What are /r/energy's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

What media blackout? The New York Times reported on it yesterday. Over 1000 articles about it are shown on Google News Search.

Earth to conspiracy nuts: just because something isn't getting the media attention you think it deserves doesn't mean that there's a "NEWS BLACKOUT!" Just because a nuclear plant is surrounded by water doesn't mean that it's in any real danger. The media and rational people realize this, even if the conspiracy department does not.

Bill Gates has already spoken out on his preference for Nuclear alternatives, and it seems he is continuing to do so even after the Fukushima events (and Germany rejecting nuclear power).

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

I'm of the opinion that Solar and Wind should be pursued, and that Nuclear alternatives could be used as stopgap measures until we reach the technological point that Solar and Wind can be effectively implemented and transmitted.

I would say no, because the output of this solar plant is so small compared to a nuclear plant.

>Together with the IHI Corporation and the Mizuho Corporate bank, Kyocera plans to deliver a 70 megawatt ‘mega-solar plant’ in Kagoshima City, Southern Japan

>As of 2007, worldwide there were 439 operational nuclear reactors with total capacity of 372,002 MW; making the average output 846 MW. However, the average new reactor can be expected to be larger. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_output_MW_of_a_nuclear_power_plant

I never said that it impacts solar production overall. I said that 3-4 days (and in some cases much more) of cloudy weather is not unusual. There is no way a residential house can survive that over the winter unless it has an impractical amount of battery backup that would sit unused for most of the rest of the year, or you had gas/heating service, which kind of defeats the purpose of disconnecting from the grid. 20 powerwalls for me would last 2-3 days based on my heating needs. If I have a week straight of clouds then what am I supposed to do? Freeze to death?

Also the problem with not being connected to the grid is that you can't sell any leftover production. You have to curtail and that non-generated electricity is wasted. It's throwing money away.

It's a completely impractical proposition outside of certain climates and locations.

I assume these are the kits?

For the lazy:

• 880 Watt for $3,599.99
  • 4x 220W panels
  • 4x Enphase Micro inverters
  • Cost per watt: $4.09
• 2300 Watt for $8,999.99
  • 10x 230W panels
  • 1x PVP-2000 inverter
  • Cost per watt: $3.91
• 3680 Watt for $13,499.99
  • 16x 230W panels
  • 1x PVP-3000 inverter
  • Cost per watt: $3.66
• 5060 Watt for $17,999.99
  • 22x 230W panels
  • 1x PVP-4800 inverter
  • Cost per watt: $3.56

All of them include a roof mounting kit.

This is all that needs to be said at the moment: Wind power has seasonal variations.

>Low wind power isn’t a threat to supplies in June when demand is low.

Pretty much why wind power is more helpful in climates like the UK's. A disproportionate amount of the power generated comes in the winter months where more energy is demanded. Thermal energy storage would be very helpful here if it could be tapped in the form of CHP during winter.

>Entire energy industry is subsidized

This is correct, its crazy that on one hand we want to get rid of fossil energy, on the other hand, we still subsidize it. Instead of implementing carbon taxes, why not just remove the fossil subsidies first? One hand does not know what the other is doing..

Relative subsidies to energy sources

^Sent ^from ^Reditr

Or if you don't want to buy an entire stove, you can just buy a cook top.
https://www.amazon.ca/Secura-8100MC-Portable-Induction-Countertop/dp/B0045QEPYM/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=induction+cooktop&qid=1600027350&sr=8-5

Am I the only one that welcomes speculation in oil, let alone any commodity? Speculating that a commodity/stock/bond/etc will go up or down is a fundamental function of the free market. So are writing options, short selling, and futures trading.

Crude oil is a global commodity, not an American one. Speculators drive short-term trends in the market, but worldwide demand for crude drives the long term price. This is yet one more area in which the government thinks it needs to get involved to help "the people," but will just end up employing a bunch of bureaucrats to micro-manage something it has no real control over.

If you think the oil price is too high, reduce your usage. Better yet, you can speculate yourself if you're so inclined. Here's two ways to do it. If you think the oil market is going up, buy DIG. If you think it's going down, buy DUG.

According to this article, two of the plants to be "shut off" are already shut off, due to major technical fuckups, so it's really only five. During the last few years they had shut down (IIRC) up to 5 plants due to various technical problems, but there has never been an energy shortage.
I'm only guessing here, but I think there's a major surplus in potential energy generation, probably because of the rapid growth of renewable energy in the last few years, so this shouldn't be a problem.

>installing solar panels is a dangerous, dangerous job

Well no shit, roofing is #5 in fatality rate.

I don't dislike him, but I suspect he's been played more than once. His independent run for the White House in 2000 for example. (And this is my opinion after having read his book on the subject of the 2000 campaign.)

If anyone can help out the Patreon campaign it is always appreciated. There's 226 Patreon supporters at the moment, and I'm hoping that number can get much higher. https://www.patreon.com/thorium?ty=h

The actual documentary itself exists right now as a 4 hours of very messy editing. Still in no condition to show anyone. But it'll happen, and it won't be 4 hours long. Moments from this interview will be in it.

