General Category => Tech Won't Save Us => Topic started by: RE on Jul 02, 2023, 04:26 AM
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 02, 2023, 04:26 AM
Not looking good for charging up all those Teslas. Not sure where they figure all the money is going to come from besides more printing of debt, which they intend to do while reducing inflation? Of course I am not one of the smartest guys in the room figuring this magic act out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORtHnYBuoQw
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 03, 2023, 12:17 PM
Quote from: RE on Jul 02, 2023, 04:26 AMNot looking good for charging up all those Teslas. Not sure where they figure all the money is going to come from besides more printing of debt, which they intend to do while reducing inflation? Of course I am not one of the smartest guys in the room figuring this magic act out.
RE
The 'running your house off your car' scenario makes no damn sense. The Power Grid Video is all about trying to keep things going the way they are.
There is not enough copper and lithium to do it. More than the imaginary money you correctly predict is needed. Imaginary metals anyone?
Copper Shortage Getting Real (https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2023-01-24/Copper-shortage-getting-real.html)
Article snippets:
Some of the world's largest mining companies and metal traders are warning that by 2025, a massive shortfall will emerge for copper, which is now the world's most critical metal due to its essential role in the green economy. The deficit will be so large, The Financial Post stated last September, that it could itself hold back global growth, stoke inflation by raising manufacturing costs and throw global climate goals off course.
The International Study Group puts the coming deficit into perspective, noting that in 2021, the global copper shortfall was 441,000 tons, equivalent to less than 2% of demand for the refined metal, but enough to drive copper prices 25% higher. Using S&P Global's forecast, 2035's shortfall will be 10 times higher, at about 20% of consumption.
Backyard corn growing is the future.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 04, 2023, 06:46 AM
I still maintain that the days of a central grid for rural areas are over. I am following closely the vehicle to home technologies that are being marketed. Right now they are catering to rich fear filled people driving trucks and wanting to keep their central ac going during a hurricane blackout. A shitty use for the tech but That is not the tech's fault. There is no reason why your house could not have a small battery bank and your car the large battery bank. The large solar array could do the house and the extra going to your car. The car could trickle back to the small house battery as needed at night. All of that is off the shelf and can pay for itself slowly over time. Upfront costs are large but they are the real costs not invisible ones. What bugs me is we have gotten used to buried costs that you don't see but are real. Cost like tens of thousands of miles of copper wires, transformers, substations, land devoted to power lines, tree trimming, coal subsidies, gas subsidies, clean up costs, to name but a few. All of the electrification tech can work as long as we change our narrative of big being better. I'm not too hopeful on that one. That's the version of the future I choose to plant my flag on these days. Cheers, NF
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 09:00 PM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Jul 04, 2023, 06:46 AMThere is no reason why your house could not have a small battery bank and your car the large battery bank. The large solar array could do the house and the extra going to your car. The car could trickle back to the small house battery as needed at night. All of that is off the shelf and can pay for itself slowly over time. Cheers, NF
It makes sense if you are generating your own power.
The charge efficiency of a lithium battery tops out at 95%. It is typically lower in the real world. Generate your own power and you don't pay for the loss.
People in the city are on a grid. Moving energy back and forth to a battery is an expense city people avoid by being on a grid. Charging an auto battery and using it to drive a car makes sense for them. Using an auto battery for anything else for a person connected to a grid is extra cost and solves no need.
The number of rural people is very small compared to the number of city people. The majority of vehicle buyers gain nothing by running their house off a car. When the car is at home it most likely needs to be charged anyway no matter where you live. At night. Perhaps all night. What is the house supposed to do? Wait for the car to charge? What does the house do when the car is not home?
If a car is running a house it will never have a full charge. When exactly would it be charged?
Did she consider that when the blackout is over the car will have to charge? I hope it is a short blackout. How much charge did she have when the blackout started?
She does not care. She is living in a million dollar house with a 100K truck having no visible means of support. What cares would she have? Needing a full charge on the truck is not one of them.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: 18hammers on Jul 05, 2023, 07:45 AM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Jul 04, 2023, 06:46 AMThere is no reason why your house could not have a small battery bank and your car the large battery bank. The large solar array could do the house and the extra going to your car. The car could trickle back to the small house battery as needed at night. All of that is off the shelf and can pay for itself slowly over time. Cheers, NF
It makes sense if you are generating your own power.
The charge efficiency of a lithium battery tops out at 95%. It is typically lower in the real world. Generate your own power and you don't pay for the loss.
People in the city are on a grid. Moving energy back and forth to a battery is an expense city people avoid by being on a grid. Charging an auto battery and using it to drive a car makes sense for them. Using an auto battery for anything else for a person connected to a grid is extra cost and solves no need.
The number of rural people is very small compared to the number of city people. The majority of vehicle buyers gain nothing by running their house off a car. When the car is at home it most likely needs to be charged anyway no matter where you live. At night. Perhaps all night. What is the house supposed to do? Wait for the car to charge? What does the house do when the car is not home?
If a car is running a house it will never have a full charge. When exactly would it be charged?
Did she consider that when the blackout is over the car will have to charge? I hope it is a short blackout. How much charge did she have when the blackout started?
She does not care. She is living in a million dollar house with a 100K truck having no visible means of support. What cares would she have? Needing a full charge on the truck is not one of them.
That add makes little sense, it claims 9.6 killowatts of exportable power. What is that? A momentary peak of power? It should state how many exportable "killowatt hours" are available.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 05, 2023, 08:16 AM
Just the cable from the car to the house by itself will be worth 100 bucks. $40 worth of 14 Gauge wire won't cut it. You need 10 Gauge wire at least. An inverter that can put out 9.6 Kw won't be cheap.
QuoteThe gauge of wire used for EV charging depends on the charging capacity and the distance between the charging station and the electrical panel. Generally, for residential charging stations, 6 or 8 gauge wire is commonly used.
Cost is about $8 a foot for the wire and the inverter is worth over a thousand. The woman in the ad might have got someone to hook it all up to her house for free since the only working people who can afford to buy that electric truck are high end hookers. Incels with rich parents to the rescue!
The woman is not working in a warehouse for a big box store and having a day off like I am. 20 bucks an hour is not going to justify spending thousands from a minimum wage job just to have hot coffee when the power goes out.
As a stoic a power outage is an opportunity to practice temperance. Let the obstacle become the way.
The satisfaction of every idle whim by technology is not stoic.
I'll save my money and improve my character.
Quote"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
* The cable upon reflection, an EV owner would already have on the charger. They would still need an inverter and the 'premium cable' probably costs more. But this is splitting ----- copper wires. I made my point.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 05, 2023, 04:23 PM
The concept of having a big batt for the car and small batt for the house and of course at least 1 EV car, along with a hefty solar array plus a grid connection gives you better than average resilience, but quite obviously is outta da budget for 95% of the population even in a relatively "rich" country like the FSoA. The whole system is predicated on the suburban model of living where everybody has their own house and car. What about all the folks who live in apartments in cities and don't even own their own car? Apartment buildings aren't suitable for solar, there's not enough surface area with sun exposure for the number of living units stacked vertically on the property. They also don't usually have a parking garage right under the building you might wire all the car batts to the living units from. In other words, this whole model is unsuitable for anyone who lives in Manhattan or downtown Seattle, even the rich folks there who might be able to afford it.
Moving outward to Brooklyn and Queens where you mostly have Brownstones and attached housing the people do generally own cars, but mostly use street parking so being able to connect home and car is probably not possible, at the least it is impractical. The 1/8th to 1/4 acre plots these dwellings sit on barely would provide enough space for your pv array, ussuming you have good southern exposure.
Once you make it out to Long Island or NJ and start finding the McMansions on 1/2 acre properties with attached garages, the paradigm becomes possible, but these days said domiciles go for $500K & up, to which you are now adding another $100K probably for the EV car, home batt, inverters, pv array and assorted wiring. What percentage of the population can afford this solution?
Moving rural, the land and home sizes are larger and come cheaper, but at the expense of fewer high paid jobs so affording the whole package is still limited, and the total population also much smaller.
Taken all together, while this option is possible for a small segment of the population, it's not a society wide solution. Nevertheless, EV transportation and solar powered homes are still held out as the Holy Grail for the Green Amerikan, like 2 cars in every garage and a white picket fence were the grail of post-WWII subdivisions like Levittown. The Amerikan Dream for everyone. Everyone never got that one, and even fewer will get this one.
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 05, 2023, 06:59 PM
QuoteThis whole model is unsuitable for anyone who lives in Manhattan or downtown Seattle, even the rich folks there who might be able to afford it.
QuoteEV transportation and solar powered homes are still held out as the Holy Grail for the Green Amerikan, like 2 cars in every garage and a white picket fence were the grail of post-WWII subdivisions like Levittown. The Amerikan Dream for everyone. Everyone never got that one, and even fewer will get this one.
Exactly right, but if your social position is comfortable enough you can practice the 'rising tide lifts all boats' logic of self-deception. You can say fuck the boatless with a smile.
Being in a social position to be able to say such shit is a fantasy for most people. In that fantasy Imagining such an attitude to be "OK" is a common delusion. In fantasy anything goes.
To that Buddy C sez: (https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/702/545/ff1.jpg) Cut that shit out.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 06, 2023, 03:48 AM
All valid points. I have no interest in the problems of urban population solar adoption. Their solutions should be transit and ride share services. Their power grid is very dense and pays for itself. My concerns and focus are on the aging rural grids that are prone to failure and don't have the density to be maintained properly. As to costs well the tech is new so it's pricey but so is hidden subsidies to grid power. Shrink the average house by 200 square feet and suddenly your solar costs are part of the house costs. Using the Ford lightning example they show a dedicated inverter charger setup with custom wiring and expensive accessories. All of that is useless fluff. Built into the Ford are high power inverters that can easily power critical loads in a house for days or slowly recharge a house based system. The much less expensive kia electrics have a plug in attachment for $200 that do the same thing. In rural areas if you have home based work you are spending most of your time at home. Most of the homes I see around me have at least one vehicle parked in the drive way most of the day. Experiences differ of course. I'm very interested in where all this goes. The world is changing I want to get an idea of how it's changing and hopefully not get crushed by it. Cheers, NF
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 06, 2023, 05:22 AM
If you go with a mixed solution like micro-nukes for the cities and the solar/batt option for the rich suburbs and rural, you are closer to a plausible total solution. You wouldn't need such a vast expansion of the high voltage transmission lines that would take so much copper and aluminum and faces so many regulatory hurdles and shortage of manpower to build it and maintain it.
