New Mars Forums

The United States is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty. That treaty prohibits any nation from claiming any territory on any celestial body. So it would be inappropriate to plan the US flag.

Canada has an ongoing dispute over Hans Island in the arctic. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, Ellesmere Island is Canadian. Hans Island is an island half-way between Ellesmere and Greenland. Both nations claim it based on claims from the 1800s. If you use an equidistant line between Ellesmere & Greenland, the border would be right down the middle of Hans Island. It's a half-acre piece of rock that doesn't even has grass or weeds. But whoever controls that island, controls the shipping channel. Periodically the Denmark navy or Canadian navy arrives, takes down the flag of the other country, and puts up their own flag. That's what a flag means: territorial claim.

Ps. At one point the Danish minister for Greenland had sailors leave a bottle of fine Danish Cognac with a note welcoming the Canadian soldiers to Danish territory. Of course Canadian sailors drank it. Since then Canada has left a bottle of Crown Royal, the premium brand of Canadian Rye Whisky.

An interesting article providing some background on why supposedly cheap wind and solar power are resulting in such high electricity prices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe … expensive/

In a nutshell, the problem of intermittent power from these devices means that a lot of extra engineering is needed to allow grid integration.  If you generate power from a thermal power station, burning coal, gas or fission of uranium, then you pay for the capital, operating and fuel costs of the powerplant.  But with wind or solar power, you pay for the capital and operating costs of these power plants and the what ever powerplant is being used to provide backup, usually natural gas.  On top of that, there are other costs as well.  In the UK, we learned the hard way that when spinning reserve is reduced to zero, wind farms need to be equipped with battery banks, as they can fall off load very quickly and even CCGTs cannot run up quickly enough to pick up load.  The same with solar, a cloud bank can advance from the Atlantic in minutes.  On top of that, there are additional costs relating to transmission.  So really, all that wind and solar plant can do is reduce the consumption of fuel in fossil fuel power plants.  You cannot get rid of those plants and their capital and operating costs need to be maintained.  So overall, wind and solar power plants would need to be close to free in order to reach grid parity with fossil fuels.  Their total lifetime costs would need be comparable to the cost of the fuel that they save.  Given the high embodied energy of all of the steel, concrete, glass and other materials needed to construct them, this is a virtual impossibility.

The usual answer to this problem is "well storage is going to get cheaper and cheaper due to technological development".  But what would storage look like, in a real system?  Building pumped storage systems capable of storing weeks worth of power that would be needed to cover things like winter lulls, in which persistent low pressure weather systems reduce wind speed to almost zero for weeks, would be impossibly expensive.  Batteries are only practical for relatively short duration grid imbalances, like the hour or so between wind farms falling offload and boilers and gas turbines coming on line.  Holland and Germany are investing in hydrogen based energy storage, using CCGTs.  It is a neat system, in which hydrogen stores enough energy to cover lulls lasting hours and longer term, but rarer outages, are covered using LNG, with total consumption of LNG being a modest proportion of the total energy consumption, year to year.  It is a neat system, but what are the technologies involved?  We are really describing a CCGT powerplant, with an industrial scale electrolysis plant next door to it, coupled to a large gas storage tank, which stores hydrogen at slightly above atmospheric.  CCGT plants have relatively low capital costs per MWe, thanks to their modular construction, which allows mass production, ease of transportation and rapid assembly at site.  They also benefit from high power density.  But why would anyone expect them to get continuously cheaper?  These technologies have cost curves, yes, but these plants have already exploited much of their potential in terms of efficiency (a function of combustion temperature and pressure ratio for a GT) and rapid modular construction.  And the electrolysis cell?  Quite an old technology now.  It has a high capital cost, which is dealt with in industry by running at high capacity factor.  That is a bit of a problem if the design function of the stack is to absorb intermittent electricity from sources that only provide excess power occasionally.