So this article seems to be total bullshit

http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=1&pid=1&aid=2&cid=GM,GC,GE,&syid=1990&eyid=2012&unit=TST

animate gif of the year over year report of coal use

http://grabilla.com/0410a-1a0e16a8-2e30-45da-b12a-5888e50f273b.gif

Hey guys, I once asked my professor (who works at a major US university's nuclear and radiation department) about Thorium fuel in nuclear reactors. This is what he had to say:

> Backers of thorium have a good PR campaign. It's not nearly as simple as that. Thorium fuel creates an isotope of uranium, u-233, that's even better (or worse depending on your perspective!) for bombs than plutonium. You can mix the thorium with a different isotope of uranium, u-238, so that pure u-233 isn't produced, but then you have plutonium produced as well as the same transuranic (above uranium on the periodic table) isotopes that the current fuel contains. Some of these are difficult to store and dispose.

> Uranium fuel can also operate under the breeding cycle described in that article. It's true that thorium is better-suited for use in molten salt fuel, but there has been no commercial success with that type of fuel (look up molten salt reactor in Wikipedia for a starting point). One big disadvantage is the production of a lot of tritium, which can combine with fluorine in the salt to make hydrofluoric acid. Any accident scenario, say like the one in Japan, where there is release of coolant becomes very difficult to manage because of the presence of this corrosive and reactive acide, and also because the coolant is the fuel, hence very very radioactive. Also tritium is difficult to contain and can migrate (e.g. diffuse) through barriers into the environment and biosphere.

> This is not to say there are no advantages to using thorium, but the thorium backers have developed a reputation in my field for portraying their technology in an unbalanced way.

> Hope this is useful!

Oh and here's the article.

>the Richter scale works logarithmically; the difference between the 8.2 that the plants were built for and the 8.9 that happened is 7 times, not 0.7

The difference is actually about five times, not seven. Simple calculation.

Yeah, weird choice of filter but it doesn't do any harm. There's a good chance many of those views would otherwise not have happened. I do have an operating Patreon campaign if anyone's interested in staying in-the-loop regarding Thorium Remix 2015 and future editions.

Good info. Balanced, objective and realistic. I fully agree with her about keeping existing plants online in the near-term as we transition to renewables. I don't agree with those who would have us keep nuclear plants open long past their sell by date, a battle that has also been fought here in Europe.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/30/netherlands-to-hand-out-iodine-pills-in-case-of-nuclear-accident

All the US stuff is either classified or so new they haven't discovered nighttime wind. Europe in and around Germany has the best power-to-gas, and Shell's Pearl plant in Qatar does the vast majority of the G2L, for the whole fungible world. I like the compressed air and pumped storage hybrids, but worry about their seismic externalities:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Young_Kim31/publication/234125856_Operating_characteristics_of_constant-pressure_compressed_air_energy_storage_(CAES)_system_combined_with_pumped_hydro_storage_based_on_energy_and_exergy_analysis/links/55fb9f7f...

http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:9eb4eaf6-e835-4974-86cd-9886f9985a7e/PHS_Pressure_Cavern_-_Erik_van_Berchum_MSc_Thesis.pdf

You're right that the difference is wrong, but your calculation is also wrong. 8.9 is not a Richter magnitudes, it's a moment magnitude. Therefore the base of the logarithm is 10^(3/2), not 10.

I don't know what scale that 8.2 figure is in. It's not give in the article and the source is not cited.

However, given that earth scientists have not used the Richter scale for decades, let's guess that the 8.2 figure is also in the moment magnitude scale. If this is correct then the linear ratio of magnitude between 8.9 M_W and 8.2 M_W is ~11.

So you were scared of a fire at a nuke plant's CORPORATE OFFICES at 3am? Sorry there is a reason why no damn newspaper on google used terrorism their versions of the article, BECAUSE IT DOES NOT FIT THE BILL.

Setting a fire in a nuke plant's corporate offices is malicious vandalism but is not terrorism. And even if it was at the plant it is still not terrorism.

241 articles on the subject from every ideology from left to right and not a single one even uses the word terror.

you dilute the word.

The number of nuclear power plants needed to replace oil is nowhere near as high as what you mentioned. US oil consumption is 20.000.000 barrels a day. This is a energy consumption rate of 1.41 TW. If you assume plants of 1.6 GW, you need 880 plants.

However, just as you mentioned, electricity can be used much more efficient than oil in an Internal combustion engine. Only 30℅ of the oil will effectively be used while 90% of the electricity can be effectively used. I would say that 300 plant are more than enough to cover US oil use.

I've been following this company and their Pollywell design for years now. EMC2 was founded by Dr Robert Bussard who worked for decades in government fusion programs and he had a lot of faith in the pollywell approach and was deeply skeptical of the standard tokamak approach.

From my undergraduate physics understanding they actually seem like a decent shot at an alternative path to fusion due to how fast the theoretical energy output scales with the size of the device. They've gone a long way to demonstrating the necessary physics and confirming their theoretical work but there are certainly criticisms and skepticism about certain aspects of the physics, in particular the problem of bremsstrahlung.

The problem with trying to assess this approach to fusion is that most fusion researchers have absolutely no experience with this kind of reactor and its physics which (from what I've read) is quite different to what you find in a tokamak.

Now i'm a long time out of physics and I have passing knowledge of plasma physics so I could well be wrong on some of this. So I'll pass it up the chain and wait for someone more knowledgeable than I to tell us why I'm wrong ;)

Edit: a word.

France has produced over 80% of their energy through nuclear power since the late 1980s. The real push for nuclear was the Arab oil crisis, which the Messmer plan directly resulted from. They went from 8% nuclear energy in 1973 to over 20% nuclear energy by 1979.