In this solution, suburbia would be limited to the rich while poor folks live in the cities with electricity, or in rural areas mostly without it. The filthy rich would have the luxury skyscrapers for their city home and an off grid solar and wind powered rural estate in the countryside. Basically the same organization as Jolly Old England circa 1880 when the Earl had his Estate and his London Town home. Poor folks lived in squalor in the city or shacks on the estate to mind the Lord's pigs and sheep. The Manor got wired up for electricity in the 1920s, but the poor folks didn't start getting wired until after WWII.
I of course am no big fan of Nuke Puke, micro or otherwise, but this solution is at least plausible. Not sure how much or how many of these micro nukes you would need to pull it off or how much it would cost, but it doesn't stretch my credibility like expanding and upgrading the grid does. I am also unsure of how much Uranium this would require and whether enough can be mined up and refined, or how long it would take to build all these nukes if you started today. I suspect it's a decade at least, probably 2. Also don't know if enough nuclear power plant engineers could be trained up to staff them all. Finally, the radioactive waste problem still remains.
The micro nuke solution also faces the same MONEY problem a grid build out does, which is that it is fabulously expensive and financing it with loans from already insolvent banks handed out to already insolvent construction companies with no clear idea how this debt could ever be paid by an increasingly poor population of consumers is a fiduciary magic act that is beyond my pay grade.
Regardless what solution is pursued here, I don't think any will come online fast enough to transition to the EV transport fleet with zero carbon by 2035. As an increasing number of EVs get produced, the increased load will lead to more grid failures, blackouts and brownouts, or they will start rationing electricity. I took a WAG that it will take about 5 years for this to become apparent. Always risky to make predictions of course.
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 06, 2023, 07:15 AM
We are In full agreement that the 2035 goal is ridiculous. I do think you overestimate the cost of solar though. I installed a 2kw array 5kwhr storage 3 kw inverter for under 10000 dollars us. Heating is by wood, no ac, full fridge, water pump, all light and comms. The system can be expanded to 3kw of solar. A good third of that was electrical and regulation. You could go the guerrilla solar route but I don't do that. So in that scenario you shrink your prefab home by 100 square ft ($250/sq ftX 100 = $25000) the solar costs are covered and you never have an electrical bill.. There could be shortages in the winter time but a $300 generator can run for 2 hours a day to make up for any lack. As for nukes; Ontario is proposing a new massive 4500 Mega watt plant. Cost wise it would be less expensive to give every household 30000 of solar and storage then to build the thing... but of course that is not on the table.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 06, 2023, 11:11 AM
How long does it take your 2kw array to charge your EV, and how do you run your house while the car is chatging?
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: 18hammers on Jul 06, 2023, 11:52 AM
I would agree, everyone appears to over estimate solar costs. First you don't put anything in or on your house (I have but that is another story). Free standing array away from the house, all components in a free standing shed away from the house. This does 2 things, first just as with outdoor wood boilers, it does not effect your insurance (if you require or care about), and you can do the work yourself (it is not a dwelling unit). I am assuming you have built the house to electrical code as you should have and thus your panels and the rest of the system just become the supply source. By doing the work yourself, Labour costs that you can cut out will drop 25 maybe 35% of your total costs. Second, components are cheap, cheap I am telling you. I say that as someone who started buying panels roughly in 2000 (75 watt 12 volt BPs) at a price that causes a nose bleed and tremor in my hands just thinking about. The last time I bought panels was in 2012, Canadian manufacture, at 58 cents a watt. That is practically free! One pallet of panels has lets say roughly 6500 watts, So $3800.00 gets you a power source that will last your lifetime, and that can power a reasonable home, even in the frozen north of Canada 10,10.5 months of the year. December is just crappy for sun so there is some augmentation with a 2000 watt inverter generator needed. I buy inverters off kijij used, from people upgrading their system from 12 volt (I am happy with 12 volt) Currently using a heavy low freq inverter bought of kijiji for 50. 00. I think I spent more in gas driving to the city to get it. Runs my house just fine, does dim the lights a bit if I am welding in the garage. Now with Lifepo4, I can't believe how well they work and how affordable. The last battery I bought 3.5kwhs (12.8 volts at 280amp hour) was 750 dollars though that sale was a one off, usually twice the price, but even at full retail of 1500 that is a great deal. Tech wont save us is right, but it can save me, that is all I ask of it.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 06, 2023, 01:57 PM
as I'm sure you realize that is not a system for an electric car household.
Understood. The question is, how big an array do you need to BOTH power a house and charge an EV? That is what is necessary for the model being promoted here of using EV Batts as part of the total power storage system for the grid and to convert the current fleet of ICE vehicles to EVs. Every suburban house would need an EV also to maintain the suburban living model.
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 06, 2023, 07:00 PM
A Chevy bolt will do 4 miles per lWHr... 1 kw of solar array will produce roughly 1200-1400 kWHrs per year...
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 06, 2023, 07:54 PM
as I'm sure you realize that is not a system for an electric car household.
Understood. The question is, how big an array do you need to BOTH power a house and charge an EV? That is what is necessary for the model being promoted here of using EV Batts as part of the total power storage system for the grid and to convert the current fleet of ICE vehicles to EVs. Every suburban house would need an EV also to maintain the suburban living model.
RE
OK, answering my own question.
According to Google charging a Tesla off a standard 120V home outlet takes 20-40 hours. Let's split the difference and call it avg 30 hours. A standard circuit is 20 amps for 2400 watts. How many hours/day do you get enough sunlight to generate 2400 watts? On a good sunny day 5? So call it 6 days to charge up with a 2.4 kw solar array, during which time said electricity is not available to run the house or charge the home batt. Obviously you need a substantially larger solar PV array to handle this task.
To bring it within reason, you probably have to increase your array size by a factor of 10 to generate 24 kw. You'll need 10X the number of panels and wiring and inverters capable of handling the load. So if your basic 2400 kw array cost $10K, an array for the Tesla costs $100K, plus of course you still need the original array to power the house.
This setup charges the Tesla in 3 hours, reasonable as long as you are charging it during the hours the sun is shining. If not, you would need a 2nd batt pack to charge while you are driving.
Since your array is so much larger, you need substantially more property on which to drop it, increasing the cost of your McMansion and your annual property taxes.
All in all, I would say $100K for the setup is an underestimate, and that's just to buy it. It doesn't include the annual property tax bill, insurance or maintenance.
Then there is the cost of the Tesla itself, burrently around $30K for the cheapest ones I think. More than 1 car needed, multiply those cost again for a still larger array, unless you can be charging one car while the other is driving.
Now of course as long as you don't completely drain the batt every day and only need to partially charge it, you can get away with a smaller setup. Also, as long as there is a commercial charging station nearby you would not need to fully charge at home. However, commercial charging stations would require a grid connection, which brings us back round to needing to upgrade the grid to carry higher loads out to the boonies.
Cloudy days also a problem. lol.
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 07, 2023, 01:44 PM
as I'm sure you realize that is not a system for an electric car household.
Understood. The question is, how big an array do you need to BOTH power a house and charge an EV? That is what is necessary for the model being promoted here of using EV Batts as part of the total power storage system for the grid and to convert the current fleet of ICE vehicles to EVs. Every suburban house would need an EV also to maintain the suburban living model.
RE
OK, answering my own question.
According to Google charging a Tesla off a standard 120V home outlet takes 20-40 hours. Let's split the difference and call it avg 30 hours. A standard circuit is 20 amps for 2400 watts. How many hours/day do you get enough sunlight to generate 2400 watts? On a good sunny day 5? So call it 6 days to charge up with a 2.4 kw solar array, during which time said electricity is not available to run the house or charge the home batt. Obviously you need a substantially larger solar PV array to handle this task.
To bring it within reason, you probably have to increase your array size by a factor of 10 to generate 24 kw. You'll need 10X the number of panels and wiring and inverters capable of handling the load. So if your basic 2400 kw array cost $10K, an array for the Tesla costs $100K, plus of course you still need the original array to power the house.
This setup charges the Tesla in 3 hours, reasonable as long as you are charging it during the hours the sun is shining. If not, you would need a 2nd batt pack to charge while you are driving.
Since your array is so much larger, you need substantially more property on which to drop it, increasing the cost of your McMansion and your annual property taxes.
All in all, I would say $100K for the setup is an underestimate, and that's just to buy it. It doesn't include the annual property tax bill, insurance or maintenance.
Then there is the cost of the Tesla itself, burrently around $30K for the cheapest ones I think. More than 1 car needed, multiply those cost again for a still larger array, unless you can be charging one car while the other is driving.
Now of course as long as you don't completely drain the batt every day and only need to partially charge it, you can get away with a smaller setup. Also, as long as there is a commercial charging station nearby you would not need to fully charge at home. However, commercial charging stations would require a grid connection, which brings us back round to needing to upgrade the grid to carry higher loads out to the boonies.
Cloudy days also a problem. lol.
RE
. Not bad for a guess but your numbers are way off. The level 1 charger on a Tesla is roughly 1200 watts or 4 to 5 miles per hour. You would not use a level one charger on solar with a large array you would use a level 2 at 30 amps at 240 volts for roughly 25 to 30 miles of charge per hour. If I was designing it I would do a 3kw array feeding to the grid for an electric car driving roughly 10000 miles a year. If the were off grid I would want to boost the array size to 5000 watts just for the car portion. I end up charging about 3 dollars Canadian per watt so roughly 15000 for the array required to run the car
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 07, 2023, 05:12 PM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Jul 07, 2023, 01:44 PMNot bad for a guess but your numbers are way off. The level 1 charger on a Tesla is roughly 1200 watts or 4 to 5 miles per hour. You would not use a level one charger on solar with a large array you would use a level 2 at 30 amps at 240 volts for roughly 25 to 30 miles of charge per hour. If I was designing it I would do a 3kw array feeding to the grid for an electric car driving roughly 10000 miles a year. If the were off grid I would want to boost the array size to 5000 watts just for the car portion. I end up charging about 3 dollars Canadian per watt so roughly 15000 for the array required to run the car
Just had the numbers provided by Google, I figured you would come back with a more accurate figure. :P 30A 240V is 7200W, how much do those inverters go for? How much for the wiring from the array to the garage? How much for the installation on roof and off roof on scaffolding? How many sq feet does it take up? How much for the grid tie in and licensing? How much to set it on motors to track the sun?
