Bill Gates Investing $2 Billion In Renewables 292
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Gates has dumped a billion dollars into renewables, and now he's ready to double down. Gates announced he will increase his investment in renewable energy technologies to $2 billion in an attempt to "bend the curve" on limiting climate change. He is focusing on risky investments that favor "breakthrough" technologies because he thinks incremental improvements to existing tech won't be enough to meet energy needs while avoiding a climate catastrophe. He says, "There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind. Power is about reliability. We need to get something that works reliably." At the same time, Gates rejected calls to divest himself and his charitable foundation of investments in fossil fuel companies.
Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:3, Insightful)
Always a dichotomy between renewables versus fossil fuels. Either you are hippy windmill-hugger or bad CO2-spewing coal monster.
Maybe, instead, he could throw few billions in direction of 4th gen nuclear power and give us another 1000+ years to focus on solving fusion and/or proper renewable energy research/storage etc?
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you seriously think Billy boy isn't well aware of Nuclear?! Watch this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to current regulatory hurdles due to nuke fears, a $2billion investment will pay for half a bathroom in a new reactor facility.
Re: Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:2)
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thick concrete walls and extensive routine inspections are safety measures.
Forcing plants to not process or reuse spent fuel is not.
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You believe that thick, expensive concrete walls will appear magically by themselves without regulations? Or that a business won't sell some plutonium to the highest bidder if not prevented by the higher cost of a penalty? Then you're delusional.
There's always liability. And given the current huge burden of regulation, I don't buy that it's making nuclear plants safer, especially when we have nuclear plants operating well past their design lifespan.
You need examples? Check out Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note. Fukushima was overwhelmed by a natural disaster for which regulation was inadequate at the time, but would have in around five to ten years (IMHO). Chernobyl was run by the people who regulated it. They deliberately ignored their regulations and too
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, to date, nuclear power has done less damage to the environment, as well as killing fewer people (by several orders of magnitude) than just coal mining, much less coal power in general.
If we'd gone all nuke back in the 60's, we'd not have had the last half century worth of coal mining deaths, nor would we have the coal ash heaps piled untidily about our environment. And best of all, we wouldn't be talking about AGW, since CO2 levels wouldn't be this high by a significant margin....
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, to date, nuclear power has done less damage to the environment, as well as killing fewer people (by several orders of magnitude) than just coal mining, much less coal power in general.
Give it time. It's got thousands of years, even if we stop using it today.
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right about the thousands of tons of nuclear 'waste' sitting all over the country with no plan on how to get rid of it.
Most here are science types, and realize there is only one thing that can be done with it. Burn it up.
The reality on the ground today is, if you are against nuclear power, then you are for nuclear waste. (It would be nice to see a Greenpeace-type marcher carry that sign in a fit of honesty.)
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most here are science types, and realize there is only one thing that can be done with it. Burn it up.
That'd be fine, but we're not talking about doing that in this country yet. That's the only kind of nuclear power I would promote. Show me an effort to fix that in the USA and I'll get behind it. Also, there is still some waste left over from that. I'm going to have to see some evidence that we'll handle that responsibly. So far, nope.
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Also, there is still some waste left over from that. I'm going to have to see some evidence that we'll handle that responsibly. So far, nope.
We don't need to. After use in a modern nuclear cycle the final waste products decay to safe levels quickly enough that it becomes an almost non issue. By comparison the waste produced by a coal power plant is significantly worse.
But we won't get there because of an interim stage of the cycle. OMG PLUTONIUM THE COMMIE TERRORISTS WILL GET US.
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Reactors that can burn it up don't exist.
You mix up spent fuel with waste. A common misconception in the US.
Or show me a reactor that burns nitric acid ... ... that is the main part of the alloy used for fuel rods.
Or show me one that "burns" zirconium
There are none. Pretty simple. The idea you can "burn" real waste is a complete myth. The only thing you can do is build a reactor that hopefully never needs to be emptied as it breeds up more or less all materials put into it, so you avoid "waste" in the first
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I did mean that to be a joke.
But yes, I'm all for going over the regulations and making them sane. No other industry is forced to produce a weaponized waste while at the same time being punished for it.
I'd suggest the rules were drafted by a Batman villain, but even Twoface is more consistent than nuclear regulations.
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Which 'job' is it of which you speak, anyway?
