The Fate of the Ocean

main_board said:
Yes, carbon dioxide is a given. What I was hinting at with reducing emissions is switching off hydrocarbons altogether. Well, not all at once clearly, but we're clearly going to need to sooner or later. Having engines that completely combust their fuel is really important, but you're only choosing the lesser of two evils and that will eventually not be enough.

Too bad about the hydrogen engines, eh? Right now people who've got them think they're doing such a good job for the environment. Unfortunately, most hydrogen gas these days is produced by stripping the hydrogens atoms off hydrocarbons, producing....can anyone guess....carbon dioxide! I guess they are atleast doing a public service announcement letting people know about the technology's potential and future. Thats always a good thing.

Personally, I think we should all go the way of the Danish with wind, wind, and more wind power!! Unfortunately, there are some unbelievable rules in place to protect "union brothers" in the energy industry preventing citizens from becoming self-reliant. At least thats how it works in Canada. Stupid politicians.


Cheers!


Yeah, some combination of unions and politics killed off the solar panel initiative in California last year; it was pretty sad.

Even if you make the hydrogen with solar/wind/hydro or nuclear power and electrolysis, there are still serious unresolved safety issues... pressurized hydrogen tanks are prone to exploding, and hydrogen leaks very easily because it's such a small molecule, and if you have a pinprick leak in a pressurized hydrogen line and it gets ignited, it will burn at some very high temperature and become a little blowtorch with an invisible flame! There may be some solutions to this, like storing the hydrogen in some solid or liquid buffer where it can be released slowly through some process, but it's still not really ready for public consumption.

A lot of people seem to be unclear on the concept of energy generation versus energy storage-- hydrocarbon fuels happen to both be a reasonable way of safely transporting high chemical energy in a vehicle, and also be something you can pull out of the ground that already has a lot of chemical potential energy. Ethanol, for example, that you make from corn or something, is a similarly good way of transporting energy in liquid form, but the energy to make it has to come from the sunlight used to grow the corn, and the energy it took to convert the corn to ethanol, and such. Hydrogen is not as good a way to store the energy, except for the fact that burning it doesn't produce CO2, and you still have to put a bunch of energy into producing it... And if you're needing to use solar/wind/hydro/geothermal or nuclear to not burn hydrocarbons to get the energy in the first place, it's important to ask whether for your particular task, what the trade off is between using that to make some chemical fuel like ethanol or hydrogen, or just putting the electricity directly into a battery... Hybrid cars are great, but they should *all* be able to be plugged into electric car charging stations so that they can avoid using the chemical fuel when they can! If you hack your prius to plug into the wall at home, you can make short trips without needing to start the engine at all!
 
Several years ago I attended an alternative energy conference in Washington DC, and at that time there were several innovations in Solar in the works, some of which are now available. One of the things that was discussed was how much enegy could be generated if every rooftop was considered to be a potential solar site. Cities in much of the US. could generate a large percentage of their own energy needs. THere doesn't seem to be the political will in most of the country to take any steps in that direction. Arizona recently mandated a certain percentage (I don't remember how much) of all power in the state to come from alternative sources bya date maybe 15 or 20 years from now (don't remember that either:oops: ). Immediately there were lots of op-eds and columns nay saying the idea. Everyone seem to be thinking in terms of the vast arrays of solar panels out in the desert, but by utilizing rooftops in the cities and towns of the state a lot could be done. There are reverse meters, after all. In suburban communities across the country the new solar shingles could be used unless a home is in deep woods. If the country gets serious about it, and offers rebates for homeowners who will retrofit on existing homes, or include it in the planning of new homes we could make huge strides in the direction of energy independence.
 
sorseress said:
Several years ago I attended an alternative energy conference in Washington DC, and at that time there were several innovations in Solar in the works, some of which are now available. One of the things that was discussed was how much enegy could be generated if every rooftop was considered to be a potential solar site. Cities in much of the US. could generate a large percentage of their own energy needs. THere doesn't seem to be the political will in most of the country to take any steps in that direction. Arizona recently mandated a certain percentage (I don't remember how much) of all power in the state to come from alternative sources bya date maybe 15 or 20 years from now (don't remember that either:oops: ). Immediately there were lots of op-eds and columns nay saying the idea. Everyone seem to be thinking in terms of the vast arrays of solar panels out in the desert, but by utilizing rooftops in the cities and towns of the state a lot could be done. There are reverse meters, after all. In suburban communities across the country the new solar shingles could be used unless a home is in deep woods. If the country gets serious about it, and offers rebates for homeowners who will retrofit on existing homes, or include it in the planning of new homes we could make huge strides in the direction of energy independence.

Yeah, a good friend of mine has been working at a company that installs solar panels on private homes up in Marin County. He was really, really mad that the bill subsidising that in California (I think it was called "million solar roofs" or something, and even Governator Ahnold was backing it) got killed. It's still not clear what happened, but at first glance, it looks like a greedy electrical workers union forced an amendment that only some very restricted class of certified contractors would be allowed to do the installations, regardless of the fact that there are whole companies of better trained installers who don't have the certification, or that there wouldn't be enough certified people in the state to do the work, or that the certification doesn't actually include any training in solar panels anyway. However, it may have had little to do with the union's clout, and been more of a poison pill attached by Democrats so that Ahnold wouldn't get credit for doing an environmentally good thing that he could use to swing moderate Democrats to vote for his reelection. In either case, it's pretty darned stupid.

My friend has also said, though, that, at least as of last year, there was a major shortage of good solar panels; apparently, solar roofs are very popular in some European and Asian countries lately, so the panel manufacturing isn't keeping up with the demand... although I suspect that if the market expanded (say, if the bill mentioned above had passed) the manufacturing sector would eventually find a way to expand production. I really hope that mass production of good solar panels becomes much cheaper and higher yield sometime in the very near future, too.
 
