Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

Void · 2023-01-21 06:14:34

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ex … &FORM=VIRE

Quote: "Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar
YouTube22K views21 hours agoby DW Planet A".

Don't misunderstand me. My interest is in how our path forward is meddled with by pressure groups. No different than how some agencies which are supposed to be politically neutral, in fact try to falsify reality, so that "We The People" have trouble steering things in the right direction.

For me the truth per wind and solar is so far as he said, she said.

Two things I do believe is that wind and solar devices will be likely to get better and better. As for recycle, I am of the opinion that that skill will improve over time.

Having said that, you probably know that I am not anti-Shale at all.

I also think that we do have global warming, but that may have kept us out of an ice age, so I am not very against burning thinks, however, I am very for new energy sources, including wind and solar.

I am of the opinion that there are a lot of people who would rather own reality than to make it better. So, in their opinion they do not hope to "Win" by doing better things but want to maintain control by stopping change.

And so, my reason for this post again is to develop methods to understand what is true, when we know for sure that many governing bodies are not serving but exploiting the people. Farming them if you like.

My definition of government is likely different than yours. I am not talking so much about here in the USA, the three branches of government which are elected. Although they are likely not perfect.

But much of our government is not from elected people, and not even from people appointed by government representatives.

If we are governed in any fashion, it then is a form of government. And so, falsehoods are a form of government. Probably impossible to stop all of it. But again, that need is to understand who is manipulating reality and why.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-01-21 06:28:50)

SpaceNut · 2023-01-21 09:25:13

From my own sites review its coming down to people not understanding how this function a very blurred statements of capability under a perfect input condition scenario that is far from the truth.

Such as my own solar to weather giving me only 8 to 10 day s of clear sky conditions with 10 partly cloudy with the remaining 50% of the month sub capable of only a trickle of power from a large array. Instead of getting full power for the 4 weeks with 1 wk at 100%, 1 wk at 50% and 2 wk at maybe 25% at best which is nowhere close to 4wk's at 100%.

off to do research on wind weather speeds but if what I have seen holds true in wind, they tend to be almost the opposite for power production in that when its sunny you get next to nothing while during partly cloudy to even higher levels you will get more wind.

edit update

these indicate wind speed or flow direction but are not altitude sensitive.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/new-h … /wind-flow

this one does give off to the side mount Washington for its speed.
https://wind.willyweather.com/nh.html

https://www.weather.gov/gyx/WindSpeedAndDirection

Void · 2023-01-21 12:12:30

It is nice that you and I can be approximately the same on the subject, it seems.

One thing that I feel is true is that there is value in China lowballing the price on solar panels. Yes it is true that they likely burn coal to make the panels, and it is also true that they use their labor. But if people buy panels to have on their houses in many cases, it is like having a 30 year tank of fuel. That could help to stabilize society in the event of energy disruptions.

While you might only have 10% of your normal energy, the last 10% is much more valuable than the top energy use 10%.

One working light is better than no working lights.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-01-21 12:15:09)

kbd512 · 2023-01-21 21:08:00

Void,

I'm all for using energy systems that are actually sustainable. Turning the planet into a giant strip mine and lakes of toxic chemicals to merely try (and fail) to deploy a single generation of photovoltaics and wind turbines and batteries to supplant fossil fuels is not sustainable at all, and will, in point of fact, completely alter the natural environment in ways that we don't have any realistic solutions to "undo". Burning through coal and natural gas reserves at a break-neck rate, in order to fill the world with even more non-recyclable plastics and electronics and battery waste, is also not the least bit sustainable.

Electricity looks like a great solution to every problem until you see the endless list of concessions made to using electricity for everything. It's an entropy problem. You're talking about energy systems that are at least 10X and sometimes 100X less materials-efficient, and cobbling together a workable energy generating solution out of that. Reordering or "undoing entropy" requires a great deal of energy input. You're talking about mining materials from the ground and turning them into useful energy-producing machines, except that both technologies don't produce energy 50% of the time, and batteries are round about 100X less energy dense than chemical reactions involving Oxygen and Hydrogen and/or Carbon. It's real easy to toss a bar of steel into the ocean and watch it turn back into Iron Oxide. It's nowhere near as easy to turn that Iron Oxide back into steel. That's also why we shouldn't be tossing steel into the ocean, but that's a different topic.

The current wind and photovoltaic technology doesn't work at all as reliable baseload on-demand power, which is what every single technologically advanced group of humans requires to remain fed / clothed / housed / educated / above "room temperature" in the winter, yet some people who are not actually very rational thinkers are having a really difficult time accepting that their favored "magic wand" solution is not viable. Basically, people like me told them that their baby is ugly. They can't accept that because of ideology and the endless stream of Soviet-style propaganda that's been fed into their soft heads by people who are salivating over their chance to make a buck off of their ignorance about energy and basic physics.

Why is there no Soviet propaganda about "big solar" or "big wind"?

How long before the same louts who are cheerleading for this "green energy", essentially returning to a time before industrialization even though almost none of the cheerleaders are intelligent enough to know that that is precisely where their ideology is taking them, are the very same ones rioting because they can't afford what they "democratically voted for"?

I can't help but notice that almost none of the Democrats I know have solar panels on their roofs or drive electric cars. They constantly blather to me about "green energy", but apparently none of them have actually bought into what they're advocating for. Funny that. It's like they go from dumb idea to dumb idea, that they always expect someone else to pay for. They're like having Doctor Kevorkian working on you in the OR, when you really want to live. I'm okay with them being dumb, but not okay with them ever having even the slightest bit of control over where my energy comes from or any other aspect of my life. They can all "democratically vote" to jump off cliffs for all I care, but I'm sure as hell not following them over the edge. Going just a bit further, I'm not onboard with anyone else's ideology but my own. They should feel the exact same way about my ideology. If they don't, then I question their sanity. I know what's best for me. They don't, and they never will know what's best for me.

Michael Moore pointed out what our "green energizers" were actually doing and our green clowns had a literal $h!+ fit over one of their own cheerleaders because he made one lousy video showing what the "green energy" companies were actually doing. Okay, to be completely fair to Michael Moore, all of his videos are as lousy as his politics and sophomoric ideology, but he's a Democrat so that can't be helped. To wit, the companies making these magical photovoltaics / wind turbines / batteries, are burning a bunch of stuff in the dirtiest way possible. Since they all agreed to sell the lie to the gullible hordes of mindless lemmings who can't wait to jump off the first cliff they run across in the game of life, they continue doing what we've always done, while calling it "green energy". The only thing "green" about it is the color of money squandered on the infantile assertion that whatever it is that they're selling, is equivalent to "saving the planet". Saving it for who and for what purpose, and will anyone be left afterwards to witness this "saved planet" achievement?

When you take off your rose-colored glasses, all energy solutions appear to have serious problems with them. The fact that one is newer or more faddish than the next, is not a mark in its favor. In point of fact, it probably creates even more problems than what it replaced. The fact that the problems are newer does not make them better. The only real difference is in whether or not those problems are more or less solvable. All the problems with photovoltaics and wind turbines, thus far, are not solvable. There are no solar panels that make power at night, nor wind turbines that generate power when the wind doesn't blow. Hooking them up to the grid was pure genius, assuming the end goal was to crash the grid. Otherwise, it's dumber than the day is long. The older I get, the longer that day becomes.

I know what can be done using steel, concrete, some catalysts, Hydrogen, and CO2. It's rather simple organic chemistry. Carbon is a major part of "the natural world", and an element essential to all life as we know it. Without elemental Carbon and Carbon Dioxide, there is no life. Anyway, all of those things are both long lasting and readily recyclable using existing technology. It's very near to "caveman technology". More importantly, they actually do get recycled with boring regularity, at a global scale. None of this new techno-nonsense is recycled to any significant degree, because it would cost even more energy to do that than it does to make a new "magic widget" using freshly extracted materials.

It's also not "merely likely" that China burns coal to make photovoltaics, it's empirical visually verifiable hard fact. The Chinsese DO burn coal to make photovoltaics. Period. The rest of the plants use natural gas. The Chinese supply nearly all of the mass-produced photovoltaics. All the rest of the companies make "artisanal" or "bespoke" products. When that coal is gone, the "affordable" photovoltaic panel production goes with it.

And no, putting photovoltaics on your roof is not like "having a 30 yer tank of fuel". It's more like, having immediately and up-front burned through 5 years of coal consumption to make the panels, and then you'll burn through another 7 to 10 years if you're serious about completely recycling them. Beyond that, it's also like having paid, up-front, a significant percentage of the total purchase price of your house, for a paltry amount of electricity. Furthermore, gasoline is usable, on-demand, unlike electricity generated from photovoltaics, unless you also purchase a set of very expensive batteries to store that electricity in, using expensive and hard-to-get electronics to regulate any generated or stored power. Without all those "other things", they cease to be useful. All that said, I'm still willing to put up with it, so long as it works at all. If it fails to do that, the way that nearly 100% of those solar powered "yard lights" fail within about a year or two, then it's a waste of time and money.

The numerous large solar panels on my roof do two things. First, they allow me to pay a fixed rate for power every month. Why? The governments and corporations conspired to run a scam on consumers to increase the cost of their electricity using a bunch of fees so they don't have to call it a "massive rate hike", which is precisely what "it" is. You pay an absurd amount of money for something that can run your refrigerator and a handful of lights, hopefully until the next sunrise. In our case, we needed 2 Tesla Power Walls to do that- and no, we don't have Nancy Pelosi's refrigerator. We bought ours at Sears, and it was an "Energy Star" model. 76 panels, each the size of a giant flat screen TV, don't run anything else in our house outside of the kitchen, because they can't. The completely non-repairable electronics in 18 of the 76 panels failed within their first year of operation. Unless the solar power company repaired them in the dark of night, then a year later they still haven't been fixed. Last I heard, they can't get the parts from China, which is where they all come from. They can't run the heating or cooling systems for a single minute, now or ever. If we truly had zero grid power, then we go back to pre-industrial life with the exception of being able to see in the kitchen at night. Second, they make it easier / cheaper for the grid operators to keep a specific number of gas turbines spinning 24/7/365. This has only ever been about making someone (the people making this equipment, obviously) a lot of money. They don't care about you, the planet, your dog, or "green energy". They never did. It's called "marketing". There are these people called "marketers" whose sole job is to try to get people to buy things. They will appeal to anything if it means they get your money. I went to college for computer science, but if I took courses in marketing, then I'm pretty sure that principle would've been taught there.

