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I posted this in the fail thread earlier. On reflection, it's more suitable for a Succeed Thread. Mods feel free to delete the post in the fail thread.
While wind and solar currently suck up most of the oxygen in the green energy sector, there have been recent significant developments both on the technical and money sides in some other sectors too. Specifically, Geothermal, Green Hydrogen, Wave and Tidal, Decarbonization, and even nuclear fusion. Add in Hydro, and you have seven different forms of green, plus decarb.
A new drilling technique called Millimeter Wave (a product of nuclear fusion research) which vaporizes rock, will allow drilling down to 12 miles, and 600 d. celcius. Fossil fuel workers and facilities can be quickly adapted to speed up the transition.
As the costs of wind and solar energy have come down, the attractiveness of using them to create Green Hydrogen has soared. Green energy created by Green energy.
World's largest Green Hydrogen facility announced for Texas.
Internet payments company stripe decided to fund some decarb start-ups. Set up a panel of experts to advise on where to invest, then asked their customers if they would like to contribute a portion of their revenue to the fund with 1% as a target. Within 18 months, 15,000 companies had signed up.
I posted this in the fail thread earlier. On reflection, it's more suitable for a Succeed Thread. Mods feel free to delete the post in the fail thread.
While wind and solar currently suck up most of the oxygen in the green energy sector, there have been recent significant developments both on the technical and money sides in some other sectors too. Specifically, Geothermal, Green Hydrogen, Wave and Tidal, Decarbonization, and even nuclear fusion. Add in Hydro, and you have seven different forms of green, plus decarb.
I'm all for being smart in energy production, but I think a lot of the "green energy" that we produce is not at all green.
Take for example, wind power. It's probably the biggest farce that's been perpetuated. A home owner can get a wind power generator, and that's pretty decent, but these large wind farms that we have all over Texas, New Mexico, etc... this is a waste. They are extremely expensive to make, use a lot of petroleum for plastics and many other chemicals which are bad for the environment, and are almost all made in China. We're basically offshoring our power to China. How does that work if China decided to stop sending us wind turbine blades? Furthermore, they have a shelf life of 10 years, and they can't be recycled... so they end up in landfills like this:
The only article I was able to find, was some basically BS fake "factcheck" article by Yahoo which is almost entirely false, trying to buck the narrative that they can be recycled. Sure... these could be used for a lot of things. They could be cut up for roofing tiles, or they could be ground up for new fiberglass construction, whatever... but no one does it, and in doing so would create more waste.
Solar isn't bad, but it's cost-prohibitive.
Hydroelectric dams are not horrible, but extremely expensive and cause ecological problems.
BEST solution is nuclear power. We need to invest in new Gen-3 and Gen-4 nuclear power plants. Gen 4 power plants can literally reuse all the prior waste from Gen-1/2 plants as a fuel source. It's significantly better... but the energy lobby from foreign governments continues to push a narrative and convince "green energy" supporters that it's bad.
I'm all for being smart in energy production, but I think a lot of the "green energy" that we produce is not at all green.
Take for example, wind power. It's probably the biggest farce that's been perpetuated. A home owner can get a wind power generator, and that's pretty decent, but these large wind farms that we have all over Texas, New Mexico, etc... this is a waste. They are extremely expensive to make, use a lot of petroleum for plastics and many other chemicals which are bad for the environment, and are almost all made in China. We're basically offshoring our power to China. How does that work if China decided to stop sending us wind turbine blades? Furthermore, they have a shelf life of 10 years, and they can't be recycled... so they end up in landfills like this:
The only article I was able to find, was some basically BS fake "factcheck" article by Yahoo which is almost entirely false, trying to buck the narrative that they can be recycled. Sure... these could be used for a lot of things. They could be cut up for roofing tiles, or they could be ground up for new fiberglass construction, whatever... but no one does it, and in doing so would create more waste.
Solar isn't bad, but it's cost-prohibitive.
Hydroelectric dams are not horrible, but extremely expensive and cause ecological problems.
BEST solution is nuclear power. We need to invest in new Gen-3 and Gen-4 nuclear power plants. Gen 4 power plants can literally reuse all the prior waste from Gen-1/2 plants as a fuel source. It's significantly better... but the energy lobby from foreign governments continues to push a narrative and convince "green energy" supporters that it's bad.