A few summary facts that should tell us that 'storage' will not be any cheaper than fossil fuel back up, as it is applied now.  (1) Storage will likely involve using CCGT plants, burning hydrogen.  From the CCGTs point of view, its internal costs are the same, but capacity factor is going to be more limited.  There is the extra cost of the electrolysis system and storage tank.  Finally, in storage, we are buying electricity, running an electrolysis system that captures about two-thirds on energy in hydrogen and then burns it back to electricity in the gas turbines.  The round trip efficiency of doing this, is about 40% (50-70% electrolysis); (50-60% recovery in CCGTs).  So a lot more primary electricity is needed when storage is used, to displace the energy that was being supplied by natural gas and to cover the energy losses in storage.  In a renewable dominated system, electric power is going to be expensive.  That means high energy intensity activities (including making RE infrastructure) are going to be a lot less affordable.

Up to this point, it has been possible to ignore a lot of the hard realities of energy economics in Western countries.  For a start, wind and solar energy are still a tiny fraction of total energy consumption, essentially all of it being electricity, which is about 15-30% of delivered energy in industrial economies.  Secondly, most of our heavy industry has been outsourced to China, where (until recently) cheap coal electricity and industrial heat, have allowed low cost production of all sorts of things to continue.  It was even possible for Western politicians to delude themselves into thinking that they had decoupled economic growth from rising energy consumption.  Yet this delusion was built on borrowed time.  It involved using debt to allow Western countries to continue consuming, whilst most real manufacturing was outsourced to the third world, which burned coal to do the things that we couldn't do with cleaner but more expensive energy.  A lot of the observed GDP growth was in low wage service industries and due to asset price accumulation, which is the simple spending of borrowed money.

In the future, presumably, in which fossil fuels are either expensive or forbidden, there is no avoiding reality when it comes to unbreakable link between per capita energy consumption and per capita prosperity.  Renewable energy sources exploit low power density resources.  This is the reason behind the enormous physical resource requirements per MWe.  The effect has been hidden for now, because most of the world's industrial materials are now produced in China, using cheap, coal based electricity, heat and gas and most of our transport and heat requirements are still met by low-cost oil and natural gas.  The Chinese themselves have subsidised steel production and certain key industries like PV module production, which in addition to the cheap energy already available from coal, makes these materials far cheaper than is really possible in the longer term.  But what happens when that is no longer true?  How cheap will wind farms be, when the mega-tonnes of steel and concrete have to be produced using solar or wind based electricity and hydrogen?  And what will happen to individual incomes, when energy costs inevitably rise much higher than they are now?  Per capita incomes in western economies have already stopped growing due to rising energy cost of energy.  Will these economic structures survive at all, in the very high inherent cost environment that will exist when our whole energy supply is dominated by renewable energy?  If the calculated ERoEI figures are to be believed, there is good reason to doubt it.  And in tge much poorer world that would result, just how affordable is space colonisation going to be?  Would the US be able to contemplate manned missions to Mars, if its per capita income was around the level of India, say?

Louis,

Is new PVC pipe to carry grey water all that choosy?

They've started lining all the concrete waste water pipes here in Houston with plastic to prevent them from leaking after they crack or become pitted, so they don't have to replace them after the ground shifts, so I thought I'd ask.

It seems as if there are bazillion (technical term there) other existing uses for recycled plastic that don't result in plastic fires or messes if, for example, a car (electric or otherwise) catches fire on the roadway and burns to the ground.

I just dunno.  Plastic roadways for up north to prevent cracking or at least make repairs easier?

Maybe, but we're going to need a hell of a lot more plastic.

Louis,

Martians can declare themselves independent when no tax dollars are used to fund them.  That's probably a century or so away, but eventually it will happen.

Louis,

I'm not sure how SpaceX will reduce the cost of a Starship launch by a factor of 200X over a Falcon 9 launch, but a launch cost of $13.33/kg will surely be a neat trick to see.

Louis,

I think you fail to grasp the totality of the phrase "technological advancement".  Those words are utterly meaningless without context.  The mere fact that something is "new" means very little.  A steel knife can be considered to be a considerable technological advancement over a flint knife in terms of durability, namely resistance to accidental or intentional impact with another solid object.  Both types of knives will cut equally well if they're equally well made.  However, a steel knife is not a technological advancement in its own right if you lack the raw materials, energy, machinery to make steel knives, and the knowledge to actually make one (all of which is rather complicated and time consuming), or if doing so is unattainably expensive in terms of materials / energy / technology / labor.

