|
Kaal posted:Again, the alternative is that they go back to using coal-based electricity - not freezing to death. Who is proposing that they retrofit their homes with electrical heaters specifically? Let alone the fact that many states that have heavy electrical usage also have heavy hydro or nuclear power supply.
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 19:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 00:25 |
|
|
blowfish posted:It's a fancy way of saying "burn wood pellets instead of coal/oil in your central heater". Since people keep going Yeah the thing is like almost nobody gets coal delivered for heating these days, and oil heat is also totally on the way out. In 2000, 0.1% of households used coal or coke:  Also, oil usage was at 9%, and not all of them can be easily or safely converted to burning wood or other solid fuel. Incidentally, coal and coke usage for heating was at 55% back in 1940 and wood at 23%. Times sure change.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 19:24
|
|
nuKKKular bad
|
silence_kit posted:I'm not really buying your explanation. While it is better to be energy dense than to not be energy dense, you haven't really shown that the energy density of solar, wind, etc., is actually a problem, especially given that there is a ton of land in the United States, and some energy generation technologies, notable flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind, can coexist with other uses of the land. Mass habitat destruction would probably be a bad thing. Just because land is empty of humans doesn't mean it's a sterile wasteland! OwlFancier posted:Unless you have star trek technology it would appear that distributed living, taking advantage of the natural processes which aid in the growth of food, provision of materials, and processing of waste, would be preferable? A big untouched wilderness isn't really worth anything if all the humans are stuck in hellhole megacities which are polluted to gently caress and back. It's interesting that you assume a high population city has to be polluted as hell. But I am to understand that your home country did get sued in a European high court over willfully ignoring of emissions standards. http://www.clientearth.org/news/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-uk-government-is-breaking-air-pollution-laws-2170 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/17/air-pollution-quality-laws-uk-government-supreme-court
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 21:49
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:Yes, wind power does great where there is lots of wind. Luckily the entire middle of the US is windy as gently caress and also fairly flat. Lots of that windy as gently caress territory has a terrible habit of being struck by tornados. Windmills generally don't like that.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 22:06
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Because what do you do with all the waste? Humans poo poo, piss, throw away food, machinery, packaging, parts. Is this a joke? Like, did you just show up here from 1850 London? Waste disposal and sewage treatment exist and have been used for a very long time. Rome managed to keep itself reasonably clean with a million people way back 2000 odd years ago.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 22:31
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:And how did ancient Rome manage that? I assume they didn't magic all the waste away, they probably took it somewhere and dumped it. Which you also have to do if everyone lives in hobbit holes or whatever the gently caress. It's in no way an unsolvable problem.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 22:34
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. And modern cities do that, like this is a Solved Problem. You only need a few dozen square miles excavated and lined to say 500 feet deep and you'd be surprised how much unrecyclable waste you can fit in there. And the transport costs are still lesser than attempting to move everything around more to widely spread settlements. Spreading people out further requires a lot more energy usage. Again I get that you're from the land of criminally polluting cities where there's also barely any vertical development comparatively, but it works quite well in other places! For example, residents of NYC are close enough in that the majority of residents do not own cars, and that combined with other efficiencies like the steam system that heats AND cools much of Manhattan results in the city's residents causing only 30% of the carbon emissions of the average American. They also use less than half the electricity per capita of the country at large. OwlFancier posted:I think generally the method for disposing of waste with a distributed population is to bury it just out of sight and wait for it to rot, then plant trees on it. Which is hella wasteful because it reduces recycling and reuse efficiency.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 22:48
|
|
|
Personally I still don't see vertical farms as necessary for primary food supply, though they certainly seem like they may be useful for secondary supply and their natural ability to easily keep needed temperatures allowing growing of various exotic foods for a climate for cheaper than it can be shipped out.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2015 23:20
|
|
|
blowfish posted:Annex North Korea, a major rare earth deposit was discovered there recently. I don't think that was really recent, it's been a known thing that northern Korea has assloads of mineable resources. Most of it just sits there because nobody wants to do business with them.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 18:14
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. New reactors are currently being built as we speak. Also countries that aren't America exist and are also doing it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 19:25
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:And the reactors currently under construction as we speak won't make a dent in current national coal use, Yes they will.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 20:28
|
|
|
