241–250 of 278 posts
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No it is not. As a consumer in Dallas we get to choose which power company we want to buy from. Basically, we have to buy our share of electricity that is used from the grid.
Do they do the same for internet providers?
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Gas is easy to transport, but only really by pipeline. LNG is a lot more expensive and capital-intensive. And there is only one place with rising demand where it's easy to transport U.S. natural gas: Mexico. Pipeline gas exports to Mexico did nearly triple between 2011 and 2016 [1]. Exports to Canada over the same period fell, however. Anywhere besides Canada and Mexico requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals,…
Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over. LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.
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No it is not. As a consumer in Dallas we get to choose which power company we want to buy from. Basically, we have to buy our share of electricity that is used from the grid.
Do they do the same for internet providers?
Having moved to Texas recently, I was really impressed by the electricity set up.
There's one company which, I assume, is granted a local monopoly on power distribution (Oncor for my area, IIRC), and they handle the actual lines to the buildings/meters etc. I've never had to deal with them directly.
I can choose from probably 40+ companies and different plans offering different rates, expected usage, contract terms, etc. and whatever other criteria I care about, all listed in one place and compared side-by-side on one website.
It was really depressing having just gotten my head around that wealth of choice to then be told "for internet, you will have Spectrum."
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Not taxing a negative externality is a 'subsidy'? This a huge stretch. If this is true, the government must be subsidizing obese men to wear banana hammocks.
Say the government decided to let Wal-Mart park delivery trucks on your property for free ( i.e. decline to enforce your property right in favor of a business). Economically, it'd be indistinguishable from a subsidy. Shareholders don't care whether the government policy increases Wal-Mart's revenue or decreases its expenses. The same is true for power generation.
Also, if the government actually subsidizes a negative externality, you're in a thicket, since some of it is a real subsidy and some of it is the estimated negative externality subsidy.
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Do they do the same for internet providers?
Why would they? The internet is the grid. There is no such thing as a "internet generation" device, like there is for electric power.
Right now, we generally treat "the internet as the grid", but there's no inherent reason we can't separate "the internet"/IP address and network peering from "the grid"/physical last-mile cables.
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> 1 megaton equivalent For those interested, Hiroshima was ~20Kt. Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. I'm more worried about the glasshouse effect of so much LNG.
> Modern nuclear bombs are ~20Mt, with the biggest at 100Mt. IIRC US (and other Western ones as well I guess) ICBM warheads are about 300Kt, Russian ones about 1Mt. The Russian did test a 50Mt device (Tsar Bomba) during the cold war (technically, there's apparently no upper limit how big you can make them), but such large devices are not really militarily useful to the point of justifying their bulk/weight/expense.
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Thanks for the link. Still, incandescents consume a lot of power, and LEDs little.
It's too bad that the light "quality" from incandescent bulbs is vastly better than either LED or CFL.
First, you need a quality DC power supply for the light. Most bulbs use small capacitive droppers that let a bit of current squeak through with each change in polarity from the AC mains. These need to be well designed with plenty of filtering to provide stable light without lots of flicker. The power supplies are also generally the failure point, rather than the LEDs themselves.
Color temperature and quality are addressed with phosphor coatings over the LEDs. With an appropriate coating, they can be perfectly suitable for many lighting applications.
The issue for all of this is mostly cost; quality LED bulbs are still rather expensive. Passable-quality LEDs are becoming much more affordable, though.
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Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over. LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.
1 megaton? Even the largest LNG tankers can hold only 67 kilotons, so even if you had a perfect stoichiometric mixture somehow and detonated all of it at one you'd get maybe a 130 kiloton explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
1000 kg of natural gas has a lower heating value of 47.1 gigajoules, much greater than the 4.18 gigajoules per 1000 kg TNT equivalent.
The lower heating value of 67,000,000 kg of natural gas is 3.16 * 10^15 joules:
http://hydrogen.pnl.gov/tools/lower-and-higher-heating-value...
So more like 750 kilotons TNT equivalent.
There are multiple factors that give rise to natural gas's much greater energy density:
- TNT carries its oxidizer internal to the molecule instead of getting it "free" from air
- TNT equivalent energy does not include full combustion of the oxygen-deficient detonation products, only instantaneous energy release during detonation
- TNT has a lower hydrogen:heavy atom ratio than natural gas
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It's too bad that the light "quality" from incandescent bulbs is vastly better than either LED or CFL.
Often true, but it's a question of quality. First, you need a quality DC power supply for the light. Most bulbs use small capacitive droppers that let a bit of current squeak through with each change in polarity from the AC mains. These need to be well designed with plenty of filtering to provide stable light without lots of flicker. The power supplies are also generally the failure point, rather than the LEDs themse…
Those same bulbs now sell for ~$11/ea on Amazon.