If you are going to be in Reykjavik, I must recommend the lobster bisque from the Sea Baron. I doubt I will ever have anything as delicious again. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g189970-d1209708-Reviews-Saegreifinn_The_Sea_Baron-Reykjavik.html

Gundersen.

Had to do some digging to dig up the source. Silly websites deleting their archives.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121228201653/http://fairewinds.org/content/ongoing-damage-and-danger-fukushima

This is fairly amazing, but it echoes the experience in other domains. US sales of plug-ins in 2017 (PHEV and EV) were roughly 200,000 last year. This year, we are on track to reach 300,000 sales. Why this seemingly small number matters: because sales of ICE vehicles are in decline, for the second year. So EV are growing, and ICE are declining. My forecast has been that by the time we reach the year 2020, or 2021, when ICE sales growth would be expected to resume, all the marginal growth will have shifted to EV. I lay out these equations here: https://gumroad.com/l/xVXxQ

G

I'm used to thinking about watts as the latest LED bulbs... a 12W LED bulb running near the TV would illuminate our whole living room.

Apple TV by comparison...

https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/AppleTV_Product_Environmental_Report_2012.pdf

...0.2W.

Now I know they're crazy different devices, but I'd have guessed their sleep modes would be more similar.

What did Admiral Rickover say about real reactors again?

Oh yeah. "(3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. "

>I wonder about the lifecycle costs.

Modvion FAQ:

>What is the planned lifetime of turbine towers in wood? > >We design the tower in accordance with the turbine manufacturers specifications, which is normally 25-30 years. The lifetime of a wooden tower exceeds the lifetime of the mechanical parts of the windturbine. > >How much carbon dioxide is emitted by wooden towers compared to steel towers? > >The life cycle emissions from a 110-metre-tall wind turbine tower of steel is approximately 1,250 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The corresponding tower in wood emits 90% less emissions, which means around 125 tonnes of carbon dioxide. > >How big are the climate impacting emissions from wind power plants with wooden towers? > >The life-cycle emissions from modern wind power plants made of steel are about 4–7 grammes carbon dioxide per kWh. Building the tower in wood lowers the emissions from the wind power plant by approximately 30 percent per kWh.

>just think it’s important to contextualize the costs and benefits of alternatives.

I used ecosia to find that context.

>Q: How does gravity work?

>A: Unfortunately, science is missing some critical pieces of the puzzle that would enable us to answer your exact question in a scientifically complete way.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_gravity_work#ixzz1c5PLzvlV

Apple computers: 41% Profit

Exxon Profits: 9.5% Profit

I think I can see who's really stealing your money.

Fixed link. Here's the 5 day chart

Actually the lira's free-fall began before the tariffs. On August 9th Erodgan made a speech vowing not to raise interest rates despite spiraling inflation, ("they have dollars, we have our people and our God"), and the lira immediately started dropping rapidly. The next day, August 10th, was when Trump announced the tariffs. I imagine the tariffs helped compound the crisis but they only began after the lira was already collapsing.

edit: If you don't believe me you can see the numbers yourself here, most of the fall happened before the tariffs were announced. In fact Trump only announced them on Twitter at 18:30 UTC, after all exchanges in Europe closed and the lira was already above 6 USD.

Abundance isn't really relevant. Availability is though, and it is readily available to the point where they aren't even bothering to recover it from lead or gold deposites (or the minor amount in coal).

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Tellurium

H/T to Rod Adams' Twitter feed for pointing out this article.

If you want to access the full text and you don't have a subscription, Google the title of the article, "The Coal Age Nears Its End". Or try clicking this link and then reading the article. It should work.

Snopes to the rescue! So yes, mercury is unsafe, but there's very little mercury in a CFL bulb.

If a CFL bulb lasts 5 years, and you're changing one every month, this means you have approximately 5*12=60 CFL bulbs in your house.

Indian Point should stay up until 2025 at least, in my opinion. With that said and that aside, Offshore Wind off NY is a good thing.

There are some interesting projects around the world with Wind Turbines and pumped storage. For instance, GE and a German company is building four wind turbines with built-in pumped hydro into the tower. https://qz.com/823054/germany-wind-turbine-hydroelectric-batteries/

I've lived in the shadow of Indian Point all my life and I know its usefulness and the risks. We had problems in the 80s and 90s with an unusual number of low-level incidents at that plant. It's been better since Entergy took over. I think it would be fine to run longer than 2021. Besides contacting my state representatives in support of IP, there is not much I can do so I'm moving on for now.

By the way, I suspect natural gas companies in the region want IP to be shutdown. The whole region has been migrating to NG and I think it's not very good for the consumer when demand will be high for NG for space heating AND electricity. The price will match the demand making them lots of money.

A NG pipeline through IP land? Hmm sounds like another reason to close IP or so the NG companies want you to think: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/nyregion/plan-to-expand-a-pipeline-at-indian-point-raises-concern.html?_r=0

Relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

"Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.”

That's true, but they're actually going the opposite way for some stuff - check this out.

Or municipal vehicles. I've noticed a rapid rise in electric vehicles in the inner cities in Germany and Holland. These vehicles aren't much bigger than a golf cart and are used for keeping things clean in pedestrian zones and other tight spaces.

These vehicles may be coming from China. Anyway Ali Baba has a lot of them on sale.

EDIT: Here's a link:

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/electric-garbage-truck.html

It's 50% lower

> Coal burning produces one and a half times the CO2 emissions of oil combustion and twice that from burning natural gas (for an equal amount of energy produced).

