General > General Technical Chat
the dark side of cobalt
Bud:
With all those fat obese people that are everywhere in the streets there is a lot of room for 5x improvement in food supply availability. Just get them eat 5x less their junk food and go to gyms 5x more often.
tom66:
--- Quote from: vad on July 15, 2023, 12:32:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on July 15, 2023, 05:24:07 am ---Still, burning fossil fuels when better alternatives are available is extremely stupid, and playing around with the climate is a colossally bad idea exactly because of the we don't know for sure factor.
--- End quote ---
I beg your pardon, what better alternatives can replace fossil fuels now and in the foreseeable future?
The world's total energy production was 617 EJ in 2019, increasing at a 2% annual rate. Fossil fuels accounted for more than 81% of production in 2019, as in previous years (source: IEA, https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-balances-overview/world).
All hydro, nuclear, biofuels, wind, solar, and geothermal combined amounted to less than 19% combined, and the 80/20 ratio has been stagnating for years.
P.S. Please note that this is total energy production, including liquid fuels for transport, and not just electric generation.
--- End quote ---
Well you start with using less energy, to do more!
Sector specific but:
Transport -
* An electric vehicle will typically have a sticker rating of 100MPGe or above. That 20% of renewable energy goes a lot further when it charges a car compared to the equivalent in fossil fuels.
* Where you can't electrify fully you use hybrids or hydrogen vehicles. And encourage less use of cars, so stop building areas that are car dependent.
* Aircraft are tricky - in the short term carbon offsetting and capture will be necessary. In the longer term a shift towards biofuels, synthetic fuels and maybe hydrogen makes sense.
Heating -
* For home heating you promote lower internal temperatures (or higher in summer) combined with better insulation, underfloor heating and heatpumps. For older buildings that are impractical to insulate or convert to heatpumps you look at alternatives e.g. hydrogen gas burned in normal gas boilers/water heaters.
* For industrial heating you mandate a switch to heatpumps by a certain date, e.g. 2035 or so.
Electricity -
* Renewable electricity generation
* Seasonal energy storage
* Nuclear where practical/cost effective
* Decommission coal and natural gas plants as soon as grid stability criteria are met
* Home solar/battery and consumption management (encouraging usage when electricity in surplus: e.g. EVs that charge on off-peak electricity)
Agriculture -
* Use less land for cattle grazing and return that land to nature, planting new forests
* As has been mentioned, where cattle are raised, use a diet that produces less methane gas (but in general, try to shift away from ruminant mammals)
Industry -
* Carbon capture where feasible
* Moving to less carbon intensive processes, e.g. making concrete with hydrogen
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 06:39:57 pm ---The next big problem to solve is storage since renewable sources are both erratic and seasonal where it comes to supply. And don't start with heat storage using water or batteris. It won't work for seasonal storage because the volume of water needed is too big, batteries will be too big & expensive and the leakage is too high.
--- End quote ---
Although it doesn't apply to all locations, if the water table is economically feasible to reach, there's your giant thermal mass you can connect to. In fact, with geothermal heat pumps, wherever there's a large mismatch between heating and cooling demand (which is most areas in the US), the ground mass gets heated or cooled over a few years requiring additional operation of the heat pump to balance it, perfect to use excess energy during spring/fall for.
Then there's finding uses for excess energy during spring/fall. If nothing else, just run a bunch of old servers mining crypto or whatever.
SiliconWizard:
Just as a thought, one very tricky part, and often misleading one unfortunately (when it comes to political communication or dodgy startups), is the cost of switching to much more energy-efficient solutions for given applications vs. the energy savings that can be projected with the operation of said more energy-efficient solutions during their lifetime.
While the example of LED lighting is one clear success, there are many other areas for which the net result is a lot less favorable, sometimes negative, or at best similar, but merely displacing the energy consumption elsewhere.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on July 15, 2023, 08:25:48 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 06:39:57 pm ---The next big problem to solve is storage since renewable sources are both erratic and seasonal where it comes to supply. And don't start with heat storage using water or batteris. It won't work for seasonal storage because the volume of water needed is too big, batteries will be too big & expensive and the leakage is too high.
--- End quote ---
Although it doesn't apply to all locations, if the water table is economically feasible to reach, there's your giant thermal mass you can connect to. In fact, with geothermal heat pumps, wherever there's a large mismatch between heating and cooling demand (which is most areas in the US), the ground mass gets heated or cooled over a few years requiring additional operation of the heat pump to balance it, perfect to use excess energy during spring/fall for.
--- End quote ---
But you can't turn heat into electricity so you are still stranded without seasonal electricity storage. Your heatpumps won't do anything without electricity. Likely scaling up your electricity storage is more economic compared to having two seperate systems.
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