In any event, it is cheaper than my Google estimate, and for 25-30 mi/hr of charging, time is 2 5 hour days of charging for a 250-300 mi range. Still need the sunny days, still can't use the car during the time of day you need to be charging it.
As I see it, EVs make great commuter cars as long as the workplace parking has plug-ins. However, this then puts the charging load on the grid unless said workplace has an array big enough to charge all the employee Teslas simultaneously. I wonder if even Tesla HQ has an array that big?
RE
Edit: You're proposing 3kw of power, not 7200w. So the charging time is more than twice as long, about the 5 days I originally calculated.]
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 08, 2023, 10:33 AM
You start getting into units there; Watts versus Watt Hours. The level 2 charger is 7200 watts. The proposed grid connected array was 3000 watts. The numbers are not power just peak draw or production... So average per hour array production is roughly 3 hours per day so 9000 watt hours per day everyday,So roughly 30-50 miles per day of production. Grid connected that means it doesn't matter if you are there or not. That is why the off-grid array would be larger since you want more bang for your buck while the car is there. If you are driving more than 50 miles a day you need a lifestyle change.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 08, 2023, 12:37 PM
Agreed 100% there. All I am really trying to demonstrate is how unrealistic the fantasy model is that we can transition over to EVs and power them with renewables and maintain the suburban model of living. It's not just the pricetag, it uses too much energy. A typical New York commuter who lives on Long Island or in NJ drives 50 mile each way into Manhattan every day. People who live around cities like Austin or Atlanta drive even further.
After that you have the kids being shipped back and forth to school, all the soccer moms playing chauffer and UPS trucks driving to everybody's McMansion to drop off the latest online impulse buy from Amazon.
The techno solution crowd sell the idea we can keep all this going with zero emissions by 2035 if we just expand and upgrade the grid and drop solar pv arrays on every subdivision in Connecticut. People believe this and will keep believing it right up till the brownouts hit every day and they start rotating blackouts to ration the juice.
Nothing short of a complete lifestyle change will suffice, but there's no housing model to replace the suburban dwellings. Can't move all those people back to the city, they're already short of housing. Can't move them out to the boonies, there isn't enough work out there.
Rock, meet Hard Place.
RE
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 09, 2023, 11:09 AM
Hard to argue with any of that. I decided that I would work on the solutions which work and I want to see in the world. Just because people are being sold the green business as usual model does not mean that that model emerges or even should emerge. If 10 years from now millions of people have solar arrays with battery backup and electric cars that is a good thing. What they do with them at that point is up to them.aybe they create a world for themselves involving less stuff and commuting and waste. We do not know what happens next.
Title: Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Jul 09, 2023, 07:51 PM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Jul 09, 2023, 11:09 AMHard to argue with any of that. I decided that I would work on the solutions which work and I want to see in the world. Just because people are being sold the green business as usual model does not mean that that model emerges or even should emerge. If 10 years from now millions of people have solar arrays with battery backup and electric cars that is a good thing. What they do with them at that point is up to them.aybe they create a world for themselves involving less stuff and commuting and waste. We do not know what happens next.
I'm all for prepping up best you can of course, and if you are amongst the lucky few with income enough to afford these techno marvels and have a type of work you can pursue within 25 miles of your home in a rural location, that's great. The problem of course is one of numbers, and because such a limited subset of the population is in a position to achieve this level of resilience you end up with the social problems that upset the apple cart.
Just as a rising tide will lift all boats, so an ebbing tide will bring them all down. At the risk of laying on the metaphors too thick, no man is an island. Once a critical mass within a given country no longer has regular access to the energy that allows them to access and store food, to have lights to read by and keep the streets safe, to transport themselves to the workplace, one domino after the other begins to fall. The businesses that relied on people who commuted to them fail from lack of personnel, the products and services they provided no longer are available, the economy collapses and even if you're out in the boonies with a charged up EV, there's no place to drive to still open for bizness. Nowhere to buy the supplies you need to run your own bizness, no food superstores with anything on the shelf, no money that works to buy anything.
What percentage of the population has to be without sufficient energy for these basics of lights, food acquisition and storage and transportation for the cascade failure begins to spread through the society? I'd wager less than 50%, but I would be surprised if we could even get 20% of the population up to your level, which at the moment doesn't include an EV car. As I recall, your plan is to use Wood Gas for the transportation energy needs.
So, you and other Doomers with an equivalent level of preparation should do better than most, but the real question is what happens to the society surrounding you? How does that reform and reconfigure, and can you stay insulated and removed from the chaos surrounding you? What comes after?
Unanswerable questions of course, but still worth considering what part you would play, since your goal here is to survive the Zero Point.
RE
Title: Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots
Post by: RE on Jul 10, 2023, 01:07 PM
There was an overflow into Seattle. There was an existing talent pool, and costs were competitive for small companies compared to the bay area. The 80's and 90's supported a pool of about 150 electrical engineers in the Seattle Area serving small companies. I am one of them. I stopped the video to comprehend the VU tube meter circuit shown in the textbook.
Then things went overseas.
Microsoft became a big player at the end.
If they heyday of Silicon Valley was like the Cambrian Era, then Microsoft and others who moved things to China constitute a Permian Extinction.
Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse
RE
Title: Small EVs you can buy from Europe & China
Post by: RE on Feb 02, 2024, 02:12 AM
More small EVs currently mostly available in Europe or China, but you can get the ones that are in production shipped here.
The average price on them is about $15K, but some are as cheap as $3K. They mostly CAN be charged up in a reasonable amount of time with a small home solar PV installation. Range varies from about 30 miles to 100 on a charge, and top speed average about 30mph. Quite a few do highway speeds though and 1 does over 100 and 0-60 faster than a porche. There are 60 different models shown in this vid!
There's even a mini quad-copter which is an oversize drone. Only 20min flying time, but if I had a nice 45' yacht to live on, it would be perfect to anchor offshore and hop inland to a taverna for a few bottles of retsina and ouzo. 24min in to the vid
RE
Title: An astrophysicist claims he finally figured out time travel
Post by: RE on Mar 26, 2024, 11:43 PM
Even better than Cold Fusion! Forget the colonies on Mars! Liquidate your investments in AI! We're going BACK TO THE FUTURE!
Do you think this guy will get some Venture Capitalist to give him some start-up cash? Will Goldman underwrite an IPO for $100B for the new DejaVu Corporation (DJV) on the NYSE? It's gotta be worth at least as much as Facebook, right?
This shit actually gets reported and makes it onto the Google Newz page. Meanwhile details of the Moscow attack remain murky. Juliane Assange did however continue to avoid extradition to the FSoA for a while longer.
An astrophysicist claims he finally figured out time travel
RE
Title: Our Aging Electrical Grid Can’t Keep Up. So It Should Go Away Entirely
Post by: RE on Mar 29, 2024, 01:24 PM
The ultimate goal should be total energy independence and the eventual planned obsolescence of the entire energy grid. Then the only remaining consideration becomes what to do with thousands of miles of unneeded transmission line...
Yes, and our transportation goal should be to breed a Skittle Shitting Unicorn for every driver and drill a water well for every McMansion. We'll all eat organic eggs from free range chickens raised free of antibiotics and hormones and our fruits and vegetables will be raised on permaculture farms from legacy non_GMO seeds without fossil fuel fertilizer or pesticides utilizing no-till dry land farming methods.
We have the technology! All we have to do is take the Green Pill and it all becomes possible. We'll pipe water from the Great Lakes to New Mexico and the desert will bloom.
Our Aging Electrical Grid Can't Keep Up. So It Should Go Away Entirely
RE
Title: Something for Nothing
Post by: RE on Apr 02, 2024, 08:04 AM
Once every few years some crackpot scientist from some obscure think tank claims to have found a source of limitless and free energy, the proverbial "perpetual motion" machine. "Something for nothing and your checks for free". Cold Fusion was all the rage a few years ago, this time we're going to get not just free electricity but also clean water from Evaporation, which anyone who got a passing grade in 9th grade Physical Science takes Heat to change the physical state of matter from liquid to gas, or gives it back in the reverse process of condensation, going from gas to liquid.
No idea how these jokers are getting electricity and clean water out of this action which goes on constantly everywhere on earth where there is Water present in both a liquid and gaseous state like in such hard to find places as the entire atmosphere of the planet. lol. Somehow until now, scientists going baack to Galileo and inventors like Da Vinci have missed this solution to our energy and water woes.
Is there a Venture Capitalist out there who will give these guys a $Million$ grant for start up ccapital? It's Nano-Nana-Nini technology, so it's very high tech and you need a Ph.D. in BS to understand it.
The comparison to cold fusion is accurate. I looked several minutes trying to find more about hydroelectric core technologies without much luck. Not a good sign. Truth does not have to hide. You have to call it misinformation to hide it.
But regardless of the scientific principles, the math obviously fails.
The phenomina seems to be more of a word salad generator than any energy source. Somehow rain running across a charged surface to an electrode generates voltage for instance. There are several permutations.
This shows an actual scientific principle is not necessary to generate a scientific paper. You simply methodically observe something and write about it. Observing something does not mean there is anything to see. And since you are observing and scientifically detached, you can be as stupid as hell. Your stupidity becomes a virtue. You can pretend tiny insignificant effects matter since all you are doing is collecting numbers.
The principle invoked in the evaporation process is totally obscure. But they all suffer from the same math problems.
Voltage represents potential energy, but is not a direct measure of energy. Voltage generated by a falling raindrop can't mean shit.
The product of current and voltage together produces power. Both are needed. Voltage without current is meaningless if you are talking about power. Simply charging something up to a high voltage does not mean a lot of energy stored. Even capacitors designed to store electric charge have negligible capacity compared to a battery, any battery.
I think we can agree that a metal sphere a foot in diameter charged to a million volts will have more energy than a raindrop with any electric charge we will find on planet Earth. Orders of magnitude more. A few thousand times more might be a low guess.
The capacitance of an isolated sphere is C = 4πε0r. What does this equation do with a 1 foot metal sphere?
C = 4πϵ0 × 0.1524 meters (0.1524 meters is six inches)
The permittivity of free space, a property of the universe, is 8.85E−12 F / m (Farads per meter) -> that is .00000000000885 Farads per meter.