On page 74 of , Harvard Medical School's study <em>Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal</em>.

> now that PV cells are more efficient ...

it's actually because the price is coming down rapidly. The cheapest cells that you can buy ($/w) are ~6% efficient. You can buy these today at less than $1/watt. More efficient (~14%) cells are ~$1.50/watt.

Covering a typical roof with even low efficiency cells will harvest ~40kwhr/day.

Here's the info

• Solar PV: 55 MW
• Battery: 15 MWh
• Total storage: 140 MWh
• Electrolyzer: 16 MW
• Fuel Cell: 3 MW
• Location: Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana

On the darkest days, the solar farm could generate 3 kWh/kW/day, translating to 165 MWh for the 55 MW solar farm. Another way to put it would be an average of 6.9 MW average on the darkest 10% of the year.

They're also looking to generate 10 MW "from morning until evening" and 3 MW "in the evenings" from the fuel cells. If I assume it's 12 hours of 10 MW from morning to evening with 3 MW for the remaining 12 hours, this would mean an average output of 6.5 MW -- well below the average output of the solar farm on the darkest 10% of the year. We'd be looking at 156 MWh of daily output and a 140 MWh storage capacity could carry this scheme through that dark day of the year.

In 2010, a study was conducted by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and National Academy of Science. This study determined the mortality rate by trillion kilowatt hours. Nuclear had the lowest mortality rate. Surpassing all other forms of energy production.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/14/why-the-safest-form-of-power-is-also-the-most-fear.aspx

And yes MSR is a thing. The first commercial MSR should come online in China this year, but test reactors have been going for many years now.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600757/china-could-have-a-meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactor-next-year/

edit: removed an extraneous word.

In 2010, a study was conducted by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and National Academy of Science. This study took determined the mortality rate by trillion kilowatt hours. Nuclear had the lowest mortality rate. Surpassing all other forms of energy production.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/14/why-the-safest-form-of-power-is-also-the-most-fear.aspx

The future looks bright for our customers in Japan! Already the coal power plants are running harder to make up for lost nuclear capacity, and with public opinion polls like that, new construction can't be that far in the future!

Jodi data. And indeed the IEA report you linked to in which they say "Global demand growth is forecast to slow to 1.2 mb/d in 2016 after surging to a five-year high of 1.8 mb/d in 2015.". So that's yoy for this year. It's hardly that surprising given the price collapse.

What? My point is that the estate - and thus the creditors and public claimants - is at a disadvantage (arguably, I will concede) without being able to offer certain key executives competitive compensation.

Here is their argument - it is fairly convincing on a quick read: https://www.docdroid.net/ix5r1yO/btu503.pdf.html

Federal mandates have limited corn ethanol to 15 billion gallons. Corn is not the only source of ethanol, advanced biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol are progressing rapidly (though, not quite rapidly enough to be honest).

Additionally, >CBO estimates that from April 2007 to April 2008, the rise in the price of corn resulting from expanded production of ethanol contributed between 0.5 and 0.8 percentage points of the 5.1 percent increase in food prices measured by the consumer price index (CPI). Over the same period, certain other factors—for example, higher energy costs—had a greater effect on food prices than did the use of ethanol as a motor fuel.

The food we eat actually contains a relative small amount of energy compared to other uses. If we assume that there 7 billion people on earth and every person consumes 2000 kcal of food per day, we only consume the energy equivalent of 3 billion barrels of oil per year.

Great post. The costs of a changeover will be difficult to compute. There is a synergy involved that makes the final savings considerably greater than simply adding up the percent saving of each component in the chain. As you have already mentioned, using rare earth magnet motors, and possibly super conductor elements, reduces the size and weight of the equipment required, and thus the amount of material used, such as copper, becomes much smaller. Less waste heat is generated, lessening the demand for air conditioning, thus further reducing the power requirements. The savings rapidly snowball.

Most power engineers I have met don't even know about HVDC power transmission, so there is a huge gap between the knowledge level of practising engineers and the state of the art. This also puts investors off, and many early investors in new power technology have been burned. I consider the barriers to adoption of new technology far more social than they are technical.

Here is a link to the original 1961 paper I was referring to.(pdf warning).

If you do some work with google you will find other studies that have similar conclusions.

I don't have an engineering degree, but have had a long career doing engineering work solving problems by being able to see the big picture, and not assuming "facts" that are common knowledge but aren't true.

Yes! I'm so excited that there's been an update to this! I first heard about it during Bill Gate's TED talk here. Definitely, DEFINITELY worth watching. This could very easily be the future of energy production.

Personally that is why I like methanol better then ethanol. Methanol can be produced from a lot more stuff. Also they've shown that methanol can be created from the air, using electricity and a special catalyst.

Edit: Couldn't find the link to the catalyst but I did find this: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0013748077900596

> That isn't their argument at all. God, you are ignorant.

Wow. More literature you haven't taken the time to read and understand?!? What, are you going to pretend that literature like Zecca and Chiari, 2010 don't exist? The crux of the Nel and Cooper paper you cite has two parts - an economic component relating to peak oil, and a carbon cycle component which argues against a significant decrease in the natural carbon sink. Le Quere, 2009 and a host of literature demolish the assumption in the carbon cycle model used by Nel and Cooper.

But again, we've had this argument before. If you choose to pretend that your card-house of an argument wasn't already demolished once, than that's your prerogative.

