July 18, 2008
Show-stoppers....
Like many people who started reading blogs "back in the beginning," I miss Steven den Beste. He used to throw splendid doses of cold water on various areas where fuzzy-thinking is common. One of them is alternative energy sources. He's posted a summary that is worth reading, if you think wind power or some such is in the near future going to take away our need for power generated by coal, oil and nuclear. (den Beste has serious health problems, by the way, that's why he now limits himself to lightweight blogging.)
....I don't blog about that kind of thing anymore. I never enjoyed blogging about energy, anyway, because for too many people "alternate energy" is more about religion than about physics. They believe that if we are just creative enough, we can overcome fundamental physical limitations -- and it's not that easy.
In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:
1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).
If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)
The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.
My rule of thumb is that I'm not interested in any "alternate energy" until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.
Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I'll pay attention.
Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.
Without that, it's just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.
The problems facing "alternate energy" are fundamental, deep, and are show-stoppers. They are not things that will be surmounted by one lone incremental improvement in one small area, announced breathlessly by a startup which is trying to drum up funding...
It's impossible to argue with most of the people who talk about "alternate energy;" They want to believe, and just don't hear anything like this. Plus, most people can't think. The average person, even with a university degree, can't think clearly about these things, and doesn't want to. For instance, the concept of scaling is basic to all technical discussions. But how many people will even understand, not to mention respond intelligently, if you tell them their favorite scheme "won't scale?" (It doesn't have to be a technical subject; there are things that work in small groups but not in large groups. Or small countries, but not large or diverse countries.)
Posted by John Weidner at July 18, 2008 09:25 AMNot only will a lot of these technologies not "scale", often they contain hidden safety problems.
Let's say you've got enough real-estate to erect your own solar-electric array big enough to power your house, and solar-collectors on the roof of your house to make all the hot water you want, allowing you to tell the gas-and-electric utility to go away.
That's great, except for one thing-- the Sun doesn't always shine, and the weather isn't always good. (OK, make that two things.) That means you've got to have BIG batteries in your basement, which can explode with dire consequences, as many unfortunates have found out over the decades when improperly jump-starting cars. And because the weather isn't always good, does one really want to get onto one's roof in the middle of January to sweep the snow off those solar-collectors, risking a possibly-fatal fall?
The gas-and-electric utility might be a pain in the backside, but it spares you the hazards associated with bombs in the basement and skating rinks on the roof.
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 19, 2008 09:33 AMYay! At least we got Steven to write about something other than waste-of-time-and-brain-cells Anime...
Mrs. Den Beste, can Stephen please come out and play? We really miss him!
Posted by: doug in Colorado at July 21, 2008 09:53 AMWe all miss him. But I remember reading some of the stuff he wrote about his health problems, and he apparently was having to take stimulant drugs to keep his brain going at full-bore-Galileo blogging level, and it was really taking a lot out of him...
Posted by: John Weidner at July 21, 2008 10:37 AMAnime is a "waste of brain cells"?
I guess you have to like animation generally, otherwise anime would be lost on you.
Of course, I'm biased. I've been a fan of anime for many years, and I help run a convention of fans of the medium.
I welcome Steven Den Beste into our fold. One more person joins the ranks. Our plan to otakunize the world proceeds on schedule. Heh heh heh hahahaha BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... *cough* *cough*..... *ahem*....
:-)
Theodore Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of science-fiction-- of anything-- is crap") applies as much to anime as to any other story-telling artform. But there are jewels in the dungheap:
Steven's review of Haibane Renmei
If you can only watch one piece of anime, watch "Haibane Renmei". It's a masterpiece. Unfortunately, it'll probably spoil you-- a lot of anime doesn't come close in quality to "Haibane Renmei", so worthwhile slapstick comedies like "Urusei Yatsura" ("Those Obnoxious Aliens") tend to get overlooked by the non-fan.
My two cents' worth, as usual.
All true, so, let's convince (demand) Detroit to build automobiles that get the gas mileage that allows us to scale in a common sense direction...
Posted by: ron childs at July 23, 2008 10:57 AMRon,
.....meaning what, precisely?
Detroit's getting better all the time-- thanks to the Japanese breathing down Detroit's neck and eating its lunch half the time.
Unfortunately for the automakers (foreign and domestic) there's a little something called "the Laws of Physics" that sets upper limits on how thrifty a car can be with fuel, no matter how that fuel is used to move the vehicle.
We're maybe halfway to those upper limits now, using conventional drive-trains. Shifting over to series-hybrid drive-trains might increase miles-per-gallon figures by 50%, but that's about it.
(Those 100-MPG carburetors that you read about in 50-year-old issues of Popular Mechanics never worked, not least because they violate the First Law of Thermodynamics-- you can't get something for nothing-- by trying to feed the engine less fuel than it actually needed.)
So cut the pointy-haired managers at the Big Three some slack. Most of them know what they're doing, and they're doing it as fast as the Universe and human understanding of that Universe allow.
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 23, 2008 09:10 PMSeems as though I remember an automobile manufactured by Simca in the late 1950's, early 60's that would get over 40 miles per gallon of gasoline. Surely current technology could equal or exceed this.
Posted by: ron childs at July 24, 2008 06:06 AMI remember the Simca-- one of my neighbors had one back around 1970, when I was in elementary school.
As I recall they were about the size of a present-day Honda Civic, and probably got about the same mileage as a Honda Civic. So it was possible to build economical cars back then. The chief improvements made since then have not been in the area of fuel-economy-- like I said, we're up against the Laws of Thermodynamics on this-- but rather in areas such as reliability and fit-and-finish. I'd much rather have a modern Civic than a Simca, even if the Simca was in brand-new condition. The Civic is simply a vastly better car, and for about the same money as a Simca, adjusted for inflation.
Posted by: Hale Adams at July 25, 2008 09:19 PMHale:
Agreed, the Honda Civic is much better car and I too would rather have the Civic. But the Chrysler Corporation had one other car that I would much rather have than the Civic. Remember the Chrysler " Turbine Car " circa 1958. It could run on anything from Crisco to Jeris hair tonic. The darling of route "66", it sprinted around the country for about a year, got rave reviews and then vanished, destroyed by the most important Law of Thermodynamics: "If it has the potential to reduce profit, it will be burned".
Meh. The Chrysler Turbine (1963?) failed mostly because of poor fuel economy-- turbines run best at constant load, and the load (or power requirement, if you prefer) in an automobile is anything but constant. And so, poor fuel economy.
Now, what with the advent of hybrid power trains, particularly series-hybrid, it might make sense to equip a car with a low-power turbine (25 horses or so) to carry the constant load of free-way cruising (letting the battery handle the job of providing gobs of power for acceleration and merges) and see how that works.
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