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How about wheeled delivery bots since they already exist. Delivery robots to replace takeaway drivers in London trial
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Mar 7, 2017 22:17
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Carpooling could become more attractive option with autonomous cars if you don't own the car anymore, not as much opposition for letting strangers in. And routing option would be improved with the option of switching cars. Walk to the street, hop in a random carpool going in the right direction, the car will communicate with some other carpool and agree pick up spot for the second leg of the trip.
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Mar 9, 2017 00:37
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I don't think there would be need for much forest clearing. The proposed route seems to follow an existing roads, so if they are willing to bury it as close to the road as possible it might be possible to do it with practically no trees cut. On the other hand, it would be less than 20 miles extra to go around the national forest completely, so it could be worth it to avoid the hassle.
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Feb 4, 2018 21:07
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Can someone just do the calculation so we can settle this issue. How much Big Macs and fries can an adult male, who doesn't exercise but intents to stay slim, eat? How much nutrients does that diet provide?
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Oct 19, 2018 18:32
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Smiling Demon posted:That doesn't strictly follow, although it would be a decent indicator. Many of the batteries we use daily are optimized for mobility. For grid level systems you can use things that would be otherwise prohibitive, eg liquid metal batteries that are both heavy and hot. But as I said, last I looked into it no significant progress had been made. Li-Ion is way too good technology to use for grid storage, but the R&D and manufacturing resources available for Li-Ion are vastly superior to what other battery technologies could dream of achieving. They may not reach Li-Ion pricing until the demand increases enough for Li-Ion prices to rise significantly and the battery prices to plateau. Even then Li-Ion will have the advantage of recycled batteries from scrapped cars or that have been replace because they aren't quite good enough for car use anymore. Those would probably still have lot of life left in stationary use. For example the football stadium of Ajax in Amsterdam utilises new and used Nissan Leaf batteries for storage. Second life LEAF batteries to power Amsterdam ArenA
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Oct 25, 2018 01:24
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Baronjutter posted:But it's no one thing. Don't trust anyone who says north american project bloat is just from one thing (ie those drat unions). It's a ton of things all coming together and resonating to make things spiral out of control. It's quite an awful situation because it's not something anyone can figure out how to actually fix and things just keep getting worse. I honestly don't know how long it can go on. Power plants, highways, subway tunnels, they should not cost remotely what they are currently ending up costing. In Finland alliance model has been successful in large construction projects in recent years. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is done differently to traditional projects. The goal is also not lowest price but high quality and keeping the project in time and in budget. Alliance contracting: the way forward?
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May 14, 2019 23:06
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VideoGameVet posted:Did the Greens hold so much power that they forced the really bad decision to turn off the nukes? Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Yes, which then forced them to rely on coal. It was the biggest self own in the energy sector in the last decade. Can you really blame Greens for that. In 2011 when Merkel's CDU announced the phase-out, the Greens were in opposition and had only 11% of the seats. The history behind Germany's nuclear phase-out quote:When the CDU/CSU won the elections in 2009 and formed a coalition with the Free Democrats (FDP), they extended the operating time by eight years for seven nuclear plants and 14 years for the remaining ten. This became known as the “phase-out of the (nuclear) phase-out” (Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg). However, in the wake of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan, the Merkel government decided in June 2011 to shut down eight nuclear plants and limit the operation of the remaining nine to 2022. Over 80 pe cent of parliamentarians voted for the bill in the Bundestag (federal parliament). Die Linke (Left Party) only objected because it wanted a faster exit and the measure’s inclusion in the constitution. Saukkis fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 16:10
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funkymonks posted:Edit: Another datapoint is a 500 kWh unit with a 700kW discharge rate is closer to $300,000 so you are paying quite a bit for the extra output. There is a lot of copper involved for the larger transformer, larger switchgear bus, and additional inverters required to handle the extra current. A problem for EV charging stations is getting a high capacity connection to the grid, and this sounds like a convenient solution for that. That battery could charge quite a few Teslas and you don't need very thick connection to the grid if it's running at full blast 24/7. Could also provide a bit of grid storage with any excess capacity.
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Nov 21, 2019 23:47
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MomJeans420 posted:Even then I highly doubt it could be done, we don't even have enough skilled craftsmen to build that many nukes at one time. How many craftsmen of nuclear construction would actually be needed? Most of the construction can be applied from other industries. Concrete workers from skyscrapers, piping from chemical industry, steam turbines from coal plants. In Finland large part of the contruction has been done by for example polish subcontractors. Of course that is also a big reason for the delays, but on the other hand they haven't been replaced by proper nuclear contructors, they've just had to redo their work until they've reached required quality standards.