A plastic roadway would require extreme quantities of petrochemicals to actually produce, which is why roads are made from gravel and sand, with either a steel-reinforced concrete or asphalt load bearing surface on top.  If all the plastic goes into making roadways, then there's not enough plastic for other uses.  We still use wooden pallets, rather than plastic, specifically because of the energy and materials cost associated with making plastics.  There's little doubt that a plastic pallet would be more durable than wood, but that's the reason why we don't typically use plastics for making pallets.  If we truly required more durable pallets for bearing the weight of the cargo, then we'd use Aluminum or steel, and that's what we typically do when we need something more durable or considerably stronger than wood.  Alternatively, we simply use thicker slabs of wood when fabricating the pallet.

From an energy expenditure perspective, it's nearly impossible for plastic to actually be cheaper than natural materials.  If the only reason you believe otherwise is that you watched a YouTube video making such a claim without evidence, then you need more education about energy.

What may be "perfect" for electricity may be far from ideal in other respects.  Since all plastic is very soft compared to concrete or gravel, it will almost certainly have much poorer resistance to abrasion.  Beyond that, the very first fuel fire that liquefies the roadway will let everyone else know that it wasn't such a great idea.  Anyway, this has been tried before, with poor results.  We had steel and Aluminum "pre-fab" tarmac for landing aircraft on tiny islands in WWII.  We tried sawdust mixed with ice in very cold places, and we've also tried plastic roads.  None of that is "new".  The technologies that proved most practical was steel-reinforced concrete and asphalt.

EV "engines" are definitely NOT "way simpler and cheaper to maintain than ICE engines", because they all cost substantially more to produce than combustion engines that reliably produce equivalent power.  You even stated as much.  The "fuel cost" is only lower if we utterly ignore every other aspect of actually using electric vehicle technology.  Indeed, that is what we must do to rationalize the nonsense behind such statements.  If I posted a random YouTube video that makes it seem as if diamond roads would practical to produce, would you believe that, too?

As far as Tesla Motors is concerned, what they have achieved is noteworthy, but they're a literal drop in the bucket compared to all the combustion engine powered vehicles.

louis wrote:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/20 … 6748604016

The lead acid battery industry claim that "lead battery life has increased by 30-35% in the last 20 years". This is one of those examples of a hidden price reduction. You might be paying the same price, but you are getting a whole lot more. Likewise with automobiles themselves.These days you can probably expect a car to keep pretty well for 8 years or more whereas 40 years ago they would be rusting hulks within 5 years.

Innovation can make a big difference in lots of areas. If we develop electric roads with induction charging we can probably reduce the battery mass in automobiles by something like 80%. That would be a really dramatic cost saving and improve the efficiency of EVs hugely (not least because they could be much lighter and so require less energy to move).

Louis,

That's true, but it's also true that the improved technology costs more money to produce.  Since nothing lasts forever, this means that total cost or real cost is increased over time, if we want to make use of the improved technology.  I'm not arguing that we shouldn't strive to improve our energy storage technologies, but that it isn't cheaper to actually produce and use.  Whereas the old Lead-acid batteries required more maintenance, but were still user-serviceable to a degree, the newer Lead-acid batteries are not, they don't last for a meaningfully greater period of time as compared to a properly-maintained user-serviceable design, and aren't easier to recycle.  That is typically the case with all supposedly "better" technology.

An Aluminum engine block is much lighter than a cast Iron engine block and much easier to repair by welding, but the energy required to produce the Aluminum block is much greater than the Iron block and that is reflected in the price of the Aluminum block.  In other words, real cost ultimately boils down to energy usage and the additional cost of "the machines that make the machine".  In practice, almost nobody except NHRA teams actually repair their Aluminum block if it cracks, so overall the cast iron engine block is superior if cost is a consideration.  For marine engines, especially those operated in salt water, Aluminum simply doesn't last as long as Iron.  If everything we make is service-life limited, and in current objective reality that is most certainly the case, then the energy cost of energy will ultimately win the argument, even if the entire concept of "money" never existed.

It's pretty difficult to argue that a modern motor car is less desirable than a horse-drawn carriage, but it's also an undeniable fact that an all-steel or combination steel / Aluminum / composite motor car costs more to produce, because it requires vastly greater quantities of energy to fabricate, with or without an assembly line using specialized labor, as compared to a horse-drawn carriage.  That was SpaceNut's underlying point in the various posts he's made about "low technology".  If the constant "churn" of "newer is better" means ever-escalating energy costs, then the end result is ultimately unsustainable.

