Climate Change(d)?

[Jimmy Higgins]

Hydro power is turning out to be not so reliable.

*Costa Rica has raised its hand*

*As has western New York*

 

[steve_bank]

Tidal power suffers from lack of good sites like hydropower does, only more so. Most of the useful tidal power sites would significantly block major shipping infrastructure.

Wave power seems to be very difficult to harvest at a reasonable cost, and also has intermittency issues.

Perhaps, and this may be a little difficult to grasp, but just perhaps, this isn't only about you.

Duh.

As for shipping and 'difficult' we're pretty good at adapting to situations.

For instance: Even though not a power solution example, here's one where government shows warts while new thinking breaks ground.

Artemis is, as expected, having issues with legacy and clean engineering problems while, even while developing new technology, SpaceX is sticking to schedule.

And the GAO says the cost per launch for Artemis is not sustainable. Too expensive.

 

[steve_bank]

Hydro power is turning out to be not so reliable.

I agree. Drought causes problems. Although the Columbia, Snake, Kootenay, system is not part of the current problems.

We have pretty good statistics on most of the world. So we should be able to chose sources for creating reliable hydroelectric power if we come to realize we're all in this together.

The UW says the Columbia will draw down from reduced snow packs. There are conservation programs in Wa like lining and covering irrigation runs to minimize losses. Glaciers and snow packs are disappering in Wa.

 

[fromderinside]

Hydro power is turning out to be not so reliable.

I agree. Drought causes problems. Although the Columbia, Snake, Kootenay, system is not part of the current problems.

We have pretty good statistics on most of the world. So we should be able to chose sources for creating reliable hydroelectric power if we come to realize we're all in this together.

The UW says the Columbia will draw down from reduced snow packs. There are conservation programs in Wa like lining and covering irrigation runs to minimize losses. Glaciers and snow packs are disappering in Wa.

Yes. there's that. Recent rainfall and flooding has been increasing over the last decade so maybe ....

 

[pood]

Here is more scientific refutation of TSwizzle’s crapola.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Hydro power is turning out to be not so reliable.

I agree. Drought causes problems. Although the Columbia, Snake, Kootenay, system is not part of the current problems.

We have pretty good statistics on most of the world. So we should be able to chose sources for creating reliable hydroelectric power if we come to realize we're all in this together.

The UW says the Columbia will draw down from reduced snow packs. There are conservation programs in Wa like lining and covering irrigation runs to minimize losses.

Also known as "preventing recharging of aquifer".

Glaciers and snow packs are disappering in Wa.

Maybe if you didn't tax so much in Washington, the glaciers wouldn't be leaving the state.

 

[steve_bank]

You have us confused with Taxachussets.

 

[fromderinside]

Hydro power is turning out to be not so reliable.

I agree. Drought causes problems. Although the Columbia, Snake, Kootenay, system is not part of the current problems.

We have pretty good statistics on most of the world. So we should be able to chose sources for creating reliable hydroelectric power if we come to realize we're all in this together.

The UW says the Columbia will draw down from reduced snow packs. There are conservation programs in Wa like lining and covering irrigation runs to minimize losses.

Also known as "preventing recharging of aquifer".

Glaciers and snow packs are disappering in Wa.

Maybe if you didn't tax so much in Washington, the glaciers wouldn't be leaving the state.

Up here in the great NW we consider water in terms of rich and poor. Rich is snowfall and snowpack and poor is rainfall and puddles. While the rich may be moving away the poor are increasing in great amounts relentlessly. The result is much more annual precipitation.

We'll let the snow bunnies, all six of them, move to Cananananada since what we need is working not recreational precip.

Source: Columbia River Basin Climate Impact Risk Assessment https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/baseline/docs/cbia/ColumbiaBasinImpactAssessment.pdf

(a wordy mealy-mouthed assessment document) It says less with more words than an English grad teaching assistant would permit from freshmen.)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

You have us confused with Taxachussets.

Exactly! And why do you suppose there are no glaciers in Massachusetts?

 

[steve_bank]

You have us confused with Taxachussets.

Exactly! And why do you suppose there are no glaciers in Massachusetts?

Ok,ok..you have the alst word.

 

[steve_bank]

From a news segment Midwest farmers are trying ways to keep the aquifers stable. Th aquifers were drawing down before droughts.

 

[TV and credit cards]

3M hopes its new powder can help unlock green hydrogen production

If you were thinking maybe a wee bit of "nanostructured supported iridium catalyst powder" might do the trick, you'd be right.

 

[Jarhyn]

3M hopes its new powder can help unlock green hydrogen production

If you were thinking maybe a wee bit of "nanostructured supported iridium catalyst powder" might do the trick, you'd be right.

I see your Star Tribune link. Do you happen to be from Minnesota?

