official data shows over and over that immigrant communities in America have lower crime and drug use than other groups, same in my country. Immigration is nothing to do with the Sovereignty issue, and low wages are more to do with automation in the manufacturing sector.
Obviously immigration has huge benefits that KIA conveniently ignores. Yes America takes a lot of immigrants each year but on a per capita basis no more than countries like Canada and Germany etc. And yes you have to obviously regulate immigration.
Ok I’m breaking my own rule on not commenting on immigration, but KIA is so one sided and mistaken on immigration, you can’t trust his evaluations on other things like the climate issue.
Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc. Perhaps in SC you are not as aware of the problems as we are in the Western US?
Good grief! IAT again waves his bigotry for all the world to see. Since he doesn’t offer credible documentation for his bigoted claims this time either, we may assume his concerns are shared only with other xenophobic bigots. America, after all, is a nation of immigrants. My maternal grandparents moved here from the UK, and my father’s father’s father from Sweden; my other direct ancestors all originally came from somewhere else, too.
I’ve lived all over the Western US for the last 25 years, and immigration is way down the list of issues I feel are serious. Sure, there are social problems associated with illegal immigration, largely falling on the undocumented themselves. Many of those problems can be solved by greatly expanding and expediting legal immigration, rather than pandering to irrational fear of “crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.” Indeed, since our internal fertility rate is below replacement level, America’s continued security and prosperity depends on immigrants. Can manufacturing survive within our borders? Who is going to produce, or buy, our goods? Who will mow our lawns, bag our groceries, drive our Uber cars, fight our wars?
It seems IAT can’t conceive of “enlightened self-interest”. He’s all about making culture war against his imagined adversaries, not comprehending that any victories for his tribe of bigots are Pyrrhic: harmful to America’s ability to thrive in a changing world. Some dare call it treason.
As to CCS–“Carbon Capture and Sequestration”–it’s expensive. Personally, I think that with “cheap coal” having become a term with mainly historical reference due to the continuing decline in the costs of wind and solar, CCS doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: more rational simply to close the coal-fired plant and build a wind or solar farm.
But cement manufacture and steelmaking may both be possible use cases for CCS: alternate tech exists or is under active development, but is still expensive. The economics almost certainly require carbon fees/taxes/credits to work.
re: 159. “Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc…”
There you go again, full racism and bigotry. In fact, the definition of them. Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
nigeljsays
Regarding the article by Godwin Vasanth Bosco that stated: “The Idea That ‘Green Technology’ Can Help Save the Environment Is Dangerous” and “Industrialists around the world have been extracting a wide array of minerals and metals to build electric vehicles and ‘cleaner’ batteries, simply replacing one injustice with another.”
Adding to earlier comments. The alleged injustices we are causing by fixing the climate problem include mainly child labour in cobalt mines, some political issue with lithium mines and loss of some forests due to expanded mining. The writer uses this to be critical of things like The Green New Deal and renewable energy production (one suspects nuclear power as well), and electric vehicles.
Now nobody in their right mind likes mining where it involves child labour, and where mining causes deforestation, and I sympathise with the author, but I can tell you for free the climate problem is a million times worse than these mining problems, and at every possible level so we need mining and alternative energy production.
Child labour is not exclusive to cobalt mines, you see it in some lead and copper mines. We use cobalt for far more applications than just climate change mitigation so what is the author suggesting? Stop using batteries? The real answer is to stop the use of child labour. There is much that could be done to put pressure on countries that use child labour, or offer them some incentives to change their laws.
The loss of forest area due to mining is small in terms of area compared to deforestation for agricultural land, and forests can at least be regrown. If areas are very sensitive ecologically there might be a case to relocate species that are effected and endangered (this has been done in NZ). If mining is properly done environmental impacts can be minimised.
The article also talks about the demands for resources made by The Green New Deal and renewable energy and by inference nuclear power, and the problem of mineral scarcity, but its all just arm waving. There are no real numbers or balanced commentary, and the article lacks a complete picture of the resources available. Proper published studies show there isn’t a problem.
Now obviously humanity is going to start running out of at least some economically recoverable minerals sooner or later, and we will be reduced to recycling whats left. We can reduce pain for future generations if we move to get population growth to stop, and we obviously shouldn’t waste resources on things that add little value but beyond this its hard to see solutions that make much sense.
I make no apologies for some healthy scepticism. Our core solution to the climate problem is new energy sources and technology, and I’m not going to stand by while people undermine this.
Astringentsays
158 and 159 MKIA . crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc . And all this due to those pesky immigrants? That, with ‘Engerland’ substituted for ‘American’ was the manta of the pro Brexit politicians. And in common with many politicians they offered no evidence for any of it. There are lots of problems in the modern world, but immigration is a symptom not a cause. And unless you are a native American, or in the UK case a Pict, complaining about immigration is just a symptom of hypocrisy.
BPL: This country was built by immigration. In any case, since we have an aging population and a decreasing ratio of workers to retirees, immigration will be required to keep the social security system working.
KIA 159: Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture
BPL: It’s the last that gives KIA’s real concerns away. Those Hispanics just aren’t white! They don’t bring “our culture” with them!
zebrasays
signin
zebrasays
Since addressing White Male insecurity/inferiority complex is really off topic, let’s have a little lesson on electricity.
I didn’t get a response from EP on why he thinks solar panels cause blackouts, which doesn’t surprise me, and AB didn’t think through the exercise I posed, which is disappointing.
The point of the exercise was to illustrate the framing/warrant issue, and also to illustrate just how wacky EP’s suggestion about preheating combustion air is.
We have a bunch of houses that represent a load of X. (Some actual number, not an unknown.) We have a gas-fired generating plant of capacity X, and we have solar panels on some or all of the houses, which, on a sunny day in summer, provide X as well. (Let’s say for 8 hours.)
As a designer, I would opt to reduce CO2, obviously, by using those solar panels for the 8 hours, and running the steam plant for the other 16. (Leaving out storage, wind, and so on for clarity.)
Now, EP seems to think that it is necessary to keep the generator “on” for those 8 hours, but never explains what that means. We could:
1. Disconnect the generator from the grid.
2. Stop providing water to create steam.
3. Stop burning gas. (Really “off”)
Now, if you disconnect the generator from the grid, but keep it spinning, there is no load on the generator. So we do not require the kinetic energy of the steam that would be converted to electric energy; depending on the design, you would need much less input.
But EP’s brilliant idea is to create a load by hooking up resistance heaters to the output, and then using them to preheat the combustion air being used to heat the water to make the steam to drive the generator so it can produce the electricity to heat the air… aaaahhhh….
Anyway, the real (framing/warrant) point is that what I just described is a solution to the design problem of “how can I produce less CO2 while keeping houses supplied with electricity”. (And not having blackouts, EP.)
It isn’t a Nirvana solution, and it isn’t a solution to “how can I keep everything the same as it was 100 years ago”. But I would say that even the people proposing “National wind and solar with massively interconnected grids” are making the same kind of mistake as those who push Socialized Nuclear.
Let the engineers figure out what works where they live, and make sure the solutions aren’t blocked by monopoly industry control of local government. If producing CO2 has a price, they will find ways to improve on that 1/3 reduction we began with.
William Jacksonsays
#159 Sorry but Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have no greater cachet then yourself when it comes to factuality or truth!
“Denmark adopts climate law to cut emissions 70% by 2030….New law binds Denmark to international climate process, including climate finance to developing countries” The contrast to America is stark.
Al Bundysays
x
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @160 and the party is probably heading towards one hell of a hangover, and a massive federal deficit.
“I’ve walked into places where I was the minority and the feeling isn’t pleasant, especially when you can’t even understand the language. It takes effort to find connections that overcome your tribal instincts.”
Totally relate to this. That language barrier also stokes the paranoia, but they are probably discussing harmless everyday stuff from my experience of working in a large multi cultural office,
Al Bundysays
Ray Ladbury: Faux News
AB: They’ve “upgraded”. They used to have to pretend to be news, but now they’re Faux Nudes, as in “naked lies”.
Ray Ladbury: As to lowering of wages, there is an effect here, but only at the very bottom of the wage scale, and the effects can be overcome by raising minimum wage and enforcing employment protections for citizens and noncitizens alike.
AB: Yes. I’ve pondered whether when ICE raids a facility and they find undocumented immigrants they should arrest the management and seize the facility for being a criminal operation. (Such seizures are essentially impossible to contest)
MRKIA, note how arresting the criminals at the top instead of the victims at the bottom actually solves the problem.
