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Sylink posted:Is it likely that we'll ever get cheap near disposable PV tiles to slap on everything and everywhere? I'd imagine if you could buy PV like paper it would provide tons of energy to just about everything when combined with dense battery tech. The problem is the battery. Renewables would be a lot more viable if we could just store the energy in a practical and economical way. It doesn't matter if wind mills become 50% cheaper or solar panels 100% more efficient - as long as we don't have The Battery their use will not go beyond supplemental generation. This guy might be on to something but who knows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTAaeQfCts
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Sep 6, 2012 16:10
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Can you have a nuclear power program that enables you to build power plants but not nuclear weapons? I mean it's pretty problematic for countries like the US to openly state that nuclear power is the best and most cost effective way of supplying power if it then denies it to a bunch of poor countries because we don't want nukes in unstable areas. We do it with Iran but we don't really want nukes where there could potentially be a civil war or a neighboring country might invade either. If the US transitions to nuclear power it sends a message and it needs a plan for how you deal with it on a global scale. I'm not saying the US should deny other countries using it. I'm saying that is what the US government will do and that it probably won't be a tenable position.
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Aug 6, 2013 21:11
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:A century ago, a gas turbine was likely a finicky and dirty machine that was barely more than a proof of concept. There are some very fundamental limitations to solar power, but you just pointed out a relatively simple engineering hurdle that will be ironed out (along with many others) in due course. 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.
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Oct 4, 2013 02:22
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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. Well it's economically cheaper to burn oil than pretty much any other energy production method - it's just that the true cost is carried by the climate and ecosystems much like conventional farming. It's difficult to compete with conveniently packaged energy from fossil fuels or just cutting down a forrest, throwing some seeds on the ground and pumping some water onto it - that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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Oct 4, 2013 08:56
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Jeffrey posted:The point is, many crops are limited in where they can grow by how much sunlight they receive. Since vertical farming is like farming in the far north re: incidence angles, most crops will need additional energy input to produce light for them to grow. Unless you want to use nuclear power to create this light you probably are using something nonrenewable to do it. The buildings also need to be heated and cooled properly, and water has to be pumped up to the top in order to reach plants up there. I agree that vertical farming is cool and it uses space better that flat farming for sure, but the energy requirements are way higher to get the same output, it's not even close. I don't think anybody is saying we have the technology to make a transition right now - but it should be the end goal. Right now we're trying to use plants designed for seasons, open fields, sunlight etc and put them into a very different system. There's no reason to think we can't make organisms tuned to convert nutrients into food at a much faster and efficient rate then conventional farming can sustain. Maybe that's future speak on the level of fusion power but if we can't do that we're simply hosed. Water and phosphorous are limited resources so eventually something has to give. We can't just keep dumping this stuff into the ocean without a care in the world. You think high gas prices are bad for the poor - wait till aquifers start running dry, deposits become depleted and farmland turn to desert. We know this will happen and is happening right now. It's true that we produce enough food for everybody right now but are we absolutely sure that with another 3 billion people consuming more resources we'll be able to continue to do that with current systems? It's important we are certain of this. Paper Mac posted:That's not my point- the problem with industrial farming methods is that they're brittle, relatively energy-intensive, and rely on non-renewable inputs. Vertical farming doesn't really do anything to address those problems. To the extent that scarcity of arable land is a pressing problem for particular societies, I don't really see "build ersatz arable land in skyscrapers" as a meaningful solution. Well I wasn't really thinking specifically about vertical farming - I was just making a general observation that we should probably start thinking about producing our food in a different way. I just take issue with the idea that using less chemicals - organic farming - is sustainable when the problem is really much larger in scope.
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Oct 4, 2013 20:10
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Baronjutter posted:I just can't imagine a bunch of people who are apparently seriously interested in energy generation, enough to run a scientific contest, to be so ignorant on nuclear they'd just lash out in such obvious ignorance and emotion. It's the exact same thing with GMOs though - some environmentalists just got it into their thick skulls that sciency things are bad. The dishonesty of their arguments and tactics resembles creationists and climate change deniers in many ways.
