301–310 of 333 posts
This was quite interesting -- but I only found that because it had a transcript. Which is why I like transcripts. It is apparently a ~17 minute video. Time to read (for me): 2½ min. I timed it. I'll give 2min to learn about rubbish management, a subject I'm not particularly interested in. I won't give ⅓ of an hour to it though. If you're making a video, provide a transcript . Oxide Computer: this especially applies t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy. The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out. Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of…
You could just not burn the stuff, and capture the carbon directly in unoxidised form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy. The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out. Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of…
What is "carbon capture" exactly? How does the mechanism work? Does it take an energy input?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Investments in long range, high wattage cabling to connect grids might be useful. There's plenty of sun light further south. With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical. Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean ca…
> With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical. Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore? > Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy b…
Also in 2023, district heating delivered a total of 53 TWh to customers. About two thirds of this came from waste and biofuels, specifically 47% renewable biofuels (mostly woodchips, bark and other forestry industry byproducts) and 20% waste. The remaining third came from an eclectic mix of inputs such as industrial waste heat (7,5%), heat pumps (5% net, that is after the electricity consumption has been subtracted), exhaust gas condensation (11%), biogas from landfills and compost (2%), fossil fuels (2,5%) and various other stuff. Turns out my info about peat was kinda out of date; it's been almost entirely phased out now.
Average CO2 emissions for the electricity generation was 41g CO2 equivalents per kWh, and for district heating about 55 g/kWh. Countries with less emissions than this do exist, for example Norway and Iceland are down around 30 g/kWh, but this is already better than almost every other country on the planet. US electricity generation for comparison averaged 369 g/kWh in 2023.
So: replacing all of the district heating with heat pumps would be an insanely huge project requiring a massive expansion of electricity generation, and it would have very low return on investment when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. There is also the problem that heating energy demands are extremely uneven and unpredictable, both over the year and between years. You need a significant amount of extra capacity for very cold days, and even averaged over the year the difference between an average winter and a cold one can on the order of 20%. Just burning stuff works great as a solution for this, it's easy to have capacity on demand. Air-source heat pumps also become much less efficient on very cold days when you need them the most, which is why they're not that popular for heating here (people prefer ground source heat pumps, but those have limitations in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite energy).
Also, a side note: the heat generation in district heating plants is extremely efficient compared to electricity generation using combustible fuels. The average efficiency of the heat generation in these plants in 2023 was 96%, and that's before exhaust gas condensation is taken into account.
In other words: there's a reason we are doing things this way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy. The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out. Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of…
If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much. If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going.
We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar.
I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much. If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
It’s much better with renewables yes! In the freeze of the Oslo winter it’s a bit hard to capture enough sunlight to heat all the housing we have here. There’s not much wind either. We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going. We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where t…
This was quite interesting -- but I only found that because it had a transcript. Which is why I like transcripts. It is apparently a ~17 minute video. Time to read (for me): 2½ min. I timed it. I'll give 2min to learn about rubbish management, a subject I'm not particularly interested in. I won't give ⅓ of an hour to it though. If you're making a video, provide a transcript . Oxide Computer: this especially applies t…
Feels like we're catching a stray over here.
I would really like to write about what you guys are doing, because it seems fascinating. But it feels to me like it's 95% podcasts, videos, and online chats, and I just do not have time for that. (And I'm about 9 timezones away or something.) I try to produce 2 articles a day, and to do that, I read tens of thousands of words of info a day... Speech just isn't fast enough.
If it's not text, I simply can't cover it.
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> All the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side. > That is, landfills take a trivial amount of space. Damn, I had to think about this for a second, but you are right. How the hell did I not realize this before? Can you please popularize this more? Maybe compress into a pithy phrase.
The supposed triviality of this size is not sitting well with me. What’s described is a 100 yard deep hole. So about 27 stories. It’s 35 miles per side, so 35 x 35 = 1225 square miles in area. That’s bigger than any city in the mainland US[1]. It’s a 27 story deep hole that’s twice as big as Houston. Three times as big as the city of LA, and over half the size of the urban metropolitan LA area[2]. Four times the size…
I started a residential trash hauling cooperative this year after 7 years of planning Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here
I've seriously wondered about this. Tell us more. Do you just act as a private middleman to get things to the dump? Do you sort or resell?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical. Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore? > Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy b…
> That's what peaker plants are for. Unless you can wish natural gas into existence, that means keeping a lot of infrastructure and storage just in case.