__________
Dan: Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
AB: How cute you are to pretend that “factual” matters to GOPpers. Listen to Trump. Winning is the only thing and facts get in the way. Look at the impeachment, where GOPpers are proudly proclaiming that they WILL violate the oath they will take with regard to impartiality. Go ahead, ask MRKIA if he gives a Rat’s *ss about gleefully bragging about violating legal oaths. That’s way beyond mere lying about facts and MRKIA DOESN’T CARE. Orwell has arrived.
___________
Kevin McKinney,
From your link: ” an energy tax credit, 45Q, that the U.S. passed this year. Under the new credit, projects will get $35 per ton of carbon captured and used for enhanced oil recovery and $50 for carbon captured and stored in geological storage.”
That doesn’t look good to me. There surely is more money to be made in $35 + oil than in $50 flat, which means that the whole thing can be functionally reduced to:
“Oooo, we can extract even more oil if we pretend that we care about the planet!”
Your other link wasn’t as negative as you think (I think). The coal plant’s CCS was being whacked by the fact that CH4 plants are eating coal’s lunch. So, I don’t see the article being terribly informative about CCS.
And time has run out. By the time humanity pivots from fossils CO2 levels will way exceed what the ocean can buffer. BECCS and/or direct air capture will be required regardless of expense. Kind of like that over-priced drug that could cure your terminal illness. Pay or die.
163 – nigelj
“And yes you have to obviously regulate immigration.”
Well, maybe you should talk to Joe about that. Right now it is not regulated – our borders are wide open. Drugs, sex slaves, terrorists, and criminals are flowing freely. One political party wants that to continue. Trump said he’d stop it so we elected him.
163 – nigelj
“…The official data shows over and over that immigrant communities in America have lower crime and drug use than other groups, same in my country….”
164 – Mal Adapted
“…Sure, there are social problems associated with illegal immigration,..”
Thanks for recognizing that. Only one major political party is willing to even give lip service to the problem, the other one does not want any borders at all. That’s a problem.
164 – Mal
“…Indeed, since our internal fertility rate is below replacement level, America’s continued security and prosperity depends on immigrants…..”
Today, govt population guess is 330MM. The population has nearly doubled just in my lifetime. We are waaaaaay beyond replacement.
America was a FAR more prosperous place before our borders were overrun. Kids had jobs after school, in the summer, etc. Problems leftists created have cost us $trillions, probably cost us the country.
169 – Astringent
“…And unless you are a native American…”
I’m not, but probably have more NA blood than Pocahantas. There are no native Americans. Everyone, everywhere, immigrated from another place – unless, perhaps, you live in the Garden of Eden. All nations were created by forcing someone out or killing them, and defending the border – it’s still going on today. Borders must be defended – all nations do it. nigelj, in 163, has given us permission. ;)
165 – Kevin M
“..Every one of which is completely and utterly bogus.”
On Sovereignty, this is from the days of O. Sort comments by “best”, read a few comments:
BPL: Have nothing whatsoever to do with immigration. They are simply and solely to intimidate and control ethnic minorities conquered by China, such as the Tibetans, Turkmen, and Uighurs.
This new research might be of interest. Its open access: “Which practices co‐deliver food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and combat land degradation and desertification?”
nigeljsays
Mr. Know It All @180, I’m going to keep this brief because immigration is getting a bit off topic. Your contention was that immigrants are causing a crime wave, but the first link you posted doesn’t support this. It said numerous studies show immigrants as a whole commit fewer crimes than native born Americans.
The first link does present some evidence that illegal immigrants commit a lot of crimes, but their evidence would need careful scrutiny, and you talked about immigration in general.
In fact Obama rounded up huge numbers of illegals and ejected them from the country. Trump is mostly just arm waving, and doing stupid things like separating mothers and children, and banning tourists.
Your other links are about imprisonment rates, but African Americans are not relevant to current immigration issues, and your links ignored the considerable numbers of immigrants from Asia, so they don’t prove anything useful.
nigeljsays
Zebra @ 173, sounds good overall even to this electrical engineering layperson, but just remember solar grids at any sort of scale are going to have fluctuating output even during 8 hours of good weather, and also you have changing loads due to consumer activity, so voltage fluctuations are inevitable. Therefore you need reactive power in the mix, and turbine style generators can supply this, and so I think they would be operating sometimes even during those 8 hours of good solar output. I think that might have been EP’s point, but god only knows.
Dan: There you go again, full racism and bigotry. In fact, the definition of them. Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
AB: Damn it Dan. I have white skin!!!! The irrelevant fact that I’m a moron pales in comparison to my WHITE SKIN! Buy a clue, dude. ;-)
_______
nigelj: The loss of forest area due to mining is small in terms of area compared to deforestation for agricultural land, and forests can at least be regrown.
AB: Sure, if you ignore all the toxic heavy metals mines release into the wider ecosystem. Heavy metals are gradually removed from the biosphere because they are heavy. Dredging them up sets the cleansing apparatus back thousands of years. In this instance I side with Killian.
_________
astringent: And unless you are a native American, or in the UK case a Pict, complaining about immigration is just a symptom of hypocrisy.
AB: Nope. It’s simply a confirmation of the blue goose pink goose experiment. Animals are attracted to those who resemble their parents, regardless of whether their parents’ color (or whatnot) is the result of genetics or some scientist with a can of spray paint.
__________
zebra: and AB didn’t think through the exercise I posed, which is disappointing.
AB: Dude, I was probably drunk and stoned if I even saw your pose, which is way improbable given the current stupidity that the comments section is. So please say it again, Sam. (And thanks for complimenting me via a dis)
Al Bundysays
MRKIA and E-P,
Why focus on the fact that the percentage of purely white folks is declining when you can cheer about the fact that the percentage of purely black/yellow/brown folks is declining?
MRKIA may not understand but E-P surely knows that hybridization is beneficial.
AB: Truncating a quote in order to obscure is wrong.
Those were your EXACT words. (You might try learning the high-tech trick of ^C/^V. It’s called “copypasta”.) Going back and even sarcastically implying I meant something I specifically ruled out previously is also wrong, wrong, wrong.
As the very next sentence in my comment said, you WEREN’T saying that.
I didn’t say what you “quoted” either. Your alteration removed my specific meaning and substituted your own.
I suspect that you believe I meant what you wrote, which would explain a great deal: reading comprehension failure. We could have been digging into that miscomprehension, but you refuse to admit your error and keep insisting that I said something I provably did not. That’s pure a**h***ry. As is what you followed it with:
There is NOTHING to be learned by looking towards the future. EVERYTHING was solved in the past.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to advance anything beyond the 1970s.
Yeah, right. For one thing, I referred you to this very 21st-century invention by the Southwest Research Institute. For another, Li-ion batteries didn’t exist in the 1970’s and my scheme relies on them heavily for traction batteries, which you would have known had you read and understood this: “It would take perhaps 130 GW(e) to electrify 2/3 of ground vehicle power, leaving the rest for biofuels.”
There’s some humor to be found in this. One of Munilla Construction Management’s executives is on video saying “It’s very important for me as a woman and an engineer to be able to promote that to my daughter, because I think women have a different perspective. We’re able to put in an artistic touch and we’re able to build, too.” Afterward she specifically denied any involvement in the failed bridge (failure is an orphan). It would be very interesting to know if an “artistic touch” had anything to do with the collapse, but I don’t have time to read the full OSHA report to find out.
IF you have it, AND IF you can make certain it’s used to buffer the surges and ebbs rather than exacerbate them. WA doesn’t have it, and nothing I’ve read says that the control protocols exist to handle private customer batteries to manage net demand.
UHVDC transmission is better than curtailment.
It’s roughly 1300 miles from Perth to Adelaide, as the crow flies. It’s over 1600 miles from Perth to Darwin (albeit all over land). Curtailment will be cheaper than building even the cheapest possible line… and there’s no guarantee that either end will be able to use the surpluses from the other.
Please compare your dumping to resistance heat to the above.
I found a range from $1.17 million/mile to $8.62 million/mile for HVDC. At the lowest figure, Perth-to-Adelaide would cost over $1.5 billion; Perth-to-Darwin, over $1.9 billion. I guaran-damn-tee you I can dump 1000 MW to resistance heat for way, way under $1.50/watt; DigiKey lists a 1kΩ 2500 W wirewound resistor for about $0.045/W, quantity 1. They’re quite a bit cheaper if you buy 100 at a time, and that only gets you up to 1/4 megawatt. I bet I could get things at $0.01/W or less at the megawatt level.
I still don’t see the patent potential, at least at the level you’ve gone to.
Haven’t you figured out yet that I PUT THE IDEA IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?
The “zero carbon” scam is just that. It treats the grid as a battery, dumping excess PV power in daytime and the summer and expecting it back at night and in winter… at par. The grid isn’t and can’t deal with this from even a substantial minority of customers, so this nonsense will break down sooner rather than later. When it does, people who bet on the scam going on forever will get burned.
