AreWeDrunkYet posted:

It's perfectly feasible

quote:

Americans installed a record number of rooftop solar panels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The group expects a total national installation of 3.2 gigawatts this year, 684 megawatts of which was installed in the third quarter alone. And fourth quarter rooftop panel projects could double to 1,200 megawatts – the highest number ever.

A drop in solar panel prices combined with the rise of leasing programs has made it less costly and easier for homeowners to invest in rooftop solar panels, Bloomberg News reports, resulting in a surge of residential solar installations. “While Q3 2012 was remarkable for the U.S. PV market, it is just the opening act for what we expect to see in Q4,” Shayle Kann, vice president of research at GTM Research, said in the statement.

More companies and government agencies are turning to solar energy as well, SEIA announced. Such programs rose 24 per cent in the third quarter to a total of 258 megawatts. This trend will continue with installations expected to soar an additional 25 per cent next year to 4 gigawatts. Even as our leadership lags in the face of climate change, the people are taking power into their own hands.

Via Bloomberg

spankmeister posted:

Natural gas is cheap and cleaner than other fossil fuels but it's still produces green house gases and other pollutants.

Also, it's mostly methane which is a greenhouse gas in and of itself and at offshore rigs they just vent it into the atmosphere directly to get at the oil underneath. (At land based rigs they burn it off as to not create a fire hazard and all)

I just wanted to get this off my chest because the idea of clean NG is a myth.Granted, it's way better than burning coal or oil.

spankmeister posted:

Can we please go back to talking about real energy generation instead of this steorn-type bullshit?

blacksun posted:

Quantum Mechanic or Hobo Erotica care to respond to this?

quote:

Wintry blasts blow away wind energy records

Blustery weather in the middle of August has sent a slew of wind energy records tumbling.

NSW wind farms generated 35 gigawatt-hours of electricity in the week starting August 18, beating the previous high for the state by about 9 per cent, consultants Intelligent Energy Systems said.

Those gales, though, had a bigger impact the previous week, when South Australia and Victoria generated record wind energy, while Tasmania and NSW recorded some of their highest totals.

Wind farms supplied 290 gigawatt-hours of power to the National Electricity Market from August 11 to 17, shattering the previous record by 18 per cent, IES chief executive Brett Gebert said. The following week's 250-gigawatt-hour total was the second highest on record.

For the first of those two weeks, wind energy to the NEM exceeded the total from Victoria's brown-coal fired Hazelwood power plant - possibly for the first time - by 13 per cent, and fell just 10 per cent short of NSW's giant black-coal Bayswater Power Station.

''There was no coal-fired power in SA at all - just gas and wind for those two record weeks,'' said Ketan Joshi, a research and communications officer at wind farm operator Infigen Energy.

In the peak week, wind farms supplied the power needs of about 2.3 million homes, about 7.6 per cent of total demand, IES said.

NSW lags SA and Victoria in wind farm capacity. AGL's Macarthur Wind Farm in western Victoria, the largest in the southern hemisphere with 420 megawatt capacity, eclipses NSW's total capacity of 282 megawatts.

Last month, AGL said it was delaying plans for the 300-megawatt first stage of a $550 million wind farm development planned for Silverton, near Broken Hill, because of uncertainty over the national Renewable Energy Target.

The Coalition has vowed to review the target next year if elected next month. The Rudd government wants the next review to be delayed until 2016.

The NSW government has also held off confirming planning guidelines for wind farms for about two years. Companies such as Infigen say the guidelines are the toughest conditions for such projects in the world.

''Those guidelines will play a huge role in how the effects we've seen in Victoria and SA play out in NSW,'' Mr Joshi said. ''There's a huge capacity for NSW to have the same effect, at times, of wind energy crowding out fossil fuels pretty significantly.''

During the windier of the two recent weeks, AGL's wind farms were all operating at about 70 per cent capacity, the company said. That compared with industry averages of 25 per cent top 40 per cent, Mr Joshi said.

By the second week, though, capacity at Macarthur was still at 50 per cent while other AGL wind farms ranged from 44 to 63 per cent, the company said.

CommieGIR posted:

It generates nothing next to a gas, coal, or nuclear plant, and takes up about the same size if not more.

