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Increasingly I think hydrogen from electrolysis will be the way forward at utility scale. This site suggests storage in salt caverns will be possible - that could greatly reduce the cost.
That's nonsense. You can't bring in racial segregation in a public mall with separate toilets for blacks and whites. It's unconstitutional. It's nothing to do with specific laws.
Likewise, you can't (or shouldn't, under the American constitution, assuming you didn't have a corrupted Supreme Court led by a corrupt Chief Justice) be able to deny free speech to people in the equivalent of a public mall. That I believe is Trump's case and it seems eminently reasonable to me. Or are you saying Bell or its successors should have the right to listen to your telephone calls and stop them when it feels what you say is offensive?
All privately owned business have the right of denial of services...
He had his own privately owned blog and he pulled the plug on it so there is nothing to the law suit as he had his chioce to make use of his own mouth piece....
For me the "canary in the coal mine" is whether we see any low lying islands disappear. I'm not talking about islands in the estuaries of huge rivers like in Bangladesh where the silt islands are disappearing and reappearing all the time, but low lying (mostly coral) islands in oceanic regions.
So far I am not aware of a single island being submerged by the waves, except where the land is generally sinking (due to other factors such as post glacial movements).
Having expressed support for climate scepticism, I do think it's probably sensible to try and stick to atmospheric constituent levels from the pre-industrial era or at least not alter them through our human activities. It's the precautionary principle. That's one reason to support green energy.
This report suggests that the cost of hydrogen from electrolysis has fallen by 60% since 2010 and is now $4 per Kg.
https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will- … ower-cost/
Further steep falls in price are anticipated.
louis wrote:The experience on new nuclear in the UK (built by the CCP - sure we can trust them) is that they won't deliver electricity for less than about $100 per MWH (they have a guaranteed price of £90 per MWH in the UK).
How do you guys manage to make nuclear power cost more than we do?
The NRC dinks with issuing permits for 10+ years, and we still can't make nuclear power cost as much as you guys do.
This is new nuclear. It costs a lot to build! I don't think the USA is building any new nuclear...or have I got that wrong? Old nuclear is relatively cheap, because you've paid off the capital cost. La Rance, the tidal barrage, is one of the cheapest forms of electricity because they long ago finished paying off the capital cost. This is why I think wind energy costs will also decline rapidly as we discover many of the wind turbines can operate beyond their 20-25 years' life.
louis wrote:Lithium ion looks economic for diurnal storage but for a viable green energy storage system in somewhere like the UK you probably need to be able to cover perhaps 75% of your normal output for up to 3 days (a worst weather event where you have an extremely low wind and solar ouput for 3 days). I douibt lithium ion batteries are the right solution. Probably a combination of (manufactured from air/water) hydrogen and methane plus liquid chemical batteries that can easily be scaled up are the answer. You don't need to change overnight. This is something that can be introduced gradually over the next 30 years as the continued green energy price drop allows.
Burning methane is NOT contributing to the purported goal of dealing with climate change and fossil fuel depletion. There's nothing "green" about it, just as there's nothing green about transforming fossil fuels into solar panels and batteries.
If you don't think Lithium-ion batteries are going to provide grid storage, then you're not alone, because a battery that stores as much power as Watts-Bar #1 and #2 produces over a 24 hour period, over the plant's service life, would cost more than both reactors combined.
I was referencing manufactured methane - from air and water. That would be sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere for the manufacturing process. It would be roughly carbon-neutral. The methane would be used to power turbines.
louis wrote:I used to be a bit sceptical about hydrogen but the more I read about it, I think at the utility scale it is probably a major way forward, as simple electrolysis of water becomes economical. We're really not far off that. I think I saw a figure of $200 per MWH for manufacturing hydrogen.
$100/MWh for nuclear power was too expensive, but $200/MWh for producing Hydrogen is "not that far off", yet you don't see the problem with your logic, do you?
This is an ideological and emotional problem for you, isn't it?
Let's suppose you have a green energy utility system that is powered 70% by wind and solar (plus hydroelectric and energy from waste) at, say, $40 per MWH and 30% by hydrogen or chemical batteries at $200 per MWH, the average cost would be $88 per MWH. That's getting you into the zone. If it's 70% at $20 per MWH and $100 per MWH for 30% that's an average of $44 per MWH. That's is then both a cheap and reliable system. Further down the road, solar plus storage could be located much closer to population centres, so you can save on your grid costs.
It's not a problem for me - I recognise you can't change a power and grid system overnight. I just think the energy landscape is changing and nations can now develop full energy independence, which I think will be good for their economies, their people and world peace!
There will be losers but when you look at countries like Venezuala, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Burma and Saudi Arabia you have to ask: were they really served well by the oil and gas boom?
I think you are right Robert. It's too much of a coincidence that climatologists switched from warning about a new ice age to warning about global warming just as the anti-pollution measures kicked in.
I also feel agricultural irrigation (which increased hugely in the post war period) is neglected as a factor in climate change.
I am a supporter of good air quality and green energy so am generally in favour of EVs but we should allow the market to sort this out I feel. What the state needs to do is encourage EV adoption through modest subsidies, infrastructure development (e.g. electrical charging infrastructure), and facilitating good purchasing models (EVs have lower maintenance and fuel prices - this could be reflected in the upfront purchase cost with tax incentives or similar). The free market is already offering small EVs at around $5000.
I see efforts to manipulate data to force an agenda. When you look at global temperature over land separately than sea, there was global cooling from 1855 to 1970. Those dates are not a coincidence; the industrial revolution started 1855. Soot from coal burning spewed into the stratosphere. Those giant concrete smoke stacks created an updraft not just to the clouds, but all the way to the stratosphere. This caused global warming in the stratosphere, and shade caused global cooling on the surface over land. Regulations in 1970 were effective and enforced. That stopped the process. Measurements showed soot from coal burning was finally gone from the stratosphere in the summer of 2010. Temperature of the stratosphere dropped in perfect sync with soot, also stabilized in 2010. If you look at global temperature over land from 1550 to 1855, and assume the trend would have continued if we hadn't screwed with the climate, then the end of 1998 temperature on the surface over land equalled what it would have been on that same date. And that's exactly when the rapid global warming stopped. Global warming over land slowed to a crawl. During the first decade of this century (2000s) scientists debated whether any global warming remained, or whether any that does remain is simply nature. Most concluded there is a tiny bit of human caused climate change, but it's tiny.