The great thing about hot-water district heat is that water puts fires out. Screwups tend to be a lot less deadly than e.g. natural gas.
I see bio/synfuel engines as an integral part of the system.
As do I. I see about 20 quads/yr of biofuel going into engines of some kind. Very little of it will be for stationary generators. The type of engine is relatively unimportant.
And AB @86 is downright funny:
So, (as I sit down to cede the floor), E-P maintained that copying is 100% accurate, which means he uses copy/paste (remember, I was typing into a small phone). Thus, he couldn’t have typoed and I could hardly not.
He’s descended to blaming his phone, and just admitted that his “quote”, wasn’t.
1. You’re a liar and a fraud, and I will not be drawn into your campaign of bullshit.
What a pathetic display of intellectual cowardice, calling a question a lie. “Run away, run away!”
2. The issues with nuclear are obvious and well-known. Anyone pushing it as a solution is 1. a liar (you), 2. a fool (you) or too ignorant of regenerative processes to know better (you and Hansen).
So tell me, and everyone: just how are France, and Sweden, and Ontario “liars” for decarbonizing their electric grids with nuclear energy? If you can’t explain it, you are the fraud and the liar.
I wrote about it more than ten years ago. Look it up at aperfectstormcometh.
You propose a “market”. The problem is, the market you anticipate has people selecting over minutes and hours. However, capital cost needs to be handled over years and decades. You pick something and stick with it.
Take NuScale (please!). The anticipated unit cost is on the order of USD5000/kW(e) for 60 MW apiece. However, that is electric output, at about 30% conversion efficiency; that means on the order of 140 MW of heat (out of 200 MW(th) output from the reactor) is at least potentially available as a byproduct. So for your USD5000/MW(e), you have a low-grade heat capital cost of about USD2100/kW… which offsets your electric cost. How you allocate it is up to you.
If you can actually use all 140 MW of heat (that’s 478 million BTU/hr, worth about $89,000/d at my local price if it can displace natural gas at 1:1) you’d displace about 218 tons/day of methane which burns to almost 600 tons/day of CO2. Of course, most of this heat will be produced when it is NOT useful and must be discarded; however, as an offset to electric power produced and sold, it’s a substantial bonus during the heating season and a smaller but steady one for DHW all year.
The heating CO2 bonus is a two-fer: you displace as much as 33 tons of CO2 per hour (~790 tons/day) from electric (compared to gas-fired turbines) and as much as another ~600 tons/day from heating. You accomplish this with no particulates and no NOx. If you merely value the CO2 savings at $100/ton, that’s $79,000/d for electric power and as much as $60,000/d for heat. Figuring the former 365 days a year and the latter 90 days/yr, you’d get $34 million/yr in savings. Amortizing a $300 million plant over 30 years at 7% only costs $24 million/yr, so the carbon tax savings would pay for it right there.
I think it is pretty well established that generating-market systems can work
In this “market” system, which parties are responsible for supplying inertia, reactive power and regulation? With “energy only” compensation, how do they get paid?
So far as I can tell, they don’t. This means that those necessities will be neglected going forward. And that will lead to increasing instability and then blackouts ala South Australia. When politics meets physics, politics loses every time. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Disobey physics and you’re screwed.
as you said, and I’ve said, nuclear plants can be part of the mix, as they are in Texas.
That really depends on whether they are prized as essential providers of zero-emission base-load and reactive power, or demonized as “unclean”, shoved to the back of the dispatch order and forced out of business. We’ve seen the latter at Kewaunee, Vermont Yankee and other plants.
One of the very cool things about the Pando platform is that it is app-based. Buyers and sellers connect via smartphone without involving the utility company directly, although GMP
Stop RIGHT there. Green Mountain Power is wholly owned by Gaz Metro, the Quebec natural gas company. There is nothing “green” about “Green Mountain Power” any more; it is a zombie controlled by the fossil-fuel lobby.
I see we’re back to “solar panels will make the wires explode”.
Nobody ever said they’d make the wires explode. We said they’d do things like force power levels on the must-run plants to be reduced to the point where they e.g. have unstable combustion in the furnaces and have to shut down. Then one of two things happens with relatively high frequency:
1. You don’t have enough reactive power or frequency control or whatever, leading to blackout.
2. When the solar panels stop producing (which they do every evening), you can’t get those plants back on-line fast enough so… customers are “curtailed” meaning rolling blackouts. That mitigates the duck-curve on the demand side. Woe be unto you if you needed to cook dinner.
If the terms of art don’t mean anything to you, it means you don’t have enough knowledge to have an opinion. If you didn’t understand the cited news article, not just ditto but tritto. If you can’t be bothered to study, why do you even post? To see your own blather?
Did you notice anything about my combustion-air-dump-load scheme? One of the things you can do with it is pre-heat some or all of the feed air above the fuel’s auto-ignition temperature. If the fuel can’t NOT burn, combustion instability is impossible.
Say I have a steam generator with X capacity, and it is connected to a bunch of houses
Steam generators are connected to turbines, not houses. Modern non-forced-air heating systems use either baseboard or in-floor radiant hot water, generally well below boiling.
Just explain the physics for this simple case
I have explained it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. The effort has to come from you.
Direct application to NuScale reactor vessel production; new machine to handle workpieces up to 3 m diameter. Note that the Fermi 1 core was only 2030 mm across.
Mr. Know It Allsays
173 – zebra
“…We have a bunch of houses that represent a load of X…”
Nah, we only have one house – the House of Representatives. To solve your algebra problem, X = horse sheeeit.
:)
178 – Al Bundy
“…Go ahead, ask MRKIA if he gives a Rat’s *ss about gleefully bragging about violating legal oaths….”
Yes, I do care greatly – those who do such things should be prosecuted. May I present exhibit A:
vehicles are the natural liquid fuel users and they’re generally lousy BECCSers.
Chemical CO2 sorbents tend to be costly to regenerate (quicklime) or have to be replaced regularly (amines). It may be possible to make vehicles that way if you can find a way to (a) keep nitrogen out of the CO2 stream and (b) still dump water.
Here’s another idea for free: Use a solid-oxide fuel cell for the vehicle’s sustainer power. Feed it with methanol. SOFCs carry oxygen ions through their membrane, so naturally separate oxygen from nitrogen. Design the SOFC to operate under high pressure on the fuel side. At the outlet of the fuel mixture, use an electric hydrogen concentrator to pull any remaining hydrogen out of the gas mix and recirculate it to the fuel inlet (this will also reform any remaining CO to CO2). Use the water-permeable membranes used to squeeze the last bits of water out of fuel ethanol to dump the water to the atmosphere as vapor. Cool the remnant CO2 to ambient and store under pressure. Offload the CO2 at the same stations where you add fuel.
This requires some bulky tanks, but holding liquid CO2 only takes about 1/10 the pressure rating required for hydrogen. You should be able to get by with steel, and if you have a leak there’s no risk of fire.
If you can’t make a SOFC that holds so much pressure, have a compressor for the CO2 or fuel with ammonia instead of methanol and avoid handling carbon entirely. Note that there have been not one but two announcements of new ammonia catalysts recently, one conventional and one for electrochemical ammonia generation (which has a lousy turnover rate so far).
So why those huge dams, why not enough turbine capacity ready to take the springfloods when it comes and the autumn floods if it comes, and produce and store aluminium or ferrosilicium or Salpeter?
Believe it or not, most dams have enough turbine capacity to handle almost anything Nature can throw at them. They have to, because very few can hold the full spring melt in the reservoir and running water down long spillways charges it full of nitrogen and hurts fish downstream. The EPA and Fish and Wildlife frown on that.
Rather store variable and unpredictable electric energy in wares and materials that must be produced in any case, but can easily be stored
This is what everyone’s saying we should use hydrogen for (round-trip efficiency, roughly 40%). Hydrocarbons (esp. methane) are much easier to store than hydrogen, though still inefficient. Your problem is the investment of money (and embodied energy and CO2 emissions) in stuff that sits idle most of the time; it can’t be cutting our CO2 output if it isn’t working.
2) I’m amazed that Fermi 1 is cited as solution. I mean, it’s not as if its brief career were exactly glorious. Here’s part of the summary linked:
The reactor was tested at low power in its first couple years of operation. Power ascension testing above 1 Mwt commenced in December 1965, immediately following receipt of the high power operating license. In October 1966, during a power ascension, a zirconium plate at the bottom of the reactor vessel became loose and blocked sodium coolant flow to some fuel subassemblies. Two subassemblies started to melt.