Rather than getting completely shafted because of this obvious scam, I receive a minor benefit in the form of paying a single fixed-rate for electricity, that is approximately double what I paid for electricity before said scam was in effect. It's another one of those "think and grow rich" schticks. The problem was apparent when the government became involved in the scam. Getting people to pay more for the same energy was pure genius, but it doesn't help the people using the energy, because it was never intended to.

Yes, having one working light is better than having no working lights, but if you need ten working lights to accomplish something worth doing, then having one working light doesn't really help you, now does it?

Some is better than none unless the "some" involves maintaining your quality of life, pre-B.S. ("Before Scam"). Working every day to merely pay sizable chunks of your income over to a photovoltaics company is no better than paying it over to an oil company. You're no better off at the end of the day, except maybe in your head. The only difference with the oil companies is that not one wind turbine (the kind hooked to electric grids, not the kind that Don Quixote was going after) or photovoltaic panel or battery in the entire world would ever exist without coal, oil, and gas. They wouldn't have been made and they wouldn't have been transported anywhere without coal, oil, and gas. To this day, that remains every bit as true now as it was when we first started the industrial revolution. We had wind turbines in the Middle Ages.

From the time I was born until now, average quality of life, as defined by relative cost of living, has only gone down. The "green energy" scam / fraud (it's a massive fraud, since none of the photovoltaics or wind turbines are made from "green energy"- don't get high on your own supply, I suppose) has only accelerated that process. 20+ years ago when I was a 20-something, the $367 I pay every month for the privilege of having enough electricity, which I also had 20 years ago at a mere fraction of the price, was approximately equal to what I paid to live in an apartment. It wasn't the world's nicest apartment, nor located in the world's best neighborhood, but it was also quite livable and affordable.

So, yeah, having any power is better than none at all, but when even that becomes impossible for the average person because you've priced them out of the new "green energy" scam entirely, then you have violent revolutions. The constant knock-down, drag-out riots over gasoline prices in France are rather tame compared to what will happen when there's no more food or beer or jobs to be had, because there's no spare energy left to make anything. Unfortunately for our green ideologues, many of those people will remember what life was like when they were using reliable energy.

California and Germany can't keep the lights on right now. What's it going to be like in another 10 years when everyone is forced to drive an electric car, roughly quadrupling electricity consumption per household, in a state being run by people who can't figure out how forest fires work?

Ultimately, to get electricity for their computerized gadgets they'll burn coal and wood somewhere nobody is looking and call that "green energy". Oh wait, they're already doing that in Germany. So, I guess everyone already knows where this is going since we've already come full-circle. We'll revert back to using the dirtiest forms of energy. If you think any of these spoiled brats with their heads buried in their dumb phones are going to live the way we did on the family farm, you're so far out into left field that you're no longer on the map. Take their entertainment gadgets away and watch how fast the world changes.

If Germany hadn't squandered so much money and energy and intellectual effort over the past 20 years on their "Energiewende" idiocy, they could already be using reliable and clean nuclear power. Whether or not Russia ever had any oil and gas to sell would be irrelevant to Europe. Think of where we could be by now if we lived in a world where demonstrated results actually mattered.

It's been 50 years since photovoltaics and wind turbines became commercially available. They had their chance to do whatever they could do, much like nuclear power. As always, old reliable oil and gas have done the serious work of keeping the lights on, the people fed, and the kettle warm. You'd think some of the people who have benefited so greatly could learn enough humility to say "thank you". Sadly, familiarity breeds contempt rather than gratitude. All we need to do is come them with solar thermal power, and all of humanity could afford to live a life of modest luxury until the Sun finally incinerates the Earth in another couple billion years.

Since everyone is selling something, in closing I feel it only right that I should be completely transparent. The only idea or concept that I'm selling is the notion that the absolute best way to use unreliable or intermittent energy is to immediately transform it into reliable energy. Hydrocarbon fuel is reliable, controllable, storable, power-dense, on-demand energy that people with near-zero formal education have all figured out how to use to drastically improve their lives in every imaginable way.

The only concept a lot of us are still missing is the notion that eventually we have to start recycling CO2 back into storable hydrocarbon fuel, using power from the Sun, the energy source that ultimately created everything you see around you. The Earth itself created hydrocarbon fuel for all of our giant space rock worshippers. You can't "save the space rock" until you save yourselves. You're a lot more powerful as technologically advanced, rather than pre-industrialized, space rock worshippers. In the world before industrialization, Greta wouldn't have lived long enough to become an icon of idiocy. In the world that existed before the never-ending now, if you threw a can of soup on one of the King's paintings, he'd have your head mounted on a stick by the following sunrise and your corpse would be fed to the dogs. In the world of abundance that came with hydrocarbon energy, we can now afford to put those people in jail while the rest of society pays for their food and clothing. Call me crazy, but I think allowing some dumb child with a dumb ideology to live long enough to learn from their mistakes is infinitely preferable to having their head on a stick. In a world of abundance, society places as much value on the life of someone who is mentally disabled (like Greta or the kids who throw soup on their own history) as we do on rocket scientists and neurosurgeons. In fact, we only have neurosurgeons because those people don't need to worry about where their next meal is coming from.

If you like being housed / clothed / fed / educated to the point that you actually care about "saving the planet", then you have a choice to make. You can keep ramming your head into the wall of basic math and physics that are arrayed against the concept of turning our energy generating systems into a giant computer game, in vain hopes that the wall will give way, or you can stop before you become a head injury case, instead deciding to elevate pragmatism and results over ideology. Unlike computer games, unfortunately there's no "reset button" for this game. The game will continue, though, with or without you. I can't speak for anyone else, but I much prefer being "in the game".

SpaceNut · 2023-01-21 21:37:09

I am sort of sad that the panels installed were so crappy and have not been fixed. I am assuming that they are all poor workmanship caused failures rather than heat caused.

Myself I would have had panels but after doing my homework for the site of placement it would have been foolish since to get enough power for the same setup that you have, I would need to build a platform 50 ft in the air for them to set on to get enough sun light. Not to mention that excess from summer would need to be banked for winter. That system is already out of reach without a major loan as it is.

I still have not found a cost-effective means for power as the price of what is delivered is still rising from those oil and gas supplies that the electric company is using.

Still looking for wind data that will tell me it's also not going to be worth it until I get above the trees on the property.

kbd512 · 2023-01-22 06:06:10

SpaceNut,

You still don't get it. It's obvious that you don't.

All the photovoltaic panels are A-OK and F-I-N-E. They're producing nominal voltage and current, just as they were designed to do. However, the electronics that regulate the voltage and current back into the batteries and the grid are D-E-A-D! They were "kaput" in under a year, and the company doesn't even know why they failed because they lack the expensive tools to run diagnostics tests on them. It's not an issue with whether or not photovoltaics work. Photovoltaics do work. If you fling enough photons at them, and Texas Sun will do that on the regular, then they generate electricity. It's purely a question of how long absolutely everything else that must be connected to them continues to function. 100% of the control system is electronic and computerized / software-controlled. That's the "unreliable part" of photovoltaic and wind turbine and battery power systems. All such systems are chock-full of gadgetry because they wouldn't be usable without them.

I'm not upset with the installation company for not having access to their supply. That's what happens when you "globalize" a supply chain. At any moment, a political change, a war, a global pandemic, or a ship sinking can functionally eliminate access to your suppliers. What's the solar company supposed to do if their resupply ship runs aground? That's why it was always a dumb and temporary "get rich quick" solution. People with little to no concept of strategic planning were allowed to make policy decisions with strategic implications. Whenever you have ideologically or monetarily motivated people making general policy decisions, they do things that only make sense from their myopic view of the world.

Closing down our steel mills was unforgivably stupid, for example. All other countries protect their bedrock industries, but for some reason we think we don't need to. The stuff you need to make homes, schools, roads, bridges, power plants, and farm the soil- all that stuff is rather important. Relying on another country to provide it when you don't have to is a mistake. Now we "know that", until the next group of "get rich quick" clowns "forgets it". The supply chain for wind and solar is farmed out all over the planet. There's never been any practical way to assure access to most of it. Are we gonna start a war with Ukraine or Russia because they're not providing the neon necessary to make the chips? Oh, wait, we already did that and a lot of neon production is already off-line. Oops...

All digital computer systems tend to function flawlessly, right up until the instant that they cease to function at any level. All modern motor vehicles use these systems to function as they do, irrespective of what power them. The electronics are marvelous when they're working. They require almost no maintenance because they're completely sealed and provide exceptionally accurate control until they fail, but they're also virtually unrepairable at any reasonable cost. The on-panel power inverters for each of my panels are an example of this. They're completely sealed and the company uses a hydraulic press to seal and separate the plastic shells that house the electronics. The solar company showed one to me. It's a substantial unit, possibly better protected than the ECU inside a car. You can't take an electronic fuel injector apart, because if you could then it would leak and start a fire. To recycle one, you're talking about cutting or melting away all the plastic, probably by burning it or shredding it or using exceptionally toxic chemicals, and then you get to separate the steel and Copper and Iron comprising the injector throat and solenoid.

To do the same thing with a computer-regulated Lithium-ion battery that weighs as much as a pair of cast Iron Big Block Chevy V8 engines, you're talking about a very complex disassembly job that removes a mish-mash of sealant adhesives and other protective foam / plastics, you have to cut the ends off each individual battery after removing their welded-on electrical connections, you'd "unroll" the "jelly roll" inside each cell, and then you have a layer cake of inter-mixed chemicals that require energy-intensive processes to separate out.

