YOU: Fix the US Energy Crisis

[mheslep]

Sandboxes don't have a darn thing to do with energy.

Sandbox Energy Corp.

 

[OmCheeto]

Sandbox Energy Corp.

"Solid investment in uncertain times…"

 

[mfb]

I reject that metaphor. Sandboxes don't have a darn thing to do with energy. Exceptions to the classical laws of thermodynamics and new forms of matter/energy that we cannot yet easily detect, already do relate to energy. So, that's a bad metaphor.

By every measure I can imagine, every sandbox has more energy and more available energy than every negative temperature system ever made. Negative temperature is not an exception to thermodynamics, it fits in very well. And again, you are arguing against the two most fundamental laws of physics, that never worked.
Do you have any reference that those systems are in some way considered as relevant for power plants?

you're failing to make an argument why, which would actually be productive and perhaps enlighten me as to why I'm wrong

See above, and also multiple previous posts.

Dark energy/dark matter are difficult to detect, nearly impossible, and as such there is little or no expectation that they will ever relate to normal matter or energy in any kind of meaningful way.

Yes.

Negative absolute temperatures deal with systems that favor being in a higher energy state

No they do not. Actually, in terms of entropy, they "favor" lower-energetic states (that's why they will give away heat to everything with positive temperatures).

and already have all the applications we could ever find

No one claimed that. But making up arbitrary combinations of "scientific concept/object" and "specific commercial application" is not going to give useful results.

 

[OmCheeto]

This kind of news is always good to hear:

Costa Rica powered with 100% renewable energy for 75 straight days
20 March 2015
...Costa Rica has been powered primarily by hydro power - both pumped storage and run-of-the-river plants - and a mixture of geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.
...

 

[OmCheeto]

I knew I'd seen something to the above effect, regarding Hawaii. Just found it:

Hawaii aims for 100% renewable energy by 2040
13 March 2015
...
“Even our utility is saying we can hit 65 percent by 2030, so 100 percent is definitely doable,” Sen. Mike Gabbard (D), sponsor of the Senate bill, SB 2181, and chair of Hawaii’s Energy and Environment Committee, told ThinkProgress. “This is huge for our state’s future. Each year, we spend $3 to $5 billion importing fossil fuels to power our economy. Our electricity bills are roughly three times the national average.”
...

Hawaii strikes me as the perfect environment: Sun, rain, mountains.

Hopefully, people seeing Costa Rica kicking Hawaii's butt, in such things, will get motivated.

 

[OmCheeto]

Someone let me know if this is getting annoying.
These announcements keep popping up on Facebook.

This Texas city [Georgetown] is going 100 percent renewable energy
March 20, 2015
On its website, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists 12 municipalities that have made commitments to 100 percent renewable power. Some, like Burlington, Vt., have already achieved the goal. Others have a longer-term view. San Diego is not planning on reaching 100 percent until 2035.

Burlington, Vt?

Burlington is first U.S. city to hit 100 percent renewable energy
Feb 2, 2015
The city produces most of its energy through hydropower, which harnesses the water pressure from underground turbines to generate electricity. 30 percent comes from a biomass facility, which burns scrap wood and creates energy by converting the heat into steam. Wind turbines produce another 20 percent.

Vermont hopes to spread Burlington’s success to other cities, Ricketts said. “There’s nothing magic about Burlington,” he said.

"Nothing magic". hmmmm... I like that.

 

[mheslep]

"Climate change is the biggest problem we face", sayeth Professor Rickets from the ivory tower. Never mind the heroin epidemic in Vermont, that doesn't rank compared to talk about what Burlington can do to save the world. Apparently green energy claims require no examination, unlike claims about drug epidemics that can quickly be checked by visits to the morgue.

After an admission that "the city produces most of its energy through hydropower,", which has been the case for almost a century in much of New England, it is comical to then follow up with "Vermont hopes to spread Burlington’s success to other cities". The idea that biomass plants are an improvement for the environment is also dubious.

 

[OmCheeto]

"Climate change is the biggest problem we face", sayeth Professor Rickets from the ivory tower. Never mind the heroin epidemic in Vermont, that doesn't rank compared to talk about what Burlington can do to save the world. Apparently green energy claims require no examination, unlike claims about drug epidemics that can quickly be checked by visits to the morgue.

After an admission that "the city produces most of its energy through hydropower,", which has been the case for almost a century in much of New England, it is comical to then follow up with "Vermont hopes to spread Burlington’s success to other cities". The idea that biomass plants are an improvement for the environment is also dubious.