That little incident was treated at book length in a little volume called “We Almost Lost Detroit.” Well, perhaps that’s alarmist
Extremely so. The core of EBR-I was melted while investigating the cause of some odd power excursions that were not understood. It made somewhat of a mess, but it damaged nothing outside of the core itself. Literally nothing worse happened at Fermi 1, and the undetectable harms from TMI Unit 2 have to be measured against the all-too-detectable harms from the coal-fired power which replaced it. Healthwise, all these breakdowns were non-events.
What really matters is that a worst-case scenario would also have been a health non-event. Hans Bethe himself did an analysis of a meltdown in which the top half of the core all melted more or less instantaneously and fell under gravity into the bottom half. Greatest possible energy yield: about 200 lb of TNT-equivalent. That wouldn’t have lost Detroit, it would barely make the control-room crew lose their bowel control. Impossible in any event; current designs suspend fuel from the top, so a meltdown would cause it to fall apart instead of together and shut down.
The loose zirconium plate was from an addition that was not on the blueprints; it was claimed that someone decided to add some “flow improvements”. It was obviously not fastened in place firmly enough, which begs the question: was it a failure to plan, or a plan to fail? Regardless, without it the unit would have run for quite some time. EBR-II ran from 1964 until Congress shut down all advanced nuclear research in 1994. It was in pristine shape when it was taken apart, with the builders’ original chalk marks still intact on the inside of the reactor vessel; had it not been commanded to close, it would likely still be running today.
What matters isn’t what we didn’t know then, it’s what we know now. We don’t need to do years of low-power testing on a known configuration (note that EBR-II was being built about the same time). We have 50+ more years of experience with fuel reprocessing. We can weld with robots and electron beams instead of by hand. We can build the same thing cheaper, faster and more reproducibly. AAMOF, we are now able to mass-produce what used to be hand-built.
The thing E-P suggests is borderline-perpetual-motion
Are you saying that you can’t substitute 1 BTU of electricity for 1 BTU of fuel? There’s nothing “perpetual motion” about it; it’s a highly lossy substitution but the boiler doesn’t care what the heat comes from.
Figuring the steam plant running at best efficiency, 1 kWh of energy generated elsewhere replaces roughly 10,500 BTU of coal. If you get down to dumping electric power into the combustion air in lieu of cranking heat back below the minimum, 1 kWh substitutes for only 3414 BTU of coal. The only thing to be said for this is that it’s better than throwing the electricity away (curtailment), which doesn’t substitute for anything. You might as well make use of it.
and certainly not patentable
“Method of making use of excess solar electricity and providing grid regulation and spinning reserve using a steam-cycle power plant at minimum power level.”
NEW ECONOMICAL HYDROGEN ELECTROLYSIS FROM WATER
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/scientists-find-cheaper-way-to-make-hydrogen-energy-out-of-water/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13415-8
Electriq~Global: A Water-Based Fuel for Zero-Emissions Transportation
Will work at mass transportation levels????
The on-board Electriq system generates hydrogen on-demand by controlling the physical interface between the Electriq switch (catalyst) and the fuel. The H2 generated by the fuel is immediately consumed by the fuel-cell and turned into electricity. “As such, the system is safe and does not contain hazardous H2 gas at any given time,” explains Guy N. Michrowski, CEO. Moreover, leftovers from the fuel can be recycled to produce the new one, so that “the footprint of our technology is zero when we use renewable energy to recycle our fuel,” Michrowski states.
https://en.reset.org/blog/electriqglobal-water-based-fuel-zero-emissions-transportation-12172018
and/or petrol powered self charging 100% EV – The NISSAN Note e-POWER – est. $15,000 USD – Engine: 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol – Motor: 40kW Electric motor – Battery: 1.5kWh – a theoretical range of over 1300km (867 Miles) on a single 47-litre (11 Gallon) tank of petrol. That equates to an official fuel consumption figure (JC08) of just 2.9L/100km.
https://www.carsales.com.au/editorial/details/nissan-note-e-power-2018-review-111177/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/14/un-climate-talks-drag-on-as-rifts-scupper-hopes-of-breakthrough
“UN climate talks end with limited progress on emissions targets…” Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns, with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic thrown in for good measure.
Forced Responses?
The current Australian climate, the extensive extreme mega-drought, dry rivers, water supply dams deteriorating, and now the last 2 months of raging Bushfires nationally are surely the classic example of “forced responses” to global warming and climate change impacts today.
Bushfire outlook update makes for more grim reading for summer ahead
ABC Weather Updated about an hour ago
We’re already dealing with a fire season for the record books — crews exhausted, millions of hectares burnt, scores of houses destroyed — but an update of the danger ahead paints an even more ominous picture.
Key points:
The bushfire outlook from August warned of above-normal bushfire conditions for most of the east coast this summer, as well as parts of all states and the ACT
Today’s update expands the above-normal region further north in Queensland, across to northern Victoria and further along the Tasmanian coast
Experts say the only thing that would change this outlook would be widespread rainfall, which is not likely this summer
(takes us up to Feb 2020 – but the fire season can run through to Easter)
The outlook was already bad, with above-normal fire potential for most of the east coast.
Now, the areas considered at greater threat have expanded into northern Victoria, northern Queensland and further along the Tasmanian coast. (see Map incl)
Dr Richard Thornton, chief executive of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC), said the update reinforced its outlook from August.
“This is coming on top of what we now have seen, which is a very early start to the fire season and a really severe start across large parts of NSW, Queensland and, more recently, over the weekend in WA,” he said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-16/bushfire-outlook-update-makes-for-more-grim-reading/11802452
Yes fires have ben bad before , and were also driven by extreme climate impacts the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires and some, yet still today the key word describing the current situation in weather and bushfires is Unprecedented aka never before has it been like this – ever.
Meanwhile I see the Chile COP located in Madrid has pretty much failed, pushing off the issues until Glascow COP which is the last chance to validate the Paris Agreement targets to 2030 in hard commitments.
I have a prediction – the UNFCCC / COP system is going to collapse. Because now globally everything is getting to the pointy end of dealing with AGW/CC or walking away. Too many nations are going to do a USA and walk away.
Leaving those who are left (at least half serious about it) with nothing to do that makes rational sense. It’s all in or none are in. Therefore it will be the latter by the look at it.
If they do manage to make some commitments in Glasgow (to save the UNFCCC system) they’ll be so weak as not to make a difference anyway. 30 years of wasting time energy and money and tons of science. What a pathetic joke this has been.
Today it’s Australia’s turn in the news, as the next decade unfolds every nation will be so effected in some way shape or form (like the Greece and CA and Canadian and Norwegian and Swedish and Siberian fires) with similar “natural” disasters and their rising costs.
My money is still on September 2025 +/- for the first Blue Ocean Ice Free Summer Arctic Event. Have a peaceful happy Christmas anyway.
We’re not going to be able to contain these fires: NSW RFS Commissioner
40-41 C temps (video 2 mins)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-16/were-not-going-to-be-able-to-contain-these-fires:rfs/11802838
Killian @141
“You *still* don’t belong in the conversation.”
No you don’t belong in this conversation. You are too obnoxious, personal and childish and you constantly miss the point and engage in pedantic attacks on peoples use of terminology. Many of your ideas are just not thought through, and others are just plain silly. The reason alternatives to nitrogen triflouride and sulphur hexachloride are not being used much yet is they are new products and it takes time to get market penetration, doh!
Kevin McKinney @145, its that definitions thing again. I understand renewables to mean just wind and solar power and no storage, and hydro power is just zero carbon. But I think we are mostly on the same page on the main thing which is the overall composition of a future grid!
Time to comment so I can see comments 136 to 149. It works. Weird!
127 – Al Bundy
“That’s the story of Brexit, a national tragedy. That’s the story of Johnson, the man of no convictions. That’s the story of Trump, who makes puppets of people through manipulation of outrage and disregard for truth…..”
Incorrect. Brexit and Boris are the result of uncontrolled immigration and leftist nut-baggery. Exactly the same things that resulted in Trump. The ‘Muricans and Brits “get it”. Many of the other Europeans are “getting it” also. The movement will spread. The nut-baggery will stop, one way or another. Today I read that India “gets it” – sort comments by “best”:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/india-protest-violence-non-muslim-citizenship-rule
Do not despair over Boris and Brexit. Boris said in his victory speech that the people voted to be carbon neutral and they would make that happen – listen from 5:10 to 5:30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-aIEzL72k
133 – Erik Lindeberg
“…There are approximately 10 000 of these unabated CO2 sources all over the world. The only rational option from an economic point of view is to clean up these point sources now for a much smaller cost than to to BECCS in a future when we are desperate…..”