The steel battery casings are directly recyclable. The plastics can be burned or converted back into oil. The Lithium Iron Phosphate and Graphite and other materials comprising the functional parts of the battery are not so easy to turn back into the chemical constituents required to make the next battery. In practice, we flip the bird to that entire delicate disassembly process and toss the batteries into a shredder. That saves a bunch of labor and associated cost, but then you have the problem of separating out all the metals and chemicals.

How you would effectively recycle the smorgasbord of hard-to-come-by materials mixed into all the electronics is beyond my understanding. In any given device, the quantity of rare materials is pretty small. In aggregate, it's a huge number. I know it's technically possible to do it, but in practice you recover the Gold / Silver / Lead / Copper, shredding and burning the rest. That is clearly not something we're going to do at a global scale. We're going to generate literal mountains of electronic waste, far higher than the ones we have now.

The mechanical devices are recyclable or repairable. The electrical devices are recyclable or repairable. The electro-mechanical devices are at least recyclable. The electronic devices are functionally non-repairable and non-recyclable for any reasonable cost. We made them that way by demanding ever-greater levels of performance from them, and they've delivered on the computing power side of the house. That much is indisputable. AS far a recycling is concerned, we mostly don't do it. That's why we have toxic water in other countries. If they eventually, as they should, refuse to accept the mountains of toxic waste being generated, then the mountains will pile up in the first-world countries until the public is finally fed-up with the idea and public support for "green energy" evaporates entirely.

I remain hopeful that one day we'll have much better electronics, but today is not that day. Until said day arrives, I think the best solution is to curb the insane over-consumption of electronics and insertion of electronics into devices that they don't need to be inserted in. A toaster doesn't need and shouldn't have any electronics in it. The toaster doesn't need to be a dollar or two cheaper by substituting plastics for steel, either.

The "Iron Age" may appear superficially inefficient to those who view history through a myopic lens of "what came before" somehow being backwards / inefficient / anachronistic, but it wasn't. People valued things that would stand the test of time, because they had so much less wealth than we enjoy today. Another century from now, a cast Iron Ford Model T engine that was painted so it wouldn't rust, will still be a functional engine. There won't be any functional computers made using today's microchips, that are still functional. The universe is very "unkind" to electronics.

Motor Trend - The 25 MPG Model T: Why havent we done better? - by Angus MacKenzie - April 4th, 2008

From the article:

I heard this again on the news the other day: The original Model T Ford, launched 100 years ago, got 25 mpg. Since then we've split the atom, put a man on the moon, and invented spray-on cheese. All these technological advances, and yet the average gas mileage of our car fleet today is barely 21 mpg. Clearly the auto industry is ripping us off, most likely in cahoots with Big Oil.
The whole 25-mpg Model T story started with an ad devised by the Sierra Club to embarrass Ford during its centennial celebrations in 2003, which unfavorably contrasted the 16-mpg Explorer with Henry's flivver. Never mind Ford's own Web site claims the Model T got 13-21 mpg (but of course, say the conspiracy theorists) the Sierra Club's 25-mpg number is now accepted as fact by credulous media outlets.
The Sierra Club didn't explain exactly how it arrived at 25 mpg for the Model T, but no matter. The comparison with modern cars is nonsensical anyway.
The 1908 Model T was powered by a 2.9-liter four-cylinder engine that developed 20 hp. It weighed about 1200 lb, and could probably hit 45 mph with a good following wind. Even if it did get 25 mpg, next to anything Ford sells today it was also crudely made, terrifyingly unsafe, and a gross polluter. It didn't even have air-conditioning, a CD player, or cupholders. But hey, let's not let the facts get in the way of a good ad.
So the 25-mpg Model T scenario is now regularly trotted out by unthinking media and eco-bloggers as evidence of the auto industry's shameful foot-dragging on gas mileage and global warming. Oh, really?
Almost 10 years ago, Volkswagen offered a high-efficiency version of its Lupo city car that made the Sierra Club's poster car, the Toyota Prius, look like a gas-guzzler. The Lupo 3L was powered by a 1.2-liter three-cylinder turbocharged, direct-injection diesel engine that developed 61 hp. Extensive use of lightweight metals such as aluminum and magnesium for the doors, hood, rear hatch, seat frames, suspension, etc., kept weight to just 1830 lb, about 1000 lb less than a Golf.
The Lupo 3L had a five-speed DSG transmission, an automatic stop/start function that meant the engine did not idle uselessly at traffic lights, and low rolling resistance tires to reduce friction. It had airbags, anti-lock brakes and stability control. It could reach 102 mph. This was state of the automotive engineering art, a real-world car that met real-world safety and reliability standards, and delivered a real-world 78 mpg. And it tanked. Only 28,000 were sold in six years.
Why? Good question. Perhaps it was because the Lupo 3L was slow in traffic, its economy-optimized transmission was clunky, the seats hard, and the low rolling resistance tires noisy. It had no air-conditioning and no power steering (they were optional, but if you ordered them, your 78-mpg went south). Oh, and it cost about 30 percent more than a regular Lupo.
VW's ultra-efficiency car proved winning the fuel-efficiency game is all about compromises and trade-offs and expensive technologies, a point far too many commentators fail to understand. I'm astounded at the folks who recoiled in shock when Bob Lutz said the Chevy Volt would likely cost $48,000 (I think GM will actually sell it for less). GM is developing a whole new powertrain architecture, and the cost is being loaded onto one vehicle. That's why it's expensive. Toyota lost money on the first-generation Prius for exactly the same reason.
So maybe we ought to forget the spurious comparisons with the Model T and the simplistic finger pointing. Maybe the real question to be asked here is not why the auto industry won't build ultra-efficient vehicles, but why -- so far -- consumers don't seem interested in buying them.

I have to ask that same question of all my Democrat / liberal friends who pretend they care about the environment and poor people. I don't see many of them rolling around in a Prius. They drive minivans or trucks or SUVs like pretty much everyone else here. Are the Lupo 3L or Prius the sorts the cars intended for all those icky "poor people" that they pretend to love, until you talk to them, whereupon their utter disdain for the "little people" really shines through? I see a lot more people in California driving more fuel efficient cars, but that's because California intentionally doubles the price of gasoline to keep the poor people poor enough to require government "wealth redistribution". Otherwise how are they gonna control a bunch of people they routinely patronize or outright piss all over?

I'm sick of this "more fake than 3 dollar bills" style of environmentalism. We had commercially available VW cars that would actually achieve 78mpg way back in 1998, when I was only 18 years old and not driving anywhere because I was in the Navy. For those who don't know, the Navy is filled with "true believers" in ye olde concept of "people power". Absolutely anything that could be hand-carried using enough people, was actually moved that way. You need to lift a Mk82? Get four guys with steel bars on either side of that thing and up it goes to the wing of your squadron's jet. The 5th man, or woman, will pin it to the pylon. For those who are unaware, a Mk82 is a 500 pound bomb, although it actually weighs a bit more than that.

Almost none of our fake environmentalists bought any of these fuel efficient cars when they were offered. That's the real reason why the automotive industry ceased to offer them. They couldn't make any money off of expensive vehicles that nobody was buying. If these same people can afford to own a Tesla, then lack of money was clearly not a reason that holds water. It certainly had nothing to do with "big oil" or other similarly tired and plainly false conspiracy theories of the left. The real miracle is how "big oil" has managed to maintain current production levels despite all input funding being slashed by 2/3rds from what it was in the 2010s. Using 1/3rd as many dollars, humanity still receives an energy benefit wildly in excess of all the energy provided by wind and solar panels, day in and day out.

Ford also offered the Pinto in the late 1970s. That was a "real car" (4 seats) that could get 38mpg on the highway, despite its curb weight of 2,558lbs, using a 92hp carbureted gasoline engine. The Pinto should've been an environmentalist's dream since it had a nasty habit of bursting into flames when struck from behind. At that point, you don't have to worry about its owner consuming more gasoline because they've been burnt to a crisp. The misnamed Sierra Club member (who knows, maybe his mother had a really twisted sense of humor), "Amory Lovins", thought nuclear power accidents were a good feature because he and his fellow anti-humanists thought such accidents could potentially kill a lot of people. In practice, apart from the Chernobyl accident involving a reactor with no primary containment building, nobody else died as a result of nuclear power accidents. That must've been a real let-down for them. The Soviets, in their never-ending quest for "cheapness", finally produced a reactor design that was modestly capable of doing something vaguely equivalent to what the anti-nuclear clowns thought nuclear power would do (somehow melting a hole through Earth's already molten core and somehow winding up in China. Louis trotted out that nonsense as an argument against using nuclear power on Mars.

Even Chernobyl's fatal flaw would've remained "undiscovered" to this day, had the plant director followed the "clear as day" instructions printed in his manual, with regard to something he should have never done, with respect to monkeying with the reactor's power settings. His reckless behavior was kinda like lighting up a flamethrower while running through an explosives manufacturing plant with another rocket scientist throwing buckets of gasoline up into the air for good measure. You can still choose to do something that dumb if you're absolutely determined to win Darwin Award of the Year, but the chances of you paying the ultimate price for your stupid stunt are awfully high.

What should the takeaway from this be?

Stop trying to over-complicate things that don't need to be so ridiculously complex. A car is not a Space Shuttle. If it starts to look like a Space Shuttle in terms of complexity, then the engineering team is trying to solve a problem that isn't solvable in any practical way. That's how you end up with a Space Shuttle in your driveway when there should be a car sitting there.

Void · 2023-01-22 11:50:53

You have made some interesting points. A simplified car might be a good idea. Maybe if it was built for people who do not feel the need to put on a show. The less wealthy, the retired, kids not yet ready to have a family. Perhaps as a 2nd car, for those who do also want a "Rich" car.