CommieGIR posted:

But lets take a quick look:

SEGS Solar Generating Plant: 1,600 Acres @ 398 MW
Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Station: 525 Acres @ 2,333 MW

So, for the acreage, I get 4.44 MW per Acre for nuclear, and 0.249 MW per acre for solar.

In other words, for the 1,600 acres I could get 7,104 MW. And 130.725MW for equivalent acreage compared to the acreage that Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Plant. And that is an OLD 1980s era plant.

hobbesmaster posted:

Also unfortunately these solar plants are going to require really long transmission lines and probably not be able to be operated by the same company if they can even be in the same state.

Pander posted:

But it is nowhere near as disconcerting as the water intake required.

hobbesmaster posted:

Yes. If you put some gas turbines the size of a 747 in the desert you'd have the same problems. Well actually not really the water ones because they don't need water.

The point is that you can put those turbines right next to where you need it instead of some massive operation in the middle of nowhere.

hobbesmaster posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

quote:

Coal has an energy content of about 37 MJ/kg. Now if you’ve got a plant that’s rated at 1 GW, that means 1 billion Watts. A Watt is a joule per second, so 1 billion watts is 1 billion joules per second. Now with coal’s energy content of 37 Million joules per kilo, to get that billion joules per second, you need to burn 27 kg of coal per second. Or at least you would, if these plants were 100% efficient – as in converted 100% of the energy in the coal by burning it. But they generally only run at around 35%. So you actually need to burn around 80 kg of coal a second. Which is 4.8 tonnes per minute, or 288 tonnes per hour, or 7,000 tonnes per day. 2.5 million tonnes per year. Just in one power plant. That’s X truck loads.

But of course you don’t just get pure coal out of the mine, To get that much coal, you need to mine X kg of rock. The mining requires X amount of energy, etc etc etc.

John McCain posted:

That passage is super hosed. 1 GW = 1e9 W. not 1e3 W. The numbers are all correct but you need to fix those units.

Anosmoman posted:

I think there's generally a bit odd perspective on green technologies - often it seems like an attempt to pursue the second worst option. Like growing food ecologically with the trade off that we'll need more land and water to do it. It may or may not be better than spraying pesticides all over the place but farmland isn't good for ecosystems or the climate and it's not "natural" in any way. When I look at my country it's forrests as far you could see cut down and turned into farmland. Growing food ecologically might be a bit less bad - but still pretty bad. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we're doing the planet any favors because we are still the problem.

If these land intensive technologies in food and energy production is the future and we're eventually going to be 11 billion people this whole planet is going to be just one giant production facility for humanity - cities, industrial farmland and now mirrors and PV. The goal should be to use as little land as we can and turn back what we have taken to its natural state. If we don't get the technologies to make our food and energy in small foot print facilities there's not going to be anything natural anywhere near human habitats.

Paper Mac posted:

Vertical farming is insanely energy intensive and expensive.

Install Windows posted:

Or you can just use the land that's sitting right there.

Paper Mac posted:

I'm not talking about running pumps, I'm talking about building skyscraper greenhouses and importing all your nutrients (where do they come from? they're either mined/synthetic or you're stripping soil somewhere). It requires a pretty massive buildout of infrastructure and you're either burning oil to provide nutrients or you're depleting soil somewhere else, so it doesn't really solve the sustainability issue.

quote:

If these land intensive technologies in food and energy production is the future and we're eventually going to be 11 billion people this whole planet is going to be just one giant production facility for humanity - cities, industrial farmland and now mirrors and PV. The goal should be to use as little land as we can and turn back what we have taken to its natural state. If we don't get the technologies to make our food and energy in small foot print facilities there's not going to be anything natural anywhere near human habitats.

Paper Mac posted:

No, vertical farming is all about building skyscraper greenhouses, it's the primary use of the term. "Farming" on balconies, rooftops, etc. is just urban gardening. I work with an urban gardening co-op and I've never heard anyone use the term "vertical farm" for anything other than this:



If you want to use "vertical farming" to mean "urban gardening", that's fine, but you're going to have to deal with the fact that the common understanding of the term, and the photos you posted from the Singapore project etc, refers to dedicated vertical farming structures.