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Jan 7, 2014 00:17
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enbot posted:Solar roads are great for places where they make utterly no sense to install. Like, they'd be great in say arizona, except why on earth would you want to install solar panels where they would be beat to hell vs. just using the endless amount of open land. And if space is an issue then you are in an area where the road will be heavily obscured during the day anyway. It's up to almost 2 million  Look, paving roads with glass and electronics is loving stupid. Glass is soft and brittle and it's not going to last for 10 or 20 years of trucks grinding sand and pebbles against it. What kind of traction do you get on wet glass after 5 years of grinding sand against it? How do you roll it out - do you have an army of technicians and electricians installing hexagons by hand? Also testing it to 250000 pounds is nonsensical - what happens when a 250000 pound truck drives over some random bit of road debris focusing all the pressure of an axle into a single point? Stop giving them money.
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Jun 4, 2014 04:06
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Renaissance Robot posted:I'm all up for hating on blind enthusiasm for awkward ideas but you are aware that there isn't only one kind of glass, right? 10-20 years is the lifespan of blacktop so that's the standard it should be judged by. Paving over our roads every 3 or 5 years or whatever is neither green, cheap nor feasible. If they have glass that can withstand 18 wheelers grinding rock against it for years that's great but it sounds amazing. Also ever noticed how rougher road surfaces produce more noise? Well this  reminds me of something.   It doesn't even matter. There's so many things wrong with it. - They want to use recycled glass to make it greener than blacktop - which is already 99% recycled. - Pressure sensors, micro processors, LEDs, wiring, solar panels, tempered glass - this is *not* greener than blacktop. - Those LED's under that glass won't be visible in direct sunlight. Think about a smartphone in direct sunlight. - Instead of lighting up entire roads maybe we could save energy and just put lamps on cars. - How are you going to thaw snow on the road with solar power... when it's snowing? - Thawing snow requires a shitload of energy. We should probably just shovel it off to the side. - This is a really inefficient way to deploy solar and you'll need an incredible number of transformer stations.
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Jun 16, 2014 23:16
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crazypenguin posted:They really are cheaper. We do have to solve the grid batteries problem before that's actually provably true, as right now you can argue the other way because we haven't (as far as I know) got a good grid battery solution, but I think you might even have to solve this problem for a pure-nuclear approach. After all, building 10 nuclear plants to supply enough to meet peak demand is likely more expensive than 5 + a grid battery system that can meet the peaks. NASA is working on vacuum magnetic bearing flywheels which I think is pretty interesting. They don't require any toxic elements, are fairly long lasting, have decent storage density and good roundtrip efficiency. Failure modes involve explosions though. There's these guys who are building a 6MV test storage facility somewhere in England. The more outlandish idea I've seen involves hauling rail cars filled with rocks to the top of a hill and then generating electricity when you roll them back down. There's a lot of stuff going on in that field as a new market more or less created by renewables - it's pretty interesting to follow it.
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Jul 8, 2014 20:35
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hobbesmaster posted:That of course is going to work but you're going to lose a lot of the energy in the process which will further increase the amount of solar/wind you need. It will certainly be more efficient than pumped hydro which is a pretty hilariously inefficient process. Pumped hydro sits around 70-75% roundtrip efficiency which I think would be manageble if it was scalable and didn't have the environmental impact. Of course energy storage is an added component to renewables that make it more expensive and complex but there's a potential there if we can figure out a cost effective way of doing it. The rail thing actually doesn't look too bad now that I look into it. I can't figure out how much space it takes up but it's low-tech proven technology, no energy loss for long term storage and the environmental impact is neglible assuming it doesn't require vast tracts of land. They claim 85% efficiency but that's from a sales pitch so whatever.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:38
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In my corner of Europe everything pre-70s oil shock got terrible insulation. It's so bad that it's more economical to tear them down and just build a new one.
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Jul 18, 2014 08:47
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crazypenguin posted:For what it's worth, Australia might actually be a place where they can get away with being nuclear-phobic. Don't they have pretty consistent year-round sunlight? I liked solar a lot more before I saw this  Solar in Germany 
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Jul 31, 2014 03:08
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Pander posted:Pretty sure it was, and it was generally eyerolled at. Yeah the thing is they don't need to jump through all these hoops if it really works. Build one - even just a small one - and sell electricity to the grid. If the scientific community refuses to see the light you have a cool monopoly on cold fusion. The only thing better than a patent would be nobody believing in your tech or being able to replicate it.