Wind turbines are generally good for more than a couple of decades, so the amount of waste generated needs to be measured against that time factor. That being said, with the boom in wind turbines, there should and does exist research into recycling the blade materials (the turbines themselves in regards to the components in the generator are for the most part recycled because they're so valuable). In terms of consumables and moving such to the plants, they end up using a lot fewer resources and a lot less waste compared to the equivalent power generated in a lot of other power plants that need to constantly have feedstock transported to them. These other power plants also have parts that wear out and need to be replaced, so combined, the physical waste in volume over twenty something years is likely heavily in favor of the wind turbines. There can be domestic production of wind turbines, the question is how do you incentivize that though the recent global supply chain issues, the rising cost of maritime shipping, and the evidently bad idea of supporting authoritarian regimes that may be bad actors has placed quite a bit more emphasis on this over the last couple of years.
Solar has gotten a hell of a lot cheaper over the previous decade and now oftentimes has the lowest levelized cost of electricity for new electricity generation. This is with still fairly low efficiency of ~22% as an industry standard so there's a lot more potential in this. Like wind turbines mentioned above, and a lot of other things, localized domestic production is looking quite a bit sweeter than it did just a couple of years ago.
Both of the above and hydroelectricity are ultimately fed from nuclear fusion reactions in the sun and even with the tiny pinprick of the Earth and a lot of that energy reflected, it's a lot of energy to capture and use. If we wanted to get real sci-fi about it, ultimately that really massive fusion reactor that outputs can probably be better captured in the end with space-based solar array or similar with ridiculous transmission equipment to Earth though that's probably a long time coming.
Agreed on nuclear power though these are extremely expensive in terms of that initial capital expenditure. I think having a reasonable framework for financing in place would greatly drop the price and reduce the risk. The various Gen-4 reactor designs are fascinating and the US should put a lot more behind piloting and then scaling more of these. Ultimately, these need to be very cost efficient as solar with storage is setting fairly low levelized cost of electricity that can be deployed in a fairly large variety of conditions. Reaching that cost efficiency takes a lot of initial capital costs and is more on the scale of what large government budgets and institutions can afford in terms of the capital itself and the subsequent financial risk. It's unclear if the US and its population is willing to take this very far, but it is clear that some other countries are. One interesting note is that I think with storage, specifically battery storage, continuing to drop in price, this is also possibly a boon for certain kinds of nuclear generation plants. Storage is good for intermittent sources like wind and solar as it allows you to take that energy generated and use for later periods, so that's pretty understandable. Where it works for nuclear generation is that nuclear power plants have high utilization rates partially because most designs are better for running at a fairly constant output rather than moving along with daily fluctuations of the demand curve. Of course, the demand curve on a utility-level generally fluctuates significantly over the course of the day, so with cheap enough storage, you can actually right-size things pretty well to meet the demand curve more precisely. That's going to be pretty exciting.
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As for the OP, these are fascinating advancements in geothermal and tidal power and it's great that the knowhow from fossil fuel drilling is applicable to geothermal sources. These are interesting as ones that aren't directly driven by the nuclear fusion reactions of the sun, so they're fascinating as entirely different categories of generation. I did have to hunt for those articles a bit though as the links are appearing for me as a truncation of the original url.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-26-2022 at 08:52 AM..
As for the OP, these are fascinating advancements in geothermal and tidal power and it's great that the knowhow from fossil fuel drilling is applicable to geothermal sources. These are interesting as ones that aren't directly driven by the nuclear fusion reactions of the sun, so they're fascinating as entirely different categories of generation. I did have to hunt for those articles a bit though as the links are appearing for me as a truncation of the original url.
Thanks for pointing out the link issue. I think I solved it.........maybe.......
Problem was I simply copied and pasted my post from the other thread, and the links "looked" OK.
