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How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

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261–270 of 285 posts

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#261
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been to Texas but a Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Texas ) suggests that 80F low occurs only in Galveston in July and it's more like 60s and 70s elsewhere. If a humidity is such a problem then you could run dehumidifier during the day and that would lower humidity ( in a sealed house ) overnight. I mean these temperatures don't strike me as particularly intolerable. I wonder i…

Dallas native here... and a runner and weather nerd constantly monitoring for the best running conditions... In July and August it will often stay above 90F until midnight. There’s usually a few evenings in August where it will still be 100F at 2200. The overnight lows in the upper 70s won’t be reached until dawn, and it will be back into the upper 80s before 10. And the breeze is a hot wind, that feels like it makes…

Interesting, I wonder how people survived before the advent of modern air conditioning. 35C/95F should be fatal at 100% humidity (as your body can no longer shed heat).

Well, something like IceBear20 ( https://www.ice-energy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ICE-BE... ) seems to be the way to go. It can run for up to 4 hours off the stored ice so it should be able to cover you from sunset to midnight.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#262
post #223

Selling solar back to the grid has one major problem that, fortunately, doesn't plague windmill installations: The Duck Curve [1]. The problem is that peak energy usage now occurs after sunset . So no matter how many solar panels you stack on your home, around 6-7 PM the coal, oil, and gas power plants all have to spin up to their max capacity. Your solar panels are new less likely to _replace_ a coal power plant, al…

>The problem is that peak energy usage now occurs after sunset. So no matter how many solar panels you stack on your home, around 6-7 PM the coal, oil, and gas power plants all have to spin up to their max capacity. Where are you getting this assumption from? In hot climates like Arizona, peak energy usage during the summer months is in the afternoon, not the evening. When it's 115 degrees outside, that's when everyo…

I think the duck curve is more about residential usage rather than overall grid usage. And this conversation is about home solar installations rather than commercial ones in offices and places of work.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#263
post #206
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to be closer to $10,000 for that kind of storage. Probably not economical for your use case unless you get good rebates and electricity is expensive where you live. Source: I build home battery backup systems for a living. The types of people buying batteries today live in places where arbitrage is an option (california, hawaii), or where the grid is frequently or always down (puerto rico)... or rich peo…

$10,000 is ~ 50kwh of battery power, that's vastly more than most people are using over a few hours.

Perhaps that includes labor and permits, not insignificant costs

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#264
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you have a given supply and demand. As long as they are in the right positions in the grid that transmission capacity is not the limiting factor, then you can fix that by reducing supply, or by increasing demand - apart from the issue of transmission those options are equivalent from the point of view of bringing the supply under control. They may not be equivalent in terms of cost, but that is a se…

> Having a reservoir as the potential to significantly increase the reduction in excess supply you can handle, that is true, but the lack of that option does not change the benefit of shutting off generating capacity. The point is to not turn off generation capacity that we don't control the start of, like wind. Why should we not generate if the wind is blowing at night?

What I commented on, and what you quoted above, was about hydro plants, not wind. With hydro plants, as long as the reservoir has capacity the reservoir acts like a battery, as hydro plants tend to be built with turbine capacity sufficient for a flow large enough to drain the reservoir. As such, unlike with wind, nothing is lost if you close the sluice gates or a while - the reservoir just builds up and you can generate more when needed.

That's the entire point: That hydro plants can act as storage even if there's no lower reservoir to pump from. Which means they're good fast response plants exactly so that types of plants where turning them off wastes potential energy, like wind farms, can keep running.

The original claim I took issue with, was that a hydro plant can't serve this purpose without a second reservoir, which is not true - a second reservoir can be used to increase total effective storage capacity, and to make the plant increase demand rather than just decrease supply, but a hydro plant on itself can improve grid responsiveness, given enough transmission capacity.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#265
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I find it hard to beleive that isolation alone is enough to make them so unempathetic. I can only assume it has something to do with the human capacity to lie to one self, otherwise even acknowledging the truth would just be too uncomfortable. Makes me imagine some weird distopian future where all people with power and wealth are forced to take some anti-self-deciet drug to prevent crimes against humanit…

> all people with power and wealth are forced to take some anti-self-deciet drug But who would force them?

Our future AI overlords, I imagine.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#266

The future of energy is mostly wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear with grid scale energy storage and long distance HVDC transmission lines. IMHO :)

Nice, how you sneaked nuclear in there.