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Aug 22, 2020 00:54
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I think France is the best example of what is possible. Nuclear power in France quote:in the 1950s a civil nuclear research program was started I haven't about heard about significant damages caused by the nuclear program in France, and the list of accidents doesn't seem unreasonable.
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Aug 22, 2020 18:00
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Nitrousoxide posted:Air source heat pumps are also pretty affordable now and with some of the newer refrigerant gasses work down to Sub-Zero temperatures. I assume you are talking about fahrenheits, since modern air heat pumps can still operate at -30°C. In one test I found from last year the heat pumps produced about 2.5kW of heat at -30°C with a COP around 1.5. This is pretty good for 1500€ devices. Combine an air-water heat pump with water floor heating in a well insulated house and there aren't many places in the world where it couldn't be a practical heating solution.  
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Oct 24, 2020 19:28
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Raised platforms, but make them high enough to drive under and cover all the parking lots with them. We should just but as much of the solar in urban environment as possible. Mandated rooftop solar panels, windows made of transparent panels. Building walls covered in them. Couple decades ago in Helsinki they built a highrise where all the south facing balcony railings were made of solar panels. To continue my earlier heat pump post. Last year in Finland we broke one million installed heat pumps. Of new built houses 70-80% use some form of heat pump and every year 8000 oil heating systems are replaced with heat pumps. About 15% of home- and service building heating is done by heat pumps. Last year an exhaust air heat pump was installed in several hundred apartment buildings, they can reduce upto 50% of heating energy.
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Oct 24, 2020 21:31
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For cities solar panel windows could be a convenient option if the dimming isn't an issue. They wouldn't be much more work than installing normal windows, just some extra cabling.
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Oct 27, 2020 03:01
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Infinite Karma posted:Transparent solar panels are kind of moronic, since the whole point of solar panels is absorbing as much sunlight as possible instead of letting it pass through like glass does. For smaller housing rooftop solar is better option unless you don't want the structure on your roof. But for highrises and especially glass-facade highrises transparent solar would be good option.
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Oct 27, 2020 19:15
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Bluewaters coal-fired power station written off as worthless as renewables risequote:The owners of Australia's newest coal-fired power station have written down the value of the asset to zero, wiping out a $1.2 billion investment in the face of an onslaught of renewable energy.
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Dec 19, 2020 04:21
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Infinite Karma posted:Also it would be weird to build a desalination plant where the production of the water isn't factored into the overall water supply. If you don't need more fresh water than you have, why desalinate at all? And if you do need more fresh water than you have, it's not exactly optional to run the desalination plant. I would think California is a good example. They don't need desalination since they have roughly enough other water sources. But it would be pretty great if they weren't using those other sources so they should take all the "free" desalinated water that is available. So what is needed are desalination plants with relatively cheap CAPEX, minimal staffing needs and practical amounts of waste energy.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:11
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In last decade there were some wide power outages in Finland and the government's solution was to raise the compensation fees for power outages. The power companies did their calculations and this gave them incentive to start burying cables heavily. This of course concerns mainly lines that were running below tree top level.quote:If the service interruption lasts at least 12 hours, the consumer is automatically entitled to standard compensation. Longer the interruption, higher the standard compensation. The amount of compensation also depends on the consumer´s annual network service fee.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:55
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CourtFundedPoster posted:So, what's the pitfall with geothermal? You'll hear it doing the rounds of a lot of techno-optimist twitter, including people who work directly in the industry, which obviously induces suspicion, but I haven't seen as much direct push back with them as I have with pretty much every other energy generation proposal. On paper, it seems to solve the problems of nuclear (the public hasn't soured on it, it's comparatively cheaper to build) and Solar/Wind (can be built basically anywhere, isn't intermittent). I'd say the biggest is what is the intent with geothermal, do you use it for heating or generating electricity. If you want electricity, then you probably need a place with volcanic activity like Iceland, so the plant produces hundreds of degrees hot steam that can be used with turbines. If you want just heat, then it becomes possible in lots of other places. There is a geothermal plant in Espoo right next to Helsinki with 6km deep holes. Cold water is pumped down one hole and returns up the other at 110°C, which is useable for district heating network. But this is only practical in places that already have extensive district heating.
