Posts by Millwright 27 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015
Of course the demand will go up. Not just ICE replacement but getting the fossil mix down will increase the need for electricity very considerably. So what? We knew that anyway, and the answer is to continue investing in renewables production, storage and distribution.
There are plenty of challenges in all of this, but renewables only being effective in the summer is not one of them.
I don't have a dog in this fight, except a small puppy as an end-user. What I can say though is that I'm doubly happy that Mr Perens is willing to have a sensible debate with the commenters here, and that in the main the latter are providing thoughtful objections and insights into a very gnarly matter. Thank you all, have a beer.
There's a lot of 'anti-greenie' tosh being written in here. Knocking down straw men to bolster untenable arguments is as old as debate, so I shouldn't be surprised.
Yes, renewables like wind and solar are intermittent. There are two obvious fixes for this - grid scale stoarge (including producing fuel hydrogen, cryogenic and thermal storage as well as batteries) and diversification into other non-fossil, non-nuclear types of genertion such as tidal flow (needs good sites and sound ecological planning but predicatable and reliable, marine current (hard engineering but energy dense and very reliable and predicatable), geothermal, wave power, salinity gradients and so on. None of these is a magic bullet and some may never be practical at meaningful scale but there are a lot of options and some proven to be both achievable and of very great potential output.
Two other avenues are bigger, longer interconnects to link places with different weather patterns (vulnerable to issues of politics and sabotage) and it's opposite, decentralised generation and storage. The latter ties in with the expected vast increase in electric vehicles, which IF the V2H and V2G infrastructure is in place will provide a lot of grid demand smoothing and storage.
Fusion has a lot of potential problems, some of them noted already like waste generation and the tritium issue. These may be overcome with diligence, intelligence and lots of money but to start crowing now about the demise of renewables is both unscientific and an act of wishful thinking on the part of insecure nuke Believers.
Aluminium air are primary batteries - not rechargeable. So they /have/ to be recycled after the equivalent of a few charges for a lithium or other secondary battery.
They may have significant use cases, but there are enough issues with the infrastructure needed for swap-out that they're not a universal replacement.
500 milliAmps. The team estimate that each bacteria cell can give off about 100,000 electrons per second.
[...] In the electrochemical chamber there are approximately 100 billion bacterial cells,
10^5 x 10^11 = 10^16 electrons per second
1A =~ 6 x 10^18 electrons per second -> 0.5A =~ 3 x 10^18 electrons per second
Two orders of magnitude error. Tsk
Am I the only one here who thought his story writing dreadful, ill-constructed, predictable drivel only saved from utter uselessness by the Niven collaboration? And the only one who found Chaos Manor a sink of ill-informed, name-dropping posturing?
Seems like it. I will grant that he managed to give me a few unintentional laughs by the sheer buffoonery of some of his CM hardware tales.
As any fule kno, Scotch comes in several levels of desirability. So does non-Scotch whisk(e)y but that's another discussion.
Sub-basement: Nasty blends of industrial grain alcohol with a meagre admixture of the cheapest, roughest malts. [Covers nearly everything that isn't labelled 'Malt'.]
Basement: Somewhat malt-heavier blends, often heavily marketed and usually at a price premium exceeding their value. Major example: Chivas Regal.
Ground floor: Vatted or blended malts. No nasty grain spirit. Vary from nigh-undrinkable to very good indeed. An example of the good stuff: the regional blends from Douglas Laing, like Big Peat.
Upper storey: Single malts. Vary from fairly bland but non-poisonous to distinctly characterful, complex and delightful. Region and style according to taste of course, barring the next level.
Penthouse: Islay.
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