This sounds promising. Has this been done for any existing plants? Do we know costs for design, equipment, installation, maintenance, etc? Do we know power requirements and whether it impacts plant output?
146 – Kevin McKinney
“… In particular, it fails to count the savings the plan would achieve,….”
Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc. Perhaps in SC you are not as aware of the problems as we are in the Western US? It is a world-wide problem – see Brexit, see India riots today, Chinese detention camps, see many EU nations very unhappy over uncontrolled immigration. It does not work, for a lot of reasons. Ask Boris Johnson and President Trump how they know I am right. ;)
nigelj: Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns, with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic thrown in for good measure.
AB: Eh, here in the USA we’re burning the deck chairs to make pretty bonfires. Party as if it were 1999.
_________
MRKIA: Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.
AB: Your facts are wrong but you do point to the Big Concern. “Leave it to Beaver” is leaving the building, both from a whiteness standpoint and a staidness standpoint. Your problem is that the change is inevitable and ongoing. Currently your side can still steal elections through gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation campaigns, and whatnot. But that era is ending. Look at voting patterns by age cohorts. GOPpers are dying off and every time a “White” dates a “non-White” (and especially if a baby results) your team just shrank. Neither of the kids are going to be slightly impressed with, “Look at My African American!” Tokenism and allusion to ownership all wrapped up with a not-so-pretty bow.
The USA is going through a demographic shift. I get it. I’ve walked into places where I was the minority and the feeling isn’t pleasant, especially when you can’t even understand the language. It takes effort to find connections that overcome your tribal instincts.
You can’t win against the genetic merging that under the “one drop” rule means They get larger and you shrink. Now couple that with the human instinct where reproduction is inversely related to security and success. The marginalized always out-reproduce the mainstream.
So you have a couple of options: you can give up your tribalism or you can go all-in with genocide or involuntary sterilization or 3/5ths rules or all of the above. (I think the Palestinians should start begging to become 3/5ths of a human, to get 3/5th of a vote, kinda like old time USA slaves.)
Or, as GOPpers seem to be choosing, you can say “Ef ’em all” and burn the planet to the ground.
Mr. KIA seems to be relying heavily on Faux News for his alternative facts.
Here in the real Universe the facts are as follows:
1) Immigrants generally commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born US citizens.
2) Immigrants are no more likely to be drug users or drug sellers than native-born citizens.
3) The US is a culture developed by immigrants. It seems to me much more likely that we undermine US culture by excluding immigrants than by welcoming them.
4) Pray, how is US sovereignty lost by allowing immigrants into the country. Talk about nonsequiturs.
5) As to lowering of wages, there is an effect here, but only at the very bottom of the wage scale, and the effects can be overcome by raising minimum wage and enforcing employment protections for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Engineer-Poet @137
thank’s for the detailed response on nuclear energy options. I don’t have time to comment too much, just acknowledging I read it, but here are a couple of random thoughts that jumped out:
Right now a lot of countries are going down the renewables route and relying on gas fired power to deal with intermittency issues, hoping it will become economic to replace this with storage. If it isnt then nuclear power will become an inevitable sort of option anyway. However the other viable pathway is nuclear power from day one. The important thing is zero carbon energy, one way or the other.
The key is the safety issue, You guys probably need to better explain levels of risk with nuclear power and without rubbishing the critics, or cherry picking information, because that will just make them more stubborn. As far as I can tell the linear no threshold model looks at least partly out of date. I have briefly looked at it, and the risks of very low level radiation look non existent for most people, and look like they would be confined to people with compromised immune systems from illnesses, and young children. But even these risks appear small, and children are far more at risk from a hundred other things in daily life. That’s my take anyway.
“It doesn’t need much brain power or imagination to see this, or maybe it does. Providing we target that assistance carefully, and control how its spent somehow.”
“That was called “colonialism”, and it is distinctly out of fashion. De-colonization shows just how wrong you are. Prosperous first-world Rhodesia is now starving Zimbabwe, dependent on food aid and unable to keep the lights on even with coal plants. These people are not going to build nukes.”
That’s stetching things. Colonialism is in the past and was something else entirely different from international aid. Colonialism was always destined to end because it was forced on people, and this conflicts with basic notions about individual liberty ,subscribed to by most people on both left and right.
Unfortunately some African countries have fools for leaders, like in Zimbabwe, but some other countries are doing ok.
It’s more about what we do NOW in relation to Africa as I pointed out. Theres no much point in arguing endlessly about the past or solutions that have no real chance of working like going back to colonialism.
I think immigration is a net positive, providing its regulated and numbers are capped. But its too off topic to go into.
“those nuclear power stations look huge and are built like fortresses.”
“That’s just because it’s all in one place, and they put it to good use. Being all in one place is a GOOD thing, as it affects far less of the landscape. We should use as little from nature as we can, because there are just too many of us now. Using things nature doesn’t have a use for should be our organizing principle.”
Yes the comment on resource use is one thing in favour off nuclear power. Wind power is increasingly going offshore which deals with the appearance issue.
Sorry if I appear to be arguing both sides of the issue simultaneously. I’m currently living alone and I tend to argue with myself as a result, taking both sides of things sometimes.
Mr KIA @159 says “Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.’
This is just so completely crazy. The official data shows over and over that immigrant communities in America have lower crime and drug use than other groups, same in my country. Immigration is nothing to do with the Sovereignty issue, and low wages are more to do with automation in the manufacturing sector.
Obviously immigration has huge benefits that KIA conveniently ignores. Yes America takes a lot of immigrants each year but on a per capita basis no more than countries like Canada and Germany etc. And yes you have to obviously regulate immigration.
Ok I’m breaking my own rule on not commenting on immigration, but KIA is so one sided and mistaken on immigration, you can’t trust his evaluations on other things like the climate issue.
Mr. IAT:
Good grief! IAT again waves his bigotry for all the world to see. Since he doesn’t offer credible documentation for his bigoted claims this time either, we may assume his concerns are shared only with other xenophobic bigots. America, after all, is a nation of immigrants. My maternal grandparents moved here from the UK, and my father’s father’s father from Sweden; my other direct ancestors all originally came from somewhere else, too.
I’ve lived all over the Western US for the last 25 years, and immigration is way down the list of issues I feel are serious. Sure, there are social problems associated with illegal immigration, largely falling on the undocumented themselves. Many of those problems can be solved by greatly expanding and expediting legal immigration, rather than pandering to irrational fear of “crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc.” Indeed, since our internal fertility rate is below replacement level, America’s continued security and prosperity depends on immigrants. Can manufacturing survive within our borders? Who is going to produce, or buy, our goods? Who will mow our lawns, bag our groceries, drive our Uber cars, fight our wars?
It seems IAT can’t conceive of “enlightened self-interest”. He’s all about making culture war against his imagined adversaries, not comprehending that any victories for his tribe of bigots are Pyrrhic: harmful to America’s ability to thrive in a changing world. Some dare call it treason.
#159, KIA–
Every one of which is completely and utterly bogus.
And still off-topic.
#133 et seq.–
As to CCS–“Carbon Capture and Sequestration”–it’s expensive. Personally, I think that with “cheap coal” having become a term with mainly historical reference due to the continuing decline in the costs of wind and solar, CCS doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: more rational simply to close the coal-fired plant and build a wind or solar farm.
But cement manufacture and steelmaking may both be possible use cases for CCS: alternate tech exists or is under active development, but is still expensive. The economics almost certainly require carbon fees/taxes/credits to work.
And some folks are optimistic about CCS:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/carbon-capture-gains-momentum
Still, I have my doubts:
https://ieefa.org/saskpower-no-more-carbon-capture-projects-at-boundary-dam/
re: 159. “Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc…”
There you go again, full racism and bigotry. In fact, the definition of them. Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
Regarding the article by Godwin Vasanth Bosco that stated: “The Idea That ‘Green Technology’ Can Help Save the Environment Is Dangerous” and “Industrialists around the world have been extracting a wide array of minerals and metals to build electric vehicles and ‘cleaner’ batteries, simply replacing one injustice with another.”
https://thewire.in/environment/the-idea-that-green-technology-can-help-save-the-environment-is-dangerous
Adding to earlier comments. The alleged injustices we are causing by fixing the climate problem include mainly child labour in cobalt mines, some political issue with lithium mines and loss of some forests due to expanded mining. The writer uses this to be critical of things like The Green New Deal and renewable energy production (one suspects nuclear power as well), and electric vehicles.
Now nobody in their right mind likes mining where it involves child labour, and where mining causes deforestation, and I sympathise with the author, but I can tell you for free the climate problem is a million times worse than these mining problems, and at every possible level so we need mining and alternative energy production.