C = 4π×8.85×10−12 F/m × 0.1524 meters => C ≈ 3.56 × 10−11 F => C = 3.56 × 10−5 microfarads. A microfarad is a millionth of a Farad.
The energy on a capacitor is given by 0.5 × C × V^2. C is capacitance in Farads and V is voltage. In this equation voltage is squared. Using this equation calculates energy.
E = 0.5 × 3.56×10−11 × (1×10E6)^2
E = 1.78 joules (for 1 sphere)
If my computer needs 500 watts to operate, how many 1 foot spheres must I discharge from one million volts in an hour to keep my computer running? There are 3600 joules in a watt-hour. My computer needs 1,800,000 joules.
1,800,000 joules divided by 1.78 joules per sphere, yields 1,011,236 metal spheres. Each a foot in diameter.
Trillions of raindrops would be needed to keep this single computer running. Not billions, trillions when you think about it. Maybe more. We started out with a charge of a million volts, and we still needed a million 1 foot metal spheres to run this computer. Energy goes up with the square of voltage and the raindrop phenomena generates small voltages.
I'll risk saying that there are a few technical problems to work out.
Could a collection area of a square mile in a hurricane run this computer using the obscure phenomena being studied? Maybe. But in a hurricane a windmill a mile in diameter will power a city.
Title: Researchers design ultra-efficient energy storage system using crushed rocks
Post by: RE on Apr 14, 2024, 07:31 PM
Great Low-Tech energy storage method. You could use this DIY with a Stirling Engine to make off grid electricity for your Doomstead. No Solar PV cells or Li-I batts necessary.
I doubt you could insulate your thermal storage enough to hold energy from summer for winter months, but for using daylight to give you juice at night it would work perfectly. Also allow you to efficiently heat or cool your home without an electric-heat conversion. Just use the steam to run a heat pump directly.
Not sure how big a reservoir of crushed rock you would need or how many fresnel lenses to heat up the rock or exposed surface area you would need to avoid having to heat the rock without electric resistance coils though? I think if you had the crushed rock on a conveyor belt and passed it under a few meters of lenses to heat and then dumped it into an insulated box that could bring it up to 750C/500F in one pass.
Building that whole system DIY at enough scale to both heat/cool a Monolithic Dome or McMansion/Cabin/Tiny Home with good insulation and run all your main appliances and charge a low power EV car/scooter/trike would be a fabulous challenge worthy of the Diner Master of DIY alternative energy systems, Duke of Wood Gas, Baron von Solar, His Royal Highness King of Contractors NF to undertake!
The idea of storing heat in sand to warm homes through winter may, on the face of it, seem too simple to work. Drop a load of cheap builder's sand in an insulated silo, heat the sand with renewable electricity, and then tap the stored thermal energy for months on end. In an age of green hydrogen, lithium-ion batteries and other high-tech energy solutions, it can't work, right?
Finland begs to differ. This month saw the Nordic nation launch the world's first commercial "sand battery". About 230 kilometres north-west of Helsinki, in the town of Kankaanpää, homes, offices and the public swimming pool are being heated by thermal energy stored in a 7-metre steel container filled with 100 tonnes of sand.
So how does it work, what else can it be used for, and should we build them in Australia?
'It's really a typical silo'
The Kankaanpää sand battery is connected directly to the grid and runs when electricity is cheapest. Hot air blown through pipes heats the sand in the steel container by resistive heating (this is how electric heaters work). The sand is able to store heat at around 500–600 degrees Celsius for months, so solar power generated in the summer can be used to heat homes in the winter. It can store up to 8 megawatt-hours of energy, which is the capacity of a large, grid-scale lithium battery. The project was the work of Finnish startup Polar Night Energy and a local Finnish utility Vatajankoski.
Polar Night Energy's chief executive officer Markku Ylönen said the entire battery could be built in "any steel workshop". "It's really a typical silo with nothing that special," he said. To discharge the stored thermal energy, air is circulated through pipes in the sand where it's heated, then directed, to wherever it's needed. Right now, that's mostly heating homes, but it could also be used for high-temperature industrial processes, Mr Ylönen said.
"Or it can be directed to a steam drum to generate industrial steam at 200C, which is quite common in industrial processes."
Very little energy is lost in this process, so long as the heat is not being transported very far, he said. In theory, the stored heat could be used to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity, but this is far less efficient. "The efficiency will be something like 20–25 per cent," Mr Ylönen said. "Technologically speaking, there are no obstacles, but the economic case is harder to find than with heat-only projects."
What can it be used for?
Australia doesn't have the same domestic heating requirements as Finland, but there's plenty of potential for using stored thermal for industrial processes, said Andrew Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. "There's an enormous storage market for these things and that is to replace gas in factories," Professor Blakers said.
"[Stored thermal] can be used for everything from food processing, to parts of the aluminium industry, to parts of cement manufacture, iron and steel, ceramics and plastics."
About 16 per cent of Australia's emissions are due to burning of gas in industry for processes needing high temperatures (anything above 100C). Heat pumps (the same technology used by reverse cycle air-conditioners), which can be powered by renewables, max out at about 100C, meaning they can't replace gas for these industrial uses. But thermal storage can deliver temperatures of more than 1,000C, depending on the storage medium. You choose the storage medium to suit the temperature of the process," Professor Blakers said. Sand is just one option. Others include crushed rock and molten salt.
Thermal storage 'cheaper than gas'
The idea of thermal energy storage, including the sand battery concept, has been around for years. So why are we only building these heat batteries now? Firstly, for many years it's been cheaper to burn gas to generate high temperatures. Secondly, due to heat loss, thermal energy can't be transported as easily as pressurized gas, which can make it trickier to use. But recently the economics have changed.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the supply of gas to Europe and other markets. In the first quarter of 2022, European gas spot prices were five times higher than in the first quarter of 2021. These high prices led to Australian gas producers exporting their gas, rather than selling it domestically, driving up prices in Australia.
Thermal storage has become cheaper than burning gas for high-temperature industrial processes, Professor Blakers said. "In the past three years, the price of solar and wind has fallen so far, and [in the past few months], the price of gas has gone through the roof.
"Suddenly, conditions have turned completely upside down, and I now imagine most factories are looking at thermal storage."
But factories looking to switch to thermal storage won't be able to simply pipe in heat, like they do with gas. Instead, they'll have to build their own thermal storage silos and heat them with cheap daytime solar electricity, from their own rooftop systems or the grid. "A few thousand cubic metres of storage would be enough to keep a factory running," Professor Blakers said. Or factories could wait for gas prices to fall. "I think they'd be nuts if they waited," Professor Blakers said. "Nobody can predict where the gas price will go, but the one thing you know is daytime solar electricity is going to stay at a low price."
What's next? The Australian start-up 1414 Degrees has developed and patented a thermal storage system similar to the Finnish battery, but using molten silicon to store heat instead of sand.
It recently teamed up with another company, Vast Solar, to plan a solar thermal project in South Australia. Swedish public utility Vattenfall is also building a 200MW-rated thermal energy storage in Berlin. The heat storage tank can hold 56 million litres of water, which will be heated to 98C to warm homes. Polar Night Energy has had plenty of interest in building more sand batteries, with the war in Ukraine putting the focus on alternative energy sources and storage methods, Markku Ylönen said.
Recently Moscow suspended the supply of gas and electricity to Finland due to its request to join NATO. The next battery will be 100 times bigger, or about 20 metres in diameter and 10 metres high, with 1GWh of energy, Mr Ylönen said. "With the economies of scale, if we go 100 times bigger, the price won't be 100 times larger. It will be 20–30 times larger. "It will be in Finland, but we are already negotiating several sites internationally." Once the first of these larger designs is built and tested, others could be built rapidly, he said. "I would [eventually] like to say that we are building 10 next year."
The source, with many pics I did not post here. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-07-19/sand-battery-debuts-in-finland-world-first-heat-thermal-storage/101235514)
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 14, 2024, 09:43 PM
A large quantity of scrap iron stores heat almost as well as water.
If you had a volume of 1 cm³ of each material:
Water will have a mass of 1 gram and can store about 4.18 J of heat per degree Celsius. Iron will have a mass of 7.87 grams and can store about 3.54 J of heat per degree Celsius. Sand will have a mass of 2.2 grams (about) and can store about 0.703 J of heat per degree Celsius.
The proper billionaire bunker would have an underground silo filled with iron balls about six inches in diameter. A solar collector would heat air to 50 degrees C or more, and blow it into the bottom of the silo. Heat is transferred to the iron balls as air passes through. The silo has a diameter on the order of three meters and is three meters tall. Imagine a giant jar of Jelly Beans. Residential heating pulls air through the the silo as needed for heating. A second silo could have night air blown through it to provide air conditioning in the daytime.
I was thinking of building a thermal ballast under the house consisting of six inch cobble stones in a wood box about ten feet square. (Years Ago) A solar collector would charge it with hot air at the bottom, and air for house heat would be drawn out of the top of the wood box. All that is needed is solar power and enough electricity to blow low speed fans to provide air flow. Solar power to operate the thermal charging air flow is an obvious choice.
The fluid tubes are eliminated if air is used. I would have built an insulated duct from the air channel that replaces the fluid tubes to the bottom of my box of cobblestones. The duct would be fan driven. Speed controlled to keep the introduced air hot when the solar collector is active. At night a damper isolates the duct from the solar collector.
But what would have been the point? Mrs. Dog would have seen it as a total waste of time and money. A ten foot square box of rocks that could cause a divorce, and then I would not be in the house.
Cultural hegemony kills many a dream.
When someone is high on hopium they like to say there are all kinds of solutions 'if people only had the will to carry them out'. Usually when they say this BS I think their fingers must stink from the shit they are pulling from their ass. But solving building heating issues by thermal storage is one of the imagined fantastical solutions that actually exists.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 15, 2024, 12:47 AM
Water will have a mass of 1 gram and can store about 4.18 J of heat per degree Celsius. Iron will have a mass of 7.87 grams and can store about 3.54 J of heat per degree Celsius. Sand will have a mass of 2.2 grams (about) and can store about 0.703 J of heat per degree Celsius.
Due to its very high heat capacity, for the purpose of home heating water works great. You can store a lot of heat in a small volume, which is fully filled with the liquid. With sand or iron balls, besides the lower heat capacity/gram, you have the issue that there is a lot of air space between the balls or grains of sand, depending on how fine the grains of sand or small the balls. So it takes a lot bigger volume to store the same amount of total heat.