Some environmentalists are just fine. Some of them are complete zealots and outright whack-jobs. Remember that there are plenty of 'environmentalists' who preach that the best thing humanity can do for the environment is to commit suicide, preferably as an entire race, and allow the Earth to return to it's 'natural' state. For the most part ignorance, wilfull or not, is what got us into our current messes in the first place; extremists nee
you never hear of having USN nuclear problems (Score:5, Informative)
TFTFY.
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Except for those that don't run on water.
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You mean the "don't run reactors without proper controls" don't (thanks environmentalists) stall upgrades on a first gen nuclear reactor in an earthquake zone? Yeah. We already know about the first, the second though pushed back upgrades on the reactors several times.
It's not dissimilar to what happened at a medical reactor here in Canada. It didn't have a secondary or third backup system for various parts, and the environmentalists threw a hissy fit over and over and over again, and the government had e
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Sure, because it's competing against coal and gas which pass their externalities of wrecking the planetary ecosystem at zero cost to everybody else and their descendants.
If coal and gas had to sequester their output as much as nuclear, nuclear would obviously be cheapest because it's much easier to capture a small amount of solid waste instead of im
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I'm one of the people who voted to shut down Rancho Seco back in the day,
And "thar's yer problem". Energy problems are all political [pbs.org] at this point, not technical. Nuclear plants are less dangerous than other forms of power, even including the crappy old light water reactors we have to deal with (and which should have gone extinct by now, except for politics, especially the dominance of public nuclear insurance).
One thing Gates could do, that would be really good, is to advance the progress of superconduct
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The "glow in the dark" thing (Score:5, Insightful)
We may have to come to grips with the idea that it's just a hard sell. The long-term average death/illness rate may be much lower than say oil or wind, BUT people remember the "spikes" of accidents such as 3-Mile-Island.
It's just easier to sell an idea that kills lots of people gradually in a predictable rate than one that kills nobody for many years, but occasionally hiccups in a newsworthy way.
That's just the way it is. We can't change human nature, and mass nagging usually backfires. We probably have to just live with that fact unless somebody invents breakthrough persuasion technology.
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BUT people remember the "spikes" of accidents such as 3-Mile-Island.
Which just goes to show that people are beyod terrible at estimating risk. It's something like the third worse nuclear powerplant accident ever and no one died and very little leaked and pretty much all trace of that has gone. In the greater scheme of incidents involved in power generation, that's somewhere approching negative.
We probably have to just live with that fact unless somebody invents breakthrough persuasion technology.
Preach it,
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when the truth of the matter is that any problems with it have been through mismanagement and poor planning
And what's going to change that? It's already heavily regulated. As long as humans and corporations are involved it will be dangerous. History has proven us irresponsible with this technology and the damage it does is very hard to reverse and in some cases impossible.
Wind and solar, while nice and clean, probably aren't going to ever be capable of delivering all the power the world needs/wants
Wind in Ontario, Canada accounts for 6% of it's yearly production. That's more than I would have expected from a place not known for high wind speeds. Here's a chart for renewable energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The fact is that as we
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I agree. All I'm saying is that these other forms of energy aren't as obsolete as they appear. As you said there's progress to be had (especially with solar and energy storage) and if we get an affordable replacement for coal all efforts towards these technologies will be immediately dropped as there will be no real interest in them anymore.
Re: Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:2)
The *only * piece of the puzzle needed for intermittent renewables to be practical is storage - and there are many many options beyond stacked 18650 cells.
Pumped hydro (if the geography suits), reflow batteries with scaled-up electrolyte tanks, buried flywheels on magnetic bearings, lumps of concrete on inclined rails - the list goes on. There's something suitable for virtually every site, and it's all doable today, no breakthroughs needed. The only real concern is efficiency and economics - and those have
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What 'damage'? You got Chernobyl. Which was done on purpose.
People like to point at Japan, but not to point out the futility of a 15 foot seawall against a 20 foot tsunami. And so far the 'damage' in Japan is noisy geiger counters. (There were 2 old men overexposed trying to fix generators - I haven't seen what happened to them.)
There are so many people that think something bad actually happened at Three Mile Island. When I remind them that nobody died or even got sick; well they don't believe me. And then
There is nuclear and then there is nuclear (Score:2)
Nuclear isn't evil at all. Heavy water nuclear reactor are however, stupid. Totally stupid.
