261–270 of 278 posts
I'm sure the politicians will solve that problem.
Yep. I've seen some documentary where they said that in a very sunny region of Spain it was too expensive to put solar panels on your own roof due to taxes. The large companies made sure it was not feasible for home owners to do so.
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Some fraction of the US military expense should be attributed to obtaining energy, both explicitly (eg, patrolling shipping lanes) and implicitly (as a superpower, we can get considerations other countries don't). I don't know enough about it to hazard a guess, but I'm hoping someone, somewhere, has done an analysis.
I dislike this line of thought because it seems to imply that oil producers in the United States need to be taxed to pay for the military defense of all the overseas producers trying to put them out of business.
This is not a stance I personally hold or reject, but there are many with strong convictions about at least some evidence with regards to this. These people cannot easily be dismissed as tinfoil hatter.
If true the most certainly they should be accountable for the cost of military action and life lost. If false then I don't know how to prove it, proving negatives and all that.
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That's assuming an accidental leak. I wonder what the risks of "bad guys" with, say, shoulder fired rockets taking the top of the tanks off look like?
Well, the double hulls of these ships are inch-thick steel, but I think the dome is less protected. An attack that blew the dome off could open up a large hole and ignite the escaping gas, but it would still take minutes for all of it to boil off, probably freezing as it does. I guess a big enough rocket could blow the liquid out of the tank, or rupture a large hole in the hull of the ship causing the LNG to dump int…
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It's interesting to speculate on how it could be done. Maybe it could be soft, like a fire hose, and kept open by internal pressure. That way it could be unfurled from a ship. Rigid pipe seems pretty difficult.
Flexible pipe for subsea O&G has existed for a long time now (it's certainly not soft, but it is flexible and it is installed from huge spools): http://www.technip.com/sites/default/files/technip/fields/pu...
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Of course it is! It comprises two of the safest things in the world, radioactive materials and fission! That's never been a recipe for disaster!
If you are suggesting that a nuclear power plant can detonate like a nuclear bomb, you are wrong, they are a completely different design. Sure they can melt down in rare cases, but that's hardly anything on the scale of a nuke. I would suggest you look at some of the stats for death rates of different power sources. Nuclear is near the bottom, coal kills thousands every year through air pollution. If you want to find…
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> Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%. Because they were both substandard and being dumped. And they drove a lot of reliable US manufacturers under. In addition, a LOT of installers went under because the warranty they offered assumed that they wouldn't have to show up again for 10 years. 3 years on they're getting warranty calls because the solar cells were fa…
The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years. If the market couldn't things like double and triple pane windows wouldn't be able to out-compete single pane windows. We have done it with other goods too. American car companies got away with selling substandard stuff for a long time b…
How many years does your reputable solar cell manufacturer need to survive to allow the market to "figure it out"? And where does he get the money to do that? "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" applies to more than just shorting stocks.
That was the issue. The domestic manufacturers were going bankrupt waiting for the market to figure out that the Chinese cells would die prematurely. Of course, once all the domestic manufacturers are bankrupt, "the market" no longer matters because all you can get are the crappy Chinese cells.
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Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind. As more export capacity comes online in the US I would expect natural gas projects in the US to continue apace even if domestic consumption stays flat or declines.
There are multiple transmission line projects in progress in the US to drag wind energy to major load centers. Solar can be produced anywhere of course. Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap. You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
So is Elon Musk saying this just because it's convenient for him and Tesla? Or do we really need emissions penalties?
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One of the holy grails of solar is syngas: using solar thermal power to convert CO2/water to a mix of hydrogen and methane. If you can do it efficiently enough, the gas is the energy storage and you can either pipe it or use it to fuel a NG turbine/combined-cycle plant which will be more thermodynamically efficient than a simpler solar->steam cycle plant. The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major m…
> The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major materials > science breakthroughs that need to happen before it's feasible. Since > the sun's energy cycles rapidly on the minute/second timescale, whatever > receiver you're using to convert inputs to syngas needs to not be > destroyed by that periodic, rapid temperature (and thus stress) cycling. What do you mean here? What aspect of the sun's energy cy…
Last time I worked in solar, the processes needed for the conversion typically worked above 600C (or much higher). If you can do conversion at atmospheric pressure, then you don't need pressure vessels (which are susceptible to fatigue because of cycling from 100C to 600C+ when a 5 minute cloud passes overhead, for example), but then your gas is at a lower density and now your process is less efficient.
Also, the higher the temperature, the higher the radiative heat losses become. T1^4 - T2^4 = much much higher. So you want to minimize the view factor of the heat transfer tubes/materials. Which means you want a cavity receiver...yada yada. Google solar air receiver and you'll get some interesting reading material, for example:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610214...
I'm a lot more familiar with salt systems, tbh:
http://www.esolar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/SolarPACES-...
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> The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major materials > science breakthroughs that need to happen before it's feasible. Since > the sun's energy cycles rapidly on the minute/second timescale, whatever > receiver you're using to convert inputs to syngas needs to not be > destroyed by that periodic, rapid temperature (and thus stress) cycling. What do you mean here? What aspect of the sun's energy cy…
Haha, yes. The sun doesn't cycle. But sun reaching your receivers does because of clouds :-). Last time I worked in solar, the processes needed for the conversion typically worked above 600C (or much higher). If you can do conversion at atmospheric pressure, then you don't need pressure vessels (which are susceptible to fatigue because of cycling from 100C to 600C+ when a 5 minute cloud passes overhead, for example),…
Yeah, the stuff I'm familiar with is solar thermal water splitting using iron oxide at ~1000C, though I can see why the Caltech group preferred ceria (my favorite ceramic).
I think my favorite cute trick with solar thermal is solar thermal reforming of biomass. By piggybacking on the existing chemical reaction you actually end up with solar energy directly added to the chemical energy! First time I saw that I was struck by how clever it was.
I imagine using CO2 as a reactant is a lot more difficult, that's not a simple molecule to break apart so I very much appreciated that the solar thermal reforming process takes advantage of the plants to do the hard part while extracting even more solar energy.
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There are multiple transmission line projects in progress in the US to drag wind energy to major load centers. Solar can be produced anywhere of course. Natgas exports may increase, but it appears everyone is getting off of fossil asap. You cannot compete against an energy source with no fuel cost.
Elon Musk has said that to fight climate change, we need to implement emissions cap and trade globally. But it seems that solar and wind is an unstoppable force now even without internalizing the external costs of fossil fuels. So is Elon Musk saying this just because it's convenient for him and Tesla? Or do we really need emissions penalties?