I don't have a problem with the suggestion we should be doing more growing in cities, I agree and I work to that end. I don't think it represents a meaningful solution because the nutrients are still by and large stripped from the topsoil of farmers (importing manure etc) or are synthetic, but I still think it's a good thing to pursue in the event we can ever get our nutrient flows sorted.


No, definitionally it's more brittle, because the refined material inputs required to grow vertically (in the sense I'm describing above) are higher than using dirt. If your system is more reliant on single-source fossil fuel inputs, its more brittle. I'm not referring as much to mono vs polyculture, although you still can't get decent polycultures in a hydroponic greenhouse (polyculture is as much about soil microbial communities as it is about species diversity).

To be specific, my argument is that the space savings vertical farming affords do not address the primary sustainability problems with extant agricultural systems, which are not really related to footprint. The productivity of industrial farming on a per-area basis is nothing special and there's no reason to suspect that it can't improve by increasing eg labour intensity.

Install Windows posted:

There is no need to go vertical because farmland exists and is serving us just fine.

quote:

at the most basic level, fewer transport miles do mean fewer emissions. Pirog's team found that the conventional food distribution system used 4 to 17 times more fuel and emitted 5 to 17 times more CO2 than the local and regional (the latter of which roughly meant Iowa-wide) systems. Similarly, a Canadian study estimated that replacing imported food with equivalent items locally grown in the Waterloo, Ontario, region would save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.

Jeffrey posted:

I don't think anyone is criticizing small scale urban gardens, where an individual can water them and tend to them, and can stick to crops that deal with having very little light. I just don't think it will ever be a viable replacement for horizontal growing once you try and scale it up. Any of the sustainability gains from not having to transport your food long distances are lost because most crops require additional light and water inputs, which generally will come from fossil fuels just the same. There is a huge loss of sunlight energy at the angles one has to grow at, I bet those commercial vertical farms use a ton of energy on lighting.

European style cities that just stop instead of trailing off into suburbs seem like a better answer. Growing the city's crops right outside the city would take a big chunk out of those 1500 miles.

EDIT: Rooftop farming is a lot more reasonable than vertical farming, we should certainly do that where we can.

Paper Mac posted:

Yes you have, as I mentioned, the Singapore picture you linked was literally from a Singaporean commercial vertical farming project. They have 9-story dedicated towers. The EROI is massively negative, obviously, if you look at the chart above you can see that the skyscraper-farm doesn't do anything to reduce most of the energy costs of producing food. If you want to know why they're a stupid idea, Monbiot wrote a thing a couple years ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/16/green-ivory-towers-farm-skyscrapers

Jeffrey posted:

Using other electricity to produce light for vertical farms is only going to make the goal of getting energy out of them further away. You are taking a bad product and proposing to make it even worse.

Arghy posted:

Hahaha man awesome video here also michio kaku should be loving shot with a gun by science for selling out. Jesus its like someone made a video about lies and misconceptions then slapped it all together.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=040_1384817880

*hahahahahha several QUADRILLION BEQUELS OF RADIOACTIVITY! please explain what this number is announcer lady since you seem to be such an expert!

quote:

Radioactive acid spill at ERA Ranger mine in Kakadu

THERE has been a major radioactive incident at a mine site inside Kakadu National Park overnight, with about a million litres of acid believed spilled, workers evacuated and production shut down.

A leaching tank containing the contaminated slurry burst at about 1am this morning, apparently with such force that it bent a crane and other infrastructure nearby at the Ranger mine.

Justin O'Brien, CEO of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation representing the site's traditional owners, said the acid had contaminated a large area of the work site, overtopped a low bund and entered a storm drain.

"A million litres of radioactive acid burst out of a tank at such a velocity that it damaged all the infrastructure nearby," he said.

"We are advised that the spill will make that part of the mine, which is the heart of the operation, inoperable for at least a month or two."

The Ranger mine's operator, Energy Resources of Australia, confirmed the tank failure.

"Upon discovery of a hole in the side of the tank, personnel were removed from the nearby area before the tank failed and a mixture of slurry escaped," ERA said in a statement.

"The slurry moved outside the bunded containment area, but has been captured and contained on site. As the material was contained within the processing area there is no impact on the environment surrounding the Ranger Project Area."

A spokeswoman said workers had been evacuated and production shut down, but was unable to confirm how much material had spilled or what damage had been done. There had been no injuries.