Child labour is not exclusive to cobalt mines, you see it in some lead and copper mines. We use cobalt for far more applications than just climate change mitigation so what is the author suggesting? Stop using batteries? The real answer is to stop the use of child labour. There is much that could be done to put pressure on countries that use child labour, or offer them some incentives to change their laws.
The loss of forest area due to mining is small in terms of area compared to deforestation for agricultural land, and forests can at least be regrown. If areas are very sensitive ecologically there might be a case to relocate species that are effected and endangered (this has been done in NZ). If mining is properly done environmental impacts can be minimised.
The article also talks about the demands for resources made by The Green New Deal and renewable energy and by inference nuclear power, and the problem of mineral scarcity, but its all just arm waving. There are no real numbers or balanced commentary, and the article lacks a complete picture of the resources available. Proper published studies show there isn’t a problem.
Now obviously humanity is going to start running out of at least some economically recoverable minerals sooner or later, and we will be reduced to recycling whats left. We can reduce pain for future generations if we move to get population growth to stop, and we obviously shouldn’t waste resources on things that add little value but beyond this its hard to see solutions that make much sense.
I make no apologies for some healthy scepticism. Our core solution to the climate problem is new energy sources and technology, and I’m not going to stand by while people undermine this.
158 and 159 MKIA . crime, drugs, destruction of culture, loss of American Sovereignty, lowering of wages, etc . And all this due to those pesky immigrants? That, with ‘Engerland’ substituted for ‘American’ was the manta of the pro Brexit politicians. And in common with many politicians they offered no evidence for any of it. There are lots of problems in the modern world, but immigration is a symptom not a cause. And unless you are a native American, or in the UK case a Pict, complaining about immigration is just a symptom of hypocrisy.
KIA 158: “uncontrolled immigration…”
BPL: This country was built by immigration. In any case, since we have an aging population and a decreasing ratio of workers to retirees, immigration will be required to keep the social security system working.
KIA 159: Monetary costs of immigration, although extremely high, are only a minor concern. Bigger concerns are crime, drugs, destruction of culture
BPL: It’s the last that gives KIA’s real concerns away. Those Hispanics just aren’t white! They don’t bring “our culture” with them!
signin
Since addressing White Male insecurity/inferiority complex is really off topic, let’s have a little lesson on electricity.
I didn’t get a response from EP on why he thinks solar panels cause blackouts, which doesn’t surprise me, and AB didn’t think through the exercise I posed, which is disappointing.
The point of the exercise was to illustrate the framing/warrant issue, and also to illustrate just how wacky EP’s suggestion about preheating combustion air is.
We have a bunch of houses that represent a load of X. (Some actual number, not an unknown.) We have a gas-fired generating plant of capacity X, and we have solar panels on some or all of the houses, which, on a sunny day in summer, provide X as well. (Let’s say for 8 hours.)
As a designer, I would opt to reduce CO2, obviously, by using those solar panels for the 8 hours, and running the steam plant for the other 16. (Leaving out storage, wind, and so on for clarity.)
Now, EP seems to think that it is necessary to keep the generator “on” for those 8 hours, but never explains what that means. We could:
1. Disconnect the generator from the grid.
2. Stop providing water to create steam.
3. Stop burning gas. (Really “off”)
Now, if you disconnect the generator from the grid, but keep it spinning, there is no load on the generator. So we do not require the kinetic energy of the steam that would be converted to electric energy; depending on the design, you would need much less input.
But EP’s brilliant idea is to create a load by hooking up resistance heaters to the output, and then using them to preheat the combustion air being used to heat the water to make the steam to drive the generator so it can produce the electricity to heat the air… aaaahhhh….
Anyway, the real (framing/warrant) point is that what I just described is a solution to the design problem of “how can I produce less CO2 while keeping houses supplied with electricity”. (And not having blackouts, EP.)
It isn’t a Nirvana solution, and it isn’t a solution to “how can I keep everything the same as it was 100 years ago”. But I would say that even the people proposing “National wind and solar with massively interconnected grids” are making the same kind of mistake as those who push Socialized Nuclear.
Let the engineers figure out what works where they live, and make sure the solutions aren’t blocked by monopoly industry control of local government. If producing CO2 has a price, they will find ways to improve on that 1/3 reduction we began with.
#159 Sorry but Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have no greater cachet then yourself when it comes to factuality or truth!
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/12/06/denmark-adopts-climate-law-cut-emissions-70-2030/
“Denmark adopts climate law to cut emissions 70% by 2030….New law binds Denmark to international climate process, including climate finance to developing countries” The contrast to America is stark.
x
Al Bundy @160 and the party is probably heading towards one hell of a hangover, and a massive federal deficit.
“I’ve walked into places where I was the minority and the feeling isn’t pleasant, especially when you can’t even understand the language. It takes effort to find connections that overcome your tribal instincts.”
Totally relate to this. That language barrier also stokes the paranoia, but they are probably discussing harmless everyday stuff from my experience of working in a large multi cultural office,
Ray Ladbury: Faux News
AB: They’ve “upgraded”. They used to have to pretend to be news, but now they’re Faux Nudes, as in “naked lies”.
Ray Ladbury: As to lowering of wages, there is an effect here, but only at the very bottom of the wage scale, and the effects can be overcome by raising minimum wage and enforcing employment protections for citizens and noncitizens alike.
AB: Yes. I’ve pondered whether when ICE raids a facility and they find undocumented immigrants they should arrest the management and seize the facility for being a criminal operation. (Such seizures are essentially impossible to contest)
MRKIA, note how arresting the criminals at the top instead of the victims at the bottom actually solves the problem.
__________
Dan: Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
AB: How cute you are to pretend that “factual” matters to GOPpers. Listen to Trump. Winning is the only thing and facts get in the way. Look at the impeachment, where GOPpers are proudly proclaiming that they WILL violate the oath they will take with regard to impartiality. Go ahead, ask MRKIA if he gives a Rat’s *ss about gleefully bragging about violating legal oaths. That’s way beyond mere lying about facts and MRKIA DOESN’T CARE. Orwell has arrived.
___________
Kevin McKinney,
From your link: ” an energy tax credit, 45Q, that the U.S. passed this year. Under the new credit, projects will get $35 per ton of carbon captured and used for enhanced oil recovery and $50 for carbon captured and stored in geological storage.”
That doesn’t look good to me. There surely is more money to be made in $35 + oil than in $50 flat, which means that the whole thing can be functionally reduced to:
“Oooo, we can extract even more oil if we pretend that we care about the planet!”
Your other link wasn’t as negative as you think (I think). The coal plant’s CCS was being whacked by the fact that CH4 plants are eating coal’s lunch. So, I don’t see the article being terribly informative about CCS.
And time has run out. By the time humanity pivots from fossils CO2 levels will way exceed what the ocean can buffer. BECCS and/or direct air capture will be required regardless of expense. Kind of like that over-priced drug that could cure your terminal illness. Pay or die.
Heatwave! Let’s go camping and check out the ice:
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/ca/resolute?cm_ven=localwx_10day
Just posting so I can read comments 160-169. :)
Good thing I read those comments 160-169. I’ve been attacked. :) Let us start with some inconvenient humor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMEg4zGCQVs
;)
163 – nigelj
“And yes you have to obviously regulate immigration.”
Well, maybe you should talk to Joe about that. Right now it is not regulated – our borders are wide open. Drugs, sex slaves, terrorists, and criminals are flowing freely. One political party wants that to continue. Trump said he’d stop it so we elected him.
163 – nigelj
“…The official data shows over and over that immigrant communities in America have lower crime and drug use than other groups, same in my country….”
Nice try. Some inconvenient facts:
https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/327229-crimes-by-illegal-aliens-not-legal-immigrants-are-the-real
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Incarceration_by_race_and_ethnicity
164 – Mal Adapted
“…Sure, there are social problems associated with illegal immigration,..”
Thanks for recognizing that. Only one major political party is willing to even give lip service to the problem, the other one does not want any borders at all. That’s a problem.
164 – Mal
“…Indeed, since our internal fertility rate is below replacement level, America’s continued security and prosperity depends on immigrants…..”
Today, govt population guess is 330MM. The population has nearly doubled just in my lifetime. We are waaaaaay beyond replacement.
https://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table/by-year
America was a FAR more prosperous place before our borders were overrun. Kids had jobs after school, in the summer, etc. Problems leftists created have cost us $trillions, probably cost us the country.
169 – Astringent
“…And unless you are a native American…”
I’m not, but probably have more NA blood than Pocahantas. There are no native Americans. Everyone, everywhere, immigrated from another place – unless, perhaps, you live in the Garden of Eden. All nations were created by forcing someone out or killing them, and defending the border – it’s still going on today. Borders must be defended – all nations do it. nigelj, in 163, has given us permission. ;)
165 – Kevin M
“..Every one of which is completely and utterly bogus.”
