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On Electricity (Generation)
Journal written by Engineer-Poet (795260) and posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:54 AM
from the looking-at-tomorrow dept.
from the looking-at-tomorrow dept.
Engineer-Poet wrote a piece a few months back that focuses on electricity production; or rather how or what we will need to do to keep pace with people's demands while balancing that with environmental and economic impact. Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.
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They're typical media (Score:2)
Good find man. I think I'll post it in a few of my discussion nodes.
Re:They're typical media (Score:5, Insightful)
As it so happens, Ethanol is being used as an ocatane-booster additive in the majority of gasoline today. In part, it's because it's safer than cleaner than most of the chemicals previously used to improve octane ratings. Another part of it, however, is that up to 10% Ethanol mixtures are helping to lower the cost of gasoline as the prices for gas surpass that of Ethanol.
Parent
Wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Ethanol is being used to reduce emissions on that small fraction of badly running automobiles out there. It does not have any effect on modern engines except to lower their mileage. Modern engines don't even require the "higher" octane rating, as they can compensate as required for slightly lower octane ratings.
Ethanol actually reduces the specific energy of gasoline.
Lastly, ethanol's true cost is in growing and producing ethanol - namely, water use and the agricultural pollution.
Ethanol i
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-jcr
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
It's true that in a pure-ethanol vehicle, you'll need more fuel to make up for lower energy density. However, the faster and hotter burn cycle can be compensated for, allowing engine designers to extract a fairly competitive amount of energy from the fuel.
The lower energy density just isn't that big of a deal when the choice is between needing 20% more Ethanol fuel at $2.50/gal vs. purchasing petroleum fuel at $3.75/gal. This must be the oddest argument I've ever heard against nuclear power. First and foremost, any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. So plants try to loose as little as possible. However, they do lose some, but nowhere near enough to have an impact on global conditions. "Global Warming" models are not based around how much heat that power plants release, but around concentrations of greenhouse gases that hold heat in. The theory is that if the concentrations were lowered, the Earth would be better able to radiate away the excess heat.
Parent
Actually, that's Wrong Too (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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A high compression engine can take advantage of higher octane fuel, but it doesn't care if the octane boost comes from ethanol or some or ingredient. The important
Plant waste heat is trivial (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh 1E15 BTU, about 1E18 Joules, or 230 megatons if you prefer it in one go.
This is mentioned in the article (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that it's energy negative- we still come out ahead- it's that it's not energy positive enough. There's a lot of other things we could be doing with that corn instead of turning it into ethanol. We are paying tax money through subsidies for something that's not going to be a long term solution. It's a waste of money and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no such thing as a long term solution. Only transitional solutions.
Even all our sources of uranium will be depleted so day in the next few hundred years.
(Of course to be even more fair we will have to leave the planet to find more sources of hydrogen for fusion in tens of thousand of years, but perhaps it will be a moot point)
That sai
Because corn = money, that's why. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math [blogspot.com]. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.
As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.
Sustainability [blogspot.com] actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:
It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.
Parent
Re:They're typical media (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, what an uninformed stereotype. Plenty of us green environmental lefties have serious issues with increasing society's reliance on industrial agriculture, and see the potential usurpation of the oil lobby by the corn lobby as a meaningless substitution. Our leaders keep trying to find new and exciting ways to supply our energy demand without examining the nature or utility of this demand. Sustainable energy will come from changing cultural attitudes regarding the worthy expenditures of energy, not a shuffling of environmental issues.
Parent
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Re:They're typical media (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe I've been around some of the more logical and open minded environmentalists, but my recollection is that they seemed to think solar and wind hold the biggest promises with ethanol being good if the major issues can be worked out.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the fact that transporting it more than a few miles to where it is produced removes most of the benefits
Corn is definitely a bad idea for this - the useful output is just far too small - about 5-10% of the biomass. Some interesting research has been done with certain kinds of bateria and soy plants (the whole plants stalk, roots leaves and all) managing to use 90-95% of the biomass as usable energy.