> I have cited Nel's work before. I deny that his arguments are absurd. I also deny that you ever cited any paper that refutes his work.

His assumptions are poor. Have you really never clicked the "Cited by" link in Scopus?

> Let the excuses begin.

Oh yes, it's an "excuse" to point that I have no intention whatsoever to dig through months worth of comments to find a thread which you know exists.

I think privacy is one area that isn't being understood or addressed enough.

Smart meters are an important piece in a smart distributed grid of the future which will enable us to tackle climate change, enabling even individuals to become prosumers (producers and consumers) of electricity. In the future appliances might even choose when to run based on minutely spot prices of electricity, and smart meters enable a range of new applications.

However they can also collect very detailed data on power usage within the home by appliance, and I think the power companies should be transparent with how this data is used if it is collected. I recall reading somewhere that market research companies were very excited to finally get data on the usage of products (which was a black hole for them until now) by consumers, which can be used for various purposes by manufacturers and service providers. Data gathered can include which appliances are used and when, which can tell you a huge amount about the person using them.

I did find this report Smart Meter Data: Privacy and Cybersecurity however haven't read it (too little time). Also cannot read this report either: Big data driven smart energy management: From big data to big insights

Yes. This is monthly average in June. Go here for other months.

Even at 25% (low) efficiency, this comes out to almost 6GW hr/mi^2 in southern AZ. And if there's one thing that southern AZ has a lot of, it's square miles.

Even the worst month in December is something like 4GWhr/sqmi/day.

Too late to ride the surge, but you can still buy the stock if you think the technology is promising. However, if that is your strategy, I think that you'd be better off buying a long term call. (See here if you aren't familiar with options)

They are pretty much sink or swim at this point so if this technology works in the market place they will go up a lot, if it doesn't, they may go all the way to zero. Today you can buy the option for a hundred shares at $2.00 each on Jan. 2014 for $35. If they are above $2.35 by then you make money, if they are below $2.00 you lose $35. For every dollar they go above $2.35 by that date (or whatever time you choose before then) you make $100 on your $35 investment.

Basically, that way you get almost all the upside of a break away success while only putting 1/4 the money at risk in case they go out of business.

Exactly,

Expect to see Tesla's next generation batteries in the Model 3. (400 mile range, fast charging, lower prices)

Interesting Article on the possibilities

Asked and dodged, it turns out. Also they're only doing assembly there, which I missed first time around.

It depends on the wind profile of the area where the wind farm is located. In Texas for example, the wind profile in the West tends to be highest at night and lower during the day. Nearly the exact opposite of daily energy consumption. However, wind farms installed off the coast of Texas tend to be higher during the day and lower at night, the two could potentially smooth out the variation over the day. However, the wind profile over a day is a pretty large time scale. Fluctuations that happen due to gusts or something like a cold front coming in, on the time scale of minutes or hours, can be evened out by just placing wind farms tens of miles apart or so. I don't have the exact numbers to show this, but the idea is that the more wind farms you have over a larger area, the less fluctuation you will see. And this has to be within an interconnected system. So the US or North America aren't really interconnected, sometimes through DC ties, but in general they're not.

This is just one study, found from googling on scholar.

>It is shown that, for the analyzed climatic region (northwest Germany), a main effect of geographical dispersion is the reduction of large hour to hour changes in the overall power output.

edit: >Anything less than the size of the USA and a single high pressure system can kill wind from pretty much the entire area

I dont' think this is true, and it takes time for a high pressure system to move across such a large area. So while it may cover the entire US, it wouldn't do so at such rapid pace that wind power from farms would be zero or at their peaks at the exact same time.

I have a few scattered points. Many current reactors are reported to be on time and near budget; most of those are being built in places with limited freedom of the press.

My understanding of thorium [obligatory aria ] -and I'm not an expert - is as follows, and I should redo this as a sonnet or something:

• There is plenty of fuel, as a side product of refining things we actually want. Fuel is not the problem.

• Stereotypical "China syndrome" meltdowns are not a problem with MSRs, because they have a non-melted salt plug that is kept frozen by active cooling. They lose power, the plug melts and the molten salt falls into a large, flat, room where it is too spread out to fission.

• There was only one built, fifty years ago (so all the builders are dead or retired and the documentation has had plenty of time to get acquainted with entropy.)

• Admiral Rickover's rules are well and truly in effect: everything's simple if you aren't the guy who has to do it. Strained analogy time: I worked on a solar thermal project and when I started, every time I turned around I was learning about something that made it cost more and work worse. I could name eight factors that hadn't occurred to me before I got there and at least four that I knew about beforehand. Science is full of approximations and engineering is where you find out how those actually work out.

And in nuclear, as I understand it, when you find one of those exciting new features you can't just engineer around it; you have to get your changes signed off on and it takes a month. I assume the regulators get training that is full of pictures of Chernobyl and Hiroshima, and told "Don't let that happen."

I don't envy the people who are trying to build new nuclear reactors. They're young and full of energy and they're going to need all of it.

Ah, okay, I've never seen it written like that before, since energy is ultimately just energy, whatever it's stored as. It's not "my" units, though, it's SI Units, and with the slash I just meant GWs OR GJ. GWs = Giga Watt seconds, which is equal to to 1 GJ, both is an amount of energy. Seems you are not a physicist ;). You did not really address what I said though, I asked you why you changed tha maximum from 13.3 to 8.25GW. A*sin²(x) makes 'A' the maximum, and you clearly have a factor of 8.25. If you change that factor to 13.3, you get my results.