Mr O'Brien said a jet of fluid had been discovered spraying from the side of the leaching tank at around 12.30am this morning. He said workers were trying to use a crane to lower a piece of steel to stop the flow when the initial hole expanded and another developed.

"The 10 to 20 people who were working on it were asked to evacuate," he said.

"Thank god they did, because the whole thing burst apart with such velocity that it bent all the metal walkways around about, damaged the bund, bent the crane and smashed the windscreen of the crane."

The incident could not have come at worse time for ERA, which recently ceased open-cut mining and is now seeking approval to develop its newly discovered Ranger 3 Deeps deposit underground.

The Ranger 3 Deeps resource is believed to be one of the world's best underdeveloped uranium deposits, containing around 10 million tonnes of ore that is expected to yield 34,000 tonnes of uranium oxide.

The federal government is presently considering whether to grant ERA approval for a new underground mine.

Traditional owners have so far maintained an "open mind" on the proposal, but Mr O'Brien said two breaches of the company's radiation plan and now a major radioactive spill in under a year was undermining that goodwill.

"That openness is diminished day by day, incident by incident," he said.

The ERA site is separate from but entirely within World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. Mr O'Brien said that with the heaviest rains of the wet season approaching, traditional owners feared the radioactive acid could be washed downstream.

The site is close to the Magita Creek, which is now flowing, and about 7km upstream from the Aboriginal community of Mudgunberri where about 60 people live.

"We understand the spill entered a stormwater drain. We have been advised that it went no further, and has been contained within that part of the stormwater drain. Well, let's see," he said.

He described the mine as a "hillbilly operation", and demanded the federal government seek advice outside Australia before making a decision on whether to approve the Ranger 3 Deeps underground development.

A spokeswoman for ERA, which is majority owned by mining giant Rio Tinto, promised further updates later in the day.

hobbesmaster posted:

The Bq is not the unit we're interested in however as it's not a unit of exposure. The entire thing is jibberish.

Pander posted:

As Jeffrey said, in absolute terms a Bq tells you roughly how many atoms within a sample undergo nuclear decay of some sort per second.

It is essentially worthless outside of specific nuclear calculations. It doesn't tell you how dangerous a source of radiation is. It doesn't tell you what kind of radiation it emits. It doesn't tell you what is lost or created. It doesn't specify energy release.

All it does it count the atoms that undergo decay. It is impossible to know from context how important a release should be by Bq. 10^15 Bq from a very small source is very dangerous. 10^15 Bq over a water tank spill that spills into a water source is essentially meaningless.

Radiation is rather complex to judge in terms of all but short-term effects for highly potent non-alpha emitters. After Chernobyl estimates of cancer rates across eastern Europe varied wildly, and it's been demonstrated in practice that there's been very little, if any, effect from the disaster. Long term effects are completely bewildering, and it's possible that ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) may be a flawed concept.

The spill sucks, and I don't want to sound like the pro-nuclear whore that I am, but I'd wager that acid is going to do more harm than radiation unless there's (for whatever insane reason) a whole lot of concentrated tails of radioactive ore lying in the way of the acidic water. I can't see the article due to paywall, so if there's anything more than what you posted I lost it. Without specifics, I'm not too sure about what that acid's been through. In light water reactors, boric acid is used in nuke plants to provide reactivity control. The borated water in the core IS radioactive. But it's not nearly radioactive on the level of the core itself. Calling it a "radioactive leak" brings to mind nuclear bombs or waste, but it's really mostly tritium or other particles likely diluted enough to be considered minor.

In short, the toxicity of uranium is a far larger worry than the radiactive part. It's true for a lot of nuclear applications. The general public's fear of invisible radiation outweighs the more realistic dangers in most situations.

Getting back to the mine, it's awful poo poo and that company sounds like it could use some serious oversight/fines. Realistically, all power requires environmentally damaging mining for installation and maintenance at the very least (and for coal/oil, burning on a far larger scale than nuclear). It'd be nice if it could be done without fuckups like that.

Quantum Mechanic posted:

we've managed to stop our new you-beaut neoliberal government from poo poo-canning a renewable investment bank that makes money.

Trabisnikof posted:

Those are just random Geiger counters connected to the internet.