Your point is righ
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Maybe I'm not typical.
Ad hominem as well as patently false. (Score:3, Insightful)
This directly contradicts my own thirty years of experience with environmentally aware and politically active people. I strongly suspect you avoid such people, since you seem to have no idea how they behave or react in meatspace. News flash, glass saviour - ethanol and fool cells are what the right-wing browns are p
No and no. (Score:2)
I'm no longer a member of Technocrat, and I barely know what Hugg is. But I know Michael Milliken reads my blog, so I expect things to be noted at both Worldchanging and Windsofchange in the next week or two.
Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Read more about it here, especially the section entitled Supply and Demand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electrici
Parent
Article Banned (Score:2, Insightful)
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As for the nuclear waste: if we switched to 100% nuclear and renewable sources, it should follow that a significant amount of time and money be devoted to a permanent solution for nuclear waste. But I'd prefer we have 1,000 years to solve that problem than have 100 years or so to solve the current one. Especially as the current problem is alreay doing harm, whereas a well-run
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Unless that nuclear "waste"... (Score:2)
100 Years of Fission / Reliable Lift (Score:4, Insightful)
Very well put. There's only one known solution to the problem at hand, and we need to start lighting up one of these plants every two months to get the carbon problem solved - nothing else has a chance of doing it (without 'killing off the human race' as an item on the table),
Besides, we only need enough time on fission to get fusion perfected. That should take less than a hundred years. Then we only need to wait until we, as a race, consider that we have lift into space as a reliable technology. Then we just take all that old fission waste and send it into the Sun for the next generation of solar system to enjoy. And that's assuming we don't have a better solution for it by then.
But, the current course is for nothing to get done and the problem to get worse. The "environmentalist" groups seem to think that's the best course of action (scare-quotes intended) and that implementing wishful thinking is a sufficient plan.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Orbital mechanics dictate that it's far easier to fling mass out of the system than in towards the sun (this having primarily to do with an existing angular velocity around the sun of ~30,000 m/s, borrowed from Earth's solar orbit).
Practically speaking, of course, there's no difference between throwing the waste out of the system and into the sun. The percentage of people who would honestly raise a "polluting the universe" concern has got to be vanishingly small. If it isn't, we're
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Not that I disagree with nuclear (pragmatically) (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Related Reading (Score:5, Interesting)
I think creative solutions to electricity problems are in all our futures. Personally, I live about 75% off the grid and am looking forward to be able to afford to get all the way off -- but I need to get my roof re-done before I can even think about solar panels or mounting a wind turbine up there.
At any rate, fiction for thought.
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If we limited the amount of energy available to them they would be forced to get off their collective arses and get jobs.
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I'm not sure if you're hoping for the sunlight that hits the roof to heat the living space inside the house or what. The area between the top of the living space and the roof (commonly called 'the attic') is not supposed to hold heat. Fresh air comes in through soffit vents and hot air is exhausted through vents at the roof's ridgeline. In the winter, I don't want my attic to be warm. I want it to be as cold as the air outside the roof. Warm air in the attic en
My Money Is On... (Score:2, Funny)
What!? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, what the hell is something like that doing on slashdot? I need more psuedo intellectual rants about how the RIAA is going to eat my first born!
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Similar Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Transitionary period for Ethanol (Score:3, Interesting)
In the meantime, ethanol for corn will help get the infrastructure in place.
Someone better tell China (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, their only fix for good air during the Olympics will be to ban cars and shutdown nearby industries.
Still got to love this comment on his blog
"There is sufficient biomass energy to replace motor fuel and then some... if the energy is not wasted. "
Well duh. Thats the problem with his whole page, its all stuck on a BIG bunch of IFs.
but the biggest problem is turing grain crops into fuel, there are just so many uses for grain crops in everyday products that a slight increase in their pricing because of competition with fuels could force consumer prices up, masking the true cost of these new forms of power creation.