I used to be pro-climate. However, the Canadian government imposed a heavy carbon tax. And they're talking about drastically increasing it. They also talked about banning sale of new gasoline cars, all new cars will have to be electric. This I must oppose. The tax is harmful to working citizens, and very damaging to the economy of western Canada. And electric cars have come down in prices, but are still too expensive for average working people. Extremist ideology is harmful, must be stopped.
The real price of fossil fuel is pretty stable over decades so that can't explain 50% or more reductions per decade on PV power generation.
Of course robotics in PV factories is most definitely a part of the story. That is technological advance of which there is more to come. The nature of PV Panel manufacture means it works well with robotics. The robotics revolution will continue. You currently have 100s of (mostly) men installing utility scale PV. Robotic systems can be developed.
The experience on new nuclear in the UK (built by the CCP - sure we can trust them) is that they won't deliver electricity for less than about $100 per MWH (they have a guaranteed price of £90 per MWH in the UK).
Lithium ion looks economic for diurnal storage but for a viable green energy storage system in somewhere like the UK you probably need to be able to cover perhaps 75% of your normal output for up to 3 days (a worst weather event where you have an extremely low wind and solar ouput for 3 days). I douibt lithium ion batteries are the right solution. Probably a combination of (manufactured from air/water) hydrogen and methane plus liquid chemical batteries that can easily be scaled up are the answer. You don't need to change overnight. This is something that can be introduced gradually over the next 30 years as the continued green energy price drop allows.
I used to be a bit sceptical about hydrogen but the more I read about it, I think at the utility scale it is probably a major way forward, as simple electrolysis of water becomes economical. We're really not far off that. I think I saw a figure of $200 per MWH for manufacturing hydrogen.
louis wrote:Since 2013 when that book was written and 2020, the levelised cost of solar panel generated electricity declined from $100 per megawatt hour to about $40 per MWH.
Louis,
The entire reason solar is as cheap as it is, comes down to cheap fossil fuels and robots replacing humans in factories, and governments / banks handing out "free cash" to anyone who says they have a "green energy" project (a project that costs lots of green, but doesn't deliver much energy compared to nuclear reactors, per dollar spent). If you want more solar panels, then you need to burn more coal / oil / gas to make more robotic factories, and mine more and more ores, which requires more and more fossil fuel energy.
If photovoltaic power alone is $40/MWh, then your assertion that nuclear power is more expensive is objectively false, despite the fact that the US pays about double what the Chinese pay for a 1,250MWe class nuclear reactor ($5B vs $2.5B). TVA's actual operating costs for Watts-Bar #2 is $24.10/MWh. There's no possible way that solar plus Lithium-ion battery storage is any cheaper, or will ever be any cheaper in our lifetimes. If Tesla manages to get batteries to $50/kWh, then your purported solution is $50,000/MWh of storage. All solar farms without storage are only one half of an actual solution.
1,250MW(1) * 12(2) * 50,000(3) * 2(4) = $1,500,000,000 USD
$1,500,000,000 USD * 4(5) = $6,000,000,000 USD (more than the cost of Watts-Bar #2)
1. A Watts-Bar sized battery
2. Hours of storage to cover the part of the day where solar provides no power
3. Dollars per MegaWatt-hour of Lithium-ion battery storage
4. Limiting Depth-of-Discharge to 50% so the battery can last for at least 10 years
5. Number of complete battery replacements over 40 years, assuming the nuclear reactor doesn't last for 60 years (as Watts-Bar #1 already has)Take away the ability to burn coal and gas, which was what we were doing to begin with, if government regulations mandate that, and your PV-powered dreams are dead in the water.
Saying, "We'll get more for our money during the next battery replacement.", is not an answer, either. Inevitably, someone on the left will say, "Remember that one time on that one day where we didn't have power? Well, we should have 16 hours or 24 hours of storage now." Trust me, someone at the power company or the government or the public (with a financial interest in the project) will find a way to jack up the price to make the second / third / fourth batteries every bit as expensive as the 1st one was, if not more so. I worry about grid collapse, not going a single day without power.
Lead-acid batteries are already at $50,000/MWh or less, yet you don't see anybody using those for anything other than short-term UPS batteries, home solar storage setups, or car batteries, despite the very low cost and 95%+ recycling rates.
I think the problem you have is that you are taking little scraps of truth and building a very large edifice that doesn't reflect reality.
Reality is there in the price and more specifically the price reduction. All that you say could be true in theory but the price reduction says it doesn't make sense.
It's clear from all the price graphs that coal cost cannot possibly account for the huge reductions in the price of solar power electricity generation, because the coal price has stayed pretty stable over the decades (as an average, though it fluctuates a lot in response to demand).
You're left with the barmy idea that the CCP government in China is subsidising our solar power generation through cheap investment loans to its own industry. If so, for once in my life I would like to say "Thank you CCP".
Louis,
I think you're either being deliberately obtuse or more naive than Pollyanna ever was. You're being presented with verifiable facts collected from dozens of sources across the globe, and all of them fly in the face of your ideology. You can keep repeating your ideology back to me until you turn blue, but it won't change where all of that steel, concrete, and glass came from. It wasn't from wind and solar power. I can promise you that much. A Star Trek type replicator didn't cause bolts, screws, and angle iron to materialize out of thin air, either. It's an extension of fossil fuels, plain and simple.