The problem with water for purposes other than home heating (like producing electricity or running a pump) is the phase change to steam (vapor) at 100C/212F. Once it changes to a gas, the heat capacity drops off the map. It essentially gives up all the stored heat in the phase change from liquid to gas. So if you want to store heat at the temps that are efficient for industrial processes or generating electricity, you need either a solid or liquid that doesn't change phase until it reaches 500F or more. Sand is good because it comes cheap, though the crushed rock/gravel probably works better with a smaller total volume. Mercury might be a choice, but it would be expensive and mercury is poisonous as all get out so you wouldn't want so much of that shit around.
In any event, according to the article on sand, well insulated it could hold heat between seasons, but you would need a huge thermal mass to hold a winter's worth of heat. Like a mountain. lol. I think this type of storage is limited to the day/night cycle.
RE
Title: Carmakers say goodbye to EVs: this is the new engine that changes everything
Post by: RE on Apr 18, 2024, 05:33 AM
What did I say about a new energy tech every day? Today's feature: Green Hydrogen!
Yes folks, since the folks at BMW apparently have concluded they'll never be able to get enough grid power for their 444 HP muscle cars, they are going to power them instead now with hydrogen produced by renewable energy sources, no carbon. The internal combustion engine is not dead: burn hydrogen, only water out the tailpipe.
Carmakers say goodbye to EVs: this is the new engine that changes everything
RE
Title: Miraculous Material Rides to the Rescue!
Post by: RE on Apr 18, 2024, 06:23 AM
Maybe BMW will build the new Green Hydrogen ICE Muscle Carz from the new Miracle Material that replaces metal, plastic, cement and wood in everything from cars to machines and buildings! Listen to this hype about the magical new Galvorn:
Recently, a group of scientists has succeeded in describing an exceptionally strong material that promises to surpass both steel in strength and aluminum in lightness. This breakthrough not only opens the door to technological innovations, but could have a significant impact on reducing carbon dioxide production.
Being lighter, it would allow the construction of more efficient infrastructures in terms of consumption and lighter in various applications, thus contributing to mitigating once and for all the environmental footprint associated with the manufacture of buildings and large architectural projects made with highly polluting materials.
We are talking about Galvorn, a material that has already been approved by the specialized materials development company DexMat, which confirms the above statements, making it clear that this new material could be implemented in industries such as construction, automotive and aviation, due to its multiple benefits.
Back in college in the 70s I remember reading about Buckyballs and Carbon Nanotubes and how they were going to revolutionize materials science and engineering. A half century later, apparently the grandchildren of Russian scientists Radushkevich and Lukyanovich, the scientists working long years in the basement of their Moscow apartment have at last taken their ideas and created NTCs, or negative temperature coefficient thermistors which besides doing your dishes and walking your dog also are eco-friendly and will sequester carbon from methane, thus also resolving global warming and climate change. With a name ike that, how could this material be anything short of the miraculous magic bullet we have all been waiting for?
Nothing in the article of course about where all the methane is going to come from to make the Galvorn or how much energy and money it takes to make a kilo of the stuff, but those are just minor details to be worked out later.
Farewell to metals in industry forever: the material that science fiction predicted and has just been produced
RE
Title: The engine that is turning the United States upside down: it is 80 years old and run
Post by: RE on Apr 19, 2024, 02:27 PM
OK, now I know why it's BMW that is going after Hydrogen powered ICE engines as the new, new solution to a carbon free transportation fleet The engine type they are talking about is the horizontally opposed configuration, which BMW uses in its motorcycles. I had one back in the 70s, a horizontally opposed twin, air cooled in those years, the BMW R100RT.
There is nothing special about this engine design that makes it better for hydrogen than the in-line configuration. It's advantage in motorcycles is it has less vibration and gives you a smoother ride. However BMW long experience playing with this engine using different size cylinders to generate power probably gave them an idea on what would work best with hydrogen as the fuel. So they probably took some of their older engines and tested them and found a good one to use,
Far as hydrogen being a "new" fuel just discovered, that's ridiculous. The only thing new is that as it has become cheaper to generate electricity with renewables, it's coming closer to the cost of using fossil fuels as they get more expensive.
This IS a means of powering even big rigs without carbon, as long as the juice is generated by wind/solar/hydro/nuke. You also can rapidly refill the tanks. So where is the problem?
It's the fact hydrogen is a gas, and to have enough of it on board your vehicle it either has to be highly compressed or in liquid form, which takes temps close to Absolute Zero. The 2nd method is impractical for small vehicles like cars.
The 1st method is practical, but a compressed hydrogen tank in a car accident is a freaking nightmare waiting to happen. When the valve breaks off, the tank blows out like a missile, the gas all mixes with air and POW, hollywood style explosions on the freeway. How they figure to deal with this little safety problem I have no idea.
The other problem is the infrastructure of filling stations and big compressed hydrogen tanks at every convenience store to have a supply on hand to sell to the happy motoristas. Then the big compressed gas supply trucks, and finally tankers with super cooled hydrogen moving around as well. All of the have to be built. We have LNG tanks that could be adapted, but not enough of them to handle a whole fleet of cars and trucks powered this way. It will take a while to manufacture all that and get it in place.
Will this fit into the mix to keep the techno-futurist dream alive? It's conceivable, but time is short I think to get it done.
Researchers develop sodium battery capable of rapid charging in just a few seconds
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: TDoS on Apr 20, 2024, 02:23 PM
Quote from: RE on Apr 19, 2024, 02:27 PMOK, now I know why it's BMW that is going after Hydrogen powered ICE engines as the new, new solution to a carbon free transportation fleet The engine type they are talking about is the horizontally opposed configuration, which BMW uses in its motorcycles. I had one back in the 70s, a horizontally opposed twin, air cooled in those years, the BMW R100RT.
Title: NASA veteran’s propellantless propulsion drive defies laws of physics
Post by: RE on Apr 23, 2024, 08:24 PM
Basically, this is Iron Man Tony Stark's "Repulsor Technology" that allows him to fly around in his suit and knock bad guys across the room by facing his palm toward them. The suit carries no fuel for rocket motors or compressed gasses, it just is powered by a miniature "arc reactor" that produces gigawatts of energy, presumably electromagnetic.
This is all bad sci-fi of course,nothing remotely like it exists...UNTIL NOW! At least according to Dr. Charles Buhler, a seasoned NASA engineer and co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies. If it works at all, my guess is it somehow interacts with earth's magnetic field to generate propulsion. If that is the case, it wouldn't work in interstellar or even interplanetary space, which is the primary thing such a holy grail type of propulsion system would be useful for.
Basically it's the anti-gravity force used as a contrivance in practically every sci-fi movie that has everything from small "land speeders" to massive spaceships that magically float up off the ground without using the action-reaction principle of Newton's 2nd Law. It's right up there with Time Travel as a sci-fi staple that has zero basis in physics to justify it, yet just recently also some physicist claimed to have shown time travel to be possible also.
Desperation makes even really smart people grab hold of any glimmer they can see of hopium. Really smart theretical physicists find their glimmers in the wildest sci fi they read as kids, and try to make it true. So far, no. But who kknows, maybe this time, right?
NASA veteran's propellantless propulsion drive defies laws of physics
RE
Title: But where are the details.
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 24, 2024, 11:26 AM
QuoteNASA veteran's propellantless propulsion drive defies laws of physics
This is the second article in a row on 'tech' you found which does not describe the physical principles underlying what is being talked about.
A long time ago I realized everything people do involves 'burning' of something. Modern civilization is only a hundred different ways to make fire. Burning is energy extraction, I have a broad definition. Changing a small about of rest energy into motion one way or another. Harnessing the heat release from E = MC^2.
Everything we do is uses electromagnetic energy on the atomic scale. A thousand different ways to do it disguises that any underlying tech is always brain dead simple. Fancy and different behavior emerges on a macro scale, but reduce whatever it is down to basics, and simple processes are revealed. But hopium tech articles never talk about any underlying physical principles involved. It would destroy the bullshit.
New car engines that blow away the performance of everything we have are published every few years. But how much can you improve expanding gasses in a metal tube against a piston really? Car engine articles always use a hat trick of some kind to get around the fact that that all you do is expand gasses in a metal tube.
The Carnot cycle describes the maximum possible performance of expanding gasses in a metal tube no matter what engine you are talking about. Steam, Diesel, Gasoline, or Sterling engines which use expanding air. All these engines expand gas in a metal tube against a piston resulting from something being burned. None of these engines can do magic. The Carnot cycle puts hard limits on what can be done.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. A robot can dance. A robot can walk. But all that happens is electric motors move things. Electric current in magnetic fields making a force. Ask how any robot works and 'electric current in a magnetic field creating a force' describes the basic principle.
My point is that the principles behind all modern tech are simple, not mysterious, easily understood, and there are not so many principles to understand. Tech is related to art. Engineers are artists who use the physical properties of the universe as their color palette. Scientists discover the principles, and when they are not discovering they teach to others. The discovering part of the job can turn into into mental masturbation and discovering new stuff is hard work. Consequently teaching has to be part of the job. Peak oil in America was in the 70's. Peak scientific discovery of new physical principles was in the 1700's. Teaching has to be part of the job of scientists or the process of discovering can turn into a process of useless eating.
Both are pigments on a surface. The sailboat is 'more' because we make it so. But on the atomic level all we have are collections of atoms on a pallet, that are transferred to a canvas.
What is the underlying principle of repulsor tech. What new color is on the palette? Current through wires in a magnetic field? Spinning wheels that go round and round? Love potion number nine? Kinky sex with Robert Downey Jr? What is it? Where is the secret sauce.
Inquiring minds want to know so bad, that I think someone who would write an article without describing the underlying physics is an asshole.
Hopium must pay well.
Title: The Myth Of Propellantless Space Propulsion Refuses To Die
Post by: RE on Apr 25, 2024, 07:57 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 24, 2024, 11:26 AMWhat is the underlying principle of repulsor tech. What new color is on the palette? Current through wires in a magnetic field? Spinning wheels that go round and round? Love potion number nine? Kinky sex with Robert Downey Jr? What is it? Where is the secret sauce.
Inquiring minds want to know so bad, that I think someone who would write an article without describing the underlying physics is an asshole.
