The following image is from NASA, plotting the recent solar activity.



It isn't clear that the current minimum is going all that much longer than expected. There is a supposed "11 year" cycle in sunspot activity, but that 11 year period is fairly loose.

There is a long cycle that runs around a century. We are over due for this long cycle to turn the sun a bit cooler. Thus, you see NASA predicting the next peak is a bit lower than the last peak.

But it seems a bit soon to say we've seen a large change.

Paul Krugman of the NY Times talks about economics and ecology. An Affordable Salvation For discussion purposes...

The 2008 election ended the reign of junk science in our nation’s capital, and the chances of meaningful action on climate change, probably through a cap-and-trade system on emissions, have risen sharply.

But the opponents of action claim that limiting emissions would have devastating effects on the U.S. economy. So it’s important to understand that just as denials that climate change is happening are junk science, predictions of economic disaster if we try to do anything about climate change are junk economics.

Yes, limiting emissions would have its costs. As a card-carrying economist, I cringe when “green economy” enthusiasts insist that protecting the environment would be all gain, no pain.

But the best available estimates suggest that the costs of an emissions-limitation program would be modest, as long as it’s implemented gradually. And committing ourselves now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump...

Originally Posted by David Krein

Another view on what to do about carbon.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_carbon.html

Pax,

Dave Krein '42

As an engineer I've always known that we cannot solve carbon emissions by simply going for green energy like windmills, solar and nuclear. My focus has always been on developing biomass fuels, first for transportation fuels and then eventually for generating electric power in CO2 sequestration plants. In this way CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere.

The idea is you would use solar/wind power to generate electricity for the grid and for generating hydrogen. Hydrogen would be reacted with biomass to form hydrocarbon fuels. Hydrocarbon fuels would then be used to generate electricity.

By converting electricity into hydrocarbon fuel you obtain the storage needed to convert intermittant solar/wind power into reliable baseload power. When the sun shines or the wind blows strongly, excess power is generated which is used to make fuel. At night or when the wind is weak, this fuel can be used to generate power, smoothing out the power fluctuations. Also since the fuel can be moved, one can generate power in one locale (e.g. solar power in the Southwest) and using it in another (in the densely populated East)

By reacting the hydrogen with biomass you get more more kwh out than the kwh you used to generate the hydrogen so its not just storage. By sequestering the CO2 emissions you remove the carbon in the biomass, achieving a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Since we need to remove CO2 there is a subsidy to be gained by making and burning biomass fuel and sequestering the CO2. Since net CO2 emissions will be taxed, solar wind and nuclear will make sense. Nuclear is naturally suitable for baseload power and should be used for such, not for making fuel

Excess solar and wind generation capacity can be built since the excess power can be sold as transportation fuel if it isn't used for power generation.

Of course as a chemical engineer I am biased towards chemical solutions, but I am very dubious of the smart grid idea. I have never found computers particularly reliable things. Complex systems are buggy. I find that since the mid 1990's personal computers have gotten slower despite technical advances. It seems more and more internal checking is added with each new generation of operating system so that although the processors are much faster, they are being asked to do far more for simple maintenance. Hence my successive computers take longer and longer to shut down and boot up.

Wind power for the grid, certainly. Solar power can take a lot of load off the grid because it is very compatible with small-scale individual uses, which when multiplied by everyone who uses heat or electricity or hot water (or even a fair majority) adds up quite a bit. I think people who try to scale up renewable and sustainable energy sources to grid size need to also look at them as something the original homeowner can and will do, especially during the Crisis or in the 1T.

Some utilities like water, sewers, heating gas, and some electricity must be centralized. And also public health as in disease control (such as the CDC, now going into high gear ).Others have forms that can be used locally like trash pickup and recycling, public health clinics and vaccinations, or individually like solar panels, conservation, drip irrigation, and behavior modification like quitting smoking. The trick is to get things rolling at their proper level, and I'm fairly sure with individual solar energy, the market will do that job.

Everything at its most effective level, is what I say. And note: I now consider public health to be a public utility,In fact, it has been so since the days that cholera epidemics led to programs for clean municipal water.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

Wind power for the grid, certainly. Solar power can take a lot of load off the grid because it is very compatible with small-scale individual uses, which when multiplied by everyone who uses heat or electricity or hot water (or even a fair majority) adds up quite a bit.