Virtually none of the "better technology" solutions we've come up with result in reduced costs, because virtually all of that new technology requires more energy, more materials, and more labor, forever and always.  The fundamental problem is that purchasing power hasn't likewise increased at an equivalent rate.  That's the real reason that most new car chassis and frames are still made from steel.  Steel is the "minimum energy" / "minimum cost" material acceptable for that use, proven durable over many years of use, provided that a modicum of care is put into preventing it from rusting.  Aluminum can be made to work.  Magnesium can be made to work.  Composites can be made to work.  However, none of those "lighter / faster / stronger" materials have ever achieved what steel has, for use as a structural material, at reduced total cost.

If we developed "electrified roads", then the total cost / real cost of motor vehicles is drastically increased by requiring a much greater mass of very expensive materials (Aluminum and Copper) that have more complex maintenance requirements, along with entirely new power plants to supply the enormous amount of power required.  Current roads are built as they are because after an initial input of energy, materials, and labor, they're usable for decades thereafter with a modicum of annual maintenance.  Here, again, we should define what we actually mean by "better".  Steel-reinforced concrete is technically "better" than asphalt in terms of durability, but it's far more expensive to repair or replace after it does inevitably fail, as compared to asphalt or "black top", which is comparatively easy to repair or replace.  Anyway, drastically increasing the cost of roads because batteries remain an abject failure for actually supplanting the capabilities of prototypical internal combustion engine powered motor vehicles is a mistake of epic proportions.

Ironically, capturing CO2 out of the air to produce new liquid hydrocarbon fuels has proven far more practical and has advanced to a far greater degree in a far shorter period of time than batteries.  That's unsurprising since chemical reactions are easier to manipulate than electrochemical reactions.  There are over 4 million miles of roads in the US, and over 64 million miles of roads globally that fit the American definition of what a road is.  Any attempt to electrify a significant proportion of these would be wildly impractical and require insane quantities of Aluminum wiring.  In short, it's a plan to spend money, with little meaningful effect.

A motor vehicle is a discrete system that is self-powered and can travel anywhere that the motor can develop sufficient torque and the tires can develop sufficient traction to take it.  An electric vehicle that requires powered roads to function simply doesn't work well enough to be practical unless virtually all of the existing roadway infrastructure is electrified.

California already looked into powering heavy duty trucks that offload cargo containers from container ships and move them to storage facilities away from the docks, a few short miles away.  These few thousand trucks would require a meaningful proportion of California's total electrical power generation infrastructure to supply the juice.  That's why the idea was scrapped.  It wasn't practical in any sense of the word, from an energy, economics, or disruption standpoint to the in-place system.

If you spend the money on roads, then the money isn't there for battery development.  If you spend the money on batteries, then the money isn't there for more efficient combustion engine development.  If you throw money at everything, then you have very diluted resource allocation that's unlikely to uncover something significant that can eventually be reduced to an engineering practice.

To the people saying, "if only we had this / that / the other or spent like drunken sailors on my pet project of choice", I say the following:

If only we had pragmatic engineering-literate people who were cognizant of the practical limitations of existing technology who focused all of their creativity on fruitful projects that don't require non-existent technology or technology that mandates massive sweeping changes and is therefore wildly impractical to actually implement, which is the precise reason why so little major advancements in power generation and storage have taken place in my lifetime.  We don't need massive sweeping changes to existing systems that fundamentally work quite well.  What we do need are actual pragmatic improvements that have knock-on effects to every other aspect of a technologically advanced society.

Louis,

Notes on my last post:
If it's not clear, I'm only considering grid-scale storage, where cost over time matters, not batteries for vehicles, despite using "vehicle type" battery form factors as a kind of "measuring tape", since those batteries are discrete tangible products with known / tested / regulated electrical properties that can be directly compared with each other to evaluate overall performance.  I think it's already pretty clear that nobody who wants to produce a competitive product will use Lead-acid batteries for directly powering vehicles of any kind.

