- #31
essenmein
- 657
- 294
In part. BTES is IMHO, the best battery on Earth. But I live in a coldish part of the world, so I'm somewhat biased.
What is BTES?
This is what we have now. But presumably, that's going away.
Was more of a question about what would be ideal from a purely functional perspective given the choice, low power density distributed harvesting or 24/7 power box. Then once you know what you "want" it can become part of the design goal. We have power boxes today, they work well, but emit CO2, so its not the power box we don't like, its the CO2.
<snip>I don't know that this is still the trend.
According to one source; "In industrialized countries the growth of cities has stopped." [ref]
That link is pretty poor. Even contradicts itself!
"In industrialized countries the growth of cities has stopped. New York and London grew very quickly during the 1800s and early 1900s, but since then their growth has slowed down. ",
Slowed down and stopped is not the same thing, just test this at your nearest stop sign!
This paints a better picture:
https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
No indication that urbanization is "stopping" any time soon, and its only "slowing" because once you near 100% urban, there is by definition no growth left.<snip>Lately, per capita North American energy consumption has gone down since, per this graph, its peak in 1979:
View attachment 241918
2019.04.15.north.america.per.capita.energy.use.png
[ref]
Be interesting to view this with both fuel economy (1970's 1MPG land yachts vs anything today), as well as the 2008 recession, seems the big dip there probably is financial rather than "wanted" or efficiency.
I do not understand this "blockchain" energy thing, at all. Perhaps you can start a new thread on that. Seriously, as far as I can tell, it is the stupidest thing in the universe.
Understanding it is not relevant, it is simply an example of a cool software idea that lead to massive energy consumption. Ie a demonstration how a seemingly innocuous idea like encrypting some data for securing money or transactions has a huge hidden energy cost. The only point is there will be more of these types of things, not less.
I'd prefer to just focus on the United States at the moment. Even focusing just on the US is, as I said earlier, TMI! (@Guineafowl, you're on your own. Sorry!)
Well, then its not going to get solved. Simple band aids here and there to make you feel better are a waste of time and more importantly energy.Electric. Sad that GM just did away with the "Volt" car. Best transition vehicle on the planet, IMHO.
Point here is that saying battery electric is simple when talking about one car, but run the numbers about how much Li (for example) we need to make ALL cars electric is a completely different story. Its like the bio fuel craze, yeah you can make a few liters of "carbon neutral" bio diesel, but when you work out that you need to convert the entire continental US arable land to growing soy just to cover diesel and heating oil, then you realize maybe its not actually a viable solution since we'd probably still like to eat.
I agree. But if we focus on conserving petrol, via alternative means, aircraft will be flying much longer. If we cut petrol consumption to 10%, planes will be flying for 350+ years! Yay!
Or we commit the engineering resource to solving it properly.
As I've said, I've decided to focus on residential use.
The problem is that you need to understand the entire scope of the problem to come up with workable solution.
Personally, I look at the long term historical perspective, and think to myself; "How do we get back to that?"
Up until around 1800, everything in the world was solar powered. Nowadays, very little is solar powered.
Interesting, feels a little like you're viewing the past with rose colored glasses.
Based on the limited reading I've done of personal accounts of people in the 1800's is that basically life sucked. JCM did his thing in 1860's, vaccines weren't really things till early mid 1900's, polio is fun I'm told.
Needless to say we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd rather not return to that!
Its also entirely incorrect to say today very little is solar power, literally everything we do is ultimately solar power. Oil is stored solar energy, uranium fission is solar power, if our sun didn't make those elements we wouldn't have them to split, the only thing that would NOT ultimately due to solar power is if we ever get H-H fusion going.
When you go out side to enjoy the day, you are saying you enjoy being exposed to raging ball of nuclear fire 8.5 light minutes away protected by nothing more than a whimsical magnetic field and a thin layer of gas. Sun burn is radiation exposure, we get skin cancer because its radiation damage.
Ultimately the problem I have with energy harvesting is scalbility and utilization.
If you want 2x the power from say wind, you need twice as much land area, then as wind farms grow, area gets bigger due to local slowing down of the wind as energy is extracted. Solar is the same, you get 1kw/m2, you want two kw? you need 2m^2 and so on.
Yet something like nuclear power where the energy density is e=mc^2, we have much more possibility to massively increase output power without increase land use. Take the USS enterprise (the real aircraft carrier not the fictional spaceship) started of with what 8 reactors? The Nimitz is down to 2 with the same shaft power.
