Climate Change, 'Greenhouse' effects: Solutions #3

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Message 2054227 - Posted: 27 Jul 2020, 21:14:32 UTC

Another very small but positive step:


France to ban heated terraces in cafes and bars
wrote:
France's government has announced new environmental measures, including a ban on heated terraces for cafes and bars.

Ecology Minister Barbara Pompili said outside heating or air conditioning was an "ecological aberration"...




All a game of politics of good sense?...


All on our only one planet,
Martin
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Message 2054233 - Posted: 28 Jul 2020, 0:56:30 UTC - in response to Message 2054227.  

Force people inside in the middle of a pandemic. Great planning. Every dead human reduces AGW.
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Message 2055061 - Posted: 10 Aug 2020, 23:39:31 UTC
Last modified: 11 Aug 2020, 0:31:00 UTC

Way to go... Solar:


YouTube: Perovskite Solar Cells: Game changer?


For a little perspective: The ENTIRE USA could be powered, 24/7, by a solar installation 100miles x 100miles feeding a battery 1 mile x 1 mile.

Ok... So that is a big installation. But then again, the USA is big, and yet that installation is vastly smaller than the areas spoilt by coal mining and fracking and oil/gas extraction. Also, that 100 miles x 100 miles is tiny compared to the area poisoned by just the one Deepwater Horizon disaster...


How soon can we kill the old fossils pollution corruption?


All on our only one planet,
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Message 2055063 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 0:28:10 UTC
Last modified: 11 Aug 2020, 0:28:49 UTC

Where politics has pathetically and miserably failed, almost too late, the finance greedily speaks:


Global Financial Giants Swear Off Funding an Especially Dirty Fuel
wrote:
Some of the world’s largest financial institutions have stopped putting their money behind oil production in the Canadian province of Alberta, home to one of the world’s most extensive, and also dirtiest, oil reserves...

... Alberta, meanwhile, has fought back hard against the divestment. ... in December, Alberta opened what it called a war room to attack anyone perceived as criticizing the industry...

... Oil has made Alberta one of the wealthiest regions in North America, but the process of extracting petroleum from oil sands releases an unusually large volume of greenhouse gases...

... It wasn’t just financing that suddenly seemed at risk. Some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including AXA, Swiss RE and Zurich Insurance, announced they would stop providing [insurance] coverage to projects in the oil sands...

... The latest blow came in December, when the rating company Moody’s downgraded the creditworthiness of Alberta’s debt to its lowest level in 20 years, citing, among other concerns, the province’s dependence on the oil sands and the environmental costs of extracting the oil.

In response to that pressure, Alberta has only increased its support of the oil sands...



Total implosion in the tar sands
wrote:
Last week, French energy giant Total, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, announced that it has withdrawn from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) because of a “misalignment” between the organization’s public positions and those expressed in Total’s climate ambition statement announced in May. Total attributes this unprecedented move to concerns around the lobby group’s regressive stance on climate ambition – and reflects the distance between CAPP and major global oil companies, who are increasingly aligning themselves (at least publically) with the need for decarbonization.

For more than a decade, CAPP has worked to undermine a host of federal and provincial environmental policies. And in the midst of a global pandemic, the lobby group has only increased the ambition of their demands for deregulation...

... Now that Total has made the bold decision to distance themselves from CAPP, other companies who claim to take the climate crisis seriously must follow in their steps...

... The tar sands are among the world’s more expensive and carbon-polluting sources of oil – meaning they are the first to lose out when crashes happen and as countries transition away from fossil fuels. In the same announcement, Total announced it is writing off $9.3-billion worth of tar sands assets in Alberta...




Hopefully, there is more profit in coming clean and green rather than staying quagmired in oil and dirty...

All on our only one planet,
Martin
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Message 2055064 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 0:42:00 UTC - in response to Message 2055061.  

My back of the envelope calculation says that isn't possible even assuming solar panels are perpendicular to the sun at all times in Texas.

Do the calculation yourself.
US annual consumption 4400 TWh
Solar power in Texas 1000w/sq m in Texas on average 8 hr/day.
And I have personal experience of rain in Texas for over a day, I've had dryer days in Manchester in February.

And if generated in sunny parts of the US there will be significant losses getting power to the North.
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Message 2055078 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 5:45:17 UTC - in response to Message 2055064.  

My back of the envelope calculation says that isn't possible even assuming solar panels are perpendicular to the sun at all times in Texas.