A couple more technologies (Score:5, Informative)
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Oil? What about soil? (Score:4, Informative)
Ryan Fenton
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Much of our soil erosion and depletion is due to the way we grow crops: in strict rows, with chemicals to kill weeds and grass. While killing weeds makes picking corn easier by keeping the rows clean, there is a lot of exposed soil under the plants.
Grasses don't have this problem and actually help to maintain or even expand soil over time, and most have the added benefit of being perennial and self-propaga
End carbon emissions in 30 years (how to) (Score:5, Interesting)
Step 1: Build nuclear power plants. Update the designs with modern technology and give tax incentives for every new nuke plant built.
Reason: 50's and 60's technology nuke plants currently generate electricity for less money than any other technology, even coal. They cost less than a third of what oil and natural gas plants cost. With modern technology its likely we could improve safety while lowering the cost further. Speaking of safety: the worst US accident in 50 years of opererating nuclear energey plants was three mile island, in which no radiation leaked and no one got hurt.
Yes, worse accidents are possible. That means that over a long enough period of time they will happen. But weigh the rare environmental damage from a meltdown against the continuous destruction of the atmosphere by hyrdocarbon burning plants.
Step 2: With the cost of electricty driven cheap enough by nuke plants, shift to hydrogen-based internal combustion engines. With electrolysis done at off-peak hours to generate hydrogen from electricity, every home can be its own fueling station. Hydrogen burns with oxygen to make water, so go drive a steamer.
Reason: Imagine a city, maybe the city you live in, where the only air pollution is the occasional methane from peoples' farts! Nuclear makes its possible and these technologies are economical now, not just in some hypothetical future after more research.
Re:What does nuclear energy cost? (Score:5, Informative)
And your original point is wrong. You are backwards, power reactors don't receive subsidies to dispose of their waste. They've been paying into a DOE waste fund since 1982. The cost of waste disposal has already been factored into the economics of their operation.
Parent
Re:What does nuclear energy cost? (Score:5, Informative)
As for the insurance costs, it most certainly is not free. Power plants spend huge amounts of money for their liability insurance. What you are probably thinking of is the price-anderson act, which states that power companies are only liable for the first $10 billion in damages due to a nuclear accident, where the federal government picks up the rest. While the act makes it so that people cannot sue the power companies for _punitive_ damages in a nuclear accident, it also states that the power companies cannot defend any action for damages. It's a fair two-way street that makes nuclear power commercially possible.
According to the wikipedia article on the price-anderson act, the actual subsidy comes out to around $2 million per reactor per year. That seems fairly modest to me, considering the financial risk power companies invest in the plants and their benefit to the country via clean, reliable power.
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I have a 2-Tank Car already. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a 2001 VW Jetta TDI. Diesel. Installed a GreaseCar [greasecar.com] system. Works well, but not in this weather (-20C..-30C).
Pretty much every other time of the year, I start on DinoDiesel and once things get hot enough I switch to Waste Veggie Oil I get and filter to 10 microns [filterbag.com] from a local pub.
The article puts things together in a clear way. Points out what's wrong with the nut-jobs who think the world can be run off of butterflies and rainbows.
To those back-and-forthing on Ethenol - think about how much energy there is in a litre of ethenol. It's very very small. Production is expensive ($$$ & energy).
I don't 100% agree with the article's view on charcol fuel sources. But I like the analysis, not many gems like that.
My thoughts on how to solve this? Okokokok I'll tell you anyways. Grow alge, crush it into oil and use that. Alge grows 100x faster than canola/soy/rapeseed, is 50% oil, and only requires sunlight, (non-)salted water, heat, dirt and shit. No expentive farming equipment guzzling diesel to harvest. Just settling ponds like at the local water treatment plant to skim off the alge.
Anyways. Alge == good. Alge has had about 3-4 Billion years head start on Solar-power. Don't believe me? Take a deep breath.
Ive said it once, and Ill say it forever more... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)