When it's cloudy or dark where will the home-based solar user get his power from? If he expects to get it from the grid then, that means the grid suppliers have to maintain enough resources to meet demand but only use them a fraction of the time, which is inefficient and jacks up costs.

A system for storage of vast amount of power is needed to order to use inherantly intermittant power sources like solar and wind to provide reliable power. Converting excess power into fuel when the intermittant sources are producing is one way to store the energy. Then when power from the intermittant sources is not available, use the fuel to produce electricity.

The idea that individual households would produce their own electricity may be attractive politically, but it doesn't make physical sense.

Of course let's be real, the way we make our food doesn't make physical sense. Ditto for the way we run our companies. Politics rules all, whether it be office politics, electoral politics, campus politics or whatever. So why not have individual households as producers of electrical power--stupider things have happened before.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

A system for storage of vast amount of power is needed to order to use inherantly intermittant power sources like solar and wind to provide reliable power. Converting excess power into fuel when the intermittant sources are producing is one way to store the energy. Then when power from the intermittant sources is not available, use the fuel to produce electricity.

Yah. Actually they've got a pretty decent way to put wind power to good home use here. Just connect the wind generator up to a resistance-coil heater element (like from an electric teapot) and stick that sucker into the reservoir from which your hot water and/or heating system pulls. You'll never succeed in boiling a full even 100L of water in your tank with even a kW-size generator, so you've got an effectively bottomless power-dump; plus since you're just making heat, you don't need the expensive (and dangerous) batteries, rectifier-invertor, and so forth.
You still want to have the ability to run off wood or gas or some other burnable for when the wind dies for the month of February, but otherwise you get a pretty good deal -- the main thing being very little of your generated power going to waste. Which is important, considering the home wind station will set you back on the order of a thousand bucks per kW-capacity (that is, how much it would generate in extremely high wind conditions -- which are rather rare pretty much anywhere you would site it).

Originally Posted by Mikebert

When it's cloudy or dark where will the home-based solar user get his power from? If he expects to get it from the grid then, that means the grid suppliers have to maintain enough resources to meet demand but only use them a fraction of the time, which is inefficient and jacks up costs.

A system for storage of vast amount of power is needed to order to use inherantly intermittant power sources like solar and wind to provide reliable power. Converting excess power into fuel when the intermittant sources are producing is one way to store the energy. Then when power from the intermittant sources is not available, use the fuel to produce electricity.

The idea that individual households would produce their own electricity may be attractive politically, but it doesn't make physical sense.

Of course let's be real, the way we make our food doesn't make physical sense. Ditto for the way we run our companies. Politics rules all, whether it be office politics, electoral politics, campus politics or whatever. So why not have individual households as producers of electrical power--stupider things have happened before.

The usual arrangement is a back-and-forth connection to the grid. When you make more power than you can use, you sell it to the grid. When you need it, you buy it. Simply circuitry can accomplish this. Then your home installation serves your needs with the external connection to supply stability.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Yah. Actually they've got a pretty decent way to put wind power to good home use here. Just connect the wind generator up to a resistance-coil heater element (like from an electric teapot) and stick that sucker into the reservoir from which your hot water and/or heating system pulls. You'll never succeed in boiling a full even 100L of water in your tank with even a kW-size generator, so you've got an effectively bottomless power-dump; plus since you're just making heat, you don't need the expensive (and dangerous) batteries, rectifier-invertor, and so forth.
You still want to have the ability to run off wood or gas or some other burnable for when the wind dies for the month of February, but otherwise you get a pretty good deal -- the main thing being very little of your generated power going to waste. Which is important, considering the home wind station will set you back on the order of a thousand bucks per kW-capacity (that is, how much it would generate in extremely high wind conditions -- which are rather rare pretty much anywhere you would site it).

The places I've seen individual windmills is either on ranches, which tend to be big and remote, or on reservations, ditto. Or at least some of the tribes are talking about it.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Yah. Actually they've got a pretty decent way to put wind power to good home use here. Just connect the wind generator up to a resistance-coil heater element (like from an electric teapot) and stick that sucker into the reservoir from which your hot water and/or heating system pulls..