Do the calculation yourself.
US annual consumption 4400 TWh
Solar power in Texas 1000w/sq m in Texas on average 8 hr/day.
And I have personal experience of rain in Texas for over a day, I've had dryer days in Manchester in February.

And if generated in sunny parts of the US there will be significant losses getting power to the North.

My back of the envelope says if the cells are 100% efficient and capturing all solar frequencies and track the sun without using any power to do so, and the power grid is superconducting, you could get pretty close in the summer, not in the winter.

Obviously efficiency is not 100%, wires have resistance, tracking will use power. So you would need to add Arizona, New Mexico and desert California to get close in reality.
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Message 2055080 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 6:49:06 UTC - in response to Message 2055078.  

BUT;
You have to leave space between panels for cleaners and maintenance, and if tilting so that panel 'A' does cause shadow on panel 'B', so maybe you need a site twice the area.
Cleaners are needed, a study in CA during a drought says panels lost 7.5% in less than 6 months due to dirt. Bird droppings are a significant source of tough to remove dirt, as you know from your experience on your car.
Converting the solar panels DC o/p to AC will also lose 10%, if not more as you have to get the DC to the inverters, in the first place.
Solar panel degradation is about 0.8%/year.
And the Lithium Ion batteries fail quicker in hot places like Texas.
And solar panel efficiency is at most in lab conditions 42%.

Without doing the sums I am going to have to revise that 10 *10 mile square to 40*40, if you want that output to be still available in 15 years. And you will still have problems getting that power to NY reliably and consistently.
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Message 2055115 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 18:56:03 UTC

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/08/11/Digital-content-to-total-half-Earths-mass-by-2245/6541597161350/
Researchers estimate that in 300 years, digital production will require the equivalent of planetary power consumption today.
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Message 2055116 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 19:17:47 UTC - in response to Message 2055115.  

Researchers estimate that in 300 years...



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Message 2055118 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 20:09:08 UTC - in response to Message 2055116.  

Researchers estimate that in 300 years...



Ah, like global warming itself.
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Message 2055120 - Posted: 11 Aug 2020, 20:22:06 UTC - in response to Message 2055118.  

Some technological trends can be extrapolated, some cannot.

For example, I can imagine nineteenth-century "researchers" predicting that in 2020, fully half of the urban workforce would be employed keeping the streets cleaned of horse poo, based on the assumption that the following nineteenth-century realities would continue:

1) There would be no street transportation but human-powered and horse-powered.
2) Only half the adult population (men) would be available to do this.
3) The job would have to be done manually ie with a shovel.

Someone actually did make a similar prediction, namely that a similar fraction of the population would be employed as telephone operators. They did not foresee automated calling.
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Message 2055141 - Posted: 12 Aug 2020, 0:43:40 UTC - in response to Message 2055120.  

Some technological trends can be extrapolated, some cannot.

For example, I can imagine nineteenth-century "researchers" predicting that in 2020, fully half of the urban workforce would be employed keeping the streets cleaned of horse poo, based on the assumption that the following nineteenth-century realities would continue:

1) There would be no street transportation but human-powered and horse-powered.
2) Only half the adult population (men) would be available to do this.
3) The job would have to be done manually ie with a shovel.

Someone actually did make a similar prediction, namely that a similar fraction of the population would be employed as telephone operators. They did not foresee automated calling.

Something will have to change
"Assuming a 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that after [approximately] 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth," Melvin Vopson, physicist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain, wrote in a new paper published Tuesday in the journal AIP Advances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine#Storage_capacity_and_growth
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Message 2055288 - Posted: 15 Aug 2020, 1:22:31 UTC

More news on those perovskite solar panels. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/15/uk-firms-solar-power-breakthrough-could-make-worlds-most-efficient-panels-by-2021

Somehow I don't think that a 25% increase in output is a big enough game changer to enable that 100*100 mile solar farm to power the whole of the US.

*******
off topic rant!
Why do reports have no maths capabilities?

27.3 / 22.n = ~ 1.33 according to the sub heading
Oxford PV says tech based on perovskite crystal can generate almost a third more electricity


/rant
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Message 2057066 - Posted: 14 Sep 2020, 18:51:36 UTC

After 2 years, just under 1% failure rate.
The way ahead?
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Message 2059344 - Posted: 15 Oct 2020, 20:06:33 UTC

At the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is wasted because of electrical resistance, being lost as heat.
It is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.
1 potential solution?
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Message 2059357 - Posted: 15 Oct 2020, 21:31:16 UTC - in response to Message 2059344.  