I think at extreme latitudes, wind and hydro might not be available everywhere and it may be easier to do nuclear. In general I hope nuclear isn’t a big part of the solution because of cost alone: nuclear is quite expensive and I don’t really see the pathway to make it a whole lot cheaper.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

said in all sincerity. I would urge you to spend a little more time looking into nuclear you would be quite surprised of how wrong your view of it is. New reactors can use used uranium which makes the problem even smaller. On top of that, the actual footprint needed to store it is absurdly small if we even had to do that. In other words Nuclear is the safest greenest form of energy we have (greener than wind or solar…

When some options interfere with each other, we often find ourselves facing a trade-off "You can't eat your cake and have it, too," Whenever this happens some people would prefer one benefit at the expense of the other, while others prefer the other benefit at the expense of the first. At this point the choice the group will make becomes a political point of contention. No matter which benefit you prefer your prefere…

Thats not the discussion. The discussion is if opposing views are allowed to exist or whether you get shamed for thinking and proposing something that is as politically valid (human flourishing).

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When some options interfere with each other, we often find ourselves facing a trade-off "You can't eat your cake and have it, too," Whenever this happens some people would prefer one benefit at the expense of the other, while others prefer the other benefit at the expense of the first. At this point the choice the group will make becomes a political point of contention. No matter which benefit you prefer your prefere…

Thats not the discussion. The discussion is if opposing views are allowed to exist or whether you get shamed for thinking and proposing something that is as politically valid (human flourishing).

Obviously opposing views are allowed to exist. I don't know how shaming can even be measured objectively. What makes you feel shamed? The fact that someone downvoted you? Thats merely the expression of someone's opposing views... (I did not downvote your comments btw)

There is no "the" discussion. There is a discussion consisting of commenter beliefs, and then responses challenging beliefs.

You classified some beliefs as political as opposed to technical.

Lets define 'technical' as relating to matters of fact. Lets define 'political' as relating to selection of options.

i.e. technical statements are positive statements, and political statements are normative statements.

Every technical discussion contains tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are the source of political disagreement: when the family needs a new car, the tradeoff could be price, performance, appearance,... and the husband and wife will not in general agree. The technical tradeofff generates the political difference.

In the example I gave, some people prefer cryptocurrencies, other people prefer nuclear energy, there is no objective technologically superior future. There is only the choice among viable futures. In democracy politics should belong to us all.

Nobody is censoring you (nor me!)

If I were forced to define shaming, it would be something like: a behaviour where the perpetrator(s) make an appeal to a groups supposed definitions of virtues/sins, to change the groups perception of the victim(s).

In order to identify any such thing in this thread, I first need to identify the group: hacker news users. From reading your comments I think you (wrongly) believe the cliche "we come here for technology, we dislike politics" Then I read your posts where you identify anti-nuclear ideas as political vs pro-nuclear technologies as technological. So it seems you are the one who is shaming anti-nuclear ideas.

I am not appealing to any group virtues or sins here, and if I did I would not classify "politics" as the sin, since I regularly see people discuss tradeoffs and how they feel about it.

Btw, I am not against nuclear energy in any absolute way:

we may need nuclear power for space travel, why burn it up here and now? [no, its not in nature decaying at the same rate as we use it up, in a reactor we promote radioactive decays]

research reactors are extremely important to have for scientific progress, and cryptocurrencies are very promising for humanity too, perhaps governments should simply have a clear public policy promising to neutralize any plane [passengers or not] coming too close to a reactor or surface-storage of radioactive materials: this would decrease the probability of attempted hijackings.

I think we can both agree that nuclear reactors would ideally be aneutronic, from a waste perspective, can we not focus on that instead?

If we ignore the waste threat there is still the centralized dependency threat: irrespective if it is downtime, sabotage by employees, accidents, vulnerability during war, ...

With all this on top, I think it is not crystal clear to all of us that alternative energy sources are more expensive.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#269
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The ocean is just too deep there. I have a better idea for a megaproject: build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, and lower the water level of the Mediterranean. You could get an enormous amount of power from a hydroelectric dam in this location (and later another one near Sicily, after the Mediterranean's level is lowered), plus you'd have a huge amount of new land in the area.

Would you want to live below sea level and trust the dam? Not me.

Why not? Countless people worldwide live in places that would be flooded if a dam broke. We saw this last year in California. And how many more people live at sea level in coastal areas that are prone to flooding?

Maybe you refuse to live in such areas, but there's probably several billion people who do.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#270
post #250
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The ocean is just too deep there. I have a better idea for a megaproject: build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, and lower the water level of the Mediterranean. You could get an enormous amount of power from a hydroelectric dam in this location (and later another one near Sicily, after the Mediterranean's level is lowered), plus you'd have a huge amount of new land in the area.

> build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, and lower the water level of the Mediterranean. You mean like this? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-bonkers-reallife-p...

Yep, I was wondering if anyone would get the reference. I don't know why they call it "bonkers", though: it seems perfectly feasible from an engineering perspective, although it's obviously a serious megaproject, and would be extremely costly. But the cost could very well be worth it, for both electricity generation and land creation. The main problem I see is political: who would own and control it, and who would get to take ownership of the new land, and also a lot of people would probably fight it because it'd be changing the geography so significantly (lots of wealthy people with waterfront property wouldn't after the sea level fell).
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