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Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

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Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#321

Post by danans »

bluGill wrote: post #311
danans wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to heat my house for a few days would need tons of rock at temperatures I'd allow in my house (I have kids and so I worry they will open the rock container and get burnt). Rocks are not free Sand/rock heat storage is for industrial and utility scale application, not your house. > You can also use water for storage, but again you have the issue needing a tank (and water is a drowning hazard, plus the worry abou…

> Sand/rock heat storage is for industrial and utility scale application, not your house. I've seen them for a house as well. (when the utility offers a large discount for power used overnight - 40 years ago my local coop was trying to sell my parents on this, but since we had natural gas heat it wasn't worth it) To hold more than a days worth of heat you need a lot of rocks. Heap pump water heaters work, but you nee…

> I've seen them for a house as well. (when the utility offers a large discount for power used overnight - 40 years ago my local coop was trying to sell my parents on this, but since we had natural gas heat it wasn't worth it) To hold more than a days worth of heat you need a lot of rocks.

Can you point at a residential scale rock heat storage system that is available? I saw one startup in the UK trying this several years ago, but can't find them now, and haven't seen anything since.

> Heap pump water heaters work, but you need a large one to hold a days worth of hot water

Mine (for a household of 4) is 45 gallons - small by US standards - but we keep it at a high temperature (along with a mixing valve) to get higher "virtual" hot water capacity during peak usage hours. It serves us fine for daily usage, but we also have efficient flow taps and showers throughout the house so that helps too.

> If you want to store more water than a days worth of use then you need more storage

I don't think it makes sense to store hot water for days if the goal is to minimize energy costs. The standby losses would be pretty significant, even with a very well insulated tank.

If the goal is resilience to a grid outage, it makes more sense to have a solar PV array + batteries that you can use to run the heat pump water heater, or have a backup gas-powered heater.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#322

Post by nec4b »

Timon3 wrote: post #304
nec4b wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's the difference between us and animals? I always find it incredible some people equating animals with people. How do you not see the difference in human range of emotions, ability to do science, technology, arts, etc. Do you perhaps live in the city and don't really have any real contact to animal?

Plenty of humans have have little ability in your mentioned fields, and animals can show an enormous range of emotions. If those were the only criteria, we'd have little trouble eating e.g. brain-dead people. That's not to discount human lives, we all have worth aside from our abilities to create. But I don't think there's a sensible non-arbitrary hard line you can draw to separate humans from all other animals.

What kind of a line do you need to draw? Isn't it obvious how humans are different from animals for you? Normal humans are innately aware we are different from other animals and we are aware that not all other humans are fully functional and we take care of them and not try to eat them. It's really weird that some people are trying to equate animals with human. I love animals and I would have unhappy life without them, but I would not hesitate to sacrifice any of them if that meant saving your life, i.e. life of a human stranger.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#324

Post by alpineman »

nec4b wrote: post #322
Timon3 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of humans have have little ability in your mentioned fields, and animals can show an enormous range of emotions. If those were the only criteria, we'd have little trouble eating e.g. brain-dead people. That's not to discount human lives, we all have worth aside from our abilities to create. But I don't think there's a sensible non-arbitrary hard line you can draw to separate humans from all other animals.

What kind of a line do you need to draw? Isn't it obvious how humans are different from animals for you? Normal humans are innately aware we are different from other animals and we are aware that not all other humans are fully functional and we take care of them and not try to eat them. It's really weird that some people are trying to equate animals with human. I love animals and I would have unhappy life without the…

Saving a human over an animal in a one-off emergency doesn't justify breeding and killing billions of animals for taste every single day, those aren't the same situation.

And if you agree we shouldn't eat humans who aren't fully functional, then the line is obviously not being drawn at capacity, it's being drawn at the fact we are members of the same species. In my view that's not an ethical argument, given animals share almost all of the same things (apart from capacity as mentioned), that make someone a human.

I used to think the same as you, btw actually. But in end it came down to 'because I'm human': when you start to break it down and engage with it that's not a very strong argument. Especially when we are killing animals ultimately for pleasure, not survival.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#326

Post by sajithdilshan »

alpineman wrote: post #284
sajithdilshan wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's actually an advice. Please don't hurt the plants and their emotions. Keep on eating dirt

>> that's actually an advice. Please don't hurt the plants and their emotions. Keep on eating dirt Thank you Sajith Dilshan

You’re welcome Al Pine Man

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#327

Post by greenleafone7 »

peterpost2 wrote: post #149
inigyou wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not doing any better. The right reaction to a comment like that is to downvote and flag it, instead of adding to the spam.

Same applies to you too. I actually was curious about his reasoning though.

My reasoning is that you cannot save the environment by regulating and degrading human life. It's like claiming that you will cure someone by killing him, technically correct... but the kind of correct that works on a weird leftist brain only.

The upper class are living lives so lavish, the emperors of Rome could have never dreamed off. We should change companies like Nestle, every single non-European company, data center companies, etc. from destroying our environment for profits. We should regulate the usage of jets and airplanes (for everyone, not just poor/middle class). What we should not do is say stupid stuff like cow-farts are destroying the environment and you need to eat bugs, or forced through digital currencies and social credit systems to only be able to go wherever the government tells you you can go. This is not even remotely near the realm of 'conspiracy theory', it's a reality for china/russia, and seriously studied by the EU, and even tentatively tried in the UK.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#328

Post by sleepyguy »

vkou wrote: post #201
sleepyguy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next frontier should be preventing forest fires. This is just Canada, imagine if we could prevent them around the world. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-... >Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon

Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.

Forests need to be managed, the problem is Canada has very little private property and vasts amounts of Crown land that is not managed. These forests just gather fuel and then burn down every summer. They need to be managed or this is only going to get worse.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#329

Post by mikaeluman »

Epa095 wrote: post #171
mikaeluman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat, and red meat, is truly a miracle food. Dense in nutrients, satiating and of course tasty. Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential. Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

But you just read an argument, and then completely ignored it, instead started brining up other aspects of red meat. That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.

Sorry I thought my point was clear.

Grazing animals are part of a cycle. Any methane from digestion is broken down in the atmosphere and bound again to plant life and recycled. This is vastly different from drilling rock and letting out new carbon into the atmosphere at a drastic rate.

That goes to my second point; if you keep cows (or other animals) and feed them grain, and use artificial fertilizer and add other fossil-fuel dependent machinery on top of that - yes then that becomes a problem.

But it is mainly a problem if e.g. the population of cows drastically increases. In Europe and North America, it has decreased since at least the 50s; increasing in other parts of the world.

So regardless of the downvotes - "we have to stop eating red meat due to co2" is way too simplistic.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#330

Post by nec4b »

alpineman wrote: post #324
nec4b wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of a line do you need to draw? Isn't it obvious how humans are different from animals for you? Normal humans are innately aware we are different from other animals and we are aware that not all other humans are fully functional and we take care of them and not try to eat them. It's really weird that some people are trying to equate animals with human. I love animals and I would have unhappy life without the…

Saving a human over an animal in a one-off emergency doesn't justify breeding and killing billions of animals for taste every single day, those aren't the same situation. And if you agree we shouldn't eat humans who aren't fully functional, then the line is obviously not being drawn at capacity, it's being drawn at the fact we are members of the same species. In my view that's not an ethical argument, given animals s…

I can't eat the grass growing in the pastures on the hills around me, but some animals can. Then it's just a question who eats those animals, either us human or other predators. I think it's unhealthy when people start to anthropomorphize their pets and map that to every other animal in existence. It's very similar to when bored rich kids pretend to be representatives of the working class.
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