It does seem to me that nuclear fission to fuels might be a good notion, as some places would tolerate it better than others, so it could have a place to be. Not California though, I am sure. They are busy being more intelligent, pretty, important than the rest of us.

I think that plastics are not going to need to continue to be a problem. They can be handled. It just requires that you don't participate directly or indirectly in dumping them into the environment. We can't fault apes if they dump on the ground, but humans are supposed to be more hygienic than that.

Now, some of the he said, she said stuff about solar: "Do Solar Panels Use More Energy to Manufacture than They Actually Produce?"

General Response: https://www.bing.com/search?q=Do+Solar+ … 4edbf96e57

Specific Response: https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-p … y-produce/

This does not include the cost of disposal.

If I interpret the numbers, I think worst case is 4 to 20. So you get 5 times as much energy than the production energy.

Best case, seems to be 1 to 25. And I am sure climate matters a lot.

OK, it does seem that disposal is a big problem, but one which could be improved on: https://www.discovermagazine.com/enviro … ean-energy

And I will leave it at that. New tech needed, Like plastic the temptation do dispose of them improperly is a wrong thing to tolerate.

Now, more back to my original post.

As an example, Australia. No doubt a best case for solar. If China wants to produce solar panels and do a price war on the rest of the world's producers, I am sure Australia will see its advantage.

So, to modify my specs, the Australians would have bought themselves at a discount the equivalent of a 20-25 year power source.

Now the issue of the control systems which can apparently go bad, I guess they would be stupid if they did not provide a fix for that. But my point was that in a world disruption they may have a distributed power source, making it very hard for an enemy to destroy. (Provided they could have adequate repair capabilities.

In truth that was a great deal of what my original post was about. Not what would be the right thing to happen, but what may be the likely thing to happen.

That and how we should not be easy pushovers, for social power entities who are not elected or even strongly associated with elected people.

But we can talk your points as well.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-01-22 12:14:21)

SpaceNut · 2023-01-22 15:32:53

Sounds like KBD512 that you have panels that fall into 3 categories with the fourth being the company.
Workmanship not done to a quality level.
A bad design that allows for an electrical over stress causing the breakdown of the circuits.
Improper handling and connecting as that is ESD or electrostatic damage from charge discharge into the sensitive circuits that has fried them.

I know these all too well as I did manufacture of electrical, electronic circuit boards and more to design levels for quality analysis.

Last a fly by night company that has no clue to keep customers when product become defective since these should be carefree for at minimum a decade.

Here is that latest gimmick to tell the public that solar panels can generate power during the night.
It's not until you find out that it's a device attached to the back of the panel that you find the truth.

These remarkable new solar panels can even generate electricity at night — here’s how they work

By installing a thermoelectric generator onto the panels, that temperature difference can be harnessed to produce electricity.
The solar panels radiate heat toward outer space at night, and this creates a difference in temperature between the panels and the air. The research, published in the journal Applied Physics Letters in April of 2022, found that through the process of “radiative cooling,” existing commercial solar panels could be modified to generate power even in the dark of night.
While the modified solar panels didn’t create a large amount of electricity, — a small fraction of what is yielded during daylight — there could still be immense applications for this technology in the future.

kbd512 · 2023-01-23 08:49:53

Void,

On the go-forward with far fewer people due to population collapse, a simplified car will be a requirement. The primary issue with the incredibly fuel efficient cars is that almost none of our pseudo-environmentalists bought any of them. They met modern safety and emissions standards, they were produced by VW- which the hippy dippy do crowd from the 1970s was absolutely in love with, they would fly down the road at over 100mph, but almost nobody wanted to actually buy them.

Big Oil and Big Auto did everything humanly possible to create more fuel efficient cars, they've poured tens of billions of dollars and countless man-hours into designing and making them, and Big Auto tried mightily to market them to the general public, but then when they absolutely delivered on their promise to "do much better", Big Consumer (the people whining and pissing and moaning about Big Oil and Big Auto) outright rejected them, full stop. 28,000 cars over 6 years. Continental and Lycoming made more light aircraft engines per year than that, even during the darkest recession years, and all of them cost more than VW's "Wunder Car"- just for the stupid engine, not the aircraft it's attached to.

Fake environmentalists should stop complaining about someone not making cars that none of them are actually buying. People want gigantic SUVs and pickup trucks powered by V8 engines. Numbers don't lie. People overwhelmingly buy giant SUVs or pickup trucks with V8s, because that's what they clearly want to drive, if they have the option to do so. Even at that, Ford / General Motors / Chrysler are somehow delivering 24mpg in trucks that make as much horsepower as a semi-truck. A Corvette with a 650hp V8 doing 75mph on a highway, somehow emits less CO2 per mile traveled, than one single horse galloping at 40mph (which it cannot do for very long)- but people are still whining about that. The emissions number will never be zero, but it's already pretty spectacularly low. When a horse emits more CO2 than an engine with more horsepower than a semi-truck, you should recognize and accept that we're at the top of our game.

Of the tens of millions of potential buyers, there were only 28,000 "real" environmentalists who put their money where their mouth was, and thought their next car should be drastically more fuel efficient than the last one they bought. 78mpg means that the battery powered cars of the 1990s were functionally never better than combustion engine vehicles for the environment, and if that 117mpg engine / car combo which Calliban posted about is real and can be mass-produced, then it means all EVs are functionally NEVER better for the environment.

A YouTuber named "Luke" who goes by the YouTube handle "Thunderhead289", proved he could get 42mpg on the highway driving a 1974 Ford Maverick with a Ford 302 V8, using a 3D-printed PET plastic intake manifold adapter and a lawn mower carburetor on the intake instead of the usual 4-barrel. The engine was dyno'd using a mobile chassis dyno during Power Tour and was clearly down on horsepower as compared to the normal 4 barrel carb, but it would also go 75mph all the way through Power Tour (annual hot rot / muscle car event held here in the US). So, using tech that existed back when I was growing up, we could already achieve 40mpg+ in a 3,000lb car. A 3D printer is not necessary to cast an intake flange adapter in Aluminum or from injection molded plastic, which was quite common in cars, even back in the early to mid 1980s.

Will It Run? Lawn Mower Carb on V8! (The "IMPOSSIBLE" Becomes Reality!) Start to Finish

He ran that carb throughout Power Tour, over 1,000 miles of real world driving. He has an entire video series on all the issues he encountered along the way, as well as fixes for them. He records his total fuel consumption and thus gas mileage as well. If he had access to a pressure carb that meters fuel off of pressure rather than volume, I would have no problem believing that his Maverick's lawn mower carb'd 302 could get 50mpg on the highway. That's in a "real car" with a V8 engine and 2,909lb curb weight. To be perfectly clear, he is using modern electronics to tell him how to tune his lawn mower carb so it doesn't run too rich (that sort of tech didn't exist for a consumer back when I grew up, but the "Big Three" certainly had that tech within their engineering departments), but it's "running" by siphoning off air (vacuum leak) to make the lawn mower carb run properly on a V8.

So, he's running a car that aerodynamically resembles a city bus, as compared to any modern pickup truck, the Maverick's chassis is twisted and damaged severely enough to crack his windshield, and he performed the front-end wheel alignment using a string, but the thing gets 42mpg, right out of the gate. Using a string is an older method that gets close enough to drive without doing too much damage to the tires, but is definitely not a good replacement for modern electronic wheel alignment in a well-equipped garage like a Firestone or Michelin service center.

Imagine what this guy could do if he had the money to buy and retrofit a modern Mustang with his 1970s 302.

Ford's engineers, in the 1970s, designed the Pinto with a I4 and then a V6 engine, IIRC. Curb weight was 400lbs less than the Maverick, but he can equal and exceed the gas mileage of the 2-seat Chevy Chevette that weighs 1,931lbs (1,000lbs less than his Maverick) and is equipped with an I4 engine with 1/3rd the displacement of Ford's 302 V8.

1976 Ford Pinto advertisement:

Ford%20usa%201976%20Pinto_Pony.jpg

Some redneck named "Luke", using a 3D printer and lawn mower carb, who came from a trailer park by his own admission, bested Ford and Chevy's entire engineering departments on fuel economy (even though that was never the point because it was originally a gag done for funsies) using a lawn mover carb attached to a V8 with triple the displacement of the engines they were messing around with. Crappy aerodynamics, crappy busted up old chassis, and a massive Iron block V8, but the damn thing still turns in 42mpg on the highway when equipped with $50 worth of plastic intake and carb. The intake could've been cast in Aluminum or injection molded plastic as all modern intakes are, and the "Redneck Special" still spins the tires when you hammer down on the throttle.

Ford and Chevy's "highly educated engineers and management team", approached this problem and thought, "We need to cut the displacement of the engine, cut out 500 to 1,000lbs of weight, and spend a bunch of money making a completely new car." Basically, they completely redesigned the entire car, the entire engine and all accessory components- all to solve a fuel economy problem that putting a lawn mower carb on engines they were already making, completely solved without redesigning anything else at all. Rednecks looked at this problem and thought to themselves, "What if we put a lawn mower carb onnit!?"

When I say, "people are dumb", this is what I mean. All the education and technology engineers now have access to, instead of simplifying problems and leading to faster solutions, causes them to come up with byzantine complexity to solve simple problems. The original problem in this case was, "How do I put a lawn mower carb on a 302 cubic inch displacement V8?" It originally had nothing whatsoever to do with fuel economy. The fuel economy benefit was derived by using a smaller carb and better fuel atomization.

So, what was the better solution?

Spending all that time and money redesigning completely new subcompact cars with rattle-trap I4s, or sticking with the smooth-running V8s, despite the added weight?

Did Ford or General Motors or Chrysler really save any money designing the Pinto and Chevette and Colt, or could we have stuck with the small block V8 engines that have powered everything from sub-compacts to small dump trucks?

How about Electronic Fuel Injection / EFI? Has Ford ever made an EFI / EI-equipped 302 CID V8 that gets 42mpg? No?