Yes, the Chinese have solar panels and wind turbines, and lots of them at that. They use them to supply expensive and unreliable power to domestic consumers to make it appear as though they're doing something that they're objectively not. That's why you can't go outside in Beijing or Shanghai without wearing a respirator, assuming you want to be counted amongst the living a few years later. This isn't a "knock" on China, either. They're using whatever is available, because they have to! They were using wind and solar before, during, and after the pandemic, but when all of their heavy industry was shut down, the air quality over their cities miraculously improved. Why was that, do you suppose? I don't have to guess at it- all of their heavy industry is powered by coal, oil, and gas, just as it's always been. Whenever the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, which is every single day, they use coal and gas to make up the difference. I can guarantee that their steel industry doesn't wait of the Sun to pop over the horizon or the wind to start blowing, before they start making steel. Sand obviously contains lots of silica, yet we don't make semiconductor wafers from sand. Instead, we mine for quartz, we heat that quartz to temperatures hot enough to melt it using natural gas, and then we throw most of it away because even the high purity silica in quartz contains numerous defects that make it totally unusable as a photovoltaic cell or microchip. All that Aluminum that solar panels use for structural support didn't come from sunshine and rainbows, either.
Despite all the solar panels and wind turbines that China makes, they don't use solar and wind power to produce Iron or Aluminum or Copper or Silicon semiconductors. If they did, then nobody could afford to buy them at the scale required. They use blast furnaces. The blast furnaces don't run on electricity, they run on coal and gas. Electric Arc Furnaces are only used to re-melt / recycle scrap metal, which would be steel that's already been through at least one blast furnace. By tonnage, most of the steel used is not recycled, it's virgin material, dug out of the ground using gigantic diesel powered mining machines, shipped to the blast furnace on giant diesel powered ships and rail cars, produced using giant gas and coal blast furnaces, shipped again to metal working factories where steel is shaped or machined into the parts necessary to make other machines (bars / tubing / plates / sheet, bolts, screws, brackets, etc), shipped again to wherever it will be used on yet another diesel powered ship, then trucked to the exact site where it will be installed using a diesel powered truck. When it's time to recycle the materials, if they're recycled, then most of that process except for mining and refining is repeated in reverse, and then it moves forward again, all using fossil fuels.
This is nonsense about them not replacing the energy used to make them. Nearly all analysts say the energy replacement period is about 2-3 years.
If 9 out of 10 lawyers are also liars, do you also accept the opinions of the lawyers that lied to you?
If more and more wind and solar keep coming online every year, then why do the CO2 emissions keep increasing, year after year after year, with boring regularity?
Germany's CO2 emissions are exactly the same as the year they started implementing wind and solar power at scale. How can that be? In what world does that even make sense? In bizzaro world, perhaps? How do our emissions keep increasing if we're continuously preventing more emissions using wind and solar or electric cars or becoming more energy efficient? Unless... WE'RE NOT! Does the possibility even exist in your mind that you might be "missing something" about the way this actually works?
You can't use an energy resource that requires 10X / 100X / 1,000X times more material input (ultimately energy input, because that is what all those materials actually represent) than fossil fuel extraction, given a net energy output lower than any economically recoverable fossil fuel source in existence, and then somehow still extract more energy from it than you put into the entire process, because that's not how math works. 2 plus 2 does not actually equal 5, even if you're a liberal. Merely stating that the energy input is "free" doesn't make any difference, either. While the Sun delivers as much power in 1 hour as humanity uses in a year, unless we had the ability to cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar panels, that has zero effect on how much power we can actually extract from sunlight in a practical manner. It's another one of those useless factoids meant to distract people to prevent them from applying enough critical thinking skills to understand the nature of the problem.
IT'S A T-R-A-P, LOUIS!
From the article:
Another aspect of the trap is that we cannot build our way out of the problem. If we tried to outsmart the trap by building an 8-unit replacement in year one, it would require 32 units to produce and only dig a deeper hole. The essential point is that up-front infrastructure energy costs mean that one step forward results in four steps back, given EROEI around 10:1 and up-front investment for a 40 year lifetime. Nature does not provide an energy financing scheme. You can’t build a windmill on promised energy.
We can mess with the numbers to get different results. If only half the total energy invested is up-front, and the rest is distributed across the life of the resource (mining and enriching uranium, for instance), then we take a 4% hit instead of 8%. Likewise, a 40-year windmill at 20:1 EROEI and full up-front investment will require 2 years of its 2-unit gap-filling contribution to install, amounting to an energy cost of 4 units and therefore a 4% hit. It’s still bigger than the do-nothing 2%, which, remember, is already a source of pain. Anyone want to double the pain? Anyone? Elect me, and that’s what we’ll do. Any takers? No? Wimps.
This energy trap of our own making would be slightly less disconcerting if any windmills actually lasted for 40 years, but since nearly all of them are quite remarkable if they last half that long, you can begin to understand why some of us are very uncomfortable with this "no solution" solution masquerading as an actual solution. After a composite wing structure starts to crack, you can stick a fork in it, because it's done, as in, done done. After that happens, you either saw it up into large pieces and bury it in a landfill (a wildly unsustainable practice that will also leach toxic compounds into the water supply), or figure out how to separate paint, gelcoat, glass fiber, carbon fiber, foam or balsa wood core material, and epoxy resin binder. Silicon is so brittle that fingertip pressure is sufficient to shatter it into a million tiny razor sharp shards.
Without understanding the nature of this problem, you're building a house of cards. If you do understand what you're asking for, then you know full well that it doesn't work at all without constant and extreme resource input, which we've never invested into energy production itself because it's so absurdly inefficient and counter-productive to do.
How Solar PV Can NOT Power A Carbon-Free Energy Revolution, In 4 Charts
From the article:
“If the industry grows faster than a critical amount” says Dave, “then the fossil energy subsidy grows bigger and bigger: The limit is given by (ERoEI/Lifetime)*100 % per year, so if the ERoEI is 25, you can grow at 100%, but if it is 2.5 you can only grow the industry at 10% – anything above that can never be energy positive.”
The article then states:
They projected that “the payback year has a 50 percent likelihood of occurring between 2012 and 2015.” In other words, there’s a good chance the cumulative solar energy generated by every PV system in use as of today equals the cumulative electricity consumed in producing those system to date.