There are several nuclear designs which produce a fraction of the waste, cannot melt down and are non-proliferation. I expect that last item is exactly why they are not used.
We do not need more heavy reactor plants.
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You used the right word when you said 'need'. There are only two forms of power stored in the Earth's crust, carbon and nuclear.
We eventually will have no choice in the matter, but today we can choose to delay advancement of the human condition as long as possible...
No perfect options (Score:3)
People treat it like it's inherently evil, when the truth of the matter is that any problems with it have been through mismanagement and poor planning.
It's not evil - just dangerous. Dangerous in a way that is challenging to mitigate. No amount of planning or good management or (probably) engineering will make fission power not dangerous. Sure we can mitigate it to some degree (thorium, etc) but we have no technology or management system that can eliminate the possibility of a serious incident. Plus even if our management was perfect (which is impossible though it's generally been very good so far) there is always the possibility of a natural disaster
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that we can not produce enough "green" energy is simply idiotic, and certainly not insightful.
No, the idea is that we can't produce enough 'green' energy economically enough. To expand: We're currently most on an 'on demand' system for electricity. You ask for it, you get it.
Since the common green energies are intermittent, producing power when the conditions are right for them, that's a supply based system. In short - either we install massively more green energy tech than we'd need to supply our energy needs alone, or we have to accept that we can't demand power whenever we like.
Or we install an appropriate amount of nuclear so that we can mostly ride through the vagaries of solar, wind, and other renewables.
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The idea that we can not produce enough "green" energy is simply idiotic, and certainly not insightful.
Can vs. should. Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant. Fear is a motivation that achieves terrible results.
"Oh, it's just human lives - I'll take my fear, thanks" seems to be the current attitude of the econuts. We can't call them 'greens' or 'environmentalists' because they're really just supporting coal power, empirically.
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Can vs. should. Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant. Fear is a motivation that achieves terrible results.
I doubt you have a statistic handy that shows how many workers died during the construction of nuclear plants.
Also if a solar worker dies by dropping from a roof, he certainly is not working according to his work regulation. He would have fallen the same way by replacing a tile ...
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This deserves an upvote. It's very hard to calculate the total cost of anything. Not only do we need to calculate the number of people who died building the nuclear plant, but we also have to count the number of people who died while mining the uranium including long term indirect health issues like lung cancer from inhaling radon gas.
We also need to discount any positive things from using either technology. What is the value to increased spending money from whichever technology is cheapest for the end co
Citation please (Score:2)
Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.
Citation please.
We can't call them 'greens' or 'environmentalists' because they're really just supporting coal power, empirically.
No they aren't. The problem is that that coal and nuclear are necessary currently. There is actually one achievable option to minimize use of both and that is to reduce the demand. We've collectively shown no actual interest in doing that but that is effectively what you are arguing for if you argue against both nuclear and fossil fuels. It requires a fair bit of belt tightening that I think is unlikely but it is technically possible to a very substantial degree.
Covering 1/4 of New Mexico has been proposed as well
Please point out a single
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No, my TV won't care.
But my 1000 mile range electric car will.
And I imagine my Amana brand kitchen replicator will use more power than that.
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With how beholden we are in the US to coal/oil, I am happy to see -any-... yes, -any- progress in the energy field.
I do agree -- nuclear is the way to go for the near and medium term. There is so much to be done with thorium reactors, and it would allow us to do things which would be cost-prohibitive now. Thermal depolymerization for example (which would render plastic trash into usable oil.) Desalination is another.
The ironic thing is that some technologies wind up being embraced by the far left and rig
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Best use of excess thorium generated electricity: Scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2, to be made into usable oil.
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Perhaps he does not like nuclear power?
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
$2bn will do bugger all for nuclear. Rich as Gates is, he doesn't have enough money to invest in nuclear to make any real difference. Besides, nuclear's problems are not really to do with a lack of money, at least not in the way that donating £2bn would help.
On the other hand, $2bn in renewables will have a measurable effect. There is a lot of R&D, a lot of good projects that are pushing the technology forwards that he can put money into, all around the world. In many places they couldn't build nuclear even if they wanted it.
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But only incremental progress, not breakthrough, because you're profoundly limited by laws of thermodynamics & energy/entropy density.