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Oct 11, 2014 05:16
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The Nordic market isn't representative of anything you can do on a global scale since there's vast natural resources here simply by virtue of area to population but it's at least a positive story. Reuters posted:Wind blows away fossil power in the Nordics, the Baltics next http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/15/nordicpower-windfarm-idUSL6N0S530M20141015
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Oct 24, 2014 12:47
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Ardennes posted:In the case of many forests for example in the Northwest, they may even be more recent than that since the timber industry usually replants. Ultimately, the most method would be using the waste from the timber industry for biomass, then replanting new trees in already established new growth forests. I don't see it something that really needs to be pushed that far, but it may be a interesting subsidization policy for the rural Northwest is Chinese demand for lumber falls. In any event decomposing plant matter produce methane and nitrous oxide as opposed to burning it which only release CO2. If you have access to large quantities of biomatter you really should either burn it or harvest the biogas from it. Landfilling is both a waste and terrible in terms of greenhouse gasses.
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Oct 24, 2014 18:18
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Pander posted:How does harvesting biomass for burning differ from allowing it to decompose in terms of soil quality? I thought that decomposition of plant matter provided the nitrogen and other nutrients necessary to allow for plant growth in the first place, and that cutting and burning trees and plant matter elsewhere was what contributed to the eradication of rich topsoil. I suppose it does but it's the case either way when we remove it from a field or forest and eventually dump it in a landfill.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:14
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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..."? Nothing is for certain but it doesn't appear to be a problem for the forseeable future. The issue is the effects it have on climate.
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Nov 1, 2014 04:10
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Placid Marmot posted:...in addition to the fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides that are inevitably required for any industrial production of biomass, which will include forests (which are not typically treated with the above), if they are harvested faster than the bedrock below them can release the minerals required to build fertile soil. Yes smoke is toxic. However, what makes it toxic, airborne particulates, do not remain in the air indefinetely so it's mainly an issue for the general vicinity of whatever is burning and the problem can be mitigated with filters. This is opposed to greenhouse gasses released when it rots which we can't mitigate. I'm specifically talking about biomatter that either ends up in landfills or is collected centrally for recycling. Burn it.
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Nov 1, 2014 20:04
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Trabisnikof posted:The people stopping nuclear power in the US aren't the general public, the NIMBYs, or the greens. Its the power companies and the price coal/gas. 
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Jan 6, 2015 19:18
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OwlFancier posted:Essentially in the UK we're building quite a number of wind farms, including a rather silly looking offshore one near me, but I believe most of them are built with government funding, or on crown land, rent free, and such. So I was wondering how they actually measure up in terms of efficient energy generation and economic viability, and I can't find the numbers I'm after on google, though that may be not knowing what to type. Onshore wind is cheap, only beaten by natural gas. Offshore wind is quite expensive. The DOE and NREL jointly run a database of energy generation cost estimates compiled from a range of different sources. http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/
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Mar 19, 2015 16:29
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OwlFancier posted:That was sort of what I was wondering about, is wind power actually practical outside of governments throwing money at it. Wind power is limited so it can never be the principal energy provider. If anyone is arguing this they are wrong. However, it's very, very cheap in the right places which makes it really dumb to not to use it if you can. I mean if you can put up some turbines in a good spot but don't, and instead burn more coal, you are literally paying money to spray toxins into your environment.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:10
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StabbinHobo posted:should we do the tesla battery here or new thread? People may buy them for the same reasons they buy Tesla cars - although it doesn't make any economic sense it's kinda cool and futuristic. As long as the economics is not there it will remain a thing for the tiny rich elite. Bloomberg did a piece on battery developers working on stuff.
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May 1, 2015 11:33
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Lurking Haro posted:Don't they use the same cell packs for SpaceX's Dragon capsules, which dock to the ISS? Either NASA doesn't care or they greenlit the use. A car with a life expectancy of 20 years is not equal to a space thing that will fly probably once.