The Myth Of Propellantless Space Propulsion Refuses To Die
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 25, 2024, 10:37 PM
QuoteMeanwhile True Believers flock to the 'Alt Propulsion Engineering Conference' (APEC), as no self-respecting conference or scientific paper will accept such wishful claims.
Title: This is the new massive hydrogen engine: 3-liter internal combustion engine for more
Post by: RE on Apr 26, 2024, 10:34 PM
Looks like the competition for ICE Hydrogen as the power source savior is heating up. This is actually the 3rd different design I have seen reported. The article also says the engine can burn either hydrogen or gas, whichever is available. That's a new claim.
IF enough solar/wind/hydro/geothermal/tidal/nuke power is brought online, even without full grid connection and IF all the infrastructure for clean hydrogen production, storage and distribution is built, this would enable our current level of technological lifestyle to go on. Hydrogen packs enough energy to run the big fast SUVs, the Jet planes and the container ships. It can heat all the homes and use the same NG pipelines currently in existence. About the only problem it doesn't solve is all the juice necessary for the AI and Data Centers, but if they have their own dedicated generators that run on hydrogen, it solves that problem too.
The main problems I see are with the economics, the resources to build all the infrastructure and the time available to get all this done. The technology though is straightforward and not sci-fi hopium so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This is the new massive hydrogen engine: 3-liter internal combustion engine for more than just cars
RE
Title: The latest 400 hp water engine: better than all hydrogen and the end of electricity
Post by: RE on Apr 27, 2024, 07:34 AM
Yet ANOTHER ICE design for hydrogen from AVL, an Austrian auto tech company. Interesting how all these companies are coming forward at the same time with their designs. Obviously, they have all been working on them for a while, one of them (I think BMW) was ready to put it into production and announced it, then everybody else comes flying out from behind the cloak & dagger world of the design boards of industrial manufacturers to capitalize on the hype and not get left behind as Venture Capitalists start sprinkling out cash for further development of their favorite model. BMW being one of the biggest and arguably technologically the best automotive engineering companies in the world doesn't need money from venture capitalists, but I'm sure AVL could use some extra Euros to try and compete with them.
In AVLs case they're talking 400HP as opposed to around 150 HP in the last one, which puts it right up there with the Muscle Cars of the 1960s like the legendary Oldsmobile 442.
Nobody fucking needs 442 HP for a car to drive to work or go shopping or even a vacation, the only reason for this kind of power in an engine is either for a racing car or for a semi that has to pull 20 ton loads. That is usually done with diesel engines which are big, heavy and very robust because there is a lot of strain on all the parts of the engine and they have to last about 1M miles of use to get your money's worth out of them. Reading between the lines a bit, AVLs engine is lightweight and uses aluminum and titanium instead of steel, so how well this engine would stand up to dragging 20 tons of beer over the Rocky mountains every day from the Coors bottling plant is an open question. The article speculates its use in motor racing, but unless there is a consumer application also, auto racing by itself doesn't justify tooling up to build these engines.
The big question therefore is the economic one, how much will one of these engines COST when mass produced for a consumer level car, presumably at a somewhat scaled down HP rating? All of the designs sound significantly more complex than a standard ICE gas model, and even more still than a diesel which doesn't even need spark plugs. More strokes, higher compression ratio, higher temperatures, computer control of fuel injection, plus having to store the fuel as a compressed gas all will drive the price tag up pretty high I imagine. If you consider how long it has taken them to bring EVs to market at a semi-affordable price, it's hard to imagine that say even BMW could have a consumer level car rolling off the production line in Stuttgart in less than a decade. They're also not going to start building them until the green hydrogen is being produced in greater volume at a lower price, which also will take a few more years to occur. Timing is a big issue here, as well as in which direction the development money and the engineers are directed by the money men. So much money and time has already been spent developing EVs as the solution to the transportation problem that they're not going to abandon that idea, which means the money and brainpower wil be divided between the two methods, which while not mutually exclusive do require differentt types of infrastructure and supply chains be developed.
So, bottom line here is that although technically Hydrogen powered ICE vehicles provide a plausible solution to maintaining the transportation systems of our modern techno-civilization without carbon and in a renewable fashion, practically it doesn't seem likely to succeed. Just have to see how it develops though.
The latest 400 hp water engine: better than all hydrogen and the end of electricity
RE
Title: You might as well be walking on the sun
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 10:42 AM
QuoteAlthough technically Hydrogen powered ICE vehicles provide a plausible solution to maintaining the transportation systems of our modern techno-civilization without carbon and in a renewable fashion, practically it doesn't seem likely to succeed.
Just like an electric car. Take a water car and park it on the black asphalt of an out of business mini-mall. Draw a chalk line around it. Park a Tesla next to it and do the same thing. You have just drawn a circle that defines zero emissions for both cars. Hell draw one big circle around both of them.
Now bow to the north, south, east, and west chanting. Carbon free cars. Do a tap dance. Sing a happy song.
Enjoy yourself, and be like the half million Tesla fools who think they are saving the planet. But do not think too deeply about this. If you do you might harsh your mellow. Do not think that drawing circles on a sphere enclose two areas not one. The area inside the circle is finite. And it is carbon free. The area outside the circle is also finite. That area is the rest of the planet, and no more than that. That area is not carbon free. That area has to supply the hydrogen.
As of 2022, more than 95% of global hydrogen production is sourced from fossil gas and coal. Considering energy losses converting fossil fuels into hydrogen, a water car may wind up being the dirtiest car of all.
Where are you going to get the hydrogen.
You might as well be walking on the sun.
'So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out 'Allow, if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive 'And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow 'But if the offer's shunned 'You might as well be walkin on the sun
'You might as well be driving a fossil car
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 27, 2024, 11:25 AM
The idea is to source it all by hydrolyzing water utilizing electricity sourced from Wind, Hydro yadda yadda. Of course as of right now, only about 5% of hydrogen is sourced that way, it's currently too expensive. The projection is that as more renewables are built, the cost of this electricity will drop and the carbon free hydrogen will be competitively priced. Given they probably can't hook up all the Solar farms to the grid, they might as well use the juice to make hydrogen.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 11:49 AM
QuoteThe projection is that as more renewables are built, the cost of this electricity will drop and the carbon free hydrogen will be competitively priced.
Only in your dreams. You can have a whole field of dreams. And that is all you will have.
If their were any truth to 'build it and they will come' we would have ten thousand members by now. We do not. In America there are many delusions to choose from.
Pick one and you will be fine. But you have to stick to it. If you don't you might see more than you will like.
Competitively priced. How is 'the market' going to do that in a world of diminishing resources and ever more people?
The American system is a system where all decisions are made by piles of money. This means nobody is in charge to set a direction. But never mind that, I just realized a bigger flaw.
In the American system competitively priced hydrogen would have to be done efficiently, and the only way this can be done, if it can be done, is by an entity which builds billion dollar factories. Any plant that produces 'cheap' hydrogen in America can not be a mom and pop operation, or be an operatione owned by the commons. Hydrogen will come from a monopoly supplier, and there will be no market to make the price competitive. We got the Musk. We got the Bezos. We got the Gates. A fucking trifecta.
Who will be the hydrogen billionaire. I can hardly wait.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 27, 2024, 12:18 PM
Only in your dreams. You can have a whole field of dreams. And that is all you will have. If their were any truth to 'build it and they will come' we would have ten thousand members by now. We do not. In America there are many delusions to choose from.
Indeed, but of the plethora of delusions out there, unlike Fusion power or 1000s of thorium salt micro nukes or drilling 5 kilometer deep wells to heat water through geothermal energy, this delusion is actually plausible. The tech is already proven, the solar and wind farms are being built and hydrogen is portable enough and packs enough energy into tanks that will fit on cars and planes to run their engines. It doesn't have huge environmental issues with mining or battery manufacture, and the only gas it expels after combustion is water vapor. You can't get any cleaner.
Do I expect it to be built up to the scale necessary to replace FFs in the time left before those supplies become uneconomic to keep being extracted or we have so much climate related problems with food production that social breakdown will collapse the system first? No, probably not. However, unlike all the other delusions I read about every day since every scientist and engineer out there if fishing for a solution, I find this one to be the most plausible. Plausibility doesn't make it economic though, and they have a long way to go to demonstrate that before they could even begin to try and scale it up as a civilization wide solution. #1 on that hit parade is cutting the current cost of carbon free hydrgen production about in half, then producing a prototype car that would sell at say $30K or so. We'll see if they even get that far before SHTF Day arrives.
RE
Title: My position
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 12:49 PM
Simon Michaux has talked about burning iron powder.
My father talked about using powdered iron to power a car fifty years ago. He knew powdered iron has high energy potential by volume. My father made it clear to me there is a difference between an energy source and a transport mechanism. At least nine of ten people do not know there is a difference. I am being kind.
Using hydrogen in airplanes is just plain nuts. The tanks to hold the hydrogen take up most of the interior space. Every hydrogen powered airplane would be equal to a mini nuke, and they would explode. How are you going to get people to fly on flying bombs? There is an advantage here regarding car accidents at intersections. The explosion from a crash will be strong enough to clear the intersection.
If the crater is not too deep cars will be able to use the intersection right away. They will not need police and tow trucks to clear wreckage. The wreckage clears from the intersection immediately from the blast, and visibility is improved since everything next to the intersection is taken out as well. Buildings people plants dogs, everything. But the explosion is clean. No toxic residue except from what gets destroyed. I have to admit hydrogen has potential positive benefits.
But regardless of positive benefits, hydrogen is only a transport mechanism. Hydrogen is not a source of energy. You can't mine hydrogen. If you could mine hydrogen it would be a source of energy. One way or another all hydrogen must be produced, and that always takes more energy than you get from using the hydrogen.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 27, 2024, 06:50 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 12:49 PMBut regardless of positive benefits, hydrogen is only a transport mechanism. Hydrogen is not a source of energy. You can't mine hydrogen. If you could mine hydrogen it would be a source of energy. One way or another all hydrogen must be produced, and that always takes more energy than you get from using the hydrogen.
Iron powder is also just a transport mechanism. You can't mine it, it's not found in ore in reduced form. It's already been oxidized. You have to put energy in by smelting the iron to get it as an element, then gring it to a powder. When you oxidize the powder, you get the energy back from the smelting process. There is some loss of course.