When I was referring to Lithium-ion being superior in terms of self-discharge, I meant to suggest that it's superior in terms of energy-in (charging efficiency) vs energy-out (lost to self-discharge over time, if not used), not in the absolute sense, where LiFePO4 is about 10% per month, whereas SLA is about 2% per month.

There are certain types of Lead-acid batteries that can last up to 5 years as well, such as AGM.  These tend to be more expensive than regular SLA types, but they exist and they do work.  In the same way that Lithium-ion can last 1,000 to 2,000 cycles, if Depth-of-Discharge (DoD) is strictly limited, the same is true of Lead-acid.  If you limit an AGM type cell's DoD to 30%, it can absolutely last 1,000 cycles, same as Lithium-ion.  If you discharge either AGM or LiFePO4 to 80% on a routine basis, they will have a very short service life.  As such, how long the user wants their battery to last is largely a function of their charging and discharging habits while using their cells.  Incidentally, AGM also has the same type of sensitivity to over-charging as LiFePO4, as well as the same sensitivity to overheating.  There's a trade-off for everything.  There is also a marked difference between starter-type batteries for combustion engines and deep cycle batteries, for both Lead and Lithium.

The CSIRO Lead-acid battery / ultra-capacitor is able to fast-charge like Lithium-ion from regenerative braking, is 70% cheaper to produce than Lithium-ion, and cell life is purported to be around 12 years.  This technology was developed for Honda HEVs.

The FireFly Oasis Carbon Foam Electrode AGM-type Lead-acid batteries, have greater than 90% electrical efficiency, can operate for extended periods of time at partial states-of-charge, and can deep-cycle, just like Lithium ion.  These batteries are in very limited production here in the US and cost every bit as much as Lithium-ion.  Unsurprisingly, performance and cycle life is nearly identical to a high quality LiFePO4 unit, with the exception of weight.  These are specialty type batteries typically sold for marine applications.  Could they potentially be cheaper in mass-production?  I don't know enough about how they're made to make that determination, but it's possible.

Moving on...

An interesting aspect of battery technology that's worthy of note when it comes to storing power into perpetuity is the fact that Lithium-ion batteries are already "cheaper" than Lead-acid in terms of power stored over time, yet the purchase cost of the Lithium-ion batteries remains 2 to 3 times higher, or more, on a per-capacity-basis.  Both types of batteries are already manufactured at massive scale, with production facilities all over the world.  Since nobody has found a way to produce Lithium-ion batteries using less energy, the cost remains substantially higher than SLA or AGM.  Absent fundamentally new technology for producing the cells, this status quo will remain.  Since nobody is producing new Lithium-ion batteries using recycled Lithium-ion batteries, at least not at any significant scale, the ultimate energy cost remains unknown.  In short, it's an input energy, manufacturing process, and raw material scarcity problem.

The cost to use the SLA technology is $0.155 on a per-day basis.  The cost to use the LiFePO4 technology is $0.299 on a per-day basis.  If we determine the true cost of using SLA over the same lifespan that the longer-lived Lithium-ion is capable of, then it's $0.285, which means the true cost of using legacy Lead-acid battery technology is little different than what Lithium-ion currently provides, with the only actual difference being the weight of the cell, which matters for vehicles that are entirely battery powered, but is not significant for combustion engine powered vehicles.  If both types are limited to 30% DoD, then Lead-acid is already the clear winner on cost, yet we don't see Lead-acid pervasively used for grid scale storage, due to cost.  You either spend more up-front for the LiFePO4 battery or about the same amount for SLA over 5.5 years if you deep-cycle both types (which will kill both types long before their stated cycle lives are achieved).  Either way, LiFePO4 still requires 1/3rd more energy to produce, assuming both are inappropriately sized to not limit DoD to 30%.  If both are appropriately sized for 30% DoD, then LiFePO4 is triple the cost.  Even if the marginal cost of energy is zero, which is impossible to sustain in the real world because it means the energy companies are producing power that they have to dump into the ground because there's no customer willing to pay for it, then LiFEPO4 is still more expensive to manufacture (in terms of energy)... by a lot.

It's almost as if basic physics has a science lesson in there somewhere, for anyone who is willing to learn.

Tropical Storm Could Develop in the Gulf of Mexico Next Week and Track Toward Texas or Louisiana

Some locations in southern Mexico have already received more than 8 inches of rain.