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May 1, 2015 16:52
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Phanatic posted:A car where you can expect a failure not to instantly kill you and which you will have time to take to a mechanic before you plunge to a horrible fiery death is indeed not equal to things that by their nature must be incredibly overengineered. The point is it doesn't matter if NASA greenlighted it to fly on rockets. NASA greenlighted the engine on the curiosity rover and I wouldn't put that in my car, plane, train or boat. Things are engineered for different tasks and being exceptionelly well - or poorly - engineered for one thing does not inform you of anything else. Tesla batteries could be immensely well suited for space travel and still be the most expensive and impractical batteries on Earth.
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May 1, 2015 20:17
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Baronjutter posted:I'll believe all this battery tech when it's deployed and proven its self technically and economically and not just a bunch marketing hype. Well, Ars posted:http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/tesla-already-has-38000-reservations-for-the-powerwall-but-use-case-is-narrow/ If it can cost more than it saves and doesn't blow up within the warranty period it will have proven to do what Musk claims it does. It's doable. Bates fucked around with this message at 18:41 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 06:49
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Lurking Haro posted:Guess who helps inflating the cost by protesting and delaying projects for decades. Private investors have other reasons to not like it. It's extremely capital intensive with high (practically guaranteed) risk of cost overruns in the construction phase and the possibility of higher operation costs than projected. Add the risk of a perfect storm scenario where your 10-15 bill. reactor is suddenly rendered useless. At the same time you have to deal with unpredictable fossil fuel costs which may price you out at any point in the 40 years you need to recoup your investment while electricity demand is trending down and renewables are reaching parity. It's a lot of uncertainty and risk for a huge investment with a small to moderate return.
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Aug 3, 2015 01:01
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crabcakes66 posted:So I don't understand the arguments about subsidies being bad for X but not for Y. That chart is a bit opaque to me. We have derived most of our energy from fossil fuels so even a tiny subsidy would accrue to huge numbers whereas the opposite is true of marginal sources such as solar. It would be more interesting to see what subsidies amount to per kwh or something like that. Anyway, if you think CO2 or smog are bad then obviously the state shouldn't subsidize fossil fuels. If you think renewable energy is a conspiracy to usher in a world government then those subsidies are bad. If you don't like subsidies then they are all bad.
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Aug 3, 2015 01:30
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Boten Anna posted:It seems the larger issue is that PV is plummeting in price even at utility grade. I feel like I'm missing something for why PV is suddenly plummeting in price and rising in efficiency; it can't all just be subsidies. I was rather surprised to find out that in the process of getting solar panels on my house that the drat things seem like they can generate about as much electricity as we use in a month, and we use quite a bit over here. Swanson's law. The real answer is economies of scale, the learning curve and a technology that haven't quite plateaued yet, One thing out of left field that dropped prices a good bit a few years back was reduction in installation costs. Solar PV is kinda interesting in that it messes with the business models of established fossil fuel plants. Output peaks at the time of day when demand is high so sometimes it can drive electricity cost way down and suddenly your peaker plant isn't making much money. You still need those plants of course but they're more expensive to run which creates an incentive for more people to put up solar PV and around it goes. Penetration isn't high enough for us to really see how it will play out yet but at some point down the line utilities in some of the sunnier states will start moaning about it.
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Aug 3, 2015 20:15
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CombatInformatiker posted:The question is the same for all harmful materials, of course. The answer, however, isn't. There's also a difference between "we know how to handle this in a safe way" and "from years of practical experience, we know that even the unavoidable gently caress-up by humans doesn't result in serious ecological impact". Sure but production of PV will be subject to the same regulations as any other industrial production. The by-products do not appear to be wildly exotic or toxic by industrial standards.
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Aug 4, 2015 14:45
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Pander posted:Seems like the same old problem. You'd think that, given the ample free space out in Wyoming, there'd have to be some kind of space-inefficient but maintenance-efficient solution available to store the energy. Are those types of applications simply impractical on the single-home scale? Well thermal storage requires a steam turbine which I can't imagine is easier or cheaper to maintain. You could do compressed air storage but again, you need mechanical gadgets. It's just not going to be efficient or maintainable on a small scale. I kinda, sorta like flywheels... the energy density doesn't degrade over time and it's pretty efficient. I have no idea about lifespan and I suspect they'd be incredibly expensive at a small scale. We'll need better and cheaper batteries.