At the moment, a lot of the energy we produce is wasted because of electrical resistance, being lost as heat.
It is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.
1 potential solution?

Thanks for that.

That's one giant leap towards some fabulous unobtainum, for real in real life! Certainly a fantastic leap in usable temperature to at last reach 'room temperature' (Scandinavian-style or Eskimo-style that is!).

Another view is given over on:

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser...
wrote:
... The material then transforms into something that can superconduct electricity: its electrical resistance vanishes as its electrons are free to move unhindered. Before this substance can be used in real-world applications, the team needs to figure out, among other things, how to make the powder at larger quantities.

“The next challenge will be to produce these materials that are stable at ambient pressure so they will be economical to mass produce,”...


Truly fantastic!

The really important part of that material mix is that we now have a 'high temperature' example of superconductivity that we can now study and engineer further for practical use. We have some very clever yet unappreciated scientists who really can engineer the atomic structure of materials!


Keep searchin',
Martin
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Message 2059359 - Posted: 15 Oct 2020, 22:09:46 UTC - in response to Message 2059358.  
Last modified: 15 Oct 2020, 22:10:26 UTC

Well, I think we're as far away from room temp superconductivity now as we were before this new discovery.
Before this discovery, the extreme low temperature required was the problem. With this discovery the extreme
pressure is the problem. 267 billion pascals - about a million times higher than typical tyre pressure.

No, that didn't change anything IMO in the race towards room temperature superconductivity...

The "big deal" with this first material example is that:

  • It actually exists;
  • We have an example that works as wished;
  • We can now examine the material structure for the required structural effect(s) to next be replicated for more practical pressures.



That really is a big leap.

The question as always for scientists is that of available resource and 'fair play' for exploiting the results...


All on our only one planet,
Martin


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Message 2059401 - Posted: 16 Oct 2020, 8:02:50 UTC

Solar & wind are a lot more effective than you think. Couple either (or better both) to storage systems and the area required is remarkably small. I recall some recent figures where it was said that the whole energy requirements of the UK could be met many times over from a solar+storage farm less than the area of the Isle of Wight.
Storage technology is an area where some real thought needs to be applied. Just now the vast majority of the thought is being applied to various battery systems, but there are other ways like pumped-hydro, pumped-pneumatic, phase conversion.
And as for generation, what about geothermal? At least one country, albeit a small one (Iceland) gets a very large proportion of its energy from geothermal sources. In the UK there are a few areas that appear to be promising, think about the old health spa towns where there is an abundance of (very) hot water fairly close to the surface and the technology to extract usable energy from that is already well established.
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Message 2059415 - Posted: 16 Oct 2020, 12:56:30 UTC

Geothermal springs are usually at 100F. Probably the springs at bath are the most famous but are mainly a tourist attraction as are those at Rota Rua in New Zealand. At Tunbridge Wells it has a Chalybeate spring which contains a significant level of dissolved mineral salts, with iron and manganese contributing to its characteristic flavour. Basically the Spa towns contained mineral springs not geothermal springs. The very fact that people travelled out of dirty London in the 1700's into the fresher countryside air, most likely did more for their health than a few cups of spring water.


Well, sorry to disavow you of your ill-founded theories we have had one town that's had a geothermal district heating system in place for about 25 years.
http://www.britgeothermal.org/research/uk.html
So, while not at Icelandic temperatures there are practical solutions available and in use.

As to the rest of your comments, you need to do a bit of research before getting things so wrong. For example, today, a rather dull Friday lunchtime the metered solar input to the grid is running at about 3GwHr (~8% of total demand) - for a near-real-time figure have a look at https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk which tracks the demand and inputs. As far as I can see this figure does not include the multitude of domestic installations, so the figure is going to be somewhat more than that, but then the domestic panels will reduce grid demand so effectively are zero contributors to the grid balance.
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Message 2059418 - Posted: 16 Oct 2020, 13:52:30 UTC - in response to Message 2059415.  

With the aim to be carbon neutral, this has to be a plus in achieving that.
The potential of the resource needs to be promoted to government and commerce to encourage investment in this form of low carbon energy.
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Message boards : Politics : Climate Change, 'Greenhouse' effects: Solutions #3


 
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