This is “largely due to steadily declining energy inputs required to manufacture and install PV systems.”
How can there be steadily declining energy inputs when all the ore grades for the materials involved are getting worse, and the ERoEI of the fossil fuels is going down too, and may not be available within 10 years? As usual, it’s what you leave out of the EI part of ERoEI that matters, and I doubt Pedro would have left anything out, because he’s run solar farms in Spain, and knows full well what goes IN to make them work….. For instance, the article gloats over the fact that the cost of PVs has dropped 99% over the past 25 years (from $10/W to $1/W now), but that’s mostly because robots are now making them instead of people. How much energy went into build the robots and the factories where they are being built? ALL made with low ERoEI fossil fuels? And their numbers must grow to keep up with production growth too….
Can you tell I’m still sceptical?
It's all built upon falsehood after falsehood.
One of the guys who, by his own admission, was and is both emotionally and financially invested in photovoltaic power (he ran a large photovoltaic electricity co-op in the US for many years), flat-out admitted that he didn't have the heart to tell the people who have pinned their hopes to commercial photovoltaic electric power generating technology that it was horribly unsustainable and only feasible in any form due to the massive over-consumption of fossil fuels. He went so far as to say he kept lying to them and to himself, not only because he wanted so badly to believe that it could work, but that he allowed his beliefs to overpower what all the math was telling him about the solution.
After you remove all ideological, emotional, and financial attachments to your beliefs about a technical subject matter, such as electric power generation, and only consider the results, it paints a very stark picture of what a future without fossil fuels actually looks like. It's downright ugly. But hey, it was fun while it lasted.
We have about 10 to 20 more years before fossil fuel prices must increase dramatically (supply and demand). When that happens, the expansion of wind and solar will end overnight, and never recover until such time as we truly have a complete manufacturing process in place that is not 100% dependent upon fossil fuel power. We may have to resort back to sailing ships because we might not otherwise be able to afford to power them.
Since 2013 when that book was written and 2020, the levelised cost of solar panel generated electricity declined from $100 per megawatt hour to about $40 per MWH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_e … energy.svg
So a reduction of 60%. Did the coal price reduce by 60% over that period? No. Taking Australian coal as a guide, it started at $96 in Jan 2013 and was at $81 in December 2020, having spent the majority of the period higher than or within 20% of the starting price.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCOALAUUSDM
Given other price factors (e.g. the rise in real Chinese incomes) I think it is reasonable to conclude that energy input per unit is declining - most analysts ascribe that to economies of scale and technological developments.
Pedro A. Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall carry out a detailed EROI analysis for Spain's photovoltaic industry in their book 'Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution: The Energy Return on Investment'. They arrive at an overall EROI of 2.45. Hall (the original father of the EROI concept) explains that most energy payback studies fail to include a lot of energy inputs. For example, it is common to include the embodied energy of the modules and inverters, but not the support frames, concrete foundations, grid connections, backup powerplant and storage. Also, an assessment of the energy cost of labour is usually left out. This is significant, because people employed in energy production are not free to work in other non-energy related industries.
An EROI of 2.45 in Spain would equate to an energy payback time of about 10 years. The UK averages about 50% of Spanish insolation levels. So I do not believe that a 13 year EPB time is overly pessimistic. I am not an expert in EROI studies, but I am inclined to listen to the man that invented the concept.
I'm with you on the last para, GW. And it's why in my view we won't see it used on Mission One. But, I could see it might be developed to facilitate tourism, so people might have a zero G "joyride" at the beginning and end of their orbital vacation but otherwise be in 1G.
Once concern - am I right in thinking with the tether system there's no way you could maintain a relatively "fixed view of Earth below. It would have to be coming in and out of view...wouldn't that be nausea-inducing? Maybe not so good for orbital tourism after all.
I see lots of proposals to use cable-tethers for spin gravity, but I have NEVER, EVER seen any experimental results to back them up, at useful gee levels (which would be 0.1 to 1 gee). Such are therefore BY DEFINITION not an off-the-shelf, ready-to-apply technology for design purposes. Not until the necessary experiments at useful gee levels have been successfully run. And the odds favor failure first time up.
GW
From what I see of PV manufacturing facilities, I imagine they run on electricity. Do you know differently?
If so, then China is not as dominated by coal as you claim.
Hydro, wind, solar and biomass account for 38% of electricity generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrici … r_in_China
This is nonsense about them not replacing the energy used to make them. Nearly all analysts say the energy replacement period is about 2-3 years.
90% of the photovoltaic panels in the world come from China and they're using coal to make them, not previously manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, or magic pixie dust. Unless someone here can refute that point, then you're repeating your ideology, as if that's supposed to mean something to anyone who can count. We're transforming coal, oil, and gas into photovoltaic panels that have a lifespan of 15 to 25 years, at most, before they need to be replaced. Over that period of time, dependent upon where they're installed in the world, they may not return all of the energy that was invested into producing them to begin with, which means that when, not if, we run out of coal, oil, and gas, there is no way to sustain the use of wind and solar energy into perpetuity. What about that do we refuse to understand?