The oxidized form Hydrogen is found in nature is Water, the chemical name for it is Hydrogen Hydroxide. When you reduce it, yu get Hydrogen and Oxygen in their elemental form. Burn the hydrogen in the presence of oxygen, you get the energy back you put in to reduce it, just like with using iron.
Fossil Fuels are also a transport mechanism, using Carbon as the element that goes through the oxidation-reduction process. The difference is with FFs the reduction was done over millions of years under high pressure and heat underground after the life process which left it in a partially reduced state. You oxidize it when you burn it to get CO2. It's not a source of energy either, that came from the Sun and the geological processes.
Iron isn't good as a transport fuel because both as an element and combined with oxygen it's a solid. You need your fuel to be a gas after the combustion in order to do work in a combustion engine. The gas expands and pushes he pistons. Or in the case of a Jet engine, the expanding gas directly powers the vehicle.
All planes are flying bombs, jet fuel is highly volatile and if a fuel line ruptures it goes BOOM. If hydrogen escapes its pressurized containment system, it goes boom also. Same with natural gas. Cars run on NG or H that get in accidents will probably go boom too. Clearly the engineers building these devices believe they can make them safe and reliable enough not to go boom too often. On a society level, we're willing to accept a certain percentage of death from high speed travel, car accidents kill more people every year than heart disease or cancer. Air travel is pretty safe overall by comparison.
According to the articles I have read thus far, they seem to suggest enough hydrogen fuel can be carried aboard a plane to fly it the necessary distances. Running a prop engine plane they definitely could. Range might not be quite as much as FFs, but I think the NY-London route would be feasible. Non-stop NY-Beijing or London-Sydney is probably out.
Anyhow, it's way cleaner overall than batteries and electricity, and for propulsion works better too. So I still consider it plausible.
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 07:57 PM
QuoteClearly the engineers building these devices believe they can make them safe and reliable enough not to go boom too often.
Believe it yes, but engineers are only told what to do. Some engineers are paid to make the biggest boom possible. Generally engineers have a personality that will consider destroying a village in order to save it. It is not a matter of moral deficiency. It comes from considering too many things. If one of the many things considered is socially sanctioned nonsense an engineer can be bewitched by technology to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Techno-narcissism says the problems of hydrogen flight can be solved. I am not a techno-narcissist. Cryogenic tanks to hold liquid hydrogen that size are not light. To make them light enough to fly safety has to be traded away. A compromise will not be safe.
On a mass basis, hydrogen has quite a high energy density, almost 3 times that of gasoline. However, on a volume basis, although liquid hydrogen has a higher energy content than compressed hydrogen, it is still much lower than most of traditional fossil fuels. It works out to be three to one in the other direction.
Don't try this at home. You have heard this before. Seriously.
The Dog Mini Nuke:
(to understand this you should watch the second video)
A pipe with a shutter at the end connects to an extension of pipe which is capped with a parabolic mirror. A button of fusible material is suspended at the focus of this parabolic mirror. A lithium micro-sphere held by spider web. The other end of the pipe has a transparent window made of highly transparent quartz which is kept cool by a jet of chilled dry air. You will know why in a minute.
The front of the pipe is filled with the optimal three to one ratio of hydrogen to oxygen. the shutter is closed. the other end of the pipe with the polished mirror is filled with argon.
Three two one fire.
The shutter is rapidly withdrawn. The argon has no time to mix with the hydrogen oxygen mixture which is ignited by multiple sparks around the periphery of the transparent window when the shutter is ninety percent open. This starts a shock wave which travels through the explosive mixture at supersonic speed. The argon gas is at 20 atmospheres like the explosive mixture is, but there is no compression of the argon by the explosion because the shock wave is supersonic.
The shock wave hits the argon and propagates through the tube producing intense light. The entire tube is reflective and light streams out the transparent window, while it streams into the parabolic mirror. The fusible material heats to fusion temperatures. The nuclear fusion pulse is short. The target blows itself up, but an order of magnitude of energy is released and a second shock wave moves through the argon gas in the opposite direction. Now the light coming through the quartz window is so intense that channels of chilled air have to streamed against it to keep it cool. However everything is designed to survive.
Vacuum valves are opened as the shutter is closed. A new target swings to the focus point while the tube is pressurized with gas for another cycle. The tube is three feet wide and the length is chosen to give enough power to drive fusion, but not enough to destroy the equipment. Spider web silk and lithium micro-spheres are the primary disposable. The tube is built to recover residual energy of the hydrogen oxygen explosion. I have another invention for this. It uses a principle that is used on railroad tracks to slow trains down if they go too fast. The end of the tube can lengthen to transfer energy from the chemical side of the explosion. The fusion reaction is over before the end of the tube with the mirror moves to recover the hydrogen oxygen energy. It is a two step process. This is like harnessing the recoil of a gun after it fires a bullet.
Tubes are fired a hundred times an hour but the fusion energy released makes for a total energy release which equals tubes fired at an audible rate if only a hydrogen oxygen reaction is considered as the energy source.
The light leaving the window hits a target where the light energy turns to heat. The heat is passed into aluminum tubes which boil water to drive steam turbines. Light to heat is not hard. Part of the produced electricity is used to split water in to hydrogen and oxygen to keep the power plant running on all cylinders.
But I am not a techno narcissist. No I am not.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 27, 2024, 10:50 PM
Hydrogen in the Hindenberg wasn't compressed and wasn't used for fuel. It was just there to provide lift. It was an unfortunate accident resulting from very poor attention to the design and construction of that dirigible. They should have never been abandoned. They would have saved a shit load of energy and could be built as safe as airplanes. Much less pollution than container ships running on bunker fuel.
Far as the H on planes goes, unlike cars I think they would probably liquify it for use in jets. Airports are big enough to have the liquification equipment and staff trained to do the fueling. As a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.
Much like the Hindenberg, if one of the first planes they fly using H as a fuel blows up, the technology will die right away. If they fly for a few years before one explodes, people will just accept the risk as they do now with planes. Does it really matter if you die from the plane exploding instead of crashing into the ground?
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 27, 2024, 11:14 PM
QuoteAs a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.
You did not look at the fuel tanks in the jet schematic.
Another diagram in another publication that is embedded in a pdf show JP-8 Jet fuel volumetric power density is intermediate between gasoline and Diesel with it being slightly closer to diesel. The same graph shows liquid hydrogen to be at a four to one volume ratio.
You know how light hydrogen is. It is the lightest element. 'As a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.' is something that makes no sense. The lighter weight means more room needed for the same energy. A cubic meter of liquid hydrogen only weighs 70.85 kilograms. A cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kilograms.
Pointing out that the Hindenburg only used a gas and not liquid hydrogen does not help your case. Pointing out that they only used it for lift also does not help your case. At atmospheric pressure the hydrogen burn was as mild as it could be with heat and burning gas mostly going up and away.
The Hindenburg displaced a volume of approximately 200,000 cubic meters. Air weighs 1.225 kg per cubic meter so the lift is 245,000 Kg. The actual figure was 238,000 kilograms Hydrogen gas weighs 0.090 Kg. per cubic meter, which is about 1/11th the weight of air. Using the 245000 Kg figure and dividing it by ll gives 22,272 Kg of hydrogen. Converted to a liquid that is 314 cubic meters of liquid hydrogen.
A Boeing 747 could fly 14,000 kilometers on that much power. It turns out the Hindenberg had the explosive power of a intercontinental hydrogen powered jet with a full tank. Exploded in the most gentle way possible.
Liquid spills are not as bad as I thought, but hydrogen is strange stuff. Under the right conditions unpredictable things will make news. The Hindenberg turns out to be a reasonable approximation of a Hydrogen powered jet aircraft accident. I can say that because of the large quantities of liquid that would be spilled. The 6000 gallon test in the guvmint film seems big, but a real spill would be larger.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 28, 2024, 12:24 AM
Well, by weight you get almost triple the KWh per kg of H (34) than for gas (12). Weight is much more important than volume for flying.
By volume, for every liter of hydrogen (2.5 kWh) you get slightly less than quadruple the kWh in a liter of gas (9kWh).
A liter of gas weighs .74 kg. 4.5X more, 1L H weighs .16 kg abou
So you probably need about 2X as much room for your fuel tanks, but they'll weigh about half as much for equivalent energy. That's not exact, I'm ballparking it. You can work out the exact numbers if you like.
According to Google, most jets have their fuel tanks in the wings, but the tanks don't take up the whole wing. I suspect you could get similar range with tanks added in the luggage compartment, and you would need less fuel because the total weight of the aircraft would be less.
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 28, 2024, 01:05 AM
The challenger before the leaking flame of the solid booster torched a hole into the dewar.
Hydrogen has to be kept in a dewar flask. Nasa knows about them. They can explode. The complexity of the tank will cancel out your fuel weight savings.
When NASA launched the first astronauts to the Moon. Propellants for the Saturn V's second and third stages were liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. They were stored in 850,000 gallon spherical containers about 1,500 feet from the pad and I presume not next to each other.
Once every airport had a setup like that, an accident would only be a matter of time.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 28, 2024, 05:54 AM
Since you're not going into space, you don't need the liquid oxygen, just the H. Also, according to that graph, compressed H at 700 bar pressure has similar volume/mass to energy ratio as the liquid version, so you probably can get away with using that and stay away from the liquid.
Now granted one of these thing going boom at JFK would be a pretty big disaster, but not as big as an LNG carrier going boom as it's being filled in Maryland or offloaded in Belgium. They are pumping millions of gallons of this supercooled liquid fuel every month these days and so far we haven't had a major boom yet. Liquid H is closer to Absolute Zero, but the cooling, pumping and storage equipment is all the same.
As disasters go also, I'll take a planeload of stockbrokers being incinerated over a nuke meltdown at 3 Mile Island. I mean really, mainly the dead people would be the passengers, only a few ground crew would likely be inside the blast radius. If you're worried about being vaporized on takeoff, stick to sailboats. :)
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 28, 2024, 10:10 AM
Since deaths from exploding tanks will only double or triple what we have now, hydrogen is a viable TRANSPORT MECHANISM. All you need is an unlimited supply of cheap energy to make the hydrogen with.
That should be a lot easier to find than places on the planet to sequester CO2.
Quantum ta-da!
Time to retire the Diner for a few centuries. All our problems are solved.