What I don't like about that is is converts a high-grade form of energy (electricity) to a low grade form (heat). You can heat water directly with solar, why use a form of energy that can do work? You are still pretty much throwing away the excess power.

Producing fuel keeps the energy in a form that can do work (which can efficiently be converted into electricity or power vehicles). The key that makes it work is the addition of biomass as a process aid. Biomass contained a fair amount of trapped solar energy. The problem is it is already "half-burned". Carbohydrate (CH2O) is half way between unburned hydrocarbon (CH2) and fully-burned hydrocarbon (CO2 + H2O). Adding hydrogen to carbohydrate will yield hydrocarbon (high grade fuel) and water.

This makes no sense if all you are using it for is storing power, generate baseload power directly with nuclear instead, even though it is more expensive. But if money can be made from removing CO2 from the atmosphere (a CO2 emisison tax applied to a negative emission translates to income) then it may very well make sense to make use of cheap wind power and use storage-as-fuel and use the process credit from sequestration to pay for it.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

When it's cloudy or dark where will the home-based solar user get his power from? If he expects to get it from the grid then, that means the grid suppliers have to maintain enough resources to meet demand but only use them a fraction of the time, which is inefficient and jacks up costs.

This the one issue that has gotten far to little consideration, because the answers aren't pretty. That doesn't mean that we can ignore it, but humans are very good at denial.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

... A system for storage of vast amount of power is needed to order to use inherently intermittent power sources like solar and wind to provide reliable power. Converting excess power into fuel when the intermittent sources are producing is one way to store the energy. Then when power from the intermittent sources is not available, use the fuel to produce electricity.

There are several good answers to this problem, and all should be used where they make sense. For example, I live on a giant battery of sorts. The local power company knew that peak load is the primary issue in the efficiency equation, so they built several paired lakes to act as storage devices. Here's the power company's explanation (Cliff Notes version) of our two lakes.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

... The idea that individual households would produce their own electricity may be attractive politically, but it doesn't make physical sense.

Of course let's be real, the way we make our food doesn't make physical sense. Ditto for the way we run our companies. Politics rules all, whether it be office politics, electoral politics, campus politics or whatever. So why not have individual households as producers of electrical power--stupider things have happened before.

There are a few cases where this is viable. At most, it lowers the grid demand. To work, though, there has to be in-home storage of some sort, and we just don't build that way. We may start now.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

The usual arrangement is a back-and-forth connection to the grid. When you make more power than you can use, you sell it to the grid. When you need it, you buy it. Simply circuitry can accomplish this. Then your home installation serves your needs with the external connection to supply stability.

The biggest problem with that model is, you make power intermittently, but use it continuously. Solar is better than wind, becasue it tends to generate during the peak demand period. Wind tends to be highest at night, and much less power is needed then.

Which brings us back to Mike's point. If the power company needs to provide reliable power, they need adequate capacity to do that at peak demand and minimal renewable power, because that will happen.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

What I don't like about that is is converts a high-grade form of energy (electricity) to a low grade form (heat). You can heat water directly with solar, why use a form of energy that can do work? You are still pretty much throwing away the excess power.

You could hardly call wind a high-grade form of energy. For fun, plug your multimeter into the leads coming off a wind generator. Everything -- voltage, current, frequency -- is directly tied to the instantaneous speed of the wind at the turbine (very slightly integrated by the inertial moment of the gizmo itself, though that needs to be as low as possible for anything like an efficient turbine). The electricity you get off it is as close as possible to completely useless as can be imagined. You can't even use it to power a lightbulb with anything approaching the reliability that a lightbulb-user would require.

Contrast that with either baseline-power (which comes rectified and stabilized), or with fuel sources themselves (compact, storable, non-degrading, etc etc.). If you're going to do something as sloppy as heating water (and live in a place where solar isn't feasible for many months of the year), wind is by far the optimal energy source.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

The usual arrangement is a back-and-forth connection to the grid. When you make more power than you can use, you sell it to the grid. When you need it, you buy it. Simply circuitry can accomplish this. Then your home installation serves your needs with the external connection to supply stability.