Well, then, the actual correct (and cheap, because we know how much both consumers and auto makers love cheap crap) solution was not to completely redesign the engine, nor cut its displacement in half, nor add a bunch of expensive electronics.

V8s should come with internally-balanced and fully-forged rotating assemblies to deliver smooth power. That means a forged crankshaft with 8 counterweights, forged rods, and forged pistons. The main caps should be billet steel units, preferably cross-bolted or angle-bolted, so 4 to 6 bolts per main cap.

We can use Aluminum cylinder heads to save about 50lbs of weight off the top of the motor (for small blocks), with a plastic intake saving another 15lbs or so over Aluminum, and plastic valve covers basically saving little to no weight over Aluminum, maybe 5lbs max, but black plastic does allow the heat to radiate away from the head to keep the valve train alive. The Aluminum oil pan may save 5lbs over steel, with plastic also being a better option here because it doesn't rust.

All told, you can feasibly do away with 50lbs to 80lbs of weight, maximum. If you go to a tiny displacement where you need 4 valves per cylinder, which means overhead camshafts, and then have to rev the engine to the moon to make any power, then friction goes way up, stress on engine components goes way up, fuel economy suffers as a result, and then the motor also requires expensive balance shafts, in addition to a crankshaft and camshaft.

All in all, a larger displacement I6 or V8 with a lawn mower carb can either do what a naturally-aspirated I4 does, or if you add turbocharging for recovery exhaust gas energy, then the V8 wins that argument convincingly, regardless of what restrictions you place on the intake to improve fuel economy for daily driver usage.

The extra weight of the V8, after you add-in all the nonsense to the I4 to cause it to make V8 power from an engine with 1/2 of the displacement of a typical small block V8, means that the I4 occupies almost as much volume, or more in many cases, and in some cases weighs almost as much to make matters worse. This is why Mazda's I4 from the Miata was almost identical to the all-Aluminum variant of GM's LS platform V8 small block in physical size, but less than 100 pounds lighter. The Mazda I4 had to be made from Iron because NVH without the added weight was horrendous. The all-Aluminum I4s use balance shafts so they don't shake themselves to pieces. The LS engine, which has better head flow than any Mazda I4, would probably deliver I4 power, with the lawn mower carb, and still cost less to make to boot.

For 0-60 performance and practical driving, as real life indicates, you can easily get away with cast crankshafts, powdered metal con rods and main caps, Aluminum block and cylinder heads, so that's exactly what GM did for most non-performance-oriented engines. The all-Aluminum LS V8, so common today, is a 425 to 450 pound engine. The turbocharged DOHC I4s that make V8 power are 350lbs to 400lbs. That means the weight savings is negligible, the overall machining complexity is such that no money at all would be saved over the larger engines, especially if every vehicle GM sold came with the same engine. There are few engines on the planet as thoroughly proven as small block V8s, and the LS is one of the very best of the breed. The Ford / GM / Chrysler small blocks fit in nearly everything, from a Miata to a dump truck. Ka-Tech makes a Propane-burning turbocharged LS V8 that produces diesel torque numbers at diesel rpm numbers for heavy duty trucks.

All of this adds up to, what the hell do you think you're improving on?

It's not cost. It's not complexity. It's not much weight. It's not even fuel economy.

Most people on this planet conflate activity with accomplishment.

If you pull out all the stops on EVs, and money is no object, then this is what you come up with:

The Mercedes-Benz EQXX achieves 87 Watts per kilometer, or about 139 Watts per mile, and comes equipped with a 241hp electric motor capable of producing a top speed of 87.5mph, which is enough for all legal speed limit driving in North America. They get brownie points from me on that concession to practicality. A Tesla Model S is 250 Watts per mile. EQXX is a very practical 4-seat sedan, and despite some comments from the peanut gallery, it looks a lot like a McLaren, so it's a beautiful car that looks right at home on a race track.

No combustion engine will ever beat the numbers that EQXX posted, but if you're already getting 100mpg+ from a reasonably priced combustion-powered car, then the amount of time it takes to offset all the CO2 emissions generated by producing the Carbon Fiber, Aluminum, Magnesium, and 100kWh Lithium-ion battery is beyond the service life limit of the electronics that make your EV "dream machine" consume less energy and material overall, and thus emit less CO2 to produce and operate. On top of that, you have to recharge your EV without burning anything. Well-to-wheels, a Tesla is 73% efficient, so you have a 23% efficiency increase, according to the State of California. If that wasn't enough, you also have to recycle your EV without burning anything. Otherwise, it will pollute substantially more than a combustion powered car because it's made from incredibly energy-intensive materials (Aluminum, Magnesium, CFRP, Lithium-ion batteries).

Tesla's Model S Plaid Edition, also equipped with a 100kWh battery pack, weighs 4,932lbs to 5,106lbs, so all those advanced materials Mercedes-Benz used in their EQXX did save a LOT of weight. The EQXX weighs 3,900lbs, so about 1,000lbs more than a 1974 Ford Maverick and 1,000lbs less than 2022 Tesla Model S Plaid Edition. All cars (Pinto, Maverick, EQXX, Tesla Model S) still seat 4 people, although I will readily admit that the EQXX and Model S are much nicer cars if you can afford to buy a $100,000+ dream machine. EQXX's tires are half the width of those on Thunderhead289's Maverick and generate significant road noise, because part of achieving a 3,900lbs curb weight required omitting "optional extra" stuff like sound deadening materials.

Now, getting back to our automotive engineer's 1970's fuel shortage conundrum:

The, "let's put a lawn mower carb on the V8", if we're going to otherwise make a low-quality and short-lived I4, wasn't enough complexity to make anyone's engineers look like they were "earning their keep". That's why we had to come up with a bunch of utter nonsense that only marginally improved fuel economy while it worsened all other aspects of the car buying and driving experience.

This is why I question what we're actually doing with electronic battery-operated cars. This is also why I question the hell out of whether or not turning a major portion of the grid's energy input into a computer game is the correct solution.

The photovoltaics could be just fine and they could actually last for 30 years, but none of their electronics will. It's painfully obvious that the electronics are the Achilles heel. If we can send a solar panel to Mars, subject it to mildly cryogenic temperatures every night, heat it back up to room temperature during the day, blast it with sand and radiation levels that would instantly fail any commercial computer chip, yet it still lives for 10+ years, then it's basic design is 100% good to go. I'll bet if you cleared off all the dust, that solar panel is still functional. The one not-so-minor problem is that the dust didn't clear itself off and NASA didn't think a feather duster was a "must-have" for a solar powered rover dependent upon electricity for its survival. That said, here on Earth the materials that photovoltaics are made from are not all that easy to come by and available land isn't infinite, so when performance drops below a certain level, then eventually the electronics or the panels themselves need to be recycled. We're not doing that at any scale because the energy required to do that exceeds the energy required to mine virgin materials. The sheer quantity of panels required to get enough power to make the investment worthwhile mandates recycling at some point.

After you include recycling, the energy produced versus the energy required to make them, starts to look pretty abysmal. If you want to use photovoltaic panels to "power human civilization" and to stop burning things to generate electricity, then that 10X EROEI multiplier is not a suggestion, it's a requirement. Therein lies the problem. Only very specific places on Earth can meet that 10X multiplier after manufacturing and recycling energy costs are taken into account. If you put solar panels in Canada or Siberia, you're consuming more energy to make the panels, which comes from burning stuff, than you could ever get back out of them. If you were purely motivated by basic logic rather than ideology, then that would cause you to accept the limitations of the technology and start looking at more viable alternatives. One of the most "viable alternatives", is using solar thermal power that doesn't require impossible quantities of scarce materials and so much energy sunk into manufacturing and recycling that you can affordably put them in more places and thus achieve a better result.

Wind turbine blades are giant wings, much larger than Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 wings, that are repeatedly subjected to stresses / g-loading that would instantly rip the wings off any modern fighter jet, the moment they were applied. 17g to 25g, on average, for 2MW+ wind turbine blades. The real miracle is that it works at all, because that would obliterate any aircraft wing. Only air-intercept missile wings are subjected to that kind of g-loading, but those things are tiny stubby little fins that only have to deal with those stresses for a few seconds of flight. The fact that wind turbine blades can last for 10 years before they're too cracked to continue spinning, is totally mind-blowing to me. Until we start making these things out of something that is much stiffer and stronger, like CNT fiber, your average large wind turbine farm represents more plastic pollution than all the disposable trash that people generate by using plastic bags for their groceries.

In either case, money / materials / labor are not infinite. It's silly to spend 3X more money on something that delivers a 10% performance improvement. The lion's share of combustion efficiency improvements are achieved through lean burn (lawn mower carb on a V8), higher temperatures (gas turbines), higher compression (any 2-stroke or 4-stroke piston engine), and exhaust gas energy recovery (turbocharging). We can make a 120mpg car using modern technology. The question is whether or not anyone will buy it.

The 260mpg-equivalent EV is a matter of money. If you spend enough money, then that level of efficiency is clearly achievable. On the "Engineering Explained" YouTube channel, which did an analysis of the EQXX, he stated that the EQXX is very near to the practical limit of what can be done (80 Watts per kilometer of travel), in the realm of energy efficiency, for a car that still looks and drives like a prototypical production road car. If you notice how thin the tires are on the EQXX, more akin to tires for a motorcycle than a light duty pickup truck, it's going to have a hell of a time on snow or ice, and it'll eat tires like candy even with proper inflation and a driver that doesn't abuse the machine in any way. It's just too heavy for a tire that small. So, if you're willing to pay any price for ultimate efficiency, then and only then does an electric power train walk away from combustion.

You still can't do anything about grid losses. That 10% to 20% loss is always with you, because not even electric power transmission is 100% efficient. Therefore, 88 Watts per kilometer / 153 Watts per mile is a practical lower limit after grid losses are accounted for. The EQXX's drag coefficient is 0.17, which is awfully close to the very best long range rifle bullets made. To do meaningfully better than that, it would need to be shaped like an actual rifle bullet. That's obviously not very practical for a road car, so EQXX is rapidly approaching realistic limits for electric road cars. On paper that looks great, but in reality a 120mpg road car needs 6.25 gallons of gasoline to go 750 miles, which weighs 37.5lbs.