Scroll to Page 56 of the following report from IRENA:
Resource Consumption per 1GWe (extrapolated from Figure 25 on Page 56, materials required for a 1MWe solar photovoltaic plant):
70,000t of glass - 3,077kWh/t (I think that's actually per short ton since my source is from the US, not metric ton, but let's pretend anyway)
Energy Efficiency Improvement and Cost Saving Opportunities for the Glass Industry - An ENERGY STAR® Guide for Energy and Plant ManagersIf that link doesn't work for you, it's an archived OSTI Report from 2008, produced by the Energy Analysis Department, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
56,000t of steel - 770kWh/t (a little less than 500kWh/t using EAF, but only when it's recycled scrap)
*Numerous sources are available for this info, and I've already provided it several times, so I'm not repeating it here
43,120MWh47,000t of concrete - 1,028kWh/t (Portland cement; global average from actual collected data over several decades, although it can be a lot more efficient than this, dependent upon the process used)
Energy Efficiency and CO2 Emissions from the Global Cement Industry
47,000MWh19,000t of Aluminum - 12,500kWh/t (newest smelters presently operational) to 15,000kWh/t
*Numerous sources are available for this info, and I've already provided it several times, so I'm not repeating it here
237,500MWh7,000t of Silicon - 50,000kWh/t to 65,000kWh/t (50kWh/kg to 65kWh/kg, per the document below from NREL)
Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Module Manufacturing Costs and Sustainable Pricing: 1H 2018 Benchmark and Cost Reduction Road Map
350,000MWh to 455,000MWh7,000t of Copper - around 19,444kWh/t (if it came from rich ores in Chile or Congo, but can be a lot more if it came from somewhere else)
Historical, Current, and Future Energy Demand from Global Copper Production and Its Impact on Climate Change
136,500MWh6,000t of plastics - 5,744kWh/t (since this is the energy savings associated with 1 metric ton of recycled plastic, producing 1t obviously consumes even more energy)
FAQ - Benefits of Recycling
34,500MWh848,620MWh of energy merely to produce the materials required, not to ship them half way around the world or transform them into finished goods. This amount of energy can be overcome if the plant is located in a desert. If it's not, then it may require half of the plant's useful service life to overcome.
Since we like using countries located in deserts as our models for solar power cost, the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station cost $2.5B, produces produces 1,470GWh/yr, and was built over the same timeframe that the $5B Watts-Bar #2 nuclear power plant was built, which produces 6,825GWh/yr. If we do some simple math, a plant that was double the cost produced 4.64X as much power output, despite running at far less than nominal capacity. If it ran at nominal capacity, then it's producing 5.66X as much power output for double the purchase price. Ouarzazate is selling power from OSPS at $0.19/kWh. It actually costs TVA $0.0241/kWh to supply power from Watts-Bar (and yes, they charge more than that for the power, because they're in business to make a profit).
*** Edit ***:
Ouarzazate Solar Power Station is located in Morocco and came online in the same year as Watts-Bar #2. The plant in question now has storage sufficient to produce power for an additional 8 hours after the Sun goes down, so you would need 2 Ouarzazate generating stations to produce 24/7/365 power, and they would cost every bit as much as Watts-Bar to purchase. This would mean 2,940GWh/yr, still 2.32X less than Watts-Bar #2 running at 2/3 of its nominal output or 2.83X less output than Watts-Bar #2 running at full nominal output (95% capacity factor). However, that's not what Morocco actually did. They used natural gas as a backup for their unreliable energy, and that's why the electricity costs so much.During the same period of time that Watts-Bar is producing power, 100% of installed wind and solar will have to be replaced a bare minimum of 3 times if Watts-Bar #2 operates for 60 years the way Watts-Bar #1 almost already has (Watts-Bar #1 is literally a few short years shy of 60 years of operations), so there's no way in hell that a photovoltaic generating solution is less expensive over time. Imagine how expensive nuclear power would be if we were scrapping nuclear reactors every 20 years. Since that's clearly not how nuclear power works, why can't we produce a wind turbine or photovoltaic panel (with precisely zero moving parts) that lasts longer than about 20 years before it's degraded to the point that we need more panel surface area to replace the power it's no longer producing?
Energy Savings by Material:
14,000kWh/t for recycled Aluminum (re-melting Aluminum is fairly easy to do, drastically less energy intensive than making it from scratch)
5,774kWh/t to 7,200kWh/t for recycled plastic
4,100kWh/t for recycled office paper (yes, that's for friggin typing paper!)
2,778kWh/t for recycled Copper (not listed in the document, but still very relevant)
642kWh/t for recycled steel (re-melting steel consumes more energy than re-melted Aluminum)
602kWh/t for recycled newspaper (amazing how much energy goes into making what's essentially toilet paper, huh?)
42kWh/t for recycled glass (takes almost as much energy to re-melt glass as it does to make from scratch, but you still save by recycling)This sophomoric "plan" to try to use wind and solar for everything is not a serious solution to conserve our natural resources or to sustain a habitable environment for humans to live in, but it is a better than average way to "light the afterburner" on materials consumption.
Renewable Capacity Statistics 2021
All we're doing is increasing CO2 emissions at break-neck speed through absurd over-consumption of concrete, glass, plastic, Aluminum, Copper, and Iron, required to prop up the sophomoric ideas of our "green energy" people. Namely, the notion that you can require 10X to 1,000X more energy input using an energy production and storage methods that are 10X to 1,000X less efficient than nuclear alternatives, in terms of materials and therefore energy consumption. That is precisely why CO2 emissions keep increasing as more and more wind and solar power comes online. These non-working ideas continually demand more and more concrete / glass / plastic / metals, so the associated energy to endlessly produce more and more of those materials over time.
Solar panels aren't made with sunshine.
The blast furnaces that produce steel use lots of Oxygen, but the refining process is certainly not powered by the wind.
There's no such thing as "doing more with less" whenever our "less" endlessly requires more and more.
That is the simple truth of this matter. It's always been that simple. Heck, even Michael Moore eventually figured this out, and he's about as mentally disabled by his ideology as anyone I've ever had the displeasure of listening to.
We've been relentlessly pursuing the fanciful daydreams of these possibly well-intentioned but insufferably indoctrinated people. They have achieved "critical mass" over time, through mass-indoctrination rather than actual education. They either can't count high enough to understand the nature of the problem or maybe can't think far enough ahead, or don't actually care enough to know that they're being lied to. We have no shortage of charlatans, or equally uneducated people, who are falsely claiming that they're going to make the climate change boogeyman go away with this little-examined fantasy that's filled with rosy projections of the future, but little to no account of what actual performance has indicated.