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May 21, 2021 21:16
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mobby_6kl posted:New report just dropped (a week ago). Apparently 5% of power plants generate 75% of global (power generation) carbon emissions. They also probably generate a huge chunk of total electricity too since they're all huge coal plants, but still seems like pretty good news if we could replace them with renewables or nukes (lol). According to them this should be enough to cut total global emissions by 20% which seems absolutely massive. The article and report doesn't make it clear if these plants are excessively inefficient or just unusually large coal plants. The report talks about the intensity, but it's relative to other fossil fuel plants and coal plants probably are more intensive compared to oil and natural gas plants. But if the top-10 are just operating at the average coal plant efficiency, then it doesn't really matter whether you decommission one of them or 10 smaller coal plants, except for the people living nearby who have to deal with most of the non-CO2 emissions. Or it might be better to decommission smaller plants.It's probably more efficient to transport to coal to one huge plant than ten smaller ones. And if we some day come up with an effective CCS system, then these huge plants are the prime candidates for deploying it, as mentioned at the end of the article. If these huge plants are less efficient than average for some reason, maybe they have outdated boiler and generators, then they should be easier to upgrade than smaller. You can only renovate small portion of the plant while the rest keep operating, instead of shutting down the whole of smaller plant for a year.
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Aug 13, 2021 20:52
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Option 1 isn’t available here in Australia so a mix of 2/3 is where we are headed. Speaking of storage, I hadn't seen this news in thread. Tesla's Megapack in Victoria caught fire during testing. Tesla Megapack caught fire at Victorian Big Battery site in Australia
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Aug 28, 2021 13:58
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Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options - UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/LCA-2.pdf quote:5.1 Discussion
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Dec 14, 2021 04:46
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evil_bunnY posted:Have you had a building inspection done for heat loss? Most US houses/buildings I've been in have been ridiculously poorly insulated. A decade+ ago I guy from Montana I was chatting with mentioned that he was in the process of upgrading the windows on his house to dual-pane. I was pretty stunned by this as a Finn. I was born in '79 and I had never lived in a house that didn't have at least dual-panes, I may not have even seen a house used for living with single panes. Triple-panes seem to have been a stardard for quite some time and if you invest in insulation you probably get quad-panes with argon filling or something. During most of my childhood and youth we lived in an old house with dual-panes and a normal practice during winter was to tape the gaps in windows. During some winters we taped a plastic sheet over the windows.
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Apr 25, 2022 12:08
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His Divine Shadow posted:This is the kind of crazy poo poo that's been happening in europe too, going from dirt cheap to expensive as hell. Even though the transfers are much better and things aren't as localized. I think I read an article about how Finland experienced this after Olkiluoto 3 went online. The transmission lines to Sweden don't have the capacity for as much electricity as we might want to sell, so this has capped the prices in Finland. But this may change again if we stop importing from Russia.
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May 11, 2022 07:58
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Lurking Haro posted:I thought everybody got a quota and you only pay if you exceed it, but companies can sell their unused quota. Those quotas weren't static. I read an article about a power plant and their carbon credits. At the beginning they had so much credits they could sell them at profit. Then they dropped to even. Later they needed to start buying credits. And the next stage the credits would have become expensive enough that they started upgrading their plant to use biofuel or some other method.
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Jul 4, 2022 11:34
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His Divine Shadow posted:Something tells me this will be atocious in terms of resources (concrete, steel, etc) to kWh. I would even be doubtful if it's possible to build such a large piston with a fit tight enough not to let water seep past it, and not get stuck because of thermal expansion.