Care to point out which law of thermodynamics applies to solar panels?
Or wich to wind power?
Give the gov an incentive to go nuclear. (Score:2)
Tell them they and the NSA will have a new reason to spy on people and post boogieman terrorist stores so we can enjoy safe nuclear power.
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People with billions of dollars to invest who look elsewhere because they don't see the (commercial) value in those technologies?
Any fix will have to be commercially viable. Yeah, NIMBYs, but do you really think that those guys are really what is keeping the nuclear industry down? Like they stopped all those coal plants and oil wells and fracking... oh, wait.
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Nice try. There might be young people here, so I'm going to out you on this one:
You don't see them because you have been politically successful for the past 50-odd years, and forbid them from being built.
Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? (Score:4, Interesting)
4th gen can run on things which are waste products of current generation of nuclear power and they promise to be 100 times more productive.
Yes, fission is not renewable, but it can be damn efficient with what 4th gen is promising. At same time it is not fossil - neither in true meaning (fossil of long dead things), or by what is commonly meant by this (burning it up and releasing CO2).
What I'm advocating is exactly investing in stopgap solution - but with stopgap being 1000+ years, to allow us to look for true alternatives. Renewables are just not efficient/reliable enough to get us out of fossil completely and this means a lot shorter time period due to pollution (I count GW as pollution).
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"upfront costs"
That's how you killed it.
That and carbon are the two power sources stored in the Earth's crust.
Choose one.
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Fine.
We got all the nuclear fuel we need sitting around in pools of water.
Never thought I would see anyone 'FOR' nuclear waste, but the times they are a changin'. ;)
Logical Enough (Score:2)
The cost of the battery packs is still the biggest thing holding EVs back from being practical, and at the same time, if we can economically store electricity in a battery pack in a car, we can store it economically outside of cars for use during peak periods.
Other companies can make facilities like Fairbank's BESS, [gvea.com] a 27MW 6.75 MWh UPS. While it can 'only' run for 15 minutes at full power, that's enough time to get other generators spinning.
With a sufficient number of them, you wouldn't need constantly spi
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the problem
Your statement implies that there's only 1 problem, which I dispute. When it comes to powering our civilization, there are many interconnected problems.
So which problem isn't being solved? The only one I claimed it would solve is the demand for power during peak periods. To be more specific, one of the problems with renewable energy today is that you need to keep a certain amount of 'spinning reserve' going in case the wind dies off and clouds cover the sun. If batteries become cheap enough, you can tur
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There is no constant spinning power (plant) that back ups wind/solar.
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You happen to have a citation on that? Because mine says the opposite. [nrel.gov]
Power companies maintain spinning reserve [wikipedia.org] even when there isn't any solar/wind power. Fairbanks doesn't have significant amounts of solar or wind power, but they have the BESS irregardless. It enabled them to keep generation facilities at a lower state of readiness while still reducing power outages when a generation source goes off line(such as the inter-tie with Anchorage).
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Power Companies maintain something like 2% of the total grid demand as spinning reserves.
Just read the relevant law for that in your jurisdiction :D
And please point out in which part of the document you believe you have found a contradiction. I don't see any.
All the so called reserves in that document btw. are most certainly not "spinning reserves", I doubt that Germany has even a single "spinning reserve" plant in operation. Modern grids don't use that anymore, much to expensive and there are simpler mean
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Just read the relevant law for that in your jurisdiction :D
Why the hell would the spinning reserves be law? That's an engineering issue, not a legal one.
And please point out in which part of the document you believe you have found a contradiction. I don't see any.
You haven't provided a document for me to find a contradiction in. I provided sources saying that spinning reserve is a thing and that the demand for such is generally acknowledged to increase with solar power.
I doubt that Germany has even a single "spinning reserve" plant in operation. Modern grids don't use that anymore, much to expensive and there are simpler means to have reserve power.
Not a citation, not even a definitive statement. Read the documents. What 'spinning reserve' today amounts to isn't an idling generator, but something like running 5 generators at 80% power rather than 4
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Why the hell would the spinning reserves be law? That's an engineering issue, not a legal one.
Because it is law? At least in my country. And I'm pretty sure in your country as well. Or are the energy companies not by law required to guarantee undisrupted power supply for the population?
You haven't provided a document for me to find a contradiction in.