On Sovereignty, this is from the days of O. Sort comments by “best”, read a few comments:
https://www.breitbart.com/local/2014/07/04/American-Flag-Burned-at-Murrieta-Protests-on-4th-of-July/
:)
KIA 159: Chinese detention camps
BPL: Have nothing whatsoever to do with immigration. They are simply and solely to intimidate and control ethnic minorities conquered by China, such as the Tibetans, Turkmen, and Uighurs.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14878?af=R
This new research might be of interest. Its open access: “Which practices co‐deliver food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and combat land degradation and desertification?”
Mr. Know It All @180, I’m going to keep this brief because immigration is getting a bit off topic. Your contention was that immigrants are causing a crime wave, but the first link you posted doesn’t support this. It said numerous studies show immigrants as a whole commit fewer crimes than native born Americans.
The first link does present some evidence that illegal immigrants commit a lot of crimes, but their evidence would need careful scrutiny, and you talked about immigration in general.
In fact Obama rounded up huge numbers of illegals and ejected them from the country. Trump is mostly just arm waving, and doing stupid things like separating mothers and children, and banning tourists.
Your other links are about imprisonment rates, but African Americans are not relevant to current immigration issues, and your links ignored the considerable numbers of immigrants from Asia, so they don’t prove anything useful.
Zebra @ 173, sounds good overall even to this electrical engineering layperson, but just remember solar grids at any sort of scale are going to have fluctuating output even during 8 hours of good weather, and also you have changing loads due to consumer activity, so voltage fluctuations are inevitable. Therefore you need reactive power in the mix, and turbine style generators can supply this, and so I think they would be operating sometimes even during those 8 hours of good solar output. I think that might have been EP’s point, but god only knows.
https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2016/may/reactive-power
Dan: There you go again, full racism and bigotry. In fact, the definition of them. Lazily regurgitating and supporting long debunked white supremacist talking points does not make them any more factual.
AB: Damn it Dan. I have white skin!!!! The irrelevant fact that I’m a moron pales in comparison to my WHITE SKIN! Buy a clue, dude. ;-)
_______
nigelj: The loss of forest area due to mining is small in terms of area compared to deforestation for agricultural land, and forests can at least be regrown.
AB: Sure, if you ignore all the toxic heavy metals mines release into the wider ecosystem. Heavy metals are gradually removed from the biosphere because they are heavy. Dredging them up sets the cleansing apparatus back thousands of years. In this instance I side with Killian.
_________
astringent: And unless you are a native American, or in the UK case a Pict, complaining about immigration is just a symptom of hypocrisy.
AB: Nope. It’s simply a confirmation of the blue goose pink goose experiment. Animals are attracted to those who resemble their parents, regardless of whether their parents’ color (or whatnot) is the result of genetics or some scientist with a can of spray paint.
__________
zebra: and AB didn’t think through the exercise I posed, which is disappointing.
AB: Dude, I was probably drunk and stoned if I even saw your pose, which is way improbable given the current stupidity that the comments section is. So please say it again, Sam. (And thanks for complimenting me via a dis)
MRKIA and E-P,
Why focus on the fact that the percentage of purely white folks is declining when you can cheer about the fact that the percentage of purely black/yellow/brown folks is declining?
MRKIA may not understand but E-P surely knows that hybridization is beneficial.
Ain’t it a hoot that bald racism is back?
(ye gods, am I really more than a week behind here? yes I am.)
AB fumes @79:
Those were your EXACT words. (You might try learning the high-tech trick of ^C/^V. It’s called “copypasta”.) Going back and even sarcastically implying I meant something I specifically ruled out previously is also wrong, wrong, wrong.
I didn’t say what you “quoted” either. Your alteration removed my specific meaning and substituted your own.
I suspect that you believe I meant what you wrote, which would explain a great deal: reading comprehension failure. We could have been digging into that miscomprehension, but you refuse to admit your error and keep insisting that I said something I provably did not. That’s pure a**h***ry. As is what you followed it with:
Yeah, right. For one thing, I referred you to this very 21st-century invention by the Southwest Research Institute. For another, Li-ion batteries didn’t exist in the 1970’s and my scheme relies on them heavily for traction batteries, which you would have known had you read and understood this: “It would take perhaps 130 GW(e) to electrify 2/3 of ground vehicle power, leaving the rest for biofuels.”
You lied; you specifically said that you DIDN’T try:
You’ve contradicted yourself so many times, a lawyer would have a field day cross-examining you. You practically begged me to concede:
Had enough yet? Tying you up in knots is fun, I can keep this up all year.
People are literally dying because of contracts let out to firms based on minority status rather than capability, and you want me to “tone it down”? If we are forced to hire people and firms who can’t even build a foot bridge that stays up, what hope do we have of rebuilding our energy systems and having them work?
There’s some humor to be found in this. One of Munilla Construction Management’s executives is on video saying “It’s very important for me as a woman and an engineer to be able to promote that to my daughter, because I think women have a different perspective. We’re able to put in an artistic touch and we’re able to build, too.” Afterward she specifically denied any involvement in the failed bridge (failure is an orphan). It would be very interesting to know if an “artistic touch” had anything to do with the collapse, but I don’t have time to read the full OSHA report to find out.
AB bloviated @82:
IF you have it, AND IF you can make certain it’s used to buffer the surges and ebbs rather than exacerbate them. WA doesn’t have it, and nothing I’ve read says that the control protocols exist to handle private customer batteries to manage net demand.
It’s roughly 1300 miles from Perth to Adelaide, as the crow flies. It’s over 1600 miles from Perth to Darwin (albeit all over land). Curtailment will be cheaper than building even the cheapest possible line… and there’s no guarantee that either end will be able to use the surpluses from the other.
I found a range from $1.17 million/mile to $8.62 million/mile for HVDC. At the lowest figure, Perth-to-Adelaide would cost over $1.5 billion; Perth-to-Darwin, over $1.9 billion. I guaran-damn-tee you I can dump 1000 MW to resistance heat for way, way under $1.50/watt; DigiKey lists a 1kΩ 2500 W wirewound resistor for about $0.045/W, quantity 1. They’re quite a bit cheaper if you buy 100 at a time, and that only gets you up to 1/4 megawatt. I bet I could get things at $0.01/W or less at the megawatt level.
Haven’t you figured out yet that I PUT THE IDEA IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?
AB quibbled @88:
And when leftist idiots don’t do their building code homework, you get whole renovated apartment towers going up in flames. 72 dead in THAT debacle because the housing council cheaped out instead of doing proper fireproofing. It would be the same story here; token hires won’t listen to PEs because “profession too white” or whatever. When people die as a consequence, they’ll be excused from responsibility because minority privilege but we’ll still hear screams of “housing racism”.
The “zero carbon” scam is just that. It treats the grid as a battery, dumping excess PV power in daytime and the summer and expecting it back at night and in winter… at par. The grid isn’t and can’t deal with this from even a substantial minority of customers, so this nonsense will break down sooner rather than later. When it does, people who bet on the scam going on forever will get burned.
The great thing about hot-water district heat is that water puts fires out. Screwups tend to be a lot less deadly than e.g. natural gas.
As do I. I see about 20 quads/yr of biofuel going into engines of some kind. Very little of it will be for stationary generators. The type of engine is relatively unimportant.
And AB @86 is downright funny:
He’s descended to blaming his phone, and just admitted that his “quote”, wasn’t.
killian evaded @85:
What a pathetic display of intellectual cowardice, calling a question a lie. “Run away, run away!”
So tell me, and everyone: just how are France, and Sweden, and Ontario “liars” for decarbonizing their electric grids with nuclear energy? If you can’t explain it, you are the fraud and the liar.
I did look it up. I found this blog with posts by someone calling themselves “ccpo”. Is that you? You couldn’t be bothered to quote or even link a specific post, so why should anyone pay attention to your obvious evasion?
zebra re-misunderstood @89:
You propose a “market”. The problem is, the market you anticipate has people selecting over minutes and hours. However, capital cost needs to be handled over years and decades. You pick something and stick with it.
Take NuScale (please!). The anticipated unit cost is on the order of USD5000/kW(e) for 60 MW apiece. However, that is electric output, at about 30% conversion efficiency; that means on the order of 140 MW of heat (out of 200 MW(th) output from the reactor) is at least potentially available as a byproduct. So for your USD5000/MW(e), you have a low-grade heat capital cost of about USD2100/kW… which offsets your electric cost. How you allocate it is up to you.