Lurking Haro posted:So when is coal expected to be getting expensive? Fuel and infrastructure being cheap is the only reason it's being used. Probably never? Like, most of it at least, because there's assloads of it around and much of it isn't even worth hauling more than a couple hundred miles away to export or just use.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 20:37
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Coal is only going to get expensive if the government adds the true costs of coal into the pricing. If energy consumers were actually having to directly pay the costs of the health and environmental effects of coal mining and burning it would become a very expensive way to generate electricity. But we don't like to actually include all costs in such things, rather just sort of dilute those costs to society in general. The solution to harmful externalities is dilution! Yeah like there's grades of coal out there that's around $10 to $30 a ton in normal trading, because it's so impure and thus gets you way less energy per ton.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2015 21:26
|
|
|
Kalman posted:I once worked in a large office building that did low energy climate control through an evaporative cooling system. Office buildings in Manhattan on the steam grid have access to super effective evaporative cooling with the steam. It's pretty neat. OwlFancier posted:Why do you people live in America again? It sounds horrible. Well we manage to not have nearly all of our cities massively exceed pollution regulations, unlike yours.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 02:03
|
|
|
Trabisnikof posted:To be fair, they burn Oil for Electricity in Hawaii, so its weird out there. They're changing it to burning natural gas once the liquid natural gas ports are up and running. lmaoboy1998 posted:Out of interest are there actually a set of EU style regulations that US cities have to abide by, and get sued for breaking? Given the right wing market utopia you live in I'm gonna go ahead and guess not, but maybe I'm wrong. I can imagine NIMBY Americans care more about keeping their backyard air clean than they do about making GBS threads on the world's climate generally. No, as there are simply national level pollution requirements that are really quite strict, and are met. It wasn't that long ago that many US cities experienced regular China-level pollution events.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2015 15:55
|
|
|
Lawman 0 posted:And? All libertarian positions are either lunacy or things that happen to coincide with sane positions due to random chance.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2015 19:04
|
|
|
A lot of the issue with trying to use it for arbitrage is that vast swathes of the country have no residential day/night cost differences to use it for, and several places that have it at all only have it for limited times of the year. And some places don't even offer it for commercial properties, only massive industrial facilities which normally have such a draw that no battery banks could help much (though perhaps you might make an industrial facility that does nothing more than hold the batteries, charge them over night and release to the grid during the day for stabilization).
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 19:11
|
|
|
Pander posted:They seem pretty transportable and modular. Add more capacity seasonally as required? Ramp up or down as necessary. What are you thinking of for seasonal capacity that they could handle and for what kind of owner? Where are they getting kept/who's owning them "off season"?
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 19:30
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I think you guys are thinking about two different thing. There's a difference in the economics of power storage for myself personally, and for Encor or whatever power company. Well that's the thing, the Tesla packs are at least nominally designed around being for an end user, but in reality they'd be more useful for a power company or similar, outside of a minority of places that actually have residential electric price changes from hour to hour.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 19:48
|
|
|
Dahn posted:What areas provide electricity to residential consumers at a reduced cost off peak? I don't think my meter cares what time of day it is, it just cares how much I use. At a glance, Glendale, California offers it as an option: http://www.glendaleca.gov/government/departments/glendale-water-and-power/rates/residential-electric-rates And so does this utility that appears to operate in Arizona: http://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/tou.aspx
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 20:02
|
|
|
Apparently if you think North American houses are bad, Australian homes are even worse and they haven't bothered making them better at all.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2015 03:42
|
|
|
In all honesty the cheapest solution over the long term is just pay for the power lines to be run out there, especially as it'll raise the value of the property more than any of the other things.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2015 01:35
|
|
|
Pander posted:First US nuclear plant of the 21st century...is a Gen II design. Aren't the reactors going up in Georgia going to be done way sooner, and either gen III or gen IV?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2015 05:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 00:25 |
|
|
QuarkJets posted:You fix that by training a new generation of nuclear engineers and scientists, not by telling people working in other fields that they need to be working on fission now. And you train that new generation of nuclear engineers and scientists by deciding to put down some cash to fund R&D in fission and to build new reactors (at this point I'd even go out on a limb and say "gently caress it, if the private sector won't step up then let's just build some government-owned fission reactors"). You can accomplish all of this without sacrificing any of the priorities in nuclear fusion Since new fission reactors are currently being built, presumably there's R&D going on for conventional fission, to say nothing of all that's going into thorium development in India. I do not think we need to worry about losing the knowledge of fission development.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2015 16:02
|
|