37.5lbs of gasoline, plus 300lbs of turbocharged 4-banger, maybe 75lbs for the transmission, and our total drivetrain weight is less than half that of the EQXX, which means a car constructed from the same materials would weigh 1,950lbs or less. The significance of hundreds of millions of cars that weigh half as much as their all-electric counterparts cannot be overstated. All those materials have to come from somewhere and they require an enormous amount of energy input to create them. Another way of thinking about it is that an all-steel Chevette weighs 1,950lbs and with 10 gallons of gasoline it will still travel further than the EQXX before needing to refuel, which it can do in 5 minutes. If the EQXX's battery was half as heavy and made from Earth-abundant and recyclable materials, then I would consider the EQXX unequivocally better, no matter how you wish to view it.

Everything is a tradeoff, though. What are you willing to give up for sake of efficiency? I can recharge a small gasoline engine in a few minutes time, unlike a battery. I can repair a combustion engine. I can only replace a battery if it's damaged, and the unreliable electronics are what determines if that occurs, or not. The electronics will work great, until they don't, and then I no longer have a working car. If the combustion engine's fuel is sourced from recycled CO2, then the CO2 emissions argument no longer holds water. It's also a lot lighter than batteries, regardless of type. I don't ever see that changing within my lifetime.

EVs are great in concept, though, so long as you don't zoom out too far as it pertains to their complete emissions and energy consumption picture. I see EVs as useful city cars, assuming it's possible to buy one for less than a gasoline powered car. Thus far, nobody has bothered to produce a simplified EV. The promise is there, but the delivery is not. Until they do, it's a faddish status symbol that doesn't appeal to me.

kbd512 · 2023-01-23 12:44:54

Void,

I have one other note about advanced new combustion engine technology. The Omega engine, which is also under active development, has the potential to produce up to 5hp per pound of engine weight. Let's be conservative and say it's 4hp per pound. A 240hp engine then weighs 60lbs. For the first time, a spark-ignited piston engine, albeit more similar to an "active power turbine" jet engine which force-feeds compressed air to itself using a split shaft design, has the potential to weigh about the same as the transmission it's connected to. There are very low friction losses, unlike a Wankel, and everything is spinning in one direction, just like a gas turbine. It's counter-rotating as a matter of fact, so almost no vibration. It requires no turbocharger, because the engine is the turbocharger. The Omega engine generates power for 270 degrees of crankshaft rotation, unlike a typical piston engine that generates power over 30 degrees of crankshaft rotation. This 9X power stroke duration advantage translates into more power per unit weight than most gas turbines, certainly all of the smaller ones.

This sort of engine removes another 500lbs of engine and chassis weight. That means a 1,000lb class 4-seat car, if you use the same aerospace materials used in the EQXX. You could use the EQXX's tires and the vehicle's weight wouldn't peel the tread off of them in less than a year. With such an engine, 120mpg is not only doable, but the car would still accelerate and drive as well as any modern car with a turbocharged engine. If Company A can make 4 cars with the same amount of material that Company B requires to make 1 car, then it's pretty hard to argue the emissions case at that point, because most of the EV's emissions are created during manufacturing.

Resource extraction to produce 100 milion EVs per year would then be equal to 400 million Omega engine powered vehicles, except that energy consumption associated with EV resource extraction is an extreme multiple of that of a combustion powered car. This is obviously not what the EV enthusiasts want to hear, but it's still the truth and the truth needs to be stated at some point. Unfortunately, there is no delusion as powerful and complete as self-delusion. I believe this is what a lot of the advocates of wind turbines / photovoltaics / batteries are engaging in. They focus on little factoids that are otherwise meaningless without greater context, but since they support their beliefs, they have constructed an entire alternate reality that agrees with their ideation about what the future will be like.

Look at all the misinformation about COVID if you require further proof of that. People constructed an entire alternate reality wherein getting a shot or wearing a mask was going to magically change what that virus was doing. It didn't, of course, and a lot of people got hurt because of false beliefs generated by this "game of telephone" that the turds in the media played with them. They conflated activity with accomplishment. There were a lot of busy bodies who needed to feel like they were "making a difference". In point of fact, all they were doing was painfully dragging out the inevitable. What became increasingly obvious over time, was that pretty much everyone was going to get COVID, that the shot only protected against certain variants and did nothing whatsoever to confer any "herd immunity" to others around them, and the masks and locking people up in their homes probably helped the virus spread faster. The "ultra-violet" in sunlight does what it does to most bacteria and viruses- it rips them apart in short order. In the end, most of the insanity was related to people wanting to feel that they were "in-control", because the media intentionally created hysteria to make people believe that they had to, "don't step on the crack unless you wanna break your mama's back". It was every bit as dumb as that nursery rhyme but even more childish (because it was adults doing this to other adults, who believed them, sadly). It turns out that most people never really grew up, they just "got older". They immediately go into total freak-out mode the moment someone shows them some part of their life that's beyond their control.

On a more positive note, light helicopters like the OH-6 or turboprops like the Cessna Caravan would see a net engine weight and fuel burn rate reduction using the Omega engine. Beyond that, the new engine would be much cheaper and faster to produce than a gas turbine.

Anyway, that's how I see this shaking out.

We'll get EVs that can truly go 300 to 400 miles on a single charge on a battery that weighs no more than a small block V8, plus combustion powered vehicles that have engines cranking out more power per unit weight than gas turbines. It's stunning to think that we already have a reliable LS-based engine that can lay down as much torque as a diesel at the same rpm as a diesel, but it can spin to 6,000rpm. This engine easily fits between the frame rails of a semi-truck, so it can use Propane or Methane or regular gasoline, but still perform like a diesel at rpms that a diesel can't spin to and live.

On the gas turbine side of the house, we now have prop-fans that can do what NASA's program failed to decades ago, because the technology wasn't ready. CFD analysis has allowed us to spin unducted propellers to power levels that exceed what a turbofan can do for a given fuel burn, by 10% to 20%, while maintaining turbofan powered airliner cruise speeds. All the weight associated with the fan casing on the aircraft is also removed. If you think about it, it's an extension of the "large blade" fans that the largest turbofans, like the GE9x, use. That will help reduce the cost and emissions associated with air travel.

SpaceNut · 2023-01-23 15:08:33

I am currently without power since 3am this morning and have shoveled my driveway and fed my family.
It is not known as to when power will be restored. We got maybe 10 inches to a foot and it's still coming down.
Since this is a no solar day I can only expect a few hour from the small units I have with leds built in for the evening after that it is battery powered flashlights to allow for satey inside. There will be no heat just extra blankets unit the power company restored it

I had a beat up Gremlin back in the day and there is a Pinto for sale at 3x that done the road where I walked to get the last car that is running.

Update
Finished another 4 inches of snow removal.
Still no power at 5:30pm.

8:30pm update
Still no power due to outage with a check that says tomorrow they will give possible time to repair

Tuesday 11Am still no power and automated response when calling and text message

tahanson43206 · 2023-01-23 18:07:11

For SpaceNut re #11

Best wishes for power restored as soon as possible!

And! Best wishes for continued good health to be able to deal with these challenges!

(th)

Void · 2023-01-23 21:04:58

Hope you can be OK Spacenut. Glad you have some small lighting.

Done.

kbd512 · 2023-01-23 22:46:30

SpaceNut,

Sorry to hear about your power situation. I hope the power company is able to get your power back ASAP.

Given the amount of time and money you've spent on modern cars, which failed within a relatively short period of time, I think it's safe to say that using your technical skills you could transform that old Pinto into a reliable daily driver for less money. I realize that it requires ongoing maintenance to keep it running, unlike a modern car which runs perfectly until it doesn't, but it's also the sort of maintenance someone can do with hand tools. The same cannot be said for modern computer-controlled vehicles.

Calliban · 2023-01-24 06:05:40

Here are some facts, as presented by the United States Department of Energy.
https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-tech … eview-2015

Download Section 10. Table 10.4 provides a summary of the quantities of steel, concrete, glass, aluminium, copper and silicon needed per TWh of electricity generated, for various different powerplants. The materials needed to construct enough PV solar capacity to produce 1TWh of electricity over its lifetime, are about 100x greater than a competing fossil or nuclear powerplant. For wind power, the materials requirements are 10x greater. These huge embodied materials requirements are a consequence of the low power density of wind and sunlight. Wind and and solar powerplants need to be country sized in order to produce the gigawatts of power needed by an industrial country.

But it doesn't stop there. Because of the intermittency problem, you still need fossil fuel powerplants that will generate power when the wind and sun are not there. All of these embodied materials require a great deal of energy to produce. Most of that energy presently derives from fossil fuels. A solar power plant is effectively stored coal energy.

Void · 2023-01-24 10:34:28

Thanks for the info in your post Calliban. I will try to absorb more of it.

It is this curious relationship that for the moment I am interested in:

A solar power plant is effectively stored coal energy.

The relationship between China and Australia potentially is that China makes solar panels at cut rate price using its power grid, power here being both electric and burning things.

China will be using its declining labor force. Just because their demographics are said to be poor, does not indicate that they will not want to use what they have left. Australia may buy many of those solar panels, and this will not only give China some profits, but also make the production of its own solar panels cheaper (Maybe).

Australia then may establish a 20 to 30 year power supply from the sun. As technology develops it may be that they could do a power to hydrocarbons setup, and then sell hydrocarbons to others, possibly including China.

Eventually there may be a path to industrial processes using concentrate sunlight and perhaps Nuclear Fission.

But China and Australia are not the only places in the world.

