We really don't have a problem. We now have gobs of cheap natural gas. We can build compact, reliable, clean generating stations as needed, and sell power at reasonable prices. New homes and businesses are more energy-efficient than in the past. Any perceived problem is political, driven by activists and politicians with an agenda that has little to do with energy.
If the crazies really cared about "carbon pollution" they would welcome producing more NG and nukes. They don't, because it's energy that they really hate.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
I can imagine cool failure modes. A zoned power feed could go out. Or a zoned communications failure. Software bug. How about lightning or gophers taking out a bunch of mirror electronics.
Once some or all mirrors freeze at some position, you have a time bomb. It could cut the tower in half. The tower below the boiler doesn't look protected from being fried; such protection would be difficult; sheathing the tower with mirrors probably wouldn't work; good enough mirrors may not exist.
It's an interesting problem.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The problem with the power company modulating the power controlled by your thermostat is that it is already modulated *by* the thermostat. I don't see how it gains the power company much. They cut the heating for
15 minutes and when they cut it back on it runs continuously for a while rather than at the duty cycle the thermostat would have provided. I don't think they were giving lower prices. I don't recall what benefit it was for the homeowner.
So now instead of needing parking areas, cars need charging areas.
Where do these widely different numbers come from? The one number I've seen is a 215 mile per charge which is nearly twice my minimum requirement. Assuming 60 kWHr gets me the full range, $7.50/215 which is about $0.035 per mile. With my present pickup at 20 MPG it costs me $0.10 per mile. Not bad. Over a 200 kmile lifespan and assuming the price of gas doesn't go up (which I expect it will) I stand to save $13,000 in fuel costs. As gas prices increase savings would mount even faster. Heck, the car could pay for itself. :) I just don't know how big it is. I'm not a small car kind of guy.
When they come out with the autonomous version I'll gladly pay double!
We don't have a problem today. We will have a bigger problem eventually, when we run out of everything that can be burned to produce electricity. All that fracking has done is delay the inevitable.
Don't worry. Environmentalists, government, activists, and the technically ignorant will conspire to raise prices to support their various agendas.
Sure, except that cheap energy is usually perceived as a license to increase consumption and continue with overpopulation. Energy production tends to be self limiting. As soon as we find a new source of energy, we also find a new way to consume it. Yours might be a rational point of view if everything stood still and growth was limited or restricted. However, with increased consumption, it won't work. Built it (power generation) and they will come.
Sure. The issue is supporting our existing civilization with affordable sources of energy. It all about who controls the energy. In a modern industrialized society, those that control the source and product of energy, pretty much control everything. The trick is to make it look like various activists, concerned scientists, and politicians are not part of a scheme to manipulate energy production for their agendas.
Nope. It's their lack of control over energy that they detest.
Gotta run... customers bearing broken machines have arrived.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
mirror pointed at the tower => safe all mirrors on that side?
Sure, but there are any number of possible answers. Nothing is foolproof but the idea is to eliminate single points of failure and at least detect multiple failures. It's a government job, so that part of the budget probably was split between the congresscritter and lobbyist.
Den mandag den 23. maj 2016 kl. 17.48.37 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:
money controls the world, the only reason energy-efficient homes ans businesses exist is the cost of power. When power is cheap no one is going to "waste" money on energy efficiency
You don't need much electricity to make babies; it works fine in the dark. In fact, the more electricity available to a population, the lower the birth rate.
So the long-term effect is that more energy available results in fewer babies and less energy used. Greenies can't understand causalities like that.
Energy
I personally wouldn't use more electricity if it were cheaper. I use LED lighting already, because it saves the nuisance of replacing burned-out incandescents.
Customers can be a nuisance. Too many customers are a bigger nuisance.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Too many urban New York Times subscribers romanticize tribes living in jungles, without contact with corrupting civilization and nasty stuff like electricity or books or antibiotics. Keep them uncorrupted and non-carbon polluting! (And let half of their babies die by the age of three.)