Edit: See integrate y = 13.3*sin²(pi*x/16.5) between x = 0 and x=16.5 = 16.5*13.3*0.5 (as I said before), in GWh, multiply by 3600s/h to get the result in GWs or GJ.

You can read about the practical limits of PV efficiency here ...

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-solar-panels-so-inefficient-What-is-stopping-us-from-harvesting-80-90-100-of-solar-energy-How-efficient-are-the-most-efficient-plants

Feldspar comes mostly as waste from other mining operations, this was explained in finnish article. I have no idea why english article skips most details.

edit: here is poorly translated version of finnish article

Fair enough, my apologies.

Chinese solar is in a market bubble that will collapse ...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/28/chinese-solar-manufacturers-are-own-worst-enemies.aspx

It'll hurt, maybe even trigger a Chinese recession, but it'll shake out soon enough. China's energy demand is only heading up.

There are also some centrally planned economy style inefficiencies in wind ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/wind/the-hunt-for-chinas-missing-wind-energy

but I'm sure someone will eventually build the required transmission infrastructure. Here's the place for a few years of low priced cryptocurrency mining.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/06/will-platinum-doom-hydrogen-cars.aspx

I've done the calculation myself in the past and came up with 10-18g in the Mirai. They say 14g. $30g * 14g= $420. Not $3000 as above.

The quote by Thomas Edison here is quite meaningless. The whole reason batteries are gaining attention now is because there have been major strides in cycling capability, discharge capability, and longevity.

The transcript of the interview with Edison is actually an interesting read, but none of the figures he supplied (which are the main reason batteries were commercially useless at the time) are accurate today.

Because offshore wind farms cost something like $244/MWh in power purchase agreements, and wholesale market rates are something $47/MWh, and (244/47) is closer to five than one hundred.

> A single ESBWR nuclear reactor on Oahu

Anyone ever built one of those? If not, I'm going to go with the Rickover quote.

"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

>I'd be very curious to see an estimate of the yearly greenhouse gases emitted by the diesels

Should be pretty good (in comparison).
Unlike a load-following diesel that has to run in all regimes, with batteries you can always run it at the sweet spot.

The question I have about this is, exactly what does 10,000 terabecquerels represent? Apparently a becquerel represents one decay event per second, and since Cesium or Iodine have specific half-lives, you can convert that amount to units of mass. Since they have very different half-lives, (Iodine is on the order of 8 days, Cesium on the order of 30 years,) you get very different amounts:

The equivalent of about 6 pounds of Cesium-137 were released into the environment. Wolfram Alpha

Or about 2.17 grams of Iodine-131. Wolfram Alpha

The article says that it's measured in terms of Iodine-131, so basically, for an event to be magnitude 6, there have to be at least several grams of Iodine. 2g of Iodine-131 has far milder consequences than 6 pounds of Cesium-137, but I'd sure like to know how much Cesium was actually released...

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&amp;prev=_t&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;layout=2&amp;eotf=1&amp;sl=auto&amp;tl=en&amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bmu.de%2Ferneuerbare_energien%2Fdownloads%2Fdoc%2F47034.php

Here is a more technical account of what happened, put together by my Nuclear Systems professor at MIT, Jacopo Buongiorno. Everything you want to know is here.

https://www.mediafire.com/?yyqmauj4y5fnfrl

I love that quote, it clearly and accurately describes what is happening.

&nbsp;

But sadly, Hitler never said it. http://onviolence.com/?e=787 and https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Big_lie.html Or at least he never said it so clearly.

Haha, thank you again for the encouragement!

We might be able to win the Clean Energy track...though there are 20+ other startups we're competing with on top of the Clean Energy ones. The organizers weren't able to fit all the competitors onto the same Facebook poll so they split them into tracks, though they're still looking at the top number of votes overall. There are some pretty impressive ones up there! The full list is here.

We'd like to think that we can make it to the Finalist Pool without being a People's Choice, but the judges may have different opinions, so we're going for anything that might help!

See my comment in this thread or Google's study of their own Googleplex installation of solar for issues with large installations where insolation is best.

What makes you think going wind and solar will be less vulnerable to storms?

The hurricanes destroyed a wind farm in the NE and a solar farm. And the Santa Isabel farm that survived still wasn't connected to the grid as of April.

Why are they leaving China out of the pie chart?

"China has a substantial amount of thorium produced annually as a byproduct of her global-class rare earth production in the Inner Mongolian Bayanobo"

Yeah, starting on the ground seems like the way to do it :)

I don't know if we really have a need for aircraft-reactors anymore, or what aircraft-acceleration does to any fluids present in the reactor... One thing that makes an MSR a bit more desirable there is that if the plane were to blow up you're not facing a large atmospheric dispersal of radioactive waste (although lava falling from the sky isn't ideal).

I would imagine that in a plane the safety gear and weight of the reactor are some of the bigger problems... One place I do see it being very interesting though is in modern blimps. Boeing is working on a heavy lifting blimp-alike and used to be working on some cool defense blimps that were made to hover in the high atmosphere for months at a time while providing intelligence and anti-missile capabilities...

I would image that's a perfect scenario for a tiny air based reactor: no more refueling, weight concerns are minimal and can be offset by blimp-size, and you'd have a lot of energy available for anti-missile laser weapons.