Why should I? Stuff that does not exist can not be found. You can not proof a negative.
I provided sources saying that spinning reserve is a thing and
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Because it is law? At least in my country. And I'm pretty sure in your country as well. Or are the energy companies not by law required to guarantee undisrupted power supply for the population?
No, my country doesn't require 'undisrupted power supply' because that's a standard they can't meet. That being said, they do a very good job of it most of the time, as they don't get paid when they're not distributing power. As such, keeping a steady supply is an engineering problem, not a legal one. There's no legal requirement for them to keep a spinning reserve of any specific amount. They determine that themselves on the basis of historical trends and such.
The document you posted is about reserve energy.
One subcategory of which is spinning reser
Refueling time (Score:2)
The cost of the battery packs is still the biggest thing holding EVs back from being practical
Disagree though I do agree that cost is a major issue - I just think it is not the biggest issue. The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time. Range anxiety is THE most common argument against EVs. Despite the logical argument that most people don't actually drive all that far in a given day, people need/want a car that can drive them 400 miles without worrying about refueling because sometimes they need to do that. Many people cannot afford multiple vehicles and if they want to go visit their
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The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time.
Tesla Supercharging stations. Charging time circles back to the cost of the batteries. I drive two vehicles that are 200 miles(motorcycle) and 300 miles respectively. I don't have a problem with them.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs, and bigger batteries can generally be charged in the same time as a smaller battery, you just use a higher wattage charger. So that helps take care of the charging time issue.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV, that's enough pen
Price is a second order function (Score:5, Insightful)
Tesla Supercharging stations.
Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough. They take 45 minutes to get an 80% charge and over an hour to get a full charge. Plus they're not much use if you don't have a Tesla. They're a good effort in the right direction but not good enough by a long shot yet.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs
With fast charging you don't need longer range EVs - we already have EVs that can do over 200 miles on a charge now with more on the way. With lighter batteries (at the same power output) you also would get longer ranged EVs so arguably you'd be better off trying to get a better power to weight ratio before worrying about lowering cost. I suspect that you'll see more car makers trying Tesla's model starting at the high end with EVs and then EVs will filter down to the lower end of the market from the luxury market as volumes build and technology improves.
Basically you won't get cheaper batteries unless you can build them in larger quantities. You won't get to build them in larger quantities until you can convince them that they can refuel their vehicles in a convenient manner. There is however hope that through development of hybrid cars we can keep developing the batteries and increasing economies of scale until recharge times and ranges and prices are low enough to make pure EVs practical.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV
Won't happen. You will see a lot of hybrids which might eventually accomplish the same end but you won't see pure EVs until the range anxiety problem is solved. To do that you need to be able to refuel them substantially faster than current technology permits.
the high cost of the battery pack limits range
The power to weight ratio is what fundamentally limits range unless you are using fewer batteries than you could for a given vehicle. Beyond a certain point cramming more batteries into a vehicle results in diminishing returns to range (eventually becoming negative) and there are practical considerations (like passengers and cargo space) that limit the number of batteries that can be used as well. A Nissan leaf is a tiny car with an absurdly short range and doesn't have a huge amount of space for a large battery pack no matter what the cost is. While it works fine, for most people it's pretty limiting.
creating range anxiety,
Range anxiety is based on a combination of limited range and long recharge times. You could give the batteries away and you'd still have the problem.
Still, Tesla is reportedly selling every car they can manufacture, which tells me that they don't need 400 miles, 250+ is enough.
Tesla is selling a specialty supercar that costs $100,000. Practicality is not a paramount concern to someone who can afford a vehicle that expensive. Believe me I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could but I'd still have another car with a gas/diesel engine. Simply visiting my parents house would exceed its range and I do that at least once a month. (no there isn't a supercharger along the route and using one would cause an hour delay to the trip)
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Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough.
Wahhhh! A technology still in the deployment phase isn't yet deployed enough to cover everything! 45 minutes is quick enough if you're taking the recommended breaks, IE go have a sit-down meal in between.
Or get a generator-trailer for those highway trips. Because remember, you can charge at home with an EV, as opposed to having to go to a gas station. Often at work.
Finally, 100% solution fallacy. EVs don't need to be 100% of the market. You make them cheap enough, primarily by reducing the cost of the
Re:Logical Enough (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people can't even maintain a home generator. For example, come a disaster, people hit the hardware stores and buy open frame construction generators that put out 4-10kw. However, they are obscenely noisy. After the disaster, they are shoved in the garage and forgotten about.
