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Ardennes posted:That really isn't true at all, there is camp #4, pro-nuclear and anti-green who want only investment in nuclear technology and see any alternative technologies as a waste. You probably need to be more honest about the biases in the thread. Those people are insignificant. (unless you have quotes to show otherwise)
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Jul 8, 2014 15:18
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At least for solar a key benefit is that the peak generation time coincides with the peak demand time (especially in the summer). Because of that, you can generate a fair amount of power without having to invest quite as much upfront in nuclear plants.
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Jul 8, 2014 17:50
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Baronjutter posted:Can someone explain all the hype about "decentralization" I hear from low-info greens? Even if we were going 100% renewables why would getting rid of any sort of grid or backups would make things better because?? What exactly do they want, every building being its own island of power with no connections? Am I missing something? Replace "centralization" with "Big Government" and it's the same logic you're familiar with.
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Jul 14, 2014 22:22
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Or you could just do breeder reactors unless space terrorists are a legitimate problem for you.
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Jul 24, 2014 20:13
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Just say "This plan is a mix of several zero carbon energy generators but solar will be the largest contributor*". *by number of facilities
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Jul 30, 2014 16:44
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Trabisnikof posted:Update your fact sheets, hydro is now less than 50% of renewables in the US: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=17351 I'm not surprised, hydro is pretty tapped out and it's terrible for the environment (less than fossil fuels but worse than anything else).
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Aug 2, 2014 05:02
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hobbesmaster posted:Are those real renewables or is that also counting burning biogas or whatever. It seems like it's counting biomass but most of the growth is in wind & solar.
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Aug 2, 2014 05:33
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Piell posted:Yes, how terrible it would be to have to get uranium from such shady countries as Canada or Australia Uranium reserves are slightly different (though by far the largest component is again Australia).
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Aug 4, 2014 17:43
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Energy efficiency *is* (becoming) a cultural value though, it's just driven primarily by economics than anything else.
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Aug 5, 2014 17:01
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Nevvy Z posted:A hippie friend just posted a water usage/MWH chart that had solar at 0 therefore the best. I think it's more an opportunity cost (so, you can't use that water for something else if you're using it for cooling) and depending where you draw it from there can be environmental concerns.
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Aug 6, 2014 17:36
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StabbinHobo posted:the polywell dream is amazing, but sometimes i wonder if a fusion breakthrough would be the worst thing that ever happened to us At a certain point Jevon's Paradox breaks down because your time is valued as well. Sure there will always be idiots that consider a 90 mile commute as a reasonable thing but most people would rather sleep in for an hour than drive to work. Also there are other services which are simply more efficient in a dense environment (regardless of the cost of energy it's going to be a long time before your farm gets fiber optic internet).
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Aug 8, 2014 04:06
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Phayray posted:Mark Jacobson has a new report out for 100% renewables by 2050 for California. I haven't had time to do a full read yet, just skimming, but at a glance it seems to be of the same quality as his global 100% renewables plan (Part 1, Part 2). "Let's just put solar panels on top of every building in LA, no big deal guys".
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Aug 9, 2014 15:49
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Phanatic posted:Because, you know, global warming won't kill many birds. You could also do it with nuclear. 
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Aug 18, 2014 21:16
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hobbesmaster posted:Because that CO2 is still going into the atmosphere! If you're sequestering it you may as well just use coal and gas and not waste our farm lands. The main reason coal et all is bad is that you're introducing new CO2 into the cycle. With something like biomass you're not adding anything into the atmosphere that hasn't been there within the past century or so (a pretty short time frame for the big picture). The same problems still apply for using farmland though.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:23
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Blue Star posted:Are we running out of oil? Will we suddenly be like "Oh poo poo, there's no oil. Welp, civilization was nice while it lasted..."? You won't physically run out of oil (even large spots of oil) because it'll become more economical to dump money into electric vehicles/etc.
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Nov 1, 2014 14:15
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Maybe someone should talk to the idiot wearing sunglasses. They asked me if I had a degree in theoretical physics, I just told them I had a theoretical degree in physics.