We can either deal with a few million tons of radioactive nuclear waste that will all neatly fit onto a single football field (over more than half a century of nuclear power generation), or we can deal with hundreds of billions to low trillions of tons (every single year, from now until the Sun inevitably runs out of fuel) of toxic waste generated by mining the stunning quantities of materials required for anything wind or solar powered that will still fail to provide 24/7/365 power and require more frequent replacement. The false "cheap-ness" of wind and solar power is an illusion. When you can no longer drink the ground water because it's been thoroughly contaminated with Arsenic and Lead, then you will come to appreciate the benefits of using a reliable energy source that doesn't stop producing power when the Sun disappears over the horizon.
Solar is cheaper than natural gas, but your electricity bill relentlessly increases as more and more wind and solar power are added to the grid- well beyond the highest fraudulently manipulated estimates for what coal or natural gas or nuclear actually cost... because wind and solar are the "cheapest energy available". That's why the typical German pays $0.3/kWh, with more installed wind and solar than just about any other country, as a total percentage of their electricity supply, while the typical American pay $0.1/kWh using natural gas. That's not a marginal increase / decrease that can be explained away, it's a factor of 3 increase for the same product (moving electrons delivered to your outlets). If you have re-wired your brain to believe that the wind and solar power actually cost less than the alternatives, then you're suffering from mass-indoctrination. In the real world, money talks and BS walks. I'm calling BS on how "cheap" wind and solar power are, until someone can adequately explain that discrepancy; or practices the slightest bit of intellectual honesty through the simple straightforward admission that the Sun don't shine in Germany, and thus solar power is not a "silver bullet" that cures all power generating problems. My explanation for that major discrepancy is simple fraud perpetrated for ideological reasons. That requires no Special Olympics gold-medal caliber mental gymnastics to understand.
It would help to have natural light. I'd like to be assured that there wasn't a major risk from meteorite impact in what could be a very crowded space with key functions (I'm more relaxed about glass roofs for Earth like gorges, because they will be less densely populated.
One point about a glass roof - I'd like to see an irregular framing pattern. This could then be camouflage0painted to blend in with the natural vegetation, so creating the illusion the frame was the branch(es) of a tree.
louis wrote:Aside from space medicine issues, the big thing we have to sort out on Mars is creating large leisure-orientated spaces that have a "fresh air feel" about them. I think this will be key to maintaining good mental health on Mars.
I've posted this a few times...
A city could have something like this. Inside Portage Place, a mall in Winnipeg. This has a glass roof over the central atrium, but could light be reflected via mirrors? (click for enlargement)
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQZilw7KZtOT3kXTKmP8dJs7F1V9ujWjxEZHw&usqp=CAU https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/imag … A&usqp=CAU
I made no claims beyond citing the article revealing that solar plus storage is the cheapest energy solution in Morocco and Jordan. But clearly, these islands of price-busting solar power are going to expand. I wouldn't be surprised if we find perhaps half the world's population can replicate the Morocco-Jordan experience in the next few years. Obviously the situaton in Northern Europe is different but eventually we will be included. We are more likely to rely on wind energy in the interim.
Here's a relevant article:
https://www.rsc.org/news-events/article … st-labour/
The price differential between China and the USA is put at 23%. There's no suggestion that is going to increase. It's more likely to narrow.
You're saying that it is cheap fossil fuels that drive the price down. No suggestion that is the case. You're on firmer ground in talking about access to capital. I expect China's state capitalist system has helped them build up a big industry through use of cheap loans etc.
In any case a 23% differential is not the most crucial variable when the cost is halving per decade over several decades e.g..
Yr0 1000 (plus 23% = 1230)
Yr 10 500
Yr 20 250
Yr 30 125 (plus 23% = 154)
Even with a 23% addition the price has dropped from 1000 to 154.
The link you gave sound like the ravings of a madman. I wouldn't pay much attention to someone who accuses Elon Musk of "idiocy".
As for the "13 year energy payback period" for solar power where does that come from, I mean apart from your own calculations?
All analyses I read say it's now down to 2-3 years.
https://www.renewableenergyhub.co.uk/ma … -analysis/
Why are you right and all the expert analysts wrong? Are you sure you're not relying on out of date figures?
louis wrote:These solar plus storage solutions are undercutting the cheapest form of conventional energy and once you have storage in place, you don't need to maintain alternative forms of electricity generation, which further brings down the cost of electricity, plus you can forget about the expensive forms of electricity generation like nuclear power. Also if solar is effective, you don't have the same issues as with wind energy where you might need to transfer it over hundreds or thousands of miles.
Of course currently we are only at the beginning of this process - so it is only in areas of very high insolation that these economics work. But given that nearly all analysts think the price of solar and storage are going to continue to decline dramatically, I think we can see this price profile moving out like a shock wave across the globe, totally altering energy economics.
Louis believes what he wants to believe. His obsession with solar power is closer to religious zealous than to any scientifically derived conclusion. I know this because he has never been interested in understanding the science behind how these things work and just parrots the same preconceptions week after week, year after year, hoping that people have suffered enough collective memory loss since the last time his pet technology got shot to pieces, that they might just buy into it, without asking difficult questions. It won't matter what anyone here says of course. But I will say it again anyway: Solar PV is not a sustainable technology for anything other than niche offgrid applications at present technology sets.
Solar PV appears cheap right now, because it is subsidised by fossil fuels. About 90% of solar modules produced in the world are being made using very low cost, coal based electricity in the People's Republuc of China. For most of the past two decades, China has had some of the cheapest electricity rates for industrial users in the world. Solar manufacturers in China also benefited from zero interest rate loans on the capital investments needed to get the operations up and running. In both China and the West, large capital projects (especially renewable energy projects) are also benefiting from low interest rates, which is very favourable to any project in which the bulk of costs are upfront capital costs. So of course they look cheap right now. But it would be foolish to assume that this favourable nexus of conditions can be maintained indefinitely.