I'm not sure how physically small we can get MSR reactors. Through my reading I've heard (qualified) people say they're highly scalable and there are discussions about 1 - 2 MW reactors. Personally I see some advantages in a commercial reactor which housed within the dimensions of a standard shipping container (and maybe another one for a 'command center'), so that they can be readily moved around the world using ships and flatbed trucks.

I imagine the ideal would be a flatbed showing up with the reactor & casing on the back, dropping it in to a prepared hole, and being ready for power generation as soon as the reactor was started up... No clue about how much energy we could reasonably expect form that style of solution though...

In my office there are 5 people. We are required to power our PCs off every night - to save electricity, for data security, and so that the PCs can pick up any changes in Group Policy when they boot up in the morning.

The three blokes power our PCs off every night, but the two ladies only power their PCs down at weekends, and sometimes not even then. One of them runs two PCs, so there are three PCs running continually throughout the week.

I've pointed out the reasons we're required to power our PCs down. I've showed them http://grano.la/, which puts your PC into standby automatically without you having to press the power button, but they just don't seem to care.

> in the U.S., where the V-8 long ruled the roost, and until recently a V-6 was seen as the major economy move.

Uh, yeah, no.

V-4 has a huge chunk of the US market.

With respect to thorium reserves, found this

>Most coal contains uranium and thorium, as well as potassium-40, lead-210, and radium-226. The total levels are generally about the same as in other rocks of the Earth's crust. Most emerge from a power plant in the light flyash, which is fused and chemically stable. Some 99% of flyash is typically retained in a modern power station (only 90% in some older ones), and this is buried in an ash dam. Some is sold for making concrete.

>The amounts of radionuclides involved are noteworthy. In Victoria, Australia, 65 million tonnes of brown coal is burned annually for electricity production. This contains about 1.6 ppm uranium (U) and 3.0-3.5 ppm thorium (Th), hence about 100 tonnes of uranium and 200 tonnes of thorium is buried in landfills each year in the Latrobe Valley. Australia exports 235 Mt/yr of coal with 1 to 2 ppm U and about 3.5 ppm Th (Dale & Lavrencic 1993) in it, hence up to 400 tonnes of uranium and about 800 tonnes of thorium could conceivably be added to published export figures.

>Other coals are quoted as ranging up to 25 ppm U and 80 ppm Th. In the USA, ash from coal-fired power plants contains on average 1.3 ppm of uranium and 3.2 ppm of thorium, giving rise to 1200 tonnes of uranium and 3000 tonnes of thorium in ash each year (for 955 million tonnes of coal used for power generation). Applying these concentration figures to world coal consumption for power generation (7800 Mt/yr) gives 10,000 tonnes of uranium and 25,000 tonnes of thorium per year.

The write up was insufficient. But the article is free online so that's good.

Looking over his research he makes a few interesting assumptions, the first is an influx of CO2 form non-sustainable sources or from bio-ethanol. I'm not 100% sure why he made this assumption? Perhaps these pools need a concentrated source of CO2? Perhaps he found a solar compressor insufficient for some reason? I'm not entirely clear, and not an engineer so if he did justify this assumption I missed it. He also out and out rejects closed containers because they are hard to cool. i'm not sure how valid an assumption this is as closed containers allow for more extensive bio manipulations that allow for higher amounts of production in less space.

I'm not saying it's bad or good research, I honestly lack the background in this specific area, but I suspect a lot of the people working on bio fuels will also lack the expertise in this specific methodology making this hard research to refute. (I have seen arguments stating that even sugar beet ethanol can be sustainable as certain costs). But again I'm not an expert on this. I'll be curious to see the follow-up and response to this.

from www.thefreedictionary.com/:

a·pol·o·gist - A person who argues in defense or justification of something, such as a doctrine, policy, or institution.

apologist [əˈpɒlədʒɪst] - a person who offers a defence by argument

Your chart is chemically impossible:

1. Methane has a heat of combustion of 55.7 kJ/g

2. 1 kWh of heat from Methane therefore requires 64.63 grams.

3. Reaction formula: CH^4 + 2O^2 => CO^2 + 2H^2 O + heat

4. Therefore every molecule of methane combusted must create a molecule of CO^2

5. CH^4 is 75% carbon by mass (carbon has mass ~12, hydrogen ~1, and 12 / (12 + 4*1) = 0.75)

6. Therefore 64.63 grams of methane contains 48.47 grams of carbon.

7. Since we've established a 1:1 ratio of CH^4 to CO^2 , 48.47 grams of carbon atoms must each be bound to 2 oxygen atoms. We need the mass of these two oxygen atoms.

8. In CO^2 , Oxygen represents 73% of mass, so 48.47 grams is only 27% of the mass of the resulting CO^2

9. 48.47 grams / 27% = 180 grams of CO^2 / kWh of heat

10. 180 grams / kWh = 0.39 lbs of CO^2 / kWh of heat, minimum

And that's with perfect combustion and no fuel chain related emissions from extracting and distributing it.

Google translate of the original Russian source

The low point of $2 per gallon was before bankruptcies and consolidations hit the US shale producers. After that the price came back up, and now after the Iran deal, and Chinese stocks plunging, it's going back down.

You can see the price history here : http://www.gasbuddy.com/Charts

(Note : gas usually lags oil prices by about a week or so)

> https://www.libreoffice.org/download/ or Google docs?

Sorry, I’m an idealistic dork try who likes free software and formats. Especially when there are awesome people like rtt445 :).

> That too but I was thinking more about general economic scaling (fixed/variable cost structure).