Well, come the next would be disaster, that generator is pulled out... and won't start. The E-10 gasoline in the tank has turned to varnish, the carb is clogged to uselessness, and in some climates, the windings on the armature are corroded, so it can't even get a current in the first place.
Good generators are expensive. Yes, one can buy a Harbor Freight special for ~$100, which is a clone of Yamaha's ET800 model, made in the 1970s... but it has no voltage regulation, and has very dirty power, where adding/removing a load may result in a 160 volt spike. A good Yamaha or Honda portable inverter generator costs five to ten times as much as the open framed models found at hardware stores... but are a thousand to ten thousand times as quiet, and have a lot better parts availability. To boot, power is extremely clean.
Or the generator gets maintained and oiled... and the person uses a "widow maker" cord to backfeed the house power, which is not a good thing for people working on the lines when power is out. Some pocos are so tired of this, they will pull an offending house's meter, and not reconnect power until the place puts in a up to code way of allowing for generator power (transfer switch [1], safety breaker interlock [1].)
In general, home generators are useful, but one can't expect them to realistically be used in a blackout situation.
[1]: Best of all worlds is a whole-house UPS with two power inputs. That way, the generator is independant of the mains power, and either or both (for a short time) cutting off would not affect power in the house.
Re:Logical Enough (Score:4, Informative)
In the future electric vehicles will be used instead of generators. Nissan already offer it in Japan. A Leaf with a 24kWh battery can run a typical house for a few days, depending on how frugal you are with the power.
Re:Logical Enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Even now, a Prius with an inverter on the traction battery bank can provide a decent amount of power. With a MEPS alternator, you can get 5kw+ from a truck or van, so even though it isn't electric the vehicle can double as a generator (and with the emissions controls on vehicles, that is a lot better for the environment.)
We are lurching slowly towards that, especially with motorhomes. For example, Roadtrek announced last week the addition of 200-1200 ampere-hour battery packs that charge from the engine. I worked on designing a Transit van conversion that would use a "hybrid" inverter so if plugged into a house (or a small vacation cabin), it would run the electricial system from the van's aux battery bank, then once the batteries hit 60% SoC, fire up a generator.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this technology filter into cars, be it plugging the vehicle in and using an alternator as a generator, or having the car's battery bank be used first.
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In response to the AC that triggered mlts's post, I didn't say one word about having house level generators. I was talking about the power company using the big-ass generators it owns and maintains, that are so huge it takes 15+ minutes to get them fired up from 'cold'. Basically, rather than having a few of them idling, using a fair bit of fuel to produce next to no power(they're most efficient at around 80-90% of capability), you shut them off because you have a humongous UPS providing power until they
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Here in Texas, if the logo on the painted sheet metal matches the logo on the breaker, that would be 100% up to code. An interlock like that is the cheapest way to feed a house from a generator safely.
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So mine wouldn't be up to code because it lacks the logo. Made it custom, but that's not exactly hard.
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That's the joy of electricity, it doesn't matter where it came from. Though if you reread my last sentence I mentioned wind and solar.
Preferably speaking, it'd be from a clean source. Wind, Solar, Nuclear. If you have nuclear providing about 40% of the power, it wouldn't be 'common' for it to hit the batteries if you figure that excess solar & wind goes there first, but it'd happen.
Then again, if the outage or demand spike forced you to start up spinning power, just leave it running once the outage is
well, it should work, for my lifetime, at least... (Score:2)
Good on him (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for you Mr. Gates, use your money to try and do something positive in this world.
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It's rare that somebody is a jerk in all ways: we all have flaws in some area(s) or another, and being in certain situations magnifies them.
I'm glad Bill's good side is coming out now.
We in the west like to view people as either "good guys" or "bad guys", perhaps because it makes for more drama in media, which reinforces that view. But reality is often more nuanced.
Maybe if the art academy had accepted the young Adolf, he'd only be known as a "decent German artist of the mid 20th century". Disaffected by th
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The grand purveyor of Windows is interested (Score:4, Funny)
in reliability? Wow!
Re:The grand purveyor of Windows is interested (Score:4, Informative)
If your Windows is crashing a lot, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you have chosen your hardware components and driver vendors poorly.