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Aug 21, 2022 12:29
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silence_kit posted:He was obviously making the argument I am attributing to him. You only need to look at the title of the chapter to see this: "The Solar Dream". He may have been wrong about his assumptions, but it doesn't matter. This whole discussion is irrelevant. Even if solar panels were practically free we still couldn't use them to power the planet, nights and clouds ruin everything. The minimum it would require is a global super conductive electrical grid. When it's night in Americas the electricity from Asian and European solar plants would need to be transferred across Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
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Aug 27, 2022 17:11
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silence_kit posted:Yeah, this is an extremely important point which escapes a lot of the posters in this thread. We used to have a moderator who posted a lot in this thread who believed that the high capacity factor of nuclear electricity was a selling point of the technology and would frequently mention it in arguments. He was wrong--it is actually a drawback and a liability of the technology! Renewable electricity is so cheap only because they have externalized the costs of stable production and grid stability, like fossil fuel has externalized emission costs. Whenever a renewable power plant fails to generate the electricity they are supposed to be capable some coal or natgas plant. If we required renewable power plants to produce their name plate capacity 24/7, as we should, they would be hideously expensive. France's eCO2mix website is a good illustration of the problem. For the past month their nuclear plants have been producing between 22.7 GW to 32.8 GW of electricity, with only few shorter dips below 28 GW. During the same period their solar plants of course drop to zero during night time, but every day the production peaks at at least 2.0 GW to 7.4 GW. And the graphs look very uniform, you can trust that solar produces at least certain amount at known times of day and you could allocate suitable amount of storage to augment. Their wind power production on the other hand is all over the place. At the minimum it has produced 1.2 GW and at maximum 15.1 GW, but most of the time it is below 10 GW and there isn't much predictability. And around the minimum production spot there is a longer duration of low production. For a period of five days from midday 9.11. to midday 14.11. the production has only a single short peak above 5 GW and most of the time it has trouble getting past 3 GW. Covering that shortfall would require an immense amount of electricity storage. So have to solve this problem. The simple solution is battery storage, whenever you build a wind turbine just build a battery next to it. But how big a battery? Based on that graph four days could be a good measure, so 100 GWh battery for every 1 GW turbine. Google suggests as as rule of thumb $1 million per 1 GW on wind turbines, and that 100 GWh Tesla battery in Australia cost $100 million. So the storage would cost 100 times as much as the production, clearly that is not a practical solution. How about the second option, overbuild and decentralize. To be able to reliably produce 1 GW of electricity just build five 1 GW turbines in different areas of the country, with the assumption that there will always be wind somewhere if far enough. But that graph clearly indicates that France isn't big enough region, you would need to locate the turbines all over Europe at least. And that would also require hellishly long transmission cables. Another issue is that to achieve stable production, overproduction would also be forbidden. When the wind is strong you would allowed to sell the 1 GW in your quota to the grid. The remaining 4 GW you need to throw away, or hopefully sell it to some other customer who doesn't use grid electricity. Of course our best electricity storage method is hydro power. Dams have immense capacity and if we dedicate them to cover the shortfall from renewable production they could solve much of the problem. But they may not be a long term solution, sooner or later we may want to restore large portion of our rivers. Right after we get rid of fossil plants the next project will be large scale dam removal.  
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Nov 27, 2022 18:57
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Pander posted:And yeah, the RRCs don't have power transformers, those are permanent install gear, and the whole point of the RRCs is temporary hotfixes to mitigate damage from LOOP. Practical Engineering did a video on rifle attacks on a substations in North Carolina and he shows footage of mobile substation that was brought in to make one of them functional.
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Jan 24, 2023 19:12
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Son of Rodney posted:Ultimately by shutting off nuclear there's less necessity to temporarily shut down renewables when the grid capacity is bound by non-flexible production methods, so in the end it'll propably remain at roughly the same intensity until gas or renewables can replace coal. Yes, I too found this comment weird and I think it reveals a big misunderstanding. Renewable production doesn't generally shut down, they are the cheapest source of electricity and will always produce at maximal capacity as far as wind and sun is available. On the other hand traditional nuclear is non-flexible and will run at static production at all times. It is the fossil fuel production that will adjust based on demand and renewable production. Good example of this is the German energy chart from week 2 this year. Start of the week winds are weak and there large amount of production from fossil plants. In the mid week winds pick up and fossil productions drops significantly. All this time the nuclear plants are running at fixed capacity, 2380MW, ±30MW, there is only short dip below 2300.
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Apr 19, 2023 21:41
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mobby_6kl posted:The best I can interpret it is that renewables are generating so loving much power that they don't know what to do with it. And since you can't (well you can, but w/e) throttle nuclear, you'd have to put tarps over solar panels or something. In which case, there is no change in carbon intensity. January 4th Germany had a record wind production, reaching almost 44GW. As a result their electricity export went over 15GW, there is always some coal plant in Europe willing to power down.
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Apr 19, 2023 22:04
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Do natural gas electricity plants regularly flare? I had mostly associated that with drilling operations. Also the idea of excess energy for natgas plant sounds ridiculous, aren't they one of the most dispatchable power sources. You spool them up when demand increases and when in drops they quickly spool down in a sub-minute schedule. "Demand dropped suddenly, quick, we have 30 seconds of mining to do. That article feels like there is enough production from renewables, nuclear and coal plants, and no one wants to buy their premium natural electricity. The facility is gathering dust and they want to find some use for it to recover their investment.