If you can actually use all 140 MW of heat (that’s 478 million BTU/hr, worth about $89,000/d at my local price if it can displace natural gas at 1:1) you’d displace about 218 tons/day of methane which burns to almost 600 tons/day of CO2. Of course, most of this heat will be produced when it is NOT useful and must be discarded; however, as an offset to electric power produced and sold, it’s a substantial bonus during the heating season and a smaller but steady one for DHW all year.
The heating CO2 bonus is a two-fer: you displace as much as 33 tons of CO2 per hour (~790 tons/day) from electric (compared to gas-fired turbines) and as much as another ~600 tons/day from heating. You accomplish this with no particulates and no NOx. If you merely value the CO2 savings at $100/ton, that’s $79,000/d for electric power and as much as $60,000/d for heat. Figuring the former 365 days a year and the latter 90 days/yr, you’d get $34 million/yr in savings. Amortizing a $300 million plant over 30 years at 7% only costs $24 million/yr, so the carbon tax savings would pay for it right there.
In this “market” system, which parties are responsible for supplying inertia, reactive power and regulation? With “energy only” compensation, how do they get paid?
So far as I can tell, they don’t. This means that those necessities will be neglected going forward. And that will lead to increasing instability and then blackouts ala South Australia. When politics meets physics, politics loses every time. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Disobey physics and you’re screwed.
That really depends on whether they are prized as essential providers of zero-emission base-load and reactive power, or demonized as “unclean”, shoved to the back of the dispatch order and forced out of business. We’ve seen the latter at Kewaunee, Vermont Yankee and other plants.
Stop RIGHT there. Green Mountain Power is wholly owned by Gaz Metro, the Quebec natural gas company. There is nothing “green” about “Green Mountain Power” any more; it is a zombie controlled by the fossil-fuel lobby.
zebra snarked @90:
Nobody ever said they’d make the wires explode. We said they’d do things like force power levels on the must-run plants to be reduced to the point where they e.g. have unstable combustion in the furnaces and have to shut down. Then one of two things happens with relatively high frequency:
1. You don’t have enough reactive power or frequency control or whatever, leading to blackout.
2. When the solar panels stop producing (which they do every evening), you can’t get those plants back on-line fast enough so… customers are “curtailed” meaning rolling blackouts. That mitigates the duck-curve on the demand side. Woe be unto you if you needed to cook dinner.
If the terms of art don’t mean anything to you, it means you don’t have enough knowledge to have an opinion. If you didn’t understand the cited news article, not just ditto but tritto. If you can’t be bothered to study, why do you even post? To see your own blather?
Did you notice anything about my combustion-air-dump-load scheme? One of the things you can do with it is pre-heat some or all of the feed air above the fuel’s auto-ignition temperature. If the fuel can’t NOT burn, combustion instability is impossible.
Steam generators are connected to turbines, not houses. Modern non-forced-air heating systems use either baseboard or in-floor radiant hot water, generally well below boiling.
I have explained it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. The effort has to come from you.
In general news:
Electron-beam welding promises to reduce reactor pressure vessel welding time from 150 days to 10:
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191216-sf.html
Direct application to NuScale reactor vessel production; new machine to handle workpieces up to 3 m diameter. Note that the Fermi 1 core was only 2030 mm across.
173 – zebra
“…We have a bunch of houses that represent a load of X…”
Nah, we only have one house – the House of Representatives. To solve your algebra problem, X = horse sheeeit.
:)
178 – Al Bundy
“…Go ahead, ask MRKIA if he gives a Rat’s *ss about gleefully bragging about violating legal oaths….”
Yes, I do care greatly – those who do such things should be prosecuted. May I present exhibit A:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXA–dj2-CY
Exhibit B, 1 year ago and then 3 days ago. Pay close attention from 1:35 to 2:50:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yfXxeJn3Tc
Let me know if you’d like to see more.
;)
181 – BPL
“Have nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.”
Looks like they want to prevent them from migrating to other parts of China. So, nip the immigration problem in the bud. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH5JPEoIRpY
Al Bundy wrote @101:
Chemical CO2 sorbents tend to be costly to regenerate (quicklime) or have to be replaced regularly (amines). It may be possible to make vehicles that way if you can find a way to (a) keep nitrogen out of the CO2 stream and (b) still dump water.
Here’s another idea for free: Use a solid-oxide fuel cell for the vehicle’s sustainer power. Feed it with methanol. SOFCs carry oxygen ions through their membrane, so naturally separate oxygen from nitrogen. Design the SOFC to operate under high pressure on the fuel side. At the outlet of the fuel mixture, use an electric hydrogen concentrator to pull any remaining hydrogen out of the gas mix and recirculate it to the fuel inlet (this will also reform any remaining CO to CO2). Use the water-permeable membranes used to squeeze the last bits of water out of fuel ethanol to dump the water to the atmosphere as vapor. Cool the remnant CO2 to ambient and store under pressure. Offload the CO2 at the same stations where you add fuel.
This requires some bulky tanks, but holding liquid CO2 only takes about 1/10 the pressure rating required for hydrogen. You should be able to get by with steel, and if you have a leak there’s no risk of fire.
If you can’t make a SOFC that holds so much pressure, have a compressor for the CO2 or fuel with ammonia instead of methanol and avoid handling carbon entirely. Note that there have been not one but two announcements of new ammonia catalysts recently, one conventional and one for electrochemical ammonia generation (which has a lousy turnover rate so far).
xx
2016: Ludovico Einaudi – “Elegy for the Arctic”
Ludovico Einaudi – “Elegy for the Arctic”
Carbomontanus asks @105:
Believe it or not, most dams have enough turbine capacity to handle almost anything Nature can throw at them. They have to, because very few can hold the full spring melt in the reservoir and running water down long spillways charges it full of nitrogen and hurts fish downstream. The EPA and Fish and Wildlife frown on that.
This is what everyone’s saying we should use hydrogen for (round-trip efficiency, roughly 40%). Hydrocarbons (esp. methane) are much easier to store than hydrogen, though still inefficient. Your problem is the investment of money (and embodied energy and CO2 emissions) in stuff that sits idle most of the time; it can’t be cutting our CO2 output if it isn’t working.
Kevin McKinney wrote @106:
Extremely so. The core of EBR-I was melted while investigating the cause of some odd power excursions that were not understood. It made somewhat of a mess, but it damaged nothing outside of the core itself. Literally nothing worse happened at Fermi 1, and the undetectable harms from TMI Unit 2 have to be measured against the all-too-detectable harms from the coal-fired power which replaced it. Healthwise, all these breakdowns were non-events.
What really matters is that a worst-case scenario would also have been a health non-event. Hans Bethe himself did an analysis of a meltdown in which the top half of the core all melted more or less instantaneously and fell under gravity into the bottom half. Greatest possible energy yield: about 200 lb of TNT-equivalent. That wouldn’t have lost Detroit, it would barely make the control-room crew lose their bowel control. Impossible in any event; current designs suspend fuel from the top, so a meltdown would cause it to fall apart instead of together and shut down.
The loose zirconium plate was from an addition that was not on the blueprints; it was claimed that someone decided to add some “flow improvements”. It was obviously not fastened in place firmly enough, which begs the question: was it a failure to plan, or a plan to fail? Regardless, without it the unit would have run for quite some time. EBR-II ran from 1964 until Congress shut down all advanced nuclear research in 1994. It was in pristine shape when it was taken apart, with the builders’ original chalk marks still intact on the inside of the reactor vessel; had it not been commanded to close, it would likely still be running today.
What matters isn’t what we didn’t know then, it’s what we know now. We don’t need to do years of low-power testing on a known configuration (note that EBR-II was being built about the same time). We have 50+ more years of experience with fuel reprocessing. We can weld with robots and electron beams instead of by hand. We can build the same thing cheaper, faster and more reproducibly. AAMOF, we are now able to mass-produce what used to be hand-built.
zebra removes all doubt @107:
Are you saying that you can’t substitute 1 BTU of electricity for 1 BTU of fuel? There’s nothing “perpetual motion” about it; it’s a highly lossy substitution but the boiler doesn’t care what the heat comes from.
Figuring the steam plant running at best efficiency, 1 kWh of energy generated elsewhere replaces roughly 10,500 BTU of coal. If you get down to dumping electric power into the combustion air in lieu of cranking heat back below the minimum, 1 kWh substitutes for only 3414 BTU of coal. The only thing to be said for this is that it’s better than throwing the electricity away (curtailment), which doesn’t substitute for anything. You might as well make use of it.
“Method of making use of excess solar electricity and providing grid regulation and spinning reserve using a steam-cycle power plant at minimum power level.”