CommieGIR posted:

Trabisnikof posted:

Saying coal/gas is about as useful as saying solar/nuclear.

Trabisnikof posted:

Its still incredibly silly to treat coal and gas as equivalent in any meaning way except they both emit carbon. Their production impacts are vastly different, their interface to the grid is different (including their emissions per kw/h), secondary markets effecting price are different, and most importantly their regional distribution is vastly different for the two fuels.

Maybe its only as bad as saying renewables/hydro, but its still not a helpful simplification. Especially when energy is so geographically dependent, the differences between coal and gas for specific counties can be a huge deal.

CommieGIR posted:

Makes sense, but comparing it to a nuclear plant doesn't really make sense to me.

Adenoid Dan posted:

I get tired of hearing about all these highschool geniuses making these discoveries at science fairs. This one, the microwaved water on plant growth one, the one about skimming the plastic off the surface of the ocean. Run it by a real scientist (who's willing to hurt the kid's feelings a bit by saying they're wrong, instead of just saying, "that's interesting, why don't we repeat it in a lab and see if it holds up? ") before running articles about it. It's so misleading to pretend they might be on to something.

Adenoid Dan posted:

The problem is that the plastic is not mostly large pieces, it's mm to cm sized fragments, and wave action mixes it deep into the water column if it's not calm. It's also not particularly concentrated, it's spread out over vast areas. Removing pieces that small would be very costly, monetarily and environmentally, since it would remove or kill (plankton is fragile) so much of the life in those areas, which don't have a lot of life to begin with. The setup would also have to survive harsh weather for years without being prohibitively expensive.

http://deepseanews.com/2013/12/how-do-you-figure-out-how-much-plastic-is-in-the-ocean/

http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array

Adenoid Dan posted:

I'm not an oceanographer or anything like that, but every response I've seen to this from scientists (like Miriam Goldstein, who studies the garbage in the gyres) has been negative. And when it was originally reported on, it was just a highschool kids project. The fact that they've done their own investigation of their idea doesn't particularly impress me either.

Remember, they're talking about filtering the first 2-3 meters of the ocean surface. It's pretty clear they are thinking only of macroscopic animals and ignoring the plankton, which again are very fragile and can't avoid the booms.

(Edit: ignoring is not right, but I believe they have a simplistic view of what can affect an ecosystem)

I'm not in that field so I'm leaving my judgement to the experts, who are saying it won't work without harming the ecosystem.

quote:

"Because they are effectively neutrally buoyant, both phytoplankton and zooplankton are likely to pass underneath the barriers along with the current. But even assuming the worst - the Ocean Cleanup Array would harness all the plankton it encounters, this would constitute a maximum loss of 10 million kg of planktonic biomass annually."

Nintendo Kid posted:

"In the north pacific gyre" meaning spread out across thousands of square miles and god only knows how much depth.

Pander posted:

I think the better solution is keep developing better nanobot technology. Solar-powered self-replicating nanobots. Maybe in 50 or 100 years. I think the carbon dioxide emissions issue is a bit higher priority than ocean plastic. Both suck, but one's just a bit more pressing and solvable now.

Nintendo Kid posted:

every way of removing it so far produces much bigger problems

Adenoid Dan posted:

The best way to clean it up would probably be to let it degrade and let it leave the system naturally

Adenoid Dan posted:

Doing nothing is often the least bad solution, even when there are remediation options that would fix the original problem.

QuarkJets posted:

quote:

Plastic in the oceans has nothing to do with energy generation

thekeeshman posted:

One of the problems with the whole decentralized generation thing is simply that if you're going to go around to a whole bunch of people and try and convince them to do something everyone would be much better off if you convinced them to put in better insulation or more efficient boilers or other power-saving technologies, rather than things like decentralized generation. These things have better returns on investment than solar in most places, and create more consistent reductions in grid load.

I know there's room for more than one campaign at a time etc... but the low hanging fruit really is efficiency and not decentralized generation.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Is lack of insulation really a problem in Australia? I mean there's plenty of older houses in the US that only have lovely older insulation, but you rarely see anything new without insulation, or anything newer than the second world war without any insulation at all.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Er what I mean is, is there really a lot of Australian housing stock out there with no insulation at all or only very minimal insulation? The proposal seems to imply that there is.