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Apr 30, 2023 03:25
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The discussion about energy storage needs a website that lists all the available or possible future methods, and the state of research with them. I have seen so many technologies listed that I can't keep track of them. When posters mention battery storage do they mean Li-Ion batteries, or also flow and liquid metal batteries and what else there are? I suspect that as long as we are limited by our litium battery manufacturing capacity we should prioritize them for EVs and only use minimal amount for grid stability uses. One unusual energy storage is used by Helsinki energy company. They have turned decommissioned oil caves to heat storage, 260 000 m³ caves that can hold 11,6 GWh of hot water. But this is probably only practical in cities with district heating. Smaller version could be hot water tanks in households, might as well heat them to 90°C when electricity is plentiful. Just need a device that mixes it with cold water at the output. Or maybe the output tube could run the height of the tank with temperature controlled openings at regular intervals. Or cool a freezer down to -20°C. Years ago I heard of device that monitors the grid frequency and would turn equipment off if the frequency dropped below nominal. It would probably be a minimal expense if all appliances that can manage with intermitten power were equipped with one, fridges, freezers, water tanks, EV chargers... For grid I think I like cryogenic energy storage best, it doesn't require rare or unusual materials or technology. Any company that has built oil refineries, chemical plants or similar should be able to manufacture them. For example, what is the company that manufactured the Nord Stream 2 pipes doing? In fact, we already have those broken and unusable pipes, let's raise them up, cut to sections, weld endcaps and stand them upright and we'll have whole lot of storage tanks right there, assuming liquid air won't make them too brittle.
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Jun 21, 2023 22:27
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Well it is very convenient when you can just look at the link and know you don't need to click it.
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Oct 6, 2023 03:36
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TheMuffinMan posted:plasma Still doesn't have anything to do with energy generation, this is more a new way to spend energy. And get lasers as a result. Probably a more efficient way to create powerful laser pulses but still no generation.
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Nov 16, 2023 20:23
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TheMuffinMan posted:if it's a more efficient way to create laser pulses then you can make nuclear fusion happen for less? Maybe, if the lasers produced by this method can be used with fusion. At least the researchers didn't address this possibility. Could be that this method is difficult to produce lasers with enough energy. The Nature article talks in the scale of 100 joules, the NIF experiment used lasers with 4 billion joules.
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Nov 16, 2023 20:46
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Olkiluoto 3 had a malfunction on Sunday and it will be back in production at midday on Tuesday. Few hours later at 16 the electricity prices will have a possibly record breaking peak 96.4 c/kWh. You might think that is a weird order of events and that is because the electricity markets didn't trust that it would be back online that soon. And they were right, at late evening on Monday updated schedule was released that delayed the start of production until 18 on Tuesday. At the same time one of the EV charger chains has "black week" going and they are selling at half price. It's a weird idea that it would almost make sense to use an EV to go buy electricity for home use. I have been thinking about electricity markets and how the higher cost producers have a perverse pricing motivation. They know they can't compete on price with wind power. There are no days when wind power production is expensive, just variation on quantity. When ever wind is plentiful they know they won't be able to sell a watt. So they should only offer electricity at high prices and wait for the days when there isn't enough wind. Saukkis fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 03:55
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Saukkis posted:Olkiluoto 3 had a malfunction on Sunday and it will be back in production at midday on Tuesday. Few hours later at 16 the electricity prices will have a possibly record breaking peak 96.4 c/kWh. You might think that is a weird order of events and that is because the electricity markets didn't trust that it would be back online that soon. And they were right, at late evening on Monday updated schedule was released that delayed the start of production until 18 on Tuesday. Well, the prices sure are volatile. On Friday between 15 and 24 electricity will cost -50c/kWh. Because a Norwegian Kinect Energy send an erronous bid for the Finnish market. Supposedly Nordpool won't redo the bidding so the price will stay.
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Nov 23, 2023 16:54
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Here's an interesting electricity price tool for Finns. You can download your consumption data from Fingrid's Datahub and this website can calculate cost differences to fixed price contracts. https://liukuri.fi/laskuri
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Nov 24, 2023 03:01
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Saukkis posted:Well, the prices sure are volatile. On Friday between 15 and 24 electricity will cost -50c/kWh. Because a Norwegian Kinect Energy send an erronous bid for the Finnish market. Supposedly Nordpool won't redo the bidding so the price will stay. Looks like there was an effect.  
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Nov 25, 2023 07:44
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I have got the impression heat storage mostly only works as part of a district heating system. No need for a energy conversion and the required heat is relatively low.
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Dec 19, 2023 06:04
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