My background thinking is that we are supposed to be in a mild ice age at this time, but apparently are not.
Greenhouse gasses warm the poles more than other places. So, while the west Antarctic ice may tend to melt, and the Greenland ice may tend to melt, it is very likely that the East Antarctic ice mass will accumulate more snow, and so then ice. Will this balance out over time? Probably not. How so? I don't know.

The alpine glaciers are said to be declining in general. This is an indicator to me that on average there is less evaporation from the oceans and other sources for snow. Snow for glaciers mostly comes from winds lifting up moist air high where it is cold. There is and will be plenty of cold in the high skies, so the decline of these glaciers seems to be from a lack of moisture not warming mountains.

As far as me feeling guilty about what goes on with climate and weather, no I don't feel guilty.

I don't care to go to climate church and have someone confess my climate sins. The purpose for social maneuvers like that is to take power from citizens and give it to those who are verbal and violent to an excess.

We have a problem. Well then, we work on in and we share in the results to some extent each.

I have even given suggestions on some treatments.

I don't feel guilty. Not gonna either.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-01-24 10:48:10)

kbd512 · 2023-01-24 12:04:31

People with strong, concise arguments and clear evidence don't concern themselves with commentary from the peanut gallery, because they know that reason eventually wins out, and the few who cannot be reasoned with are not worth their time. The vocal minority, who want radical change to feel vindicated in their beliefs, whines incessantly whenever anyone at all takes them to task over their false claims about one form of energy being "cleaner" than the next. Someone else is not imbibing in their "religious experience", which is a real problem for them. Their arguments are so weak and so fraught with inconsistency that they get upset over a few people leaving a snarky comment about their claims. It's a clear sign that they don't have more convincing arguments or lack the ability to articulate what they actually mean.

At present, there is nothing clean about the way wind turbines or photovoltaics or batteries are made, but you need an astronomical number of these electronic gadgets to replace burning chemical fuels. That's not going to change on a grand scale in the near future, and everyone who is honest knows it. Unfortunately, our "green energy" advocates lie to themselves first and nothing good can ever come from being dishonest with yourself. Refusing to accept reality doesn't change reality. We've hit upon a fundamental limitation of our own technology and there's no simple or easy way around it. If you try to put a photovoltaic panel in Alaska or Germany, then the only thing you achieved was increasing CO2 emissions (the great boogeyman of the climate change religious movement, similar to "the devil" in Christianity), because the energy required to make the panel will exceed the energy it produces as a function of your insistence on putting said panel somewhere that isn't very sunny. If that's not religious ideology at work, then I don't know what qualifies. The problem is that they don't have any viable alternatives included as part of the religion. Almost none of them know what to do with themselves, so they want to feel as though they're "a part of something bigger", even if "something bigger" is a massive fraud. In a religious cult you have a single answer to all problems. There's no nuance, nor acceptance of the limitations of the ideology.

Wind turbines and photovoltaics and batteries are not clean and they're not reliable, so they're not an answer. As a function of how they're made and used in places where they fail to produce enough power to make them "earn their keep", they're making a bad situation worse, in much the same way that pseudo-science did with the masks and lockdowns did during the COVID pandemic.

These people want absolute control and authority over something they're only superficially interested in (to satisfy their religion) and knowledgeable about (and the ones with the knowledge say they're making a mistake), without any intellectual honesty or actual debate where they're forced to address the shortcomings of their assertions with honest answers. Unfortunately for our faux environmentalists, in a free society everyone gets to have an opinion and they get to voice it in public. We have freedom of speech specifically because of the problems humanity has encountered in the past without it- like slavery, for example. If your arguments don't withstand cursory public scrutiny, then work on your arguments, assertions, and proposals.

I spend my time working on my solar thermal proposal, because it's the cheapest way to make synthetic fuels, which humanity needs if we're going to remain a technologically advanced civilization. It doesn't require a complete redo of the electric grid. It doesn't require obscene over-consumption of fossil fuels to make the equipment required to implement it. It's the only form of "battery" that's technologically feasible at a global scale, using current technology. Long term, there is no "beyond fossil fuels". That's like saying, "beyond heat and light". Well, beyond heat and light there is only death. If you want reliable heat and light, then you also want hydrocarbon fuels, because that's what they deliver at a global scale, every day of the week, every year of the decade, every decade of the last century. Prior to that, life was short, bleak, and brutal. Unless you really want to go back there, with the assertion that you'll somehow be better off, then take stock of what wind turbines / photovoltaics / batteries have delivered over the past 40 years. They're about 2% of net energy consumption at best. If you want to wait another 2,000 years, given the present rate of expansion of "green energy", then be my guest. Some of us want solutions a little faster than that, and cheaper as well.

Calliban continues to advance his nuclear thermal synthetic fuels proposal. I wish him good fortune. I don't have a bone to pick with his proposal. It doesn't require consumption at unsustainable rates or other absurdities, so it's technically feasible to do. I think it will end up costing more than my proposal, but that remains to be seen. In a place without lots of sunlight, such as the UK, it makes more sense than solar thermal.

kbd512 · 2023-01-24 13:22:31

Void,

During COVID (2020-2021) while Australia was still on lockdown, the nation consumed 1,479.75TWh worth of fossil fuel energy, or 1,480,000,000,000,000Wh for the entire year.

3,700,000,000m^2 at 400,000Wh/m^2/year, so 3,700km^2, or about 60.83km by 60.83km for the panels alone, with no spacing, which obviously isn't practical. A practical solar park will about double that land use to prevent shading panels, so about 7,400km^2, or 86.02km by 86.02km. At highway speeds, it'll take an hour to drive from one end of the array to the other and you'll be able to see it clearly from space.

The land will be stripped of any vegetation. You'll need access roads into and out of the facility.

On top of that, you'll have to store at least 1/3rd of the power for night time usage.

0.148km^3 or 01.5 cubic kilometers of oil stores the same amount of energy, and 0.0123km^3 stores an entire month's worth of energy.

For a 500Wh/L Lithium-ion battery, storing 1 month's supply of energy means 246,666,667m^3 or 0.247km^3.

That means Lithium-ion power storage for 1 month is approximately double the volume required to store 1 year's supply of oil, because that 500Wh/L figure is for the batteries alone and nothing else required to actually use them.

Can you infer what the problems are with trying to scale-up all the materials that go into making photovoltaic farms and batteries that could be seen from space if they were all contained in one facility?

Can you imagine how much pollution and emissions are required to create and transport them? How about the emission to recycle them AND manufacture the next generation of panels and batteries so they're ready to go when the time comes?

Let's say a commercial panel weighs about 40lbs per square meter for the panel and electronics, so 67,131,671t for the panels alone. 672 ship loads at 100,000t per load for the panels alone, no packaging. China gets lots of steel and Aluminum and minerals from Australia, so we're talking about thousands of super tanker and super cargo ship crossings between Australia and China to make this happen. You might need to build some more of those ships so there are enough of them to go around.

It's not practical at the scale of a single technologically advanced nation of 26 million people (fewer people than Texas). There are more than 7 billion people in the world, and they all need energy. It's not going to come from electronics, because we're going to run out of materials first.

Can you understand why wind and solar still only provide 2% of the TPES, 40 years after we started incorporating it onto the grid?

They're going as fast as they can, and can't go much faster.

That's why the power system has to be based off of synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. The batteries can't possibly store enough electricity to last for a month, and if they could then they'd be a multiple of the volume of oil we consume every year. This is why low energy density systems don't work when you try to scale them up. It's not a smear, it's just basic math. You can figure out how much using a pocket calculator. No advanced functions are required. You look up how much of whatever material goes into something you want to make, you do the math on how many you need and thus your material requirements, and then you multiply out. You don't need exact precise figures like the ones I provide if you know what ballpark you're playing in. After you're done with that, then you look at how many of whatever kind of widget we make per year as a global total to gauge the feasibility of scaling it up to whatever level you wish to scale up to.

This is how you quickly come to the realization that the answer is a very dense energy storage medium for those periods of time when there is no sunlight or wind, very simple and recyclable thermal power plants that use things already made by humans in extreme quantities (steel, concrete, sand, hot water, CO2), and you shy away from complex designs and solutions that would require an "Extreme Power Grid Makeover, Planet Earth Edition".

Edit:

I should've said China gets a lot of "Iron ore" from Australia, not "steel". China ships the steel back to Australia, so at least 2 ship loads per transfer, because they're worried about pollution and climate change in Australia, which can clearly only come from or affect Australia itself, so heavy industry is offshore in China, and I guess some sort of magic happens that prevents CO2 emissions in China from counting towards the yearly grand total.

Last edited by kbd512 (2023-01-24 13:34:08)

SpaceNut · 2023-01-24 15:54:42

SpaceNut wrote:

I am currently without power since 3am this morning and have shoveled my driveway and fed my family.
It is not known as to when power will be restored. We got maybe 10 inches to a foot and it's still coming down.
Since this is a no solar day I can only expect a few hour from the small units I have with leds built in for the evening after that it is battery powered flashlights to allow for satey inside. There will be no heat just extra blankets unit the power company restored it
I had a beat up Gremlin back in the day and there is a Pinto for sale at 3x that done the road where I walked to get the last car that is running.
Update
Finished another 4 inches of snow removal.
Still no power at 5:30pm.
8:30pm update
Still no power due to outage with a check that says tomorrow they will give possible time to repair
Tuesday 11Am still no power and automated response when calling and text message

Update
Finally power had been restore at 4:10pm on Tuesday

Weather update for Wednesday evening into Thursday will dump many more inches of snow. I spent the afternoon releasing my roof of some of the snow so that I will not have any collapse occur but to also clear the sun tunnel domes to allow more-light to enter the dark rooms lessoning the amount of electricity during the day hours.

Void · 2023-01-24 16:33:07

Very good news Spacenut! It must feel good. I have gotten tired of winter here in the Midwest as well. Looks like a string of sunny days coming, I hope it is true.

kbd512, settle down My bones won't care in 20 or yes years or maybe will my spirit.