Wow.
And I thought I had ADD.
Talk about "look over there! HEROIN!"...
I could have swore this was the "general engineering" forum.
Lots of people have their own personal biggest problem.
I don't.
There are lots of problems.
I try to solve them all.
I actually have solved many of the major ones, IMHO.
But, as I've said, many times, "My solutions probably aren't very politically correct".

hmmm...

Perhaps we should start a new thread.
I mentioned several years ago, that PF needed a forum devoted to "Systems Science", but got frightened away by a wordsmith.

OmCheeto - what's your idea of systems science?
These days, I would see it centred around hierarchy theory, dissipative structure theory, Peircean semiotics, complex adaptive systems, second order cybernetics, generative neural networks, relational biology, scalefree networks, condensed matter physics and self-organising systems.

So quite a variety of currently active approaches. But most distinguished by a recognition of some kind of downward causation to complement the usual bottom-up causality of atomistic and mechanistic modelling - which is what makes a system more than the sum of its parts.

I would ask; "Where is the ferrous monkey nowadays?", but I'm sure he'd respond with; "Apes are not monkeys!"

 

[mheslep]

Not every mention of a "100% renewable energy, now and forever more, amen" prayer chant belongs in the general engineering forum.

 

[russ_watters]

Lots of people have their own personal biggest problem.
I don't.
There are lots of problems.
I try to solve them all.

It doesn't really work that way. Some problems overlap, so you can't solve both/all at the same time. Even worse, solving one problem sometimes creates another. So you must decide which is the bigger problem in those cases.

My issue is similar to mheslep's. I view problems based on time horizons/immediacy in addition to severity:
-A problem that exists now must be solved now.
-A problem that will exist in the future but actions now affect it must be solved now.
-A problem that will exist in the future and actions now don't affect it doesn't need to be solved now.

The difficulty with climage change, IMO, is that it isn't a "now" problem and it is difficult to gauge how much our actions now will impact the future. Worse, it is difficult to gauge how much our actions are going to change on their own in the future.

Social Security is a problem that is a "now" problem because our actions today are near certain to result in it going bankrupt in around 2035. We can predict with near certainty that it will happen, when it will happen (+- just a few years) and what happens when it does, based on our actions in the meantime. Climate change isn't like that. Not only do we not have a very good handle on the rate of change (the temperature change itself), we don't have a good handle what impact that will have. Even worse, we've proven to be very bad at forecasting our own actions, even over a period as short as 10-15 years.

This is why I'm going to need to reboot the thread whenever I get around to it. Now that it is more than 10 years, some of my predictions turned-out to be very wrong and so my opinions on what we should do next have changed.

 

[mfb]

"Nothing magic". hmmmm... I like that.

There is something magic about those examples: they all happen to have a lot of hydroelectricity available. It is easy to show this cannot work on a larger scale - there are just not enough rivers with sufficient flow and height difference. It is an illusion to think every other town or country could simply adopt this strategy and we would have 100% renewable energy everywhere.

 

[rootone]

This thread is too long to read it all, so tidal has probably already been mentioned, but anyway I think it's a good candidate.
I don't live in the US, but it looks like there's quite a lot of useable coastline there.
It's big bonus over other renewables is that it is completely predictable.

 

[mheslep]

This thread is too long to read it all, so tidal has probably already been mentioned, but anyway I think it's a good candidate.
I don't live in the US, but it looks like there's quite a lot of useable coastline there.
It's big bonus over other renewables is that it is completely predictable.

Tidal power, all of it on the coastlines, is still a fraction of global consumption, and it's still intermittent.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/can-tides-turn-the-tide/

 

[rootone]

Ah OK. Interesting read.
I had thought that the available energy in tides was a lot greater than it actually is.
Only certain rare locations channel tides in a way so that they possesses useful amounts of energy that could be extracted.
Open sea tides average at about only 1 meter, and much of the coastline offers little more than that.
Even so, I guess it's worth exploiting in those parts that do have potential.

 

[OmCheeto]

Tidal power, all of it on the coastlines, is still a fraction of global consumption, and it's still intermittent.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/can-tides-turn-the-tide/

Wow. Have you posted articles by that guy before? I like people who do maths.

I like the one graph he posted:

 

[mheslep]

I find Murphy's DTM articles on energy to be excellent when he's actually doing the math, both in clarity of approach and accuracy.