Stability for you at the expense of instability for the larger system. When your home installation is generating power, so will everyone elses and they will be a surge of excess power streaming into the grid that the gird operator has to deal with (at great expense) but for which he is not compensated. Right now its not a problem since so few homes are hooked up this way. But once the fraction gets to 5-10% it will be a big problem.

Last night I watched a TV special about the great midwest floods of 1993 and 2008. When I saw the map on this thread I just had to ask if any of you think the global warming issue is responsible for one or both of those floods. The show pointed out the culprit to be a stalled jet stream in both years.

They showed actual people dealing with the effects of the floods, and how one whole small town along the Mississippi was moved father inland following the 1993 disaster, and how there were some lessons learned from the former which proved positive in the latter occurrence, such as building some of the levees higher. Interesting show.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

You could hardly call wind a high-grade form of energy. For fun, plug your multimeter into the leads coming off a wind generator. Everything -- voltage, current, frequency -- is directly tied to the instantaneous speed of the wind at the turbine (very slightly integrated by the inertial moment of the gizmo itself, though that needs to be as low as possible for anything like an efficient turbine). The electricity you get off it is as close as possible to completely useless as can be imagined.

I find it hard to believe your claim that electricity from wind is of zero value. Wind power has been around for more than 30 years. Yet only recently have a lot of installations started to be built. At the same time, the written material I've read on the subject has said that wind power has only recently become cost competitive. If the power generated from windmills was worthless as you claim, I find it hard to believe that all these installations would have been built.

It cannot be a politics because wind turbines were around for the first energy crisis, but tons of wind turbines did NOT get built then. On the other hand, biofuels were hotter than they are now.

The reason why is simple. In the early 20th century, chemicals like acetone, butanol, ethanol and methanol were manufactured from biomass at huge scale. The more capital-intensive chemical routes to these and other chemicals using fossil fuels eventually supplanted the earlier methods, although there was a burst of renewed activity in biotechnology during WW II: Germans manufactured gasoline during WW II. Making chemicals from biomass was a sound ide--it was not pie in the sky and as a result plants were built in the 1970's. The South Africans and Brazilians moved into manufactured fuels in a big way. In contrast, wind power was pie in the sky back then, sort of like fusion, and no commercial installations were built.

Today, biofuels are still at the WW II level of technology. Wind technology has apparently moved from "pie in the sky" to "makes sense" because commercial installations are being built today, just as happened with biofuels back then. Fusion is still pie in the sky, no commercial installations are being built.

If you were right about wind power then it would never have proceeded from pie in the sky to building large numbers of wind turbines. The concerns you raise appear to be irrelevant.
************************************************** *************
By high quality I was speaking in the thermodynamic sense as energy that can do work directly as opposed to energy released as heat.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I find it hard to believe your claim that electricity from wind is of zero value.

Who said 'zero value'? What's critical about wind is that, unlike most every other rotating-coil system of power generation, it features rotor speeds under near-constant white-noise-type fluctuations. It requires (as I have mentioned) significant postprocessing infrastructure -- with related losses, of course -- to turn what you get from it into useable grid (or even battery) energy. So of all the varieties of generated electricity, it is by far the sloppiest and least conducive to gridding.

(I'm not talking out my ass here. I live in a region where home wind power is not particularly uncommon -- we've got a 1kW generator ourselves)

Wind power has been around for more than 30 years. Yet only recently have a lot of installations started to be built.

Well yes. Early wind power was used in places with relatively constant wind to (mechanically) power full-time artesian pumps. Those are a good example of something that wind is very well-suited for.

As for recent grid-wind-installations, it is worth remembering that we live in a world where subsidies and political expediency at times strongly skew cost-benefit analyses.

There are, of course, sites on earth where wind is relatively constant enough to be feasible as an energy source (like off the shore of Copenhagen, for a good example). But wind as a decentralized source -- which is what we were talking about -- means the majority of generators are not at those sweet spot sites.

The ranches I mentioned are, by and large, in the sweet spots because they're out on the open prairie, which is a very windy place. However, one of the major uses for the windmills is and always has been, pumping water, which is a sporadic use. A lot of ranch energy needs are of that nature.