Here are all the links correctly entered.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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As s a wide person once said, "There is no free lunch." Maybe that doesn't make sense here but the problem is that every "green" energy solution has it's own major problems. The wind power, for example killing endangered birds. Solar also kills birds, but won't work well in areas like here where it rains 8-9 months of the year. Even our plentiful, clean hydro power is threatened by those trying to protect the salmon. We have already destroyed two dams/power plants for the fish.
I'm all for being smart in energy production, but I think a lot of the "green energy" that we produce is not at all green.
Take for example, wind power. It's probably the biggest farce that's been perpetuated. A home owner can get a wind power generator, and that's pretty decent, but these large wind farms that we have all over Texas, New Mexico, etc... this is a waste. They are extremely expensive to make, use a lot of petroleum for plastics and many other chemicals which are bad for the environment, and are almost all made in China. We're basically offshoring our power to China. How does that work if China decided to stop sending us wind turbine blades? Furthermore, they have a shelf life of 10 years, and they can't be recycled... so they end up in landfills like this:
The only article I was able to find, was some basically BS fake "factcheck" article by Yahoo which is almost entirely false, trying to buck the narrative that they can be recycled. Sure... these could be used for a lot of things. They could be cut up for roofing tiles, or they could be ground up for new fiberglass construction, whatever... but no one does it, and in doing so would create more waste.
Solar isn't bad, but it's cost-prohibitive.
Hydroelectric dams are not horrible, but extremely expensive and cause ecological problems.
BEST solution is nuclear power. We need to invest in new Gen-3 and Gen-4 nuclear power plants. Gen 4 power plants can literally reuse all the prior waste from Gen-1/2 plants as a fuel source. It's significantly better... but the energy lobby from foreign governments continues to push a narrative and convince "green energy" supporters that it's bad.
Less than 100% green beats fossil all day everyday. A lot of people don't have the ability to utilize "personal" wind turbines. That's lead to the emergence of "community solar" Wind might get there too.
Most US wind hardware is manufactured in the US.
As s a wide person once said, "There is no free lunch." Maybe that doesn't make sense here but the problem is that every "green" energy solution has it's own major problems. The wind power, for example killing endangered birds. Solar also kills birds, but won't work well in areas like here where it rains 8-9 months of the year. Even our plentiful, clean hydro power is threatened by those trying to protect the salmon. We have already destroyed two dams/power plants for the fish.
Cats are estimated to kill two billion birds a year in the US.
...but no raptors....We won't mention that the "2 billion" figure is as gross lie.....If everyone in the country owned an outdoor cat (350 million), each of them would have to kill 6 birds/yr to reach 2 bill...I have 4 barn cats who like to stalk around my dozen shepard crook bird feeders which are visited 100s of times per day, every day of the year...Maybe they kill 3 birds a yr among them...and thatjust serves to thin the herd of bad genes.
More importantly-- all technologies have their risks and benefits....Solar and wind will never be more than solutions to a small niche of power problems. Costs, lack of raw materials and habitiat destruction and unreliability will limit their use.
Power usage is a parametric of standard of living...To limit power usage is to reduce that standard of living. Is that what our goal should be? Are we justified to tell the develpong nations that they can't develop anymore. Late to the party? Too bad?
This whole argument is predicated on the false notion that fossil fuels are bad...No proof of that.-- The contribution of burning fosil fuel is negligible in the tital carbon cycle...Increasing co2 at this poiint (416ppm) contibutes minimally to additional warming, and additinal warming is good (who retires and moves north?) at any rate.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource and will become depleted on a centuries long time scale. Plenty of time to make a wise transtion, not a hasty, poorly thought out change mandated by politicians with their personal power-grabbing agenda forcing technologes on us that create more problems than they solve.
Hydroelectric dams are not horrible, but extremely expensive and cause ecological problems.
BEST solution is nuclear power. We need to invest in new Gen-3 and Gen-4 nuclear power plants. Gen 4 power plants can literally reuse all the prior waste from Gen-1/2 plants as a fuel source. It's significantly better... but the energy lobby from foreign governments continues to push a narrative and convince "green energy" supporters that it's bad.
Solar has been getting cheaper over the decades since it was first developed.
Before you implement your "best solution", you need to figure out where you're going to store all the waste product it generates, and how you're going to do it in a manner that's not only safe today, but that will remain safe for future generations.
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