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Nov 22, 2014 02:18
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double nine posted:holy poo poo. What happened, increased water consumption, change in rainfall, supplying river changed course? Drought and increased usage if I had to guess. You see that all around the West.  Lucky Peak Reservoir, in Boise Idaho (not a hydroelectric plant IIRC but still).
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Nov 24, 2014 16:00
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Maybe California should stop using their water to grow grass. If California stopped growing almonds they could triple residential use. Not even a joke.
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Nov 24, 2014 18:14
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i am harry posted:What is wrong with doing this? Can it not be spread out across states in what is currently widely un-used space? If Texans care so much couldn't we just annex Mexico and cover that instead? Animals live in the desert too.
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Dec 30, 2014 04:40
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Rent-A-Cop posted:What kind of service life does a large scale solar-thermal plant have? I imagine that highly reflective panels aren't exactly the most robust things in the world. I'm seeing around 30 years, maybe 50. As for solar panels, most manufacturers seem to guarantee at least 80% of rated power output at 25 years of age, and after that it's kind of unknown.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:16
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double nine posted:how about most of the world that's not the USA? Half of that is Wolfram Alpha.
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Jan 29, 2015 15:43
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OwlFancier posted:And likely accounts for the majority of its fluidity, though you could argue that removing all of the DHMO from something and grinding it to a fine enough powder would still create a very viable fluid, and also be rather more terrifying in a flood A single wind turbine is probably cheaper than a coal plant but it also won't give you nearly as much electricity.
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Mar 19, 2015 08:57
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OwlFancier posted:I would agree that overall population would seem like the fundamental problem, and question whether the effort involved to relocate everyone into cities unless absolutely necessary would justify the resources involved, which could instead be spent on trying to stop population growth. How you stop population growth: give people money, access to birth control (already happening). How you don't stop population growth: lamenting the UN for letting families decide how many kids they want like the person who coined "tragedy of the commons" was ranting about.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:51
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CombatInformatiker posted:Environmental impact of wind power § Birds (Wikipedia). Right after we drop the myth of nuclear plants = nuclear bombs.
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Aug 3, 2015 14:20
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silence_kit posted:Do batteries actually require rare earth elements, or is this like when you tried to claim that solar cells require rare earth elements earlier in this thread, i.e. you are pulling this out of your rear end? Also lol at your "they don't grow on trees" argument. You can probably make designs that don't require them, but currently (or so the assertion says) those designs don't exist/aren't used. Also mining is a pretty major (in terms of volume anyway; it's actually pretty stupid) argument against fission so I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.
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Nov 17, 2015 14:31
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Anosmoman posted:What he means - I'm guessing - is that batteries with a reasonable energy density require expensive and rare elements such as the lithium batteries in Teslas powerwall. Yeah, that was actually explicitly stated: quote:Currently developed batteries with useful energy density for transport are expensive and use rare earths(...)
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Nov 17, 2015 14:44
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Major parts of the environmental movement seem to have fallen into the same trap as the GOP, where lack of new blood is forcing them to continually use strategies and ideologies from 40 years ago. In both cases, they're due for a shakeup soon. Although I guess for the environmental people, it's more that large parts of their platform was accepted by society, so they can't really do that much while remaining distinct except act crazy.
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Nov 19, 2015 02:06
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silence_kit posted:If nuclear energy were actually the slam dunk technology that people in this thread claim (low cost, low risk, zero sociopolitical side effects), the US government wouldn't kowtow to a powerless advocacy group that few people care about. In reality, there are major drawbacks to the technology that many people in this thread pretend don't exist. Instead they prefer to believe in some kind of environmentalist conspiracy preventing rapid buildout of the technology. I guess by this same logic, if coal was really so terrible then the US government would stop using it by now.
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Nov 20, 2015 18:36
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Anosmoman posted:Not sure I'm parsing this correctly but isn't the fed already subsidizing financing and project costs? From what it sounds like, a loan guarantee just makes it so if the bank lends money to someone and they go bankrupt, the bank gets paid by the feds. It doesn't do anything to the actual contractor.
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Nov 21, 2015 00:33
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Tias posted:
Because building a dam fucks up the environment in a much more active way than a nuclear plant ever will. Ditto with building a bunch of solar panels on "useless" land, especially at the magnitude you need for US power generation.