Well, actually efficiency goes up with increased production numbers. Power plants would get cheaper if every house had one. But we would need more, of course, making them expensive again. Maybe you’re right and a few really large plants will always be cheaper. But I’m sure in the zombie apocalypse, decentralized systems with renewable sources would absolutely be worth every penny.

> Get a couple of small modular reactors and you are done ;)

Yeah, those would be awesome. Making money by burning nuclear waste in your basement! But from the little research I did, those things are as far away as large scale renewables or fusion. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Screw it, I'd install one of these bad boys. $8, 112 mA @ 9V (both ±5%) = ~1 W. Mount it on a waterproofed project box and wire up a few useless LEDs for $18 (LEDs shine if the sun shines) if people complain about it being non-functional - hey, now it lights up some blue lights, it's totally functional! Ideally you'd just throw the $8 panel on the roof though and call it a day.

Realistically, none of our solutions would achieve code compliance, so they'd just demand a code compliant install (and that's where it starts getting expensive). Although...I wonder how cheap you could make a "fuck the code"/"compliance system" setup that's grid-tied and electrically sound... Theoretically you can get a small simple plug-in grid tie inverter for ~$100 on Amazon, then spend another ~$100 for a 100 watt panel, and while I'm not sure if it's up to code (probably not, idk), it would be fully compliant with the spirit of the law for only $200 + a bit extra for cabling, mounting, misc install costs, etc.

Specialization works. Most people, myself included, have no time or interest in learning how to operate and maintain battery banks or converters. Even failing that, I have more productive targets for investment capital.

Adam Smith was just as astute in his day as in ours with the passage on a pin factory from <em>The Wealth of Nations</em>.

Looks like its either a scam, or made by well meaning folk who don't understand the physics behind wind generation. For a wind turbine to work efficiently you need:

a) an area that experiences long periods of wind above the minimum start speed and lower than the cut off speed for the turbine,

b) a laminar flow of air into the turbine. That means putting the turbine up on a tall pole, high above the ground, houses and trees.

The examples in their video show a small turbine (I assume the 50W maximum model) sitting about a foot off the ground in a mountainous region with a chap sitting next to it. Not what one might call an ideal location. The larger one that the chap manages to turn on with a smart phone app appears to be attached to a house, which is one of the most stupid places you can put a wind turbine (rough air around the house, chance of passing vibrations into the structure, etc, etc).

Absolutely no way any of my cash is going into this kickstarter scheme... especially after investing in a previous kickstarter project that included this book on renewable energy systems design. This Trinity design just throws up warning flags after reading that.

1 which is most important from an endowment standard is bunk. Past performance is no indication of future results. Plus any timeline is somewhat arbitrary and easy to game the system.

Finally I'm not really sure its true... I just picked two major oil and gas (Chevron, Exxon) companies, compared to 10 years ago, compared vs DJI and SP500 and they beat the socks off the market.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CVX+Interactive#symbol=cvx;range=20031001,20131001;compare=%5Edji+xom+%5Egspc;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

> its cost competitive with fossil fuels.

Actual nuclear plants as built in the US? Or academic reactors ? Because Toshiba, most recently, might have a few words to say on that topic.

This is very confusing to me, so I looked up some definitions of Darwinism. The American Heritage Dictionary has "A theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.", which came as no surprise to me.

None of the definitions I found had anything to do with economics nor suicide.

“Despite efforts to add EV charging points, RoadChef, one of the country’s top three motorway service station operators, isn’t able to move forward as planned.

Its EV charging point plans have largely been held up by local electricity grid operators (DNOs). Chairman Simon Turl says the local operators charge millions of pounds and take up three years to install the required infrastructure.”

https://thenextweb.com/cars/2020/01/06/uk-power-grid-not-ready-electric-cars-boom-cost-billions/

> $500 Billion? What, I've never heard that estimate before.

You probably didn't attempt to investigate. Here you are. Bear in mind I said up to, not that that's the exact cost. However, having said that it's clear that it can't be too far off the mark. If we've learned anything about these accidents historically it's that the cleanup always costs far more than initial estimates suggests. And at Fukushima, the costs will keep piling up for decades to come.

> You divert attention away because you know this is correct.

Huh? I don't really care about these "what-if" questions because fact is that it was located wrongly and that's a risk that you can never entirely eradicate. Today it's the location of the back up power, tomorrow it's gonna be something else. Look, statistically these accidents will keep happening, and the question really is why should we go to that trouble if it's not at all required.

> One solar panel costs around $611 USD

> One solar panel produces about 250-400 watts per hour

Here's a link to a 600W solar panel package for half that price

Done by the taxing process of going on Amazon, typing in "solar panel" and looking for something cheap.

> small appliance that uses a lot. Hence the toaster.

Hair dryers often use most in smallest package :) especially travel ones. example 1875w unit.

https://www.amazon.com/Conair-Vagabond-Compact-Folding-Handle/dp/B0012DL8B4/?th=1

> Getting ahead means someone else is behind

Hardly! It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game unless we make it.

> many people would rather try to burn the world down than see others succeed when they have not.

That is sadly true, but, hopefully, we sane people can overpower the worst and convert the rest.

The only nations I see a real Hubbert curve in are the US - as I previously mentioned (but technology in terms of shale oil might change the game), and the UK and Norway, probably because they've extracted oil using the highest level of technology out there, have very limited resources to start with compared to the rest of world, and are perfectly politically and economically stable.