Sorry for OT

 

[TV and credit cards]

3M hopes its new powder can help unlock green hydrogen production

If you were thinking maybe a wee bit of "nanostructured supported iridium catalyst powder" might do the trick, you'd be right.

I see your Star Tribune link. Do you happen to be from Minnesota?

Sorry for OT

No. Ohio. But Google Finance has an uncanny ability to feed me stories that interest me. And I just started visiting GF.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Interesting paper comparing hydrogen storage verses battery storage. Ultimately, the idea of storage seems wasteful and risky... and it'd be nice just to have energy created on demand. Once you start storing wasted energy, you've lost quite a bit already. The cost to store is also very anti-green.

 

[steve_bank]

There have been hydrogen electrolysis kist online for a while

Horizon Solar Hydrogen Science Kit

The Solar Hydrogen Science Kit lets students invent their own clean energy applications using fuel cells and renewable hydrogen created using solar energy and water. The set includes curriculum on renewable energy with easy to follow experiment manual, assembly guide, flash animations, and...

www.arborsci.com

Ballard has been making fuel cells for EVs for a long time

Fuel Cell & Clean Energy Solutions | Ballard Power

Ballard Power is the leading global provider of innovative clean energy fuel cell solutions that offer superior performance at a reduced operating cost.

www.ballard.com

There are commercial fuel cell power generators.

A gov paper on wind turbines and hydrogen storage. I looked at it in the past. The guy Pickens had an idea to build a string of windmills across the Midwest. The idea was you could use some of the power to create hydrogen and use fuel cells in low wind. Turned out the efficiencies did not work out.

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy03osti/34656.pdf

 

[Swammerdami]

We do. Fully 35% of California's energy supply comes from renewable sources, a proportion that increased every year for two decades until now. It's been a good investment and a successful one, financially and environmentally, and grearly reduced the amount of dirty power we're obliged to buy at considerable cost from other states.

Nitpick: I think you mean "electricity supply," not "energy supply." Many households spend more on the gasoline and diesel they pump into their cars and trucks than their entire electricity bill.

I've attached a graphic showing the energy source/sinks for the entire U.S.A.

One thing that catches my eye in this graphic is the huge (23.8 quadrillion Btu) "electricity system energy losses."

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We do. Fully 35% of California's energy supply comes from renewable sources, a proportion that increased every year for two decades until now. It's been a good investment and a successful one, financially and environmentally, and grearly reduced the amount of dirty power we're obliged to buy at considerable cost from other states.

Nitpick: I think you mean "electricity supply," not "energy supply." Many households spend more on the gasoline and diesel they pump into their cars and trucks than their entire electricity bill.

I've attached a graphic showing the energy source/sinks for the entire U.S.A.

One thing that catches my eye in this graphic is the huge (23.8 quadrillion Btu) "electricity system energy losses."

Quite. Though, the 65% of electricity being lost seems even more relevant.

In 2019, U.S. utility-scale generation facilities consumed 38 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) of energy to provide 14 quads of electricity. Most of the difference between these values was lost as an inherent result of the energy conversion process.

link

The term loss seems misplaced. About 1 quad of power is lost due to the grid sweating it off. The remainder is about the loss due to the base energy in a power source and the cost of turning that into electricity. Renewable is probably best at this type of efficiency... once you have transmission lines attached. Gas needs to be fracked, piped, etc'd, repiped, burned.

 

[bilby]

We do. Fully 35% of California's energy supply comes from renewable sources, a proportion that increased every year for two decades until now. It's been a good investment and a successful one, financially and environmentally, and grearly reduced the amount of dirty power we're obliged to buy at considerable cost from other states.

Nitpick: I think you mean "electricity supply," not "energy supply." Many households spend more on the gasoline and diesel they pump into their cars and trucks than their entire electricity bill.

I've attached a graphic showing the energy source/sinks for the entire U.S.A.

One thing that catches my eye in this graphic is the huge (23.8 quadrillion Btu) "electricity system energy losses."

The "internal combustion engine energy losses" are roughly 65% as well; And solar panel energy losses are typically 80-85%. For whatever reason, that energy is lost everywhere hasn't been explicitly mentioned in the graphic. However it is one of the first things they themselves point out in their footnote.

Thermodynamics is like that. We lose energy at every step (which is one reason why Source>Electricity>End Use is far superior to Source>Electricity>Storage>Electricity>End Use; And why storage is therefore incapable of ever making intermittent renewables environmentally sustainable).

 

[steve_bank]

Losses in the grid are distributed. It would be hard to recover any of the losses.

The ultimate sink is the cosmic background which looks like a blackbody at around 7k or so.

Locally the ultimate sink is the mass of the Earth, atmosphere, and oceans, situated in a vacuum.