I'd like to see every home come with considerable battery storage that could iron out fluctuations or dips or act as a temporary stop-gap during emergencies.
State of the Game
- Thread starter Fuglydog53
- Start date
The problem with battery storage (and potentially electric cars) is the rare elements needed to manufacture them - it feels like we are basically just starting another cycle of stripping natural resources for some future shortage...
it's not solving anything really though - because using more energy will warm up the planet even more - and once we have plenty of it, we are prone to make use of it. So this is just delaying the doom, but not avoiding it.
Here is Scotland you regularly see the wind turbines stopped on a windy (i.e. normal) day, some of this because production outstrips demand. This is due to the grid being antiquated- energy storage is never totally efficient, but it's good for smoothing over fluctuations, and we barely have any. Pump water up hill, pump heat into a molten salt reactor. Make sure the grid is smart-metered. It would be better for subsidies to go towards these infrastructure changes rather than towards further oil extraction. Oh, and nuclear, which is great. I doubt anyone would object to back-up fossil fuel generators in extremis, but regular reliance on a 19th century power source is not the best way to be forward-looking!
Oh yes. I'm sure that the idiotic focus on wind farms had absolutely NOTHING to do with endless government subsidies for them, along with punitive regulations designed to make it ever more difficult to do things any other way.
But I can meet you halfway: How about we get government the everloving fark out of just about everything and let people just mind their own business as much as humanly possible?
Texas does double the subsidies for gas and oil (which is what froze and failed and caused the problem in that state ...just like it did 10 years prior) than it does for wind.
Do you just drink that republican koolaid straight from whatever keg they're brewing it in or do they distribute it in little jars like old school milkmen? You know that this was all warned about and happened before just a decade prior in the state and those recommendations were ignored and led to exactly what they predicted would happen. Absolutely no need for weird green-energy conspiracies or current political events. Gas power companies wanted to save some money, and then the ones that stayed up made absolute bank on selling power at surge pricing during a disaster.
Why would you think more of the same governmental behavior such as that (which is what got texas into the electirical mess it got into) would be good at a more individual scale?
that's short sighted and selfish ...but that basically fits with the culture there. maybe eventually after enough companies take advantage of the public there they'll come around to abandoning those ideas... I guess some people need to be reminded why governments and basic societies exist and why we're all not running around in tribes. It sounds great until people start doing it and have the means and motivation to not care about what their actions mean to you.
Electricity storage in every home?
Sadly there is not enough toxic elements and substances on Earth to fulfil this apocalyptic dream.
I must admit that it would pimp up the fumes lethality of home fires substantially.
Kudos, I always respected ideas that make people hurt themselves by tricking them into delusions that they do something for their own good.
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Molten. Salt.
It is not energy that is causing the warming of the planet it is greenhouse gases.
the actual problem is not that we would need more energy, but less people on earth - further population growth confronts us with problems we don't want to have - the current pandemic is showing pretty well what kind of problems arise from too many people on earth. As it currently is, we will be running out of crude oil in less than 40 years, AFTER we added all it's carbon to the atmosphere - pretty much the same amount we did within in the last 175 years. Nature will deal with that problem then, but not to our liking - there will be starvation, there will be mass migration and the area around the equator will be much less habitable than it currently is. A lot of those areas, which are currently used for food production will turn into semi-deserts. This will reduce our species by quite a lot - like i said, nature will deal with it, but we won't be happy leaving it to nature, will we?
It's both, you replace just one problem with another one.
Unless we eventually build huge beam lasers with thermal vent engineering and just vent excessive heat onto some useless planet though a chain of relay/mirror satellites.
Although probably we would just cut the costs by heating the Moon up, what could end... spectacularly.
Nature won't "deal with it".
There is no purposefulness behind this chain of events, just dumb and soulless physics / chemistry laws at work.
the energy is right below our feet - we installed a heat pump below our garden - 120m deep, pipes were water is pumped through for heat exchange - cooling our home in summer, heating it in winter - and there is tea water at 90 degree C right from the tap at all time as well. For every kW put in we get the equivalent of 5kW out.
^^ this!
Coming from a farming background, it's been known for centuries that you have too many sheep/cows whatever in too small an area, you run into problems with disease, behavioural issues, all the things we see in our over-populated world. It's always the elephant in the room whenever carbon footprint comes up - the world has too many people, end-of... and at some point nature will give us a clubbing...
agree with the no purpose bit, but as above, simple livestock dynamics make the likelyhood of a cull that much higher.
The population of India uses far less energy resources per head than the US.
you realize that everything in nature evolving - and not just life forms evolve - happens not to fulfill a purpose but it always has one once it evolved. So even there is no intention, it is in the end like there would have been one in the first place. In this sense I'm using "will deal with it", because the outcome always fulfills a purpose.Given that "purpose" in a whole is an "invention" of our intelligent view on the matter - we can give it a reason and that is why it might be purposeful - nature might not have a notion of purpose at all.
I was referring more to the climate change part then diseases / overcrowding.