We have a different style. I don't like binary pick one notions. I say try all of it, and see how far it gets. If we are doomed, then lets make doomed as good as we can for as long as we can. But lets try for better.

We seem to think that you are all in for solar thermal to fuels, and that Calliban is all in for nuclear to fuels. OK, lets see how far that can get.

I myself am for bio solar, that's why I got really mad when the knuckleheads became obsessive about plastics. It is my feeling that they did that on purpose, to stifle the chance. I believe that they are heavily infiltrated by the enemies of our cultures. But that may not matter so much.

My view is that organic produce can be further processed by a secondary process to produce fuels. I feel that water is the open resource where that could be done in plastic bags. So, of course the obsessive compulsives of the neopaganism, and the true enemies of our culture would bend reality to try to stop it. They believe that we need to be subjugated so they can lead us with their god like brilliance. I am very much not so sure as in don't favor being raped.

But here again please consider staying away from a binary contest of decision. Time will tell what works. We don't want the elites to judge a binary contest, as they want us under their feet, and nowhere else.

Done

Last edited by Void (2023-01-24 16:43:30)

kbd512 · 2023-01-24 17:22:14

The reason we still predominantly make cars from steel is that it's the minimum cost (minimum energy cost) material that has the correct stiffness, strength, and durability characteristics required to fabricate the chassis and high-stress components of a motor vehicle.

You can use Aluminum for most major parts, but that's triple the monetary and energy cost of steel per part produced, even though the parts are 50% to 60% lighter. That's why you pay so much more for any kind of Aluminum, as compared to any kind of steel except for super alloys used in jet engines and chemical processing plants, which are similarly energy-intensive to make and machine. All said and done, your "ongoing energy consumption efficiency improvement" (from using lighter vehicle parts), means a LOT more energy investment is required, per vehicle.

That's why an Aluminum engine block, which weighs half as much as cast Iron, is 3X more expensive. It's not "just because". It's not snobbery, either. Engine block makers will outright tell you that it costs them 3X more money for Aluminum metal, as compared to Iron. This very question has been asked of companies like Dart, which specialize in making stronger aftermarket versions of production engine blocks and cylinder heads, and was answered thus. It's not machining costs, nor specialty metal handling costs, nor companies behaving as if they were giving you a "premium product" (unlike the "green steel", which is marketed as a "premium product" when in reality it's just a much more energy-intensive way to make an existing steel product without as much CO2 generated), or any other such nonsense. GM also charges 3X more for their all-Aluminum LS blocks, ditto for Ford and Chrysler and Toyota. It's as if there's a pattern there.

This seems peculiar at first because Aluminum melts at much lower temperatures than Iron, which is true, except that the Aluminum also starts off as Alumina Oxide, which is a ceramic material used to make crucibles. The Alumina Oxide, therefore, must be heated to crazy high temperatures while it's mixed with caustic chemicals to cause that ceramic to "give up its bond to the Oxygen", and thus produce Aluminum metal.

Well, what about Carbon Fiber or glass fiber?

Same issue there. Finding Carbon or sand ain't that difficult. Once again, those crazy high temperatures required to make glass fiber or Carbon fiber means it costs more than twice as much as Aluminum for the strongest grades of fiber. Making CNT fiber requires an even more stupendous amount of input energy, as compared to Carbon Fiber, and there are various chemical processing issues there as well that can destroy the fiber before it's ever spun into yard. Increasing CNT production is obviously doable, but CNT won't be replacing steel I-beams in buildings any time soon. If someone forces the issue, then we simply won't have any new steel-reinforced bridges and buildings for quite some time. The same applies to photovoltaics and wind turbines and batteries.

You can use other materials or methods to replicate certain parts of the existing infrastructure, but not all parts. You can replicate the range of a gasoline powered car, using a battery, if all concessions to cost and practicality are ruthlessly ignored- Carbon Fiber, Aluminum, Magnesium, solar panels to power vehicle accessories (heat, AC, lights, etc), no sound deadening of road noise, and so forth.

Why do photovoltaic makers use Aluminum frames if steel will do?

It won't do at all, obviously, which is why they use Aluminum. The same applies to using Silver vs Copper for the on-panel electrical connections. As good a conductor of electricity as Copper is, it's clearly not "good enough" to do the job to the performance level required. The semiconductor is encased in glass so it doesn't crack. It has nothing to do with creating a talking point against this idea. The sophisticated inverter electronics ensure that the panel does not overheat or electrically short-circuit. It's all necessary engineering stuff, and mass production has already done what it can do for the cost of the equipment.

All of this talk about transport in a wind and solar topic ties back to where the energy comes from and what it's primarily used for. Most of the energy is used to extract natural resources, transform them into useful products, and then transport them to where people use those products. Whatever you have to devote to sectors of use in total, that's the limit of your productivity. If your input energy system soaks up 10X to 100X more material and energy, then that doesn't magically rematerialize elsewhere. If your energy system requires 10X to 100X more materials and thus more energy input, all on its lonesome, then you no longer have that energy to do useful things. Someone has made the point that EVs are more efficient than combustion. Okay, but how much more efficient? About 50% more efficient at most, as it turns out, and often less than that when we're talking about stationary power plants. That's great, but the orders of magnitude increase to "get there", means that no net energy or emissions or materials were ever "saved" for future generations. It's more like you constrained what can or will exist, ever after, because you're either going to dramatically reduce energy availability or cannibalize other sectors, so no possibility of economic growth and prosperity. In short, there's a reason we quit relying on the Sun for light to see. If you can read at night, then you can become educated to the point that doing more than eeking out a liviing as a subsistence farmer is possible.

Where the hell do you think your food and cleaning drinking water, your ride to work, your modern health care, your education, and your electronic entertainment gadgets are going to come from when all the energy and materials previously used to make them, is now used to try to make a woefully inadequate system (for the intended use case) work at scale, that doesn't work using any existing / known technology?

Are you willing to give up all of that stuff so the top 1% can use their wealth to show you how "green" they are, while leaving yourself, your neighbors, and ordinary people across the world destitute for life?

Just how important is this technology religion, that worships science like Christians and Muslims worship Jesus and Mohammad?

Unlike Jesus, our scientists are not going to make the sign of the cross and turn water into wine, nor a dozen loaves of bread and fishes into enough food to feed an army.

I'm not telling anyone not to use technology, which is silly, I'm simply informing them of technology's very real limitations. We don't have Star Trek replicators. If we did, then we wouldn't be having this silly conversation. The people who thought the planet needed saving would be using their replicator to turn CO2 back into Carbon and those of us who recognize how silly that would be if we were in possession of such technology, would instead be using it instead to "make our daily bread" so we could spend more time with our families instead of staring at screens and punching buttons. Nobody would bother with using gasoline or owning a car if all you had to do was press a button on your chest and say, "Beam me up, Scotty!"

Unfortunately for us, I don't think my generation will ever live to see that come to pass. It's fun to think about, but living my life trapped inside a fantasy world of my own delusions about how the real world works, is not very appealing. It's clearly very appealing to others, but those are not the sort of people I want making energy decisions on my behalf. Being "stuck" in the real world, with all of my limitations arrayed before me, is a great motivator to "do better". If I had a Star Trek replicator at my disposal or was opulently wealthy, then I don't know if I would still have the same drive to do better.

It's a thorny problem, that's for sure.

SpaceNut · 2023-01-24 17:31:39

After going without electricity that could have gone on for days more and may still as I will be getting more snow it comes down to what we take for modern life is that we are using the easy way to energy for all actions.
In the good old days, I would have had a no power required device to make heat and to cook food but in these days of trying to be eco we need power to run everything.

kbd512 · 2023-01-24 17:35:31

Void,

I'm telling people to "go solar" if they're dead set on doing that, but not in a way that leaves half the planet as an electronics waste dump filled with toxic heavy metals. If you ask most people if they want to drink Arsenic or Lithium, they'll tell you that they don't. For whatever strange reason, that's where they're headed anyway.

SpaceNut · 2023-01-24 20:20:47

Knowing that my well water is already dangerous to drink means that all owners of such need a water processing plant in the future any ways and that is shown true by many a polluted water source that have been used for decades to supply that resource to the communities.

The unit that takes in moist and creates drinkable water just needs to utilize evaporation water as well as the source for input into that system.

I have learned that relying on a single source for any energy needs is the wrong answer to the total problem and that net metering without a standby is also a problem even if it's for just an hour of use a year.

Since I now have the data to tell me what I can achieve via solar it's up to planning for that not only for electrical but as a stored heat as well. The trick is to size all systems to be able to provide for each other's energy requirement as a substitute.

So, if is a sand battery I need wood or other fuels to burn which even could be the rubbish that one generates from packaging, One can also allow for plumbing within the sand to hydrothermal water from a cold tank to water it for hot water,

The same water can be pumped back from a solar concentrator to warm that same water that could be used for baseboard heating as well if there is sufficient volume to make use of, with that same concentrator for solar; I can do solar panels that are back-to-back and flow pipes between them to preheat the water that goes into the collectors hot tubing at the focal point.

Flow pipes in the collector will need to be with a food glycol and heat exchanger to keep drinking water safe if it's used otherwise make a separate system for the drinking water that must be heated as you can wrap that system around the sand battery tank or around the chimney flue pipe to create heated water for that separate supply use.

If I can get steam, then we can generate power from a turbine from any of the probable solar concentrators that I might be able to build in the future.

The point to make oneself less reliant on oils or other fuels to create power or heating and less one the power line running by the house.

Void · 2023-01-25 10:47:47

It would be nice to solve for you Spacenut. I don't have much. But this can be encouraging.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ho … &FORM=VIRE

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?&q=H … ajaxhist=0

Stretching hydrocarbons out by using less of them will of course make the supplies last considerably longer. This should offer more time for more invention to expand the process.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2023-01-25 11:16:47)

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#1 2023-01-21 06:14:34

Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

#2 2023-01-21 09:25:13

Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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Re: Exposed: The smear tactics against wind and solar

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