As an aside do yall remember the dustup where the rich people living on (the name of the island escapes me it was the one from the show Wings) had a problem with a wind farm12 miles out to sea because it would mess up their view? we should build wind farms everywhere on the planet the winds make such feasible and build tide and solaras well. and what is keeping us from building a solar sat at L5? so it costs 100 billion the power is free and it will pay for itself in 20 or 30 years
 
bigGdelta said:
and what is keeping us from building a solar sat at L5? so it costs 100 billion the power is free and it will pay for itself in 20 or 30 years

Microwaving it back without baking an entire state is still an issue. I think L5 is a less than ideal place for a solar sat, geosysnchronous orbit would be better because it wouldn't have to be constantly tracking and switching receiving stations on the ground. Something that big in GSO would probably be an eyesore, but I could get used to it for clean power :smile:

Now that NASA is building a heavy-lifter again, something like this is back on the table, but serious talk is probably another 50 years distant. Even today it would probably cost a lot more than 100 billion. Maybe between 1 and 10 trillion?

Dan
 
bigGdelta said:
As an aside do yall remember the dustup where the rich people living on (the name of the island escapes me it was the one from the show Wings) had a problem with a wind farm12 miles out to sea because it would mess up their view? we should build wind farms everywhere on the planet the winds make such feasible and build tide and solaras well. and what is keeping us from building a solar sat at L5? so it costs 100 billion the power is free and it will pay for itself in 20 or 30 years


Martha's Vineyard....

There's a ridge in Southwestern Minnesota which is said to be capable of generating enough power for the entire twin cities area, and in some parts of Texas wind turbines are being interspersed with oil derricks, so the oilmen in that area are not fighting the idea of wind power.

I suspect tidal could cause some potential problems for sea life.
 
We're having some wind-power debates in NZ too - there's been talk over the last few months of putting up a wind-farm near Wellington that would cover the city's entire energy budget, but it's been delayed because the people who live where it would be built think it would be 'ugly.' The selfishness of humanity is astounding sometimes. Which is why, whether the current global warming trends are due to our own activities or not, I think it would be a very good thing for the world if we would at least take the possibility seriously and make a concerted effort to control our potentially dangerous activities long enough to find out. We don't have a particularly stellar history of awareness and concern that our activities on this planet have a way disproportionate effect on everything else.
 
DHyslop said:
Microwaving it back without baking an entire state is still an issue. I think L5 is a less than ideal place for a solar sat, geosysnchronous orbit would be better because it wouldn't have to be constantly tracking and switching receiving stations on the ground. Something that big in GSO would probably be an eyesore, but I could get used to it for clean power :smile:

Now that NASA is building a heavy-lifter again, something like this is back on the table, but serious talk is probably another 50 years distant. Even today it would probably cost a lot more than 100 billion. Maybe between 1 and 10 trillion?

Dan

I coworker of mine was working on solar sats until Regan came in and cancelled the project. Apparently, you can actually keep the beam divergence pretty low from geosync, so that's not too bad, although you probably want to keep people out of an area a few square miles around. Geosync is definitely better, so you're always directly over the receiving station. I guess L4, L5, or L1 is never shadowed, but it's *way* further away, so the beam divergence would be awful.

However, I've heard some pretty compelling arguments that the cost of lifting stuff into orbit is so much higher than, say, laying it out in the desert, that it's pretty much never going to be cost effective to put large areas of solar in orbit when you still have room in the desert, or floating on the ocean, or maybe even as fleets of blimps with solar cells or something. Yeah, in orbit you get no atmospheric loss of the sunlight (but some in getting the collected power back down to earth) but it's so costly to get it up there it's a big issue. You do get to get sunlight that would otherwise be going past the Earth, I guess, but we're not in danger of not having enough incident light in the near term future, we're just not using it well... and if we put black solar panels where we're reflecting a lot of light from the mostly-white desert, that's getting a lot of solar energy that's normally re-radiated to space, too (although on a large scale, that might be a global warming issue, too... I've heard the dumb suggestion that if we floated a bunch of styrofoam on the oceans, we'd reflect more sunlight to offset global warming...)
 
The other thing with wind power is it isn't reliable enough in many places to be anything but supplemental to other sources. I grew up in southern Wisconsin, where the power utility put up a small wind turbine field a few years ago. It provides about 5% of the utility's power, which is actually pretty respectable. The problem is there's a lot of days when they just aren't moving at all.

Ideally, you could have enough wind capacity to only use coal on those days, but then power costs twice as much because you're maintaining twice the facilities....

Dan
 
Good points, Monty.

I think the solarsat option is always something that's been on the more distant horizon for those reasons. Even if cost-to-orbit was a lot cheaper, it still wouldn't be feasible right now just because of where we are in terms of the technology. Its a 50 yr or 100 yr goal. Like mining 3He out of the lunar regolith.

I would think the shadow problem from GSO would be a non-issue because to make it feasible for global power you would probably need more than one anyway--if your recieving station is in west Texas how do you get that energy to Japan?

The problem with laying them out on the desert however is still environmental. Your changing the ecosystem quite a bit when you pave over Arizona with solar panels. Deserts are living, moving things, too. Check out the mega-dunes in Saudi Arabia on Google Earth. You can see places where they've built runways, oil pipelines and highways, all slowly being buried. Solar panels are a lot more expensive than concrete!

Dan
 
I've been inspired by talk of solar arrays out at sea, atop old oil derricks. I don't think much was developed from the idea, but I hazzard a guess that it could be revived in a discussion somewhere. It was quite a while ago, and I think the technology has progressed quite a lot. I was a wee lad, wide eyed and ambitious.

Felix.
 

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