OT: Solar power

In most engneering and economic situations, a 2:1 improvement is considered to be pretty good going. But the real benefit of NG over coal is the essentially complete reduction in emission of mercury, particulates, and radioactive stuff. CO2 may or may not be changing climate, but particulates certainly are.

Another problem that doesn't need fixing.

And if you want to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere (can't imagine why you would) stop the Australians from selling roughly 500 megatons of carbon to the Chinese every year. Torpedo their cargo ships or something, in the name of humanity.

OK, never drive far from home, and pre-plan a gasoline-powered rental if you ever have to go very far.

The local power grid would have to be changed a lot if many homeowners start pulling 5 kilowatts at midnight.

Let's see what happens to Tesla sales long-term. It will probably follow the sales curves of other EVs.

I'm already making money in that job, so I don't need your permission. But, thanks anyway.

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there must be a lot to gain from an "intelligent grid" and variable price,

just imagine the simple stuff, let the power company start your washer/dryer when they have excess,

let them shutoff certain non crital appliances for shorter periods

if you and your neighbours AC runs at

Or the great-grandchildren's.

You had better stop breathing, then.

Nonsense. They're simply adding to the problem, and generating many more.

Complete bullshit.

Like to work every day?

Sure. Just burn more coal. Dam more rivers. Fracking forever!

If he's *so* sure about Tesla, how much stock in the company does he hold?

Den torsdag den 26. september 2013 22.58.39 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@attt.bizz:

how far do you have to work?

it is not every where that people live far away from work, I think most people I have worked with lived with in say 60km of work, many within half that

-Lasse

It's mostly subway-riding, greenie, foodie, urban metrosexuals who want to Save The Earth by starving half its population to death. You know, the New York Times types who refer to non-urban lands as "dirt."

Where the hell do they think their Braised Pork Belly comes from?

Just swap the battery module for a charged one.

Cheers

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or > >> take the bus whenever they want.

Sadly, in this application, it isn't remotely good enough.

CO2 certainly is changing the climate - your willingness to believe otherwi se reflects your gullible susceptibility to denialist propaganda - really d umb propaganda aimed at people who can't do critical thinking, because anyt hing aimed at a more critical audience would be doomed by its self-contradi ctions.

He's into ignorant denial.

You don't have imagine - you just have to read up on the physics involved

Sadly, John Larkin skipped his physics lectures as an undergraduate, and ca n't understand a word of it.

Australia produces about 5.6% of the world coal output, and ships most of i t to China, where it makes a trivial contribution - maybe 10% - to China's coal consumption - most of their three gigatons is mined locally. The US m ines three times as much coal at Australia, so John would be better off sab otaging trains in his own backyard, rather than torpedoing cargo ships betw een China and Australia.

China is at least on a trajectory to get to renewable energy sources eventu ally - their national philosophy is to get their industry into a state wher e it can build renewable energy sources on a scale which can support a firs t world economy, and the fastest way to do this is to start by burning a lo t of coal.

That's what the West has been doing over the last few centuries. We should be investing more in the technology that would lets us build renewable ener gy sources on a scale that can replace our own fossil-carbon fueled energy generation, but the people who've got that kind of money in the West are ma king too much money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel to be willing to recognise that they are wrecking their own long-term inter ests (as well as everybody else's).

John's a sucker for the denialist propaganda they pay for to discourage the population as a whole from thinking about what's going on.

I'd like to see your math on that one too...

Assume you could get the car manufacturers to standardize on a capacity, form-factor, connector, electronics, mounting, etc. If every vehicle were electric... How many battery packs would a filling station have to have in stock to meet the peak demand?

In a world of intentional proprietary everything, how many packs?

And what about after 20 years when there ain't no more packs to fit your car?

Another of krw's unsupported assertions - which happens to be wrong, like most of his other assertions.

The food you metabolise is grown by a process that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. We rely on renewable energy to power our muscles.

I wonder what krw thought he was saying there. It certainly reads like mindless abuse, which is all that krw can manage.

Or so krw likes to believe. If he could think, he'd like to think that too, but dignifying what goes on in his head with the title "thought" would be going way too far.

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"Saving the earth" doesn't involve "starving half its population to death". I don't know where you dug up that claim, but there's no reason to suppose that we can't eventually generate more renewable energy from solar radiati on than we now generate from the energy trapped earlier in fossil carbon.

You've got this idea that "greenies" are anti-technology, when they are mer ely anti-pollution. Admittedly the sillier examples of the breed are agains t wind-farms and solar plants in their own backyards, but the German greeni es have a perfectly rational preference for building their solar plants in the Sahara, and I can see a lot of Californians voting for a solar tower in Arizona with its focal point aimed squarely at Jim Thompson.

That's what it is. Bumpy dirt is scenic. Flat dirt is often fertile, though there are large tracts of flat dirt in Australia and America which are too dry to grow anything. Anthropogenic global warming may move the "too dry" areas around, but you don't want to think about that.

Chinese pot-bellied pigs kept as pets in urban farms until they got too big , old and cantankerous to be entirely acceptable pets ...

Which is obvious nonsense.

lar > or wind output is low, so they need to have a lot of underutilized,

Wind-power is unpredictable. Solar power much less so. At the moment the di stribution system is designed around a few big generators. The distribution won't be any more stressed than it is now when the renewable generators ar en't running, and less stressed when the more widely distributed renewable sources are feeding into the net.

Maybe you think that the distribution network cares which way the power is moving?

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At the right price, very likely. In the UK and the Netherlands you tended t o have two electricity meters, one for "off-peak power" and one for regular power.

"Off peak" power was cheaper.

About 40 miles a day. Others where I work drive closer to 120 miles a day - about three hours.

People living in large metropolitan areas tend to drive much further.

Just? Why not "just" invent a Mr. Fusion?

You're right. You don't need my permission to piss in the ocean. It's kinda strange that you actually get paid for it, though. Must be a California thing.

distribution won't be any more stressed than it is now when the renewable generators aren't running, and less stressed when the more widely distributed

renewable sources are feeding into the net.

for regular power.

Hi,

For a solar panel to be worth making and installing from an overall perspective of the economy of a country, it has to generate less electricity than you might think. For a country that imports fuel, and where the solar power can offset that importing, for every watt of solar power, you are keeping a watt worth of imports out of the country, and at the same time paying off the initial investment of the solar panel. By the time the full energy used to make the solar panel is paid off, there has also been the same amount of energy potentially not imported from another country! This is why even if on paper solar panels don't make a lot of sense a smart country like Germany has so many of them as they realize that even if their energy is more expensive they are keeping the money in the own country more than before, which makes their economy stronger even if the cost of energy is higher.

cheers, Jamie

This is all very well, but it doesn't solve the problem that solar power is not available every day. However energy captured by solar during the say is saved for night time use, it's available for that use only if was actually captured. Since that is not guaranteed, there has to be a fall back option - typically a fossil fuel plant - and that fall back option has to be paid for whether or not it's running.

The solar plant then only makes economic sense if its cost (mostly capital), including whatever storage option is chosen, is less than what would have been marginal cost of operating the extra plant on those nights when the solar energy was infact captured.

This is not a theoretical impossibility, but the existing technology doesn't get close.

The economics for the solar storage option improve if the cost of the CO2 emissions (the external cost) is included (a.k.a internalised), but there's no agreement on what that external cost is.

Solar is a dead end. Better to spend that money researching other technologies.

Sylvia.