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To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

bostonreview.net

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Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#41

Post by kanox »

FooHentai wrote: post #37
erentz wrote: post #30

I don’t understand why people keep proposing these ideas that we must sacrifice and do without electricity. There are 7 billion people on the planet. Even if you organized to have enough Americans self sacrifice (needlessly) why would you ever expect the rest of the world, in particular the developing world who are trying to raise their living standards, to do the same? This is not a solution. It’s dead on arrival bu…

Counter to this is the persistent myth that we can just increase capacity to meet demand. That growth will continue and that this can be sustained. The global population is double what it was fifty years ago and fifteen percent of the entire lived collective consciousness of humans is walking the earth right now. Aside from our theoretical ability to meet increased energy demand, our biosphere doesn’t support the ent…

> Could France have fully de-carbonised it’s grid without international trade to less developed nations producing many things it consumes? Doubtful.

France uses nuclear power, what makes you think that this is somehow difficult to scale? Electrical energy is very fungible.

Shifting production to developing countries is mostly due to labor costs.

> Counter to this is the persistent myth that we can just increase capacity to meet demand.

This is not a myth, increasing capacity causes issues but those issues are solvable.

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#42

Post by [deleted] »

wow_yes wrote: post #5
sm0ss117 wrote: post #3

This is morally and politically a non-starter. Electricity improves people's lives way too much to be time restricted.

This is why electoralism was, is, and always will be a failure. True global fixes will always require unpopular and unpleasant decisions like this.

[deleted]

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#45

Post by tuatoru »

gruez wrote: post #34
PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not economically competitive with a gas-turbine power plant powered by methane. (almost the same thing as the power plant on a jet airplane) The real hazard of the current "renewable energy" economy that is when the sun doesn't shine the backup power is generated from methane (aka 'natural gas') which has very high power density and very low capital cost compared to the steam turbine either in a coal or nuclear plant…

>the backup power is generated from methane (aka 'natural gas') which has very high power density and very low capital cost compared to the steam turbine either in a coal or nuclear plant. Doesn't natural gas power plants also use turbines to generate electricity? How can it be cheaper than the steam turbine portion of a coal/nuclear power plant?

Combined cycle gas turbine generators use a steam turbine as a second, downstream method to recover exergy from the exhaust of the main gas turbine.

CCGTs are expensive. Simple gas turbines that are used to meet daily demand peaks are relatively cheap; as GP said they're basically stationary jet engines.

To me it's kind of bizarre that money is so cheap at present, but somehow it's still too costly to use it to invest in things with a delayed payback.

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#46

Post by brippalcharrid »

kanox wrote: post #36
brippalcharrid wrote: post #35

> Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment— Hang on there, are we so sure about that? Our present-day obsession with reliable technology in healthcare is a very recent development, but it's something that has largely been sold to us by industrialists and the oil industry, and we consume it, increasingly, at the cost of the living standards, even the lives, of the poor and those in developing countries.…

This is satire, right?

> Society has conditioned us to believe that reliable power for ... life-sustaining applications is something that we can't live without

> A modest proposal

Oh yes, I was taken aback by the sleight-of-hand tricks in the article, and I was keen to take some of the ideas to their logical conclusions while using a similar form of argumentation. I notice that there was a link to a Jonathan Swift article posted earlier, as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683397.

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#47

Post by tjansen »

I don't have a link at hand, but I remember a study for Germany that the difference between production at night and at day wasn't the biggest issue, but the production in summer was so much greater than in winter. If you would just produce enough renewable energy for 100% of the yearly energy consumption, you wouldn't only have to store the energy for the night in batteries, but you would need to store several months' energy consumption in batteries to make it through winter.

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#48

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I went to the Dominican Republic in the 1990s when the power grid was overloaded. They'd have rolling blackouts in the capitol, first the lights would go out, but the generators would kick in and the hotel you are in would light up, and the houses of rich people, everybody else would be in the dark. The glass factories, the microchip factories, infrastructure that runs aviation, etc. are a different business which ca…

That will be interesting to watch. I've read of supercritical CO2 as a working fluid before. But as far as I could understand from a laymans point of view, in that state it is supercorrosive to the materials, similar to the atmosphere of Venus on the ground. So I'm exited for the results of something as delicate as turbines operating under conditions which made space probes last only a few hours long :)

Re: To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

#49

Post by PaulHoule »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #48
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I went to the Dominican Republic in the 1990s when the power grid was overloaded. They'd have rolling blackouts in the capitol, first the lights would go out, but the generators would kick in and the hotel you are in would light up, and the houses of rich people, everybody else would be in the dark. The glass factories, the microchip factories, infrastructure that runs aviation, etc. are a different business which ca…

That will be interesting to watch. I've read of supercritical CO2 as a working fluid before. But as far as I could understand from a laymans point of view, in that state it is supercorrosive to the materials, similar to the atmosphere of Venus on the ground. So I'm exited for the results of something as delicate as turbines operating under conditions which made space probes last only a few hours long :)

Materials compatibility is a concern but it is not that bad

https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/published-pap...

people use stainless steel, fiberglass, teflon and other common materials. The most notorious problem is that sCO2 dissolves in hydrocarbon oils, even very heavy hydrocarbons so keeping the CO2 from exiting through the turboshaft seals is challenging, but a solved problem.

The one obnoxious thing for nuclear use is that CO2 reacts with liquid sodium! It's not that hard to contain the effects of a CO2/sodium leak because the volume of the 1500 psi section is small, so that if the coolant loop bursts the overpressure in the (still not very big) confinement structure is more like 15 psi.

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