What is BTES?
This is what we have now. But presumably, that's going away.
Was more of a question about what would be ideal from a purely functional perspective given the choice, low power density distributed harvesting or 24/7 power box. Then once you know what you "want" it can become part of the design goal. We have power boxes today, they work well, but emit CO2, so its not the power box we don't like, its the CO2.
<snip>I don't know that this is still the trend.
According to one source; "In industrialized countries the growth of cities has stopped." [ref]
That link is pretty poor. Even contradicts itself!
"In industrialized countries the growth of cities has stopped. New York and London grew very quickly during the 1800s and early 1900s, but since then their growth has slowed down. ",
Slowed down and stopped is not the same thing, just test this at your nearest stop sign!
This paints a better picture:
https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
No indication that urbanization is "stopping" any time soon, and its only "slowing" because once you near 100% urban, there is by definition no growth left.<snip>Lately, per capita North American energy consumption has gone down since, per this graph, its peak in 1979:
View attachment 241918
2019.04.15.north.america.per.capita.energy.use.png
[ref]
Be interesting to view this with both fuel economy (1970's 1MPG land yachts vs anything today), as well as the 2008 recession, seems the big dip there probably is financial rather than "wanted" or efficiency.
I do not understand this "blockchain" energy thing, at all. Perhaps you can start a new thread on that. Seriously, as far as I can tell, it is the stupidest thing in the universe.
Understanding it is not relevant, it is simply an example of a cool software idea that lead to massive energy consumption. Ie a demonstration how a seemingly innocuous idea like encrypting some data for securing money or transactions has a huge hidden energy cost. The only point is there will be more of these types of things, not less.
I'd prefer to just focus on the United States at the moment. Even focusing just on the US is, as I said earlier, TMI! (@Guineafowl, you're on your own. Sorry!)
Well, then its not going to get solved. Simple band aids here and there to make you feel better are a waste of time and more importantly energy.Electric. Sad that GM just did away with the "Volt" car. Best transition vehicle on the planet, IMHO.
Point here is that saying battery electric is simple when talking about one car, but run the numbers about how much Li (for example) we need to make ALL cars electric is a completely different story. Its like the bio fuel craze, yeah you can make a few liters of "carbon neutral" bio diesel, but when you work out that you need to convert the entire continental US arable land to growing soy just to cover diesel and heating oil, then you realize maybe its not actually a viable solution since we'd probably still like to eat.
I agree. But if we focus on conserving petrol, via alternative means, aircraft will be flying much longer. If we cut petrol consumption to 10%, planes will be flying for 350+ years! Yay!
Or we commit the engineering resource to solving it properly.
As I've said, I've decided to focus on residential use.
The problem is that you need to understand the entire scope of the problem to come up with workable solution.
Personally, I look at the long term historical perspective, and think to myself; "How do we get back to that?"
Up until around 1800, everything in the world was solar powered. Nowadays, very little is solar powered.
Interesting, feels a little like you're viewing the past with rose colored glasses.
Based on the limited reading I've done of personal accounts of people in the 1800's is that basically life sucked. JCM did his thing in 1860's, vaccines weren't really things till early mid 1900's, polio is fun I'm told.
Needless to say we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd rather not return to that!
Its also entirely incorrect to say today very little is solar power, literally everything we do is ultimately solar power. Oil is stored solar energy, uranium fission is solar power, if our sun didn't make those elements we wouldn't have them to split, the only thing that would NOT ultimately due to solar power is if we ever get H-H fusion going.
When you go out side to enjoy the day, you are saying you enjoy being exposed to raging ball of nuclear fire 8.5 light minutes away protected by nothing more than a whimsical magnetic field and a thin layer of gas. Sun burn is radiation exposure, we get skin cancer because its radiation damage.
Ultimately the problem I have with energy harvesting is scalbility and utilization.
If you want 2x the power from say wind, you need twice as much land area, then as wind farms grow, area gets bigger due to local slowing down of the wind as energy is extracted. Solar is the same, you get 1kw/m2, you want two kw? you need 2m^2 and so on.
Yet something like nuclear power where the energy density is e=mc^2, we have much more possibility to massively increase output power without increase land use. Take the USS enterprise (the real aircraft carrier not the fictional spaceship) started of with what 8 reactors? The Nimitz is down to 2 with the same shaft power.