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: RE on Apr 28, 2024, 12:19 PM
Sadly, even under the unlikely event enough cheap, clean energy sources could be built AND all the infrastructure for producing, storing and delivering the H put into place AND carz and planes running on ICE and Jet engines could be produced at affordable prices, transportation is only ONE of the multitude of problems faced by Industrial Civilization. Population Overshoot, Aquifer and Topsoil depletion, Desertification and Sea Level rise are still going to cause huge problems, and our economic system has reached the end of the duck tape and crazy glue to keep it patched together. So no rest for the weary Doomers of the Diner, we'll still have plenty of Doom to Discuss before we can put the Diner out to pasture.
Collapse is the Gift that keeps on Giving. No end in sight.
RE
Title: Tech Hopium ofthe Day: Turquoise Hydrogen
Post by: RE on Apr 28, 2024, 06:27 PM
Now, back to our regularly scheduled delusions.
Hydrogen now comes in a variety of Colors, Green, Blue, Gray and the latest entry, TURQUOISE! ::) These colors meant to signify their source and whether the H gets produced with or without producing CO2 emissions in the process.
The feedstock for turquoise H is methane (CH4), aka Natural Gas (NG), and you get the H from a process called Pyrolysis, where you cook the methane at 700F to split it into its constituent elements Carbon & Hydrogen. This supposedly is great because you can now sequester the carbon and take it out of the whole RedOx cycle and build stuff with it. you could use it to make Diamonds! Diamonds will be so cheap we can make them the size of bricks and build affordable housing with them! The hardest substance known to man, we can build Diamond Skyscrapers that will stand until the Sun goes Red Giant! OK, the Diamond stuff is my own hype, but you get the picture I hope.
OK, now why as opposed to Blue Hydrogen you get through Hydrolysis of Water which I consider a good and worthwhile means of making H for use as a transportation fuel (despite perhaps vaporizing the occasional planeload of vacationers bound for Hawaii) do I think pyrolysis of methane is a stupid idea?
First of all, while there is plenty of water available at sea level over 75% of the earth surface in the oceans, to get the much more limited supply of methane you have to drill for it. Next, while water is completely oxidized and so useless as a fuel, Methane has tons of energy and pyrolysis actually reduces the amount of energy usable once converted to H & C, besides the fact that like Hydrolysis you need to INPUT a lot of energy from renewable, carbon free sources to do Pyrolysis. Nobody will do this at scale when they can simply sell the NG right out of the ground. Third, we already have a chemical process to turn Methane into something useful, the Haber process uses Nitrogen to convert it to ammonia for use in Fertilizers which we need to keep feeding 8B Useless Eaters. That process has CO2 as a byproduct which is a downside, but at least until we have a substantial dieoff, we need the fertilizer.
Even the idea that we can build enough renewable energy sources to produce the Gigatons of Hydrogen we'll need every day for all the carz, trucks, planes, container ships and tankers is a pretty big stretch into the world of Hopium addiction, adding still MOAR renewable energy to pyrolyze all the methane is a leap of faith I am unable to make without a half dozen hits of Sandoz Acid. lol.
This turquoise fuel is the end of hydrogen: it is obtained from clouds and metal
RE
Title: Tech Hopium of the Day: Liquid Nitrogen
Post by: RE on Apr 29, 2024, 12:08 PM
Are you suffering from Technosolution Burnout yet? Today's offering, Liquid Nitrogen, which you don't burn at all, just allow it to expand into a gas as it warms up, drawing heat from the surrounding environment.
I give this one very low chances of getting off the drawing board.
A Stunning New AI Has Supposedly Achieved Sentience
RE
Title: EU hydrogen targets are 'impossible' as green H2 costs eight times as much as grey H
Post by: RE on Apr 29, 2024, 07:55 PM
Actual price on Green H claimed to be far higher than prior pro-H articles I have read recently, which is not at all surprising. Also the timeline for building enough Green H production capacity to provide fuel for the transportation market is a lot longer than the proponents claim.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between these claims, but I think you can safely say there will not be anything more than a few prototype H ICE cars running on the roads by 2035. This is probably pretty close to the limit of keeping the FF fleet of carz & trucks rolling at full scale, without rationing and a much larger share of EV cars on the road.
Bottom line, rumours of the Collapse being cancelled by being saved by the Hydrogen Cavalry riding to the rescue in the nick of time have been greatly exaggerated. We can return now to our regularly scheduled Doom Programs.
Title: Tech Hopium of the Day- LDES
Post by: RE on May 02, 2024, 01:06 PM
We've discussed compressed air before as an energy storage method, but not this design which is very creative in its use of geology and equipment used for oil drilling. Sounds as though it's price competitive with batt storage, again using simple tech without need for mining and rare eart metals.
They don't say, but probably not. Probably made from methane, as most is currently.
In the future, theoretically it comes from renewable electricity turned to chemical energy stored in the H, then back to electrical when converted by the fuel cell. Same as batteries work, electricity is stored as chemical energy in the Li-H salts then converted back to electricity when discharged. All batteries store energy in some chemical compound or salt.
RE
Title: A fully-electric 10,000 ton container ship has begun service equipped with over 50,0
Post by: RE on May 03, 2024, 12:46 AM
I wonder how they charge it up? Obviously, they have a means to charge or swap out batts on the Chinese end, but what about at the delivery port? Otherwise it has to have enough juice to do a round trip wherever it goes. Maybe it has a backup generator to charge it, but that would obviously run on diesel.
Now, IF all shipping was converted tomorrow to batt power, how much additional load would that put on the grid supporting all the ports that had charging stations? How long do the ships need to stay plugged in at port to fully charge for a trip from shanghai-seattle?
Technologically speaking, this is about the easiest transition to make since there isn't much constraint on size or weight for the batts. To make it really GREEN though, all the charging has to come from renewables, which I doubt the Chinese are doing with just this 1 ship, much less trying to convert all the COSCO fleet to electric. For now this is just a greenwashing gimmick for propaganda purposes.
A fully-electric 10,000 ton container ship has begun service equipped with over 50,000 kWh in batteries
RE
Title: Tech Hopium of the Day - Moon Power
Post by: RE on May 04, 2024, 02:09 PM
Just when you think the possible sources of Infinite Energy to allow Infinite Miles of Happy Motoring and Infinitely large Data Centers exchanging an infinite amount of information about the infinitely large population have been exhausted, the folks at the Dept of Energy Hopium Technology have come up with another doozy.
According to this article Helium-3, an isotope of the inert gas that features an extra proton in the nucleus is available in so much quantity on the Moon that it is "infinite". Since the Moon is finite in size that's obviously untrue, but let's go with "infinite" meaning for this propaganda writer, "so much that for all practical purposes we won't run short of energy for 1000 years".
Now, what they have NOT explained is HOW, even if you could economically mine the moon for He-3 and ship it back to earth, do they intend to get this not infinite but at least very large amount of energy from the HE-3? Are they talking a Fission of the He-3 into 2 Hydrogen atoms, or a Fusion of 2 of them into an atom of Beryllium? The first seems more likely, since we still can't fuse Hydrogen to make Helium, and fusing Helium to make Beryllium takes more energy than that.
Can you start and control a He-3 chain reaction in a fission reactor and how efficiently do you capture this energy? I don't know of any designs for using He-3 as fissionable fuel for reactors, but I suppose it's possible to build them. Is He-3 on the moon there in so much quantity that it beats out Uranium and Thorium here on earth, not to mention Plutonium you can make in Breeder reactors and use for fuel too?
Finally, WTF do TPTB feel it necessary to bombard us literally on a daily basis with outrageous new claims of infinite energy sources ready for harvesting? Is their terror of running out of jet fuel really that great? I'm even more curious to know if Bezos or Musk will actually try sending rockets to the Moon to go mine this stuff? Will somebody convince Goldman to underwrite some corporate bonds for say $100B at 10% interest to finance mining He-3 from the Moon? Will Hedge Fund Managers and Pension funds buy these bonds as part of a balanced portfolio?
The ultimate and infinite energy, finally found: 400 000 kilometers away and will be extracted
RE
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on May 04, 2024, 02:22 PM
QuoteIs their terror of running out of jet fuel really that great?
Yes
Title: - Tech Won't Save Us
Post by: K-Dog on May 04, 2024, 09:18 PM
This is a long assed-video. But two minutes in I realize I have an obligation to watch this one. Like it was part of a job.
Dana is a Diner who does not know it. Only because she does not know who we are. Nineteen minutes in Dana says 'research shows' fossil fuel buys votes. Twenty-six minutes Dana says we need to lean into activism. I agree. I say very hard. The reason is the 'deciders' will not do anything. I agree, nothing will happen without pressure.
QuotePower concedes nothing without a demand.
Forty minutes in Dana is being a bit unrealistic. She thinks evaluating ever activity in terms of carbon emissions is important. How much CO2 does a peace march release? I'm feeling disappointment. Dana is the sociologist who understands that resource depletion (global heating is included in that) is a social issue not a technical issue. I would pay attention to her CO2 calculations, but nobody else would. Nerds are a minority.
Dana points out online organization is inadequate. If people do not meet in person efforts are worthless. My words not hers, but she makes the point. At the Diner we agree. People making connections is what is important. COVID was a huge setback.
Dana is coming from a 'Bowling Alone' perspective. Climate issues will not be addressed until people start coming together. That won't happen until climate shocks are severe. Very severe considering the new age of ubiquitous censorship I think.
Dana sees moments of opportunity after climate shocks. People in and after a shock become socially oriented for a short period of time. How to lengthen the time?
An hour in Dana says this summer is going to be climate hell. Place your bets.
Dana kept the discussion 'in the matrix', and I think she did this deliberately. Why? because she wants converts not enemies.
Do doomers serve a function. We do if we engender anger at the system. Before there can be a social change in consciousness overall attitude has to get MORE apocalyptic.
QuoteThe earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.
My words, not originally, but they are now.
One hour and sixteen minutes in Dana describes clean vs conventional energy consumption. The actual situation. If she knows what it is, she should mention Jevon's Paradox and how to deal with it. Dealing with it is not hard but you have to know what it is. So you do not do exactly the wrong thing. As most Green New People think to do.
(Looks like she does not know about Jevon's.)
Appropriate advice at the end.
Title: Tech Hopium of the Day: Warp Drive
Post by: RE on May 07, 2024, 07:00 AM
"The engines, Captain! The ENGINES!"
Forget the hydrogen. Put your money on Di-Lithium Crystals.