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Nov 29, 2015 15:07
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Tias posted:This I agree with, I guess I was just hoping there was some other solution, or maybe to use the carbon we're spamming on coal to build renewable sources :-/ Renewable sources have downsides of their own. Environmental impact was noted but variability in power generation is another major factor. Powering your country with solar energy ain't so good when winter comes around. Germany found this out the hard way (not that they were in the best place for solar in the first place), and have supplemented their solar power with coal since they decided to shut down their nuclear plants.
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Nov 29, 2015 16:35
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silence_kit posted:You are ignoring that flat plate solar cells can be put on houses, office buildings, over covered parking lots, etc. You don't need to slash native forests to put in solar cells. They can pretty much be installed anywhere. Even if you covered every urban area (including highways, etc) with solar panels it would (depending on the latitude obviously) still be a lot less than what you need.
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Nov 29, 2015 23:56
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silence_kit posted:Could you show your work? In the online book Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, the author, who by the way is not really committed to solar energy at all, does a back of the envelope calculation, and concludes that there is enough roof space in not exactly sunny Britain to make a pretty good dent in personal use. It's an old book--he mostly complained about the current production of solar being too low and the price being too high, but of course things have changed a lot in the past couple of years. I severely doubt that. Here's a map of solar exposure for Europe and for the USA:   Note the two different unit scales. 1900 (aka the red on the Europe map) is ~5.2 kWh/m2/day, which is the orange-ish area you'll see around the Southeast US. London itself looks to be around 3.0 kWh/m2/day, which is less than any solar area in the contiguous United States, even places like Seattle.
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Nov 30, 2015 00:30
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If the solar cells are functionally identical or very similar, then it's probably because of some process improvement at the production level. If instead there's a different type of solar cell entirely (different material, etc) that's more efficient, then that's at least partially based in academic research.
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Dec 3, 2015 05:10
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QuarkJets posted:Isn't shale one of those things where it takes a lot of capital to start but the operation costs aren't terrible? That might explain how it keeps holding on through several price drops (because you might still be profitable, you just wouldn't be as profitable as a regular oil rig) The other thing is that you don't get much yield per well, so you need to set up a whole bunch of them to get a lot of volume. I believe the current wells are fine but new ones aren't really being pursued, which is an issue.
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Dec 5, 2015 05:36
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OwlFancier posted:I think the argument is that that is why they're seen as a good idea, because Governments Build Roads so if we can get them to Build Solar Roads we can get Governments to Build Solar Panels. No, probably not. There's a long standing tradition of having useless yet "cool" inventions that people want. One common recurring example is the hoverboard from Back to the Future.
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Dec 26, 2015 04:39
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Paradoxish posted:Only if you're actually making it available quickly enough to do that. You'll damage the value over the long term either way since you'll have a proven reserve that everyone knows about, but you won't necessarily tank the market if you aren't just taking a giant space rock's worth of resources and dumping them onto the planet all at once. All that means is that you now have a large amount of inventory, which means you still have a large amount of money locked up in your product. Either way, it's a very high capital investment and most people are going to want an ROI in a reasonable time frame.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:24
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Wanderer posted:I want to ask what might be a stupid question. Burning things involves oxygen. When you burn Hydrogen, you make water (vapor). Unless you trap the water, it will go into the atmosphere just like any other evaporated water.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:43
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rudatron posted:*in Seinfeld voice* And what's the deal with kilowatt hours?? 3600 KJ just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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Jan 14, 2016 07:37
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014. If these were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and the price of platinum crashed to nothing, then by your own numbers GM would reduce manufacturing costs by $9.9 - $29.7 billion dollars a year. $1,000 - $3,000 worth of platinum in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is equal to about 3-9% of the average price paid for a new vehicle today. Those numbers don't look insignificant to me at all, and that's a single application in a single company. You're making two big assumptions - that platinum would be literally free, and that all of GM's vehicles would utilize it in such high quantities. There's always going to be a cost of transporting the material, and I suspect that alone is going to cut into your "$10 billion savings" quite heavily.
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Jan 15, 2016 18:02
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