Sidebar: Charging batteries (Score:2)
Nice but his arguments make not much sense (Score:3)
There are basically two fundamentally different ways how to install renewable energy.
Local, for home owners or e.g. boats and grid scale.
If you have a max demand of lets say 10kW, and the demand curve is mainly oscillating between 1kW and 5kw and only sparsely approaching 10kW, you can relatively easy figure how big your battery stack needs to be. Depending on: how long you want it to last in an emergency or dire situation. Also it is easy to make your rooftop solar plant big enough, like 1.5 to 2.0 times the peak demand.
Note: you are building up a plant as combination of solar power generation and battery storage fitting your own load pattern (and geographical location and orientation of the house etc. ... and your budget)
Switching the whole grid to renewables is a complete different matter. And storage technology is the least of all concerns.
The daily load curve of a grid looks like this: night from roughly 1:00 till 5:00 the load is at 40% (Germany) or 60% (France) and for the USA somewhere in the middle. That number is called "base load".
From roughly 5:00 to roughly 9:00 the load is ramping up rapidly to close to 100%. From roughly 21:00 till 1:00 the load is dropping down again to "base load".
Between 9:00 till 21:00 the load is varying between 85% and 100% depending on country and usage pattern (e.g. lots of AC in the USA, nearly no AC at all in Germany).
So: as long as your total installed wind + solar power is not at 100% of the daily demand curve: it makes no sense to store anything. Because you literally have no excess to store. This is basically the reason why in Germany most private roof top solar plants simply feed into the grid. And inhabitants simply draw from the grid.
To get your night load from storage, just the 4 hours from 1:00 till 5:00 (lets say it is 50% of peak), you need 4hours during daytime where you generate 140% of your peak load and store 40% of that somewhere.
On the other hand: wind is also blowing at night. So if your distributed wind plants can statistically feed more than 40% of your peak load constantly into the grid, and the grid can transport/distribute that power over your whole country: you don't need any storage at all, and you can safe the investment into 40% overproduction beyond the 100% peak as well as the storage.
I would assume that a country like the USA already has enough pumped storage to simply switch to solar and wind. For Germany that certainly is the case.
Pumped storage btw. is mainly used as reserve energy and balancing energy ... not simply as a "storage for excess production".
I would like if energy articles would focus more on stuff that really matters instead of bringing up the "storage myth" every now and then.
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Storage is not a myth. Talking about putting power into and pulling out of a "Grid" means nothing. When your production drops below your demand, you need storage. And your threshold for deciding what is "enough" should not be based on an average, or even on a 1% event. Having rolling worldwide blackouts 3x a year is not what I consider stable.
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I suggest to reread, what I wrote, and grasp it.
When your production drops below your demand, you need storage
And how do you fill this storage?????
You can only fill it if there is one point, and possibly not a point but a duration, in time where you produce more than you need.
If you are not even close to produce what you need, then you certainly are not producing MORE than you need and then certainly you can not STORE ANYTHING for the time you are so afraid off, hence: before the grid is not close to 100%
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So: as long as your total installed wind + solar power is not at 100% of the daily demand curve: it makes no sense to store anything. Because you literally have no excess to store. This is basically the reason why in Germany most private roof top solar plants simply feed into the grid. And inhabitants simply draw from the grid.
So why does Fairbanks, AK have their Battery Energy Storage System? [gvea.com] To avoid outages, of course.
I would assume that a country like the USA already has enough pumped storage to simply switch to solar and wind. For Germany that certainly is the case.
It's certainly NOT the case in the USA, and more pumped storage is expensive(because of the sheer amount of earth-moving required), so we're looking for alternatives as is.
As for renewables, more storage is practically required as renewables start exceeding about 40% of the supply. We're nowhere near that yet, but it's something to consider. This is seen as necessary because renewables produce on their schedul
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So why does Fairbanks, AK have their Battery Energy Storage System? To avoid outages, of course
I would ask them? Perhaps they are not connected to a grid and want to be self sufficient? Or they like to test nw technology?
As for renewables, more storage is practically required as renewables start exceeding about 40% of the supply.
No it is not. At which time of the day would you have surplus in such an amount that storing makes sense? There is none. Pretty simple.