However, he also has a habit IMO of introducing a thesis by rigorous maths, which are indeed solid, and then meandering into personal speculation, however likely or not, with varying context, and then treating that speculation as if it were just as irrefutable. That graph above is a good example: the data on the rise of energy use is known, but Murphy has no business putting the known rise alongside his his personal speculation on the when and rate of the decline. He's also made a statement about Hubert's peak oil theories, that Hubert's prediction of irreversible decline of US domestic oil production from its 1970's levels were "irrefutable", a claim he made a few years before the US oil industry refuted it.

 

[OmCheeto]

How did I miss this article?

Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables (Bloomberg)
This is the beginning of the end.
April 14, 2015

The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's no going back.

Holy Moses! Bloomberg has a bunch of these articles. When did they become tree huggers?

Big Oil Is About to Lose Control of the Auto Industry
A pollution-free revolution is coming
April 16, 2015

While the U.S. pats itself on the back for the riches flowing from fracking wells, an upheaval in clean energy is quietly loosening the oil industry's grip on the automotive industry.

bolding mine

I've heard bad things about "Fracking". Though, I don't follow it closely enough to know whether or not the frack-o-phobes are telling the truth. Let's see if I can find something from a non-whacko site.

This one seems legit':

How safe is fracking? (The Economist)
August 19, 2013

Fracking is not without risk. As gas rises to the surface it can escape into drinking water. Recent research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the impact of drilling in the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from north-eastern Pennsylvania to southeastern New York, found that four-fifths of nearby wells contained methane and that concentrations of gas in the water in nearby homes were far higher than in those further away.

Sounds a bit bad, but the article leans towards pro-fracking.

But back to this string of Bloomberg articles:

Germany Proves Life With Less Fossil Fuel Getting Easier
April 12, 2015

The system Scheibner manages has been so successful that Germany experiences just 15 minutes a year of outages, compared with 68 minutes in France and more than four hours in Poland. The model in Germany, the biggest economy in the world to rely so heavily on renewables, is being copied from California to China as wind and solar displace traditional fuels such as nuclear and coal.

hmmm... The rest of the article makes the 'headline' sound like a bait and switch. It does not sound "easier".

“In 10 years, we will need to transport 25 gigawatts of renewable power from northern to southern Germany,” as atomic reactors in the south are closed, said Scheibner at the 50Hertz center. “We’re in a race against time.”

Though, I see nothing wrong with a good 'struggle', as it keeps you busy.

ps. I saw Wolram's post the other day about "Fireplaces", and being of the 'efficiency' nerd persuasion, I ran an experiment with my wood fired 'Franklin Stove' all day yesterday. I haven't run the numbers yet, but I've always been curious, since I made that post:

I just discovered that Oregon couldn't even power Oregon with our wood
...
I seriously doubt my old Franklin stove has an efficiency over 0.1%.

Numbers to follow. Some day...
I just completed science experiment #5. The first of which I started 48 hours ago.
So much data, so little time...

 

[mfb]

The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined.

The statement counts nuclear power as "renewable". And 1 GW in a coal power plant means you get ~800 MW, while 1 GW installed photovoltaics gives you on average something like 100 MW. We are far away from the point where the increase in delivered power from renewables is larger than the increase from fossil fuels, not even the 2030 forecast gives that. And it just means the current massive difference does not increase even more after that point.

 

[mheslep]

Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables (Bloomberg)
This is the beginning of the end.
April 14, 2015

The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's no going back.

The Bloomberg fanfare is a comparison between the "capacity" of sources with very different capacity factors. Bloomber has new fossil capacity at 141 GW, which runs ~70% of the time (when its needed) so the average fossil fueled power is ~100 GW. The new "renewable" capacity is given as 143 GW. About half of that tally is the not-so-new technology of hydro and biomass, along with some nuclear. The other ~71 GW capacity is 35 GW wind and 35 GW solar. Solar runs ~20% of the time so its average power is 7 GW avg and wind at 33% is 12 GW avg, so that new wind and solar produce about 7% of total electric generation (coal-gas-hydro-nuclear-biomass-solar-wind).

Imagine instead an article exclaiming, WooHoo!, 7% new solar and wind, and by the way global consumption of trees (biomass) has doubled or tripled in the last few years. Such is not going to draw many readers, though it would convey a realistic picture of what's happening with wind and solar and biomass, and, well, in some media outlets that can't be allowed. Fortunately https://www.linkedin.com/pub/tom-randall/4/830/56 don't build and run the grid.