To understand how difficult it will be to replace a large chunk of human energy consumption, I suggest reading Patzeak's 3-part series: The New Green Revolution.
https://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/ … grand.htmlTo produce 1watt-peak of solar infrastructure, requires an upfront energy investment of about 40MJ of energy, much of it electricity. Under UK conditions, 1We-peak will generate about 0.1W on a time average basis. If you divide 40million by 0.1, you get an energy payback time of about 13 years. If you factor in the round trip energy losses and embodied energy of sodium-sulphur or lithium-ion batteries (what Louis calls 'storage'), then 'solar and storage' in the UK will barely pay back the energy needed to create it in its 20 year life. Even in a country with double or triple the UK's solar energy budget, a solar PV array still spends most of the first decade of its life just paying back its initial energy investment. That gives an EROI of between 1-3, for 'solar and storage' as Louis describes it. An EROI of at least 11 is needed to sustain an industrial civilisation, because of the energy invested and used in every other part of society.
The sensible conclusion to draw, is that whilst cheap Chinese electricity and low interest rates have provided temporarily favourable conditions for solar power, it would be foolish to assume that this technology is about to replace the huge quantities of energy presently derived from fossil fuels. Given the limitations in solar EROI, it is presently impossible to develop an industrial system on solar power alone, because these power plants barely produce enough energy to replace themselves. For wind power, the situation may be a little different, at least in countries where wind resources are abundant. But solar PV is not a sustainable technology at present technology sets. For this to change, technology would need to develop in a way to allow a very large reduction in embodied energy per peak-Watt of solar PV systems. Is there any reason to simply assume that this is possible or is going to happen anytime soon?
Totally agree.
Polynesians also accumulated huge knowledge of the oceans, just as we have accumulated huge knowledge of space and Mars. The polynesians' store of knowledge is quite fascinating .They could see patterns in waves and even currents that enabled them to navigate the vast Pacific. They could tell from the colouring of the underside of a cloud whether there was land or ocean beneath it.
Aside from space medicine issues, the big thing we have to sort out on Mars is creating large leisure-orientated spaces that have a "fresh air feel" about them. I think this will be key to maintaining good mental health on Mars.
I live in Winnipeg. Winter here is cold. It can get down to -40° (C or F) real temperature. If you don't have a source of heat, you die. It gets below -30°C more often. And where do you expect to find food in winter? Technology is necessary. You have to grow food in summer, and stockpile surplus to survive winter. And humans can't go outside in winter without warm clothing. That requires more technology. Yes, tanning animal hide to form leather is technology. A sewing needle made of bone with an eye to pull thread, is technology.
Over 100,000 years ago, ancient humans migrated into Siberia. Yes, Neanderthal was there before them. But humans had to survive. They developed new technology: parka and pants made of fur. Mits, boots also of fur. All this had to be close to the body, not a loose cape or coat. That was new. The parka did not open, instead pulled over your head like a sweater. And it had a hood so only the face was exposed. They used the warmest fur of any animal known: reindeer aka cariboo. And they had domesticated dogs. Dogs could pull a sleigh, expanding how much cargo they could carry. They hunted mega fauna including mammoth. You need significant cargo capacity to haul meat from a mammoth. And they built insulated tents using mammoth ribs for supports, and the tent was tanned mammoth hide. That means the tent itself was heavily insulated.
Polynesian people developed technology to cross the Pacific and settle islands. How many thousands of years ago?
Ancient aboriginal people of the Amazon developed technology to build deep soil where they could grow crops. They built a vast network of villages, all connected by dirt roads. This was documented by the first white man to visit. That document was thought a fabrication, but modern archaeology is proving he was right. People today don't know how to build soil in the Amazon. It's a tropical jungle, but soil is ridiculously thin.
People of the Andes mountains lived so high that most food crops will not grow. They found a natural tuber that does grow. It's toxic, a member of the deadly nightshade family. But they found if they take the tuber even higher, so high in the mountains that temperatures at night freeze and nothing grows, and they tread on the tuber to break open the skin, this causes the tuber to freeze dry. And that leaches the toxin from the vegetable. This makes it edible. They did this for centuries, selectively breeding their crop until the tuber no longer had the toxin. The leaves and stems still have the toxin. The fruit has concentrated poison. But the tuber is grows plentifully. They developed a technique of raised beds with water filled trenches surrounding. When temperature plummets over night a couple degrees below freezing, the water vapour prevents their crops from freezing. This crop was called potato.
Today we live in environments lethal to humans. Our technology allows us to thrive. Mars is just another climate. Our technology will allow us to thrive there was well. Anyone used to a tropical climate, where they aren't confined indoors for months in winter, may be so spoiled that they don't understand Mars. Those of us who live in harsher climates can understand Mars.
Interesting, I get the impression that a tether system won't be for Mission One. It could revolutionise space tourism. It could also be the basis for successful reproduction on Mars if you had a 1G facility in LMO where women could go to be pregnant - allowing for safe foetal development.
I was watching a couple YouTube programs, and it seems that Elon is now considering a tether system between 2 Starships for production of artificial gravity. No doubt the influence of Robert Zubrin?
It's also ironic that it was the Green movement which was a major beneficiary of the Apollo space programme. The photos of "spaceship Earth" and "Earthrise" probably did more than anything to kickstart the ecology movement as it was then called. They say a picture paints a thousand words -well those pictures paint whole volumes.
GW,
It's not a genuine argument. It's a straw man. This woman is using a modern computer that was based upon Apollo-era microcomputer technology incorporated into the Saturn V's guidance computer and she's using the internet, which was based upon a DARPA project that allowed scientists at various research agencies, including NASA, to share ideas. All the technological advancement and scientific understanding that space exploration and colonization efforts provides her with a job, because that's what she writes about. She's a direct beneficiary of the space program and military / space communications infrastructure, yet she's complaining that Elon Musk isn't taking on one her pet projects, or that because he's a capitalist, he only wants to go to Mars because he's greedy or egotistical. Someone with his type of wealth who's greedy and egotistical doesn't live in a shoebox apartment with a single car and a handful of worth clothes. He spends every waking hour with his family or at work, solving technical problems. Despite his ability to purchase anything he wants and to never work again, he lives no better than she does. Beyond that, ISS has never been branded a hellhole, yet the environment just outside the thin Aluminum walls of the space station is every bit as lethal to human life, and then some.