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Aug 5, 2015 20:10
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:It's admittedly speculative, but again it comes back to scale. A nuclear plant with a couple of reactors can produce a couple GW in a relatively compact structure. I would expect the foundations and mountings, plus the materials for the panels themselves, for the fields of PV panels necessary to generate that much electricity would require significantly more materials. These guys do some calculations but I don't know how accurate or useful it is. Keep in mind you can run the calculations for suburban vs urban living and get similarly hugely different numbers in land/energy/material use - and people wouldn't care at all. It's all very true but you're not going to convince anyone with it. In any event the US government is not fighting against nuclear - it's actively supporting it. The problem isn't policy, it's risk averse investors.
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Aug 6, 2015 22:51
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Bloomberg thinks renewables is starting to impact the cost of coal/gas generated electricity. The solar subsidy will be phased out over the next couple of years which will probably stall growth though.
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Oct 7, 2015 06:02
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computer parts posted: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. Rare earths refer to 17 elements and there's plenty of battery chemistries that don't involve any of them such as zinc-air or lead-acid. 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. Personally I find it odd to pay a premium for energy density on the utility scale so I don't think lithium will really be used there - it'll probably be flow batteries and other chemistries to optimize for cost rather than size.
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Nov 17, 2015 14:42
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computer parts posted:Yeah, that was actually explicitly stated: Rare earth elements and elements that are rare are different things, is what I'm saying.
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Nov 17, 2015 14:53
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:It really shouldn't be that complicated. Just have the government (with its access to more or less zero interest rate borrowing) build plants wherever there is demand, and sell the electricity at cost or with slight margins. If private producers of energy can do it a lower cost, go for it. If not, too bad. It's not cheap and that's the problem.
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Nov 20, 2015 20:22
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Not sure I'm parsing this correctly but isn't the fed already subsidizing financing and project costs? http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power-Policy/ World Nuclear Association on the Energy Policy Act 2005 posted:Federal loan guarantees for advanced nuclear reactors or other emission-free technologies up to 80% of the project cost.
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Nov 21, 2015 00:24
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QuarkJets posted:First, you're overestimating the destructive capacity of a nuclear meltdown by a huge margin. Amusingly hydro electric plants were often built so nuclear plants could run full tilt 24/7 because it was cheaper and more efficient than cycling them up and down. It's not that much of an issue with newer designs but a lot of hydro electric plants are a legacy of those first reactor designs.
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Nov 30, 2015 02:22
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QuarkJets posted:You don't have to resort to conjecture, you can just go look at how much we spend on nuclear power R&D and solar power R&D. Let's ask the people who actually study this: the Energy Information Administration (EIA) The federal Solar Investment Tax Credit expires in 2016 so that'll be interesting.
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Dec 1, 2015 07:42
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OPEC comitted ritual suicide Friday. The economies of Russia and Venezuela offered in appeasement to the angry Gods of oil. Bloomberg posted:OPEC abandoned all pretense this week of acting as a cartel. It’s now every member for itself. Given the current Sunni-Shia proxy-war in Syria it's unlikely the Saudis are going to do anything that could be helpful to Iran or Russia - and no one can really afford to do it without them. American shale and maybe some oil sands may go offline but they have proven inexplicably resilient so who knows how long it will take. Incidentally current oil prices are buoyed by China building up its strategic oil reserves which will continue and accelerate through 2016 albeit not enough to offset Irans return to market. Exciting times ahead for SUVs.
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Dec 5, 2015 04:31
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OwlFancier posted:See now that just doesn't make sense, solar panels eat sunlight so obviously they protect you from UV radiation. Solar panels soak up sunlight and amplifies UV. Ever wonder why areas with solar panels are hotter than areas without? The panels are frying everything around them. Every year around spring solar farms ramp up production of electricity and emit toxic radiation and the temps go up. Every year. The drought in California is more and larger solar farms baking the whole state. Germany built organic solar farms so they're ok.
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Dec 13, 2015 23:30
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