 

[OmCheeto]

...
[edit] Not quite true.

The truth of the matter is, that I've determined that the people running around PF are so freaking smart, that a mere hint of what I've discovered, would have them knowing exactly what it was, that I've stumbled upon. Mere mortals would laugh. But PF'ers, would slap the sides of their heads, in a "Why didn't I think of that"?, kind of way. (See: Pet Rocks, Road Reflectors. etc. )

My guess, as to why they haven't, is because, it's been my focus, from day one.

ps. My science experiment from yesterday was a complete failure.

The mosquito's survived...
But not for long...

 

[mfb]

Thread re-opened after cleanup. Please keep in mind that we do not discuss private unpublished theories and inventions (this comment is not related to the previous post).

 

[jim hardy]

(this comment is not related to the previous post).

OM's thought seems quite realistic. No reason in principle one couldn't use exhaust heat in a second thermodynamic cycle, just as in combined cycle power plants.
Before high temperature water chemistry got good there were a few plants built that boiled mercury at ~1000 degF and condensed it at ~400, using heat from the mercury condenser to boil water for a conventional steam plant. A friend of mine worked on the automatic controls for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine

The advantage of operating a mercury-vapour turbine in conjunction with a steam power plant lies in the fact that the complete cycle can be worked over a very wide range of temperature without employing any abnormal pressure. The exhaust from the mercury turbine is used to raise steam for the steam turbine. The Hartford Electric Light Co. (U.S.A.) has a 10,000kW turbo-generator driven by mercury vapour, which reaches the turbine at 70 lb. per sq. in. (gauge), 880°F. The mercury vapour is condensed at 445°F and raises 129,000 lb. steam per hr. at 280 lb. per sq. in. pressure. The latter is superheated to 735°F and passed to the steam turbines. During 4 months continuous operation, this plant averaged about 0.715 lb. of coal per kWh of net output, about 43% of the output being from the mercury turbine generator and 57% from the steam plant. On maintained full-load the heat output averages 9800 B.Th.U. per net kWh. It is believed that maintenance costs will be lower than in ordinary steam plant. The back-pressure on the mercury turbine is fixed by the steam boiler pressure; only a small vacuum pump is needed, as there is no air or other gas in the mercury system.

Power plants designed by William Emmet were constructed by General Electric and operated between 1923 and 1950. Large plants included:

• Hartford, Connecticut, 1.8 MW, starting in 1922, uprated in stages to 15 MW in 1949
• Kearny, New Jersey, 20 MW mercury turbine +30 MW steam, started 1933
• Schenectady, New York,[3]
• Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 40 MW, 1950.[4][5]

Assuming 10,000 btu/lb coal that's a heat rate of just 7150 BTU/KWH which is darn good even today. Modern combined cycle plants might do 6000, nukes maybe 10,000, conventional coal 9,000 .

For automotive application a steam engine could return power to the drivetrain. I've long wanted to do that by re-plumbing an air conditioner compressor as a steam engine and returning power to engine through the fan belt.
Practical problems would be the same as with original steam automobiles, people up north wouldn't want their boiler to freeze up in winter.
Another working fluid like Freon seems natural, though.
Hobbyists turn old Chrysler V-2 air conditioner compressors into Stirling engines because they come with the needed 90 degree offset between cylinders. But that'd be a plumbing nightmare.so, OM - lots of us have eyed that exhaust heat stream you linked in "wild geese".
Keep up the good work. Something for over-the-road trucks might give a quick payback.

old jim

 

[OmCheeto]

OM's thought seems quite realistic. No reason in principle one couldn't use exhaust heat in a second thermodynamic cycle, just as in combined cycle power plants.
Before high temperature water chemistry got good there were a few plants built that boiled mercury at ~1000 degF and condensed it at ~400, using heat from the mercury condenser to boil water for a conventional steam plant. A friend of mine worked on the automatic controls for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine
...

Interesting. Never heard of such a thing.

so, OM - lots of us have eyed that exhaust heat stream you linked in "wild geese".
Keep up the good work. Something for over-the-road trucks might give a quick payback.

old jim

I actually haven't worked on the 'wild geese' idea since it was posted. BMW has been working on it since 2000. 15 years!
If a multibillion dollar corporation can't figure out how to engineer something in that amount of time, then I probably didn't have much of a chance with my duct tape and sticks technology.