What you perhaps mean is that you need more
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I would ask them? Perhaps they are not connected to a grid and want to be self sufficient? Or they like to test nw technology?
Hint: I live there. I found out about the battery system in the little magazine all electric subscribers here get. We're not connected to the national grid, but we have an intertie with Anchorage.
No it is not. At which time of the day would you have surplus in such an amount that storing makes sense? There is none. Pretty simple.
Well now, how do you determine this? You're just declaring it like it's truth, with nothing to back it up. When would there be a surplus? Let's look at current examples: Hawaii, on the weekend, moderate weather. A good amount of sun, a lot of businesses are closed and people are out doing outside things. R
Hey Soulskill, biased much? (Score:2)
Dumping: deposit or dispose of (garbage, waste, or unwanted material), typically in a careless or hurried way.
So either your point of view is that Bill Gates wasted two billion dollars on renewables because renewables are a waste.
Wanna know why people like Bill Gates now? (Score:2)
Because his goals and your interests are now aligned.
Broadly speaking, the Gates Foundation wants to improve the world. It doesn't care about making a profit, it just wants to get the most improvement for the money it has available to spend. It can choose freely what kind of energy production to promote, and it is clearly choosing based on a bang-for-the-buck basis.
When Gates was running Microsoft, his goal was to make Microsoft bigger. Microsoft's mission statement of "enabling people and businesses thr
Focusing on AI would have solved this... (Score:2)
And a few million other problems that are in the domain of solvable problems within acceptable time and resource constraints. Solve the BIG problem (useful, scalable, humanlike AI) and you solve the energy problem as a side effect.
Instead, Gates is chasing after problems in a random piecemeal way by simply throwing money at them. I hope it works, but the approach is not worth of someone of his intellect.
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Solve the BIG problem (useful, scalable, humanlike AI) and you solve the energy problem as a side effect.
I've seen some crazy stuff from the singularity nuts, but this one takes the cake!
Re:sorta realated...? (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thermionics (Score:4, Interesting)
TEs are ridiculously inefficient and aren't looking to be much better anytime soon
Because thermoelectric effect devices leak heat big time.
However there's also thermionics. The vacuum-tube version is currently inefficient - about as inefficient as slightly behind-the-curve solar cells - due to space charge accumulation discouraging current, but I've seen reports of a semiconductor close analog of it (as an FET is a semiconductor close analog of a vacuum triode) that IS efficient, encouraging the space charge to propagate through the drift region by doping tricks (that I don't recall offhand). The semiconductor version beats the problems that plague thermoelectrics because the only charge carriers crossing the temperature gradient are the ones doing so in an efficient manner, so the bulk of the thermal leakage is mechanical rather than electrical, and the drift region can be long enough to keep that fraction down.
Second law of thermodynamics. (Score:3)
we have a way to turn electricity directly into heat. But there is no direct way to turn heat into electricity. It has to go thru a second step of mechanical energy to spin a magnet to create electricity.
You can go from electricity directly to heat because that increases entropy. You can't go from heat to anything useful because that decreases entropy, and entropy of a closed system only increases. The best you can do is a heat engine, working off a temperature DIFFERENCE. (Some of them also work backwa
Re:Bill Gatus of Borg (Score:5, Funny)
Greetings, Slashdot time traveler from the year 2000. Welcome to the world of 2015!! You'll find that many things have changed here.
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ummm slash dot is only for time travelers... current time users are doing it wrong, go back to your twitbook... also the lawn
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You understand that is probably the exact reason, in this case, Bill Gates, is not divesting.
And hopefully, again, in this case, he is using the profits from that industry to help invest in renewables.
That would be 200% okay in my book. A robin hood of sorts for investments.
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There are some battery types which have a very high amount of charging cycles. Supercaps and NiFe batteries come to mind. Neither is great at energy density, but both can (assuming proper care taken) last for a very long time.
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Precisely... the two ideas are independent.
If his investments are publicly-traded, selling his stake does nothing. The companies he's invested in won't lose his money, because he'd just be selling to another individual, so "his money" becomes "the other guy's money". If it's a private investment, where he may be contractually limited in what he can do, then the whole discussion is rather moot. He may be able to sell his way out of the investment, which would reduce the company's operating capital somewhat,
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So very very cringe-worthy, it's like a freshman abusing the fuck out of a thesaurus while writing his very first college essay.