Most of planet Earth would be nearly or completely uninhabitable by humans without protective clothing, buildings with central air conditioning and heating / electrical power / plumbing for fresh and grey water, purpose-built vehicles for transportation (cars / trucks / ships / aircraft, many if not most equipped with air conditioning / heating / atmospheric filtering), etc.
"You have to wear a space suit in space!", is not a genuine argument. It's like saying, "You have to wear a jacket in Michigan in the winter!", or you'll die. Both statements are equally true. There are not varying degrees of dead. Whether you die from lack of oxygen or from hypothermia, you're just as dead either way. My response to that line of argumentation is, "So, what?" If I go to Michigan, then I will wear a jacket. If I go to Mars, then I will wear a space suit. The woman making this argument would not survive the winter in New York without wearing protective clothing. I've seen pictures of her wearing a coat on the internet, so I know good and well that she does just that. She doesn't think being bundled up like an Eskimo is too onerous, but she's worried about wearing a space suit? It's silly to even contemplate. If your jacket fails to insulate, then you die. If your space suit fails to provide oxygen, then you die. Both types of technology are utterly reliable at this point.
Most humans on planet Earth protect themselves from their environment in a multitude of ways. Very few people walk around completely naked outside, even when permitted to do so. I know it can be done and is survivable under some circumstances, but the people that do it who have previously worn clothing that protects them from extreme hot or cold, sharp rocks, and stinging insects immediately regret the decision. I've slept outside on the ground in the winter time here in Texas with a jacket / pants / hiking boots, but no tent or sleeping bag or poncho to protect from cold rain, and it was a miserable experience. I obviously survived, but that's not my idea of fun. Humans make and use tools, because that's what humans do to survive and thrive. Protective clothing and environmental controls are simply additional tools in humanity's tool belt to either make life more pleasant or merely survivable.
The original article in the Atlantic (PC Ideology Central) is a malodorous pile of dog-doo: shallow, manipulative, dishonest and pointless.
There are huge downsides to living on Mars, for sure and I have pointed to many of them here in discussionsbut there are compensatory upsides: being part of this big creative endeavour to plant human civilisation on a different planet. It's difficult to quantify just how much of a pyschological boost that will be. My guess is it will be very big.
As long as we can develop ELEs (Earth-like environments) for leisure and exercise to compensate for the very limited opportunity to be "outdoors" I think Mars can become a pleasant place to live, albeit quite different from Earth in some respects.
If you read the article, Evan Plant-Weir is one of us. He's Chief Communications Officer for Mars Society Canada. His article argues against the assertion that Mars is a hellhole. He makes the same arguments we do.
He provided a link to the article he argues against, published in Atlantic. Mars is a Hellhole
These solar plus storage solutions are undercutting the cheapest form of conventional energy and once you have storage in place, you don't need to maintain alternative forms of electricity generation, which further brings down the cost of electricity, plus you can forget about the expensive forms of electricity generation like nuclear power. Also if solar is effective, you don't have the same issues as with wind energy where you might need to transfer it over hundreds or thousands of miles.
Of course currently we are only at the beginning of this process - so it is only in areas of very high insolation that these economics work. But given that nearly all analysts think the price of solar and storage are going to continue to decline dramatically, I think we can see this price profile moving out like a shock wave across the globe, totally altering energy economics.
So power production facilities and plants from either will be on par to service the same customer base at a price that will keep on rising....
Don't think this has been mentioned...
https://www.marssociety.org/red-planet- … -hellhole/
Perhaps Robert knows about it.
Latest video from SpaceXCentric - good update.
Welcome back Gary, you might enjoy these graphics if you haven't seen them yet...
Absolutely not! They will play their usual self-serving double game. They will be pushing planetary protection now to slow down Space X but as soon as they are ready to take the lead the concern will be jettisoned.
Differentiating any native Mars based life forms with those from Earth originated forms would be quite simple today due to the sophistication of nucleic acid analysis of the DNA contained in what is discovered. This assumes that life forms are universally DNA/protein based organisms. One of the instruments I neglected to include in my laboratory would be (should be) a DNA analyzer.
The entire argument that planetary protection of Mar should preclude travel there is ridiculous.
As Louis stated, protection of sand, rocks, and a barren planet is absurd.P.S. I really don't think that the CCP gives a tinkers damn about what the planetary protection people think! That will not stop or even incrementally slow down the Chinese.
There was faecal matter floating around on some of the Apollo Missions, I recall reading. I expect things are more hygienic on the ISS now!
Calliban wrote:Diarrhoea would be even less fun than it usually is in a 20' wide tin can with a fully recirculating air system.
Words to live by.
Calliban wrote:You will get the same sort of cranks that claim that the moon landings were faked.
You'll get those no matter what you do. Guaranteed.
The real threat to human colonisation is the "planetary protection" dogma. That says we should totally minimise our impact on Mars - even on dead rocks and regolith. For me, that's absurd.
If we find life on Mars it will be a double edged sword. On the one hand there will a huge scientific "gold rush" to get to the planet and study these new life forms which will kick start the indigenous Mars economy. On the other hand it will boost the planetary protectionists and probably lead to restrictive legislation.
It is clear to me at least that there must have been a huge exchange of life forms between Mars and Earth over billions of years - probably why we have extremophiles on planet Earth. Mars will frequently have been bombarded by chunks of Earth rock and ice containing Earth life forms. Whether they survived is anyone's guess, but my point is a well ordered colonisation effort is not going to do any more damage.
When the time comes to terraform there will certainly be ethical issues to consider. However, if all the life forms on Mars are small organisms, we can simply preserve the life in specialist environments and proceed with terraformation. Real ethical issues would only present themselves if we were faced with complex ecosystems and much larger organisms. There is not a lot of evidence for the latter as yet.
See the Starship is Go thread - BN3 rolled out for ground testing and BN4 will be the first orbital booster, it seems.
It looks like they are finally building the launch tower and the first of a test vehicle for the booster for starship
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/NSF-2021-07-03-05-46-15-672-1920x1071.jpg
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