Originally Posted by The Grey Badger

The ranches I mentioned are, by and large, in the sweet spots because they're out on the open prairie, which is a very windy place. However, one of the major uses for the windmills is and always has been, pumping water, which is a sporadic use. A lot of ranch energy needs are of that nature.

Pumping water is good, because you've got a practically bottomless well to dump your wind-generated energy into (that is, the potential energy of elevation and volume). So it doesn't matter to you at all what the quality of your generated power is, so long as there is enough of it over time to raise enough water out of the ground and over your head to keep wet what you want wetted.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Who said 'zero value'?

You wrote: The electricity you get off it is as close as possible to completely useless as can be imagined.

Something that is useless has no value.

But wind as a decentralized source -- which is what we were talking about -- means the majority of generators are not at those sweet spot sites.

I wrote: The idea that individual households would produce their own electricity may be attractive politically, but it doesn't make physical sense.

I had already rejected decentralized power.

Your point made it sound like wind power was pointless and could never work. THAT I found hard to believe.

... this is real.


Well, would YOU want to move to the Solomon Islands?

Think about it, the place is more nasty and brutish-poisonous snakes and fairly recent tribal warfare-rather than being a tropical paradise.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

... this is real.

Yes it is. From wiki:

The Carteret islands likely consist of a base of coral that sits atop an extinct volcanic mount. In the usual geological course of events first proposed by Charles Darwin, such islands eventually subside due to weathering and erosion, as well as isostatic adjustments of the sea floor. It has also been speculated that dynamite fishing[5] in the Carterets such as occurred in the island during the prolonged Bouganville conflict may be contributing to the increased inundation. Coral reefs buffer against wave and tidal action, and so their degradation may increase an island's level of exposure to those forces. Another suggestion is that tectonic movement may be causing the gradual subsidence of the atoll.

Dynamite fishing near a coral reef? No wonder the atoll has been undermined. Coral is fragile.

And the shame is that by mindlessly pointing the finger at "anthopogenic global warming", the result is that the truly guilty parties are let off the hook and such tragedies will happen again and again.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Yes it is. From wiki:


Dynamite fishing near a coral reef? No wonder the atoll has been undermined. Coral is fragile.

Well, you can't blame this on unorthodox fishing techniques.

And the shame is that by mindlessly

This is the reason that I rarely post on this thread. It's rare that someone brings up a different angle on this issue, such as whole islands being actually abandoned, without being called "a tool" or "mindless" or some other redundant variant of the same. This observation isn't aimed just at you individuality, but I've notice that too often this thread seems to turn into an informal flame war.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

Well, you can't blame this on unorthodox fishing techniques.

Nobody was. Bolivia is in the mountains, where people don't generally go out trawling for tuna.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Nobody was. Bolivia is in the mountains, where people don't generally go out trawling for tuna.

And that is the point. We are seeing the theoretical turn into the actual. Islands are being lost, glaciers are permanently disappearing.
Of course, there are always independent variables factoring into any correlation.
But, to draw an analogy, if one smokes four packs of cigarettes a day, one should not be surprised to recieve a dianosis of lung cancer after a couple of decades of such behavior.

Originally Posted by herbal tee

But, to draw an analogy, if one smokes four packs of cigarettes a day, one should not be surprised to receive a diagnosis of lung cancer after a couple of decades of such behavior.

In the Poisoned Waters documentary, they measured strong pollution from biological wastes in a stream that fed from a culvert that ran between two chicken factory buildings. Each chicken factory contained thousands of chickens. A representative of the chicken industry suggested that local foxes might be responsible for the pollution. No scientific study has ruled out foxes.

Some of this is obvious financial interest. Corporations will avoid taking on additional costs and defend their short term profits. Some of this is public relations dishonesty. Some of it can only be described as a Big Lie. And, perhaps, who knows, perhaps an occasional fox does do his biological business while considering how to get into the henhouse.

But some people really don't want to change. Some will continue to blame the fox until the Chesapeake is one big oxygen free dead zone. The belief that one has a right to do as has always been done, the notion that the consequences are not real or can be ignored, can be persistent, deep and irrational.