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
People are generally afraid of nuclear, and don't understand that NG has the least carbon per bond/ (energy)*
Nuclear is nice, in that we can tuck all the waste away in one small place... Or burn it up. I'm not sure what the time constant is of a nuclear reactor.. but something we could ramp up on a daily basis, would be ideal.
Personally I have no problem with a carbon tax. (or gas tax... Back in 1980 I went door to door for John Anderson.... Republicans, were different then.)
Oh, they understand it. The problem is that most people (including me) can't easily distinguish between a cause and an effect. In this case, more babies (i.e. more population) eventually causes more electricity shortages. Want to solve *ALL* the related problems? Just find an politically acceptable method of reducing the demand, which eventually implies some form of population control and reduction.
I would use more. I heat my house with firewood. It would be so nice to have an all electric home, burning (locally) clean electricity that doesn't fill the house with ash and dust. Just push the button and instant heat without waiting 30 mins for the wood burner to warm up.
This customer is my attorney, so I have to be nice to him when he drops in without warning. Fortunately, it was an easy fix, followed by a wasted hour at a nearby coffee shop while we exchanged horror stories and anecdotes. These 4 hr work days are really tough, but I can handle it.
Too many customers has never been a problem because it allows me to pick and choose which customers are likely to pay and are least likely to drive me insane. In the distant past, I would sort my customer list in order of most profitable per hour and with the fewest nightmares and surprises. I would then pick the worst 5-10 customers, and ask them to find someone else to drive insane and insolvent. However, that was the 20 years ago, before Y2K hit, where nobody had a clue and computahs repair labor charges were sufficiently high to support my decadent and lavish lifestyle. These daze, it's not quite so lucrative, so I need to nice to most everyone. I figured that computahs would have become a commodity and unprofitable to repair by now and that I would be forced to return back to designing radios. I was wrong.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That is an amazingly naive idea. If you reduce demand by reducing population, you also reduce the ability to maintain facilities and extract resources. The problem isn't that we have too many people. The problem is that people want everything on the cheap without considering what others will be left with.
I know people who burn wood. They have never been able to show me it is any cheaper and they spend some fair amount of time dealing with it. I use the switch on the wall.
It is a bigger nuisance to have too few customers. Then you get visited by people who take your stuff and kick you out of your home.
So is repairing computers so much better than designing radios?
The total consumption doesn't vary, but the peak does. And peaks cause brownouts.
The PCo can sequence demand on a priority basis, so that always-available (high priority, volatile usage) power can be charged separately from medium-priority (e.g., air conditioning) or low-priority (hot water, fridge?) loads, which can in turn be managed externally to some degree.
If you've ever done, or seen, a multi-phase switching power supply, it's the same principle at work: by interleaving pulses, lower ripple is produced. Sometimes none!
Most such loads are periodic or infrequent, so they can be deferred (or preemptively triggered!) by some minutes, hours even. They could be triggered in sequence between neighbors, for example.
A simple algorithm is a priority queue with active weights; the longer an item sits in the queue, the greater its priority grows (so it's not a strict queue in the CSci sense, as objects move around within the queue according to how fast they accumulate those weights). At any given time, there is a priority state variable; when any item exceeds this threshold, it gets removed from the queue and processed (i.e., turned on). Likewise, as items get served, their priorities decrease, until they can be removed (switched off) at some point.
There would be some rules for these tasks, such as: a washing machine shouldn't be switched off randomly, so its priority doesn't decrease until it turns itself off; whereas heaters and air conditioners can be turned on and off for variable times, so that the room temperature stays within an acceptable band, if a wider band than the users might've been expecting.
Or if too many loads are active (which would lead to a brown-out), low priority tasks don't start at all, or get actively switched off. Maybe with an apology, like, tweeting to the homeowner that "your sacrifice is helping to prevent a brownout in the area". Reminding people of worse outcomes is always a winner, right?
The best part is it doesn't require central control; load sharing only has to go on within a neighborhood powered by a given sub-grid. Though, naturally, I wouldn't expect the power company to be as open minded (like, having all /those/ sub-grids programmed by a central authority that gets to set who gets what, and when..).
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.