I posted it mainly as a reference to the fact that energy efficiency has been my primary interest in science since I arrived here.
As I mentioned to BlueSpanishLady last month, I've thrown most of my old ideas out the window.

And I'm not above stealing ideas. I thought this one was great:

Powertrain Drawbacks
April, 2011

I'm thinking about an on-board electrolysis unit that could convert water (with added electrolytes) into hydrogen and oxygen...

I like this idea. Consider your idea stolen.
...

AlephZero didn't seem to like the idea, but I loved it.

 

[Hachibei]

Personally I feel as though nuclear energy provides the safest in alternative energy and allows for the greatest amount of energy to be produced at the lowest cost rather than using hydroelectric power with the various problems cited above

 

[Buckleymanor]

Personally I feel as though nuclear energy provides the safest in alternative energy and allows for the greatest amount of energy to be produced at the lowest cost rather than using hydroelectric power with the various problems cited above

It would be interesting to ask the inhabitants around Chernoble or Fukashima if they share your feelings with regards the cost.

 

[russ_watters]

It would be interesting to ask the inhabitants around Chernoble or Fukashima if they share your feelings with regards the cost.

Asking only a small, select group of people about the cost does not provide a complete cost-benefit picture, nor does it provide any comparison with other costs. Also, it wrongly assumes those costs are the same everywhere.

 

[Buckleymanor]

Asking only a small, select group of people about the cost does not provide a complete cost-benefit picture, nor does it provide any comparison with other costs. Also, it wrongly assumes those costs are the same everywhere.

I agree but right or wrongly it does explain why the world does not embrace nuclear power with enthusiasm.

 

[russ_watters]

I agree but right or wrongly it does explain why the world does not embrace nuclear power with enthusiasm.

Broadly, that's kind of true and vastly different from one country to the next. France decided to go all nuclear in 1974 due to the first oil shock. The anti-nuclear movement was well underway in the US by then, mostly on political grounds (equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons). The US nuclear industry had already essentially stopped growing before Chernobyl in 1989.

Environmentalists have started to come around on nuclear power and the original anti nuke weapons opposition has largely dissipated. With coal being crushed by anti-global warming rules, it seems likely to have a comeback here.

All that said, I have this thread in the engineering section because I want to focus on technical/practical concerns. On that score, nuclear's merits are quite high compared to alternatives.

 

[mheslep]

the original anti nuke weapons opposition has largely dissipated.

If only. I think "replaced" with more of the same is more accurate. There seem to be quite few full time Caldicot replacements out there, degreed people fronting one man "institutes" who work out of their kitchens for decades trying to get published, and occasionally some junk papers slip into a journal. Mangano comes to mind. And the NYT still feels the need to publish the ravings of Caldicott.

The responses to the crackpots have grown concise, clear, but not sufficient to put them on the dustbin. The balance I think will allow some more nuclear plants, but still via an over-long and and over-expensive process that will make them too expensive in the US, continuing to be double and triple the price of Chinese and Indian projects. BTW, I think keeping US nuclear power at its current status quo (100 reactors and no more) serves the interests of all conventional power producers, including the owners of of large, expensive, 60 year life nuclear plants.

 

[OmCheeto]

Yay! I love it when someone else does the maths for me:

Engineers Develop Roadmap To Get The US To Run on 100% Renewable Energy By 2050 (IFLScience)
June 10, 2015 | by Aamna Mohdin

A new study suggests it’s entirely possible for the U.S. to run on 100% renewable energy in just 35 years. The radical plan outlines what each state needs to do to achieve this ambitious goal. What’s the main barrier to making this happen? Political willpower.

Mark Z. Jacobson, from Stanford University, and his research team outlined the changes in infrastructure and energy consumption that each state has to undergo to achieve this transition to clean energy. Jacobson points out in a statement that it’s “technologically and economically” possible to successfully achieve this “large scale transformation.” Researchers have even created an interactive map that showcases their plans.
...

Their interactive map is fun. It shows what is available in each state.
The original paper is available. (This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2015)
The only thing that seems too optimistic is aircraft.

...
Long-haul aircraft: by 2040, all remaining new aircraft are electrolytic cryogenic hydrogen (ref. 6, Section A.2.7) with electric power for idling, taxiing, and internal power. The limiting factors to a faster transition are the time and social changes required for the redesign of aircraft and the design and operation of airports.
...

Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what "Ref. 6, Section A.2.7" was.
And I've only found one commercial sized aircraft that was cryogenic hydrogen powered: Tupolev Tu-155