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Carly Fiorina Destroys Katie Couric on Climate Change
It’s from May but — just in case you missed it — it’s here for your viewing enjoyment:
Published in Politics, Science & Technology
I was just playing… and the only thing I was ridiculing was the headlines in these sites. How many times have you seen them use words like destroy and eviscerate when all they show is one person winning a point in a discussion?
And following that, I now have the facts on her actual performance.
The universe is electric with possibilities!
You’re finally getting plugged in to reality. Great to hear.
There is certainly great potential for solar power as a secondary, supplemental energy source. A car body covered in solar material can help charge a hybrid battery (though not very much), keep the regular battery from going flat, run an interior fan to keep the interior from baking in the sun, etc. Very useful.
Solar panels are very useful when you are off the grid. Remote job sites, RV’s, remote traffic control hardware, that sort of thing.
If solar gets so cheap and easy to manipulate that we can make inexpensive solar shingles for houses, you’ll see more people using that to keep their electrical bills low.
But solar power is being heavily over-sold by ignoring its major limitations. You mention storage. But don’t forget that you can’t charge and discharge a battery without incurring some serious losses. About 30% of the energy is lost in the process. Then there’s the energy cost to make the batteries – a Li-ion cell may last for 1000 charges before it has to be recycled. And the cost – A $10,000 battery that lasts for 1000 charge cycles costs you $10 every time you charge it. Tesla’s battery alone will cost more than what you pay for electricity today if you are in a typical US state.
And solar can never provide ‘base-load’ power for industry. And that means you have to retain the base-load infrastructure anyway, only now you will be operating it at a less efficient duty cycle. Another way in which solar power comes back to bite you in the butt.
The energy sector will evolve like any other technology – it will be a mix of options. We will use solar, wind, fossil fuel, nuclear, hydro, and anything else that ingenious minds come up with, and we will use them in the proportions that make the most fiscal sense.
Or rather, that’s the way it should evolve, and would if governments didn’t try to control energy markets because they think they know better than the wisdom of the crowd.
I agree entirely on this point. Solar works for powering low-level logic and sensing loads.
I wonder on this. Shingles take a lot of abuse – and shortening their lives by compromising their mission might be tough.
Solar DOES work very well (and without any government aid) as a hot water source for residences – in places with decent levels of sunlight.
Zackly. If it’s a good idea, it won’t take a government program to ram it down our throats — somebody will be out there making money off of it.
As you point out, it solar-electric-grid that is the ridiculous prospect. Literally, worthy of ridicule.
I don’t know peoples. What you are saying is echoed in a lot of (non-enviro-nutjob) places, so your observations have a good pedigree. But I don’t think this is next gen stuff. I get daily email science news updates from an outfit called R&Dmag and they regularly bombard me with new ‘break thru”s in these fields. Here’s a sample for your delectation:
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/04/aluminum-battery-offers-safe-alternative-conventional-batteries
Reminds me of hotels that put a large, olympic size pool on their top floor. Lot’s of weight. In future I expect these to be replaced by the sheets of solar cells instead.
PS. Where is this exactly?
I read the IEEE journals and stay on top of this stuff. Of course there are lots of ‘breakthroughs’ and press releases of new technologies. But as always in engineering, the devil is in the details and many of these breakthroughs never survive to market because of unanticipated costs or limitations.
With respect to batteries, they have a fundamental flaw in that they have to carry their own oxidizers, while fossil fuels are concentrated carbon that combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to make energy. That gives fossil fuels a very high energy density we simply can’t match with any other technology other than nuclear power.
Now, there are some experimental batteries that do not have this limitation – zinc-air batteries for example. They currently have enough other problems that we don’t know if they’ll ever be cost effective on a mass scale in applications which need large amounts of power delivered rapidly. Another promising tech is graphene-based supercapacitors, but these are also in the theoretical/experimental stage.
If you want to look at comparable technologies to see what kind of progress we can make over a period of years, don’t look at computers – look at things like refineries, power generators, power transmission hardware, the chemical industry, and other mature technologies. We have long past the stage of harvesting the low-hanging fruit in most of these industries, and further improvements come on the margins after great expense and effort.
I believe we have been spoiled by watching the rapid advance of computer technology, and that has distorted the average person’s understanding of how hard engineering can be and how difficult it can be to extract more performance out of other existing technologies.
Solar panels can not be made cheaper by making them smaller. There is no ‘room at the bottom’ to find efficiency gains. With solar power we run into some very hard limits in terms of available solar flux, practical locations, energy storage, and the sheer amount of raw materials required. Even if we doubled panel efficiency, that would only cut the panel size requirements in half, and the cost of the panels is only one small part of the solar infrastructure. You also need mounting hardware, the labor to install the stuff, the raw materials for the mounting, copper for cables, inverters to convert the DC power to AC, batteries to store the energy, etc. So cutting the cost of the panels in half might only bring the total system cost down by a few percentage points.
Don’t underestimate the safety aspect either. Falls are the second most common form of accidental death in America. Solar panels have to be kept clean. Imagine a nation with roofs covered with materials that have to be regularly cleaned off. How many people will be killed or injured doing that? Or if you think some form of automatic cleaning system can be developed, add the cost of that and the energy and water requirements for it to your calculations for solar power.
Wind power can be cost-effective in the very best locations, but there are very few of those. Once you use them up and move to the places with poorer conditions, the cost of wind power skyrockets and becomes non-competitive. And we don’t have nearly enough great locations to provide more than a fraction of our energy needs.
One of the most promising new technologies is the rise of small, modular nuclear piles. These can be moved on truck beds, and they are buried in the ground with a steam turbine above ground connected to them, and they can generate power for a small city for ten years – at which point they are dug up and removed for reprocessing/refueling and a new one put in place. They can’t melt down, they are zero maintenance, and they do not produce fissionable byproducts.
They are perfect for installation in Africa and other places where there is no functioning power grid, and they could provide the power the 3rd world needs to join the industrial age with no CO2 emissions. You would think the global warming crowd would be salivating all over them, but they’re not. I guess it’s because there’s no way to use them as part of a worldwide government that controls all economic flows.
This is
This is intriguing.
Could this also be used in areas of the US that are extremely rural, thus off the grid?
I love them for exactly that purpose. If they could make a variety of sizes they could eliminate vast miles of transmission lines. And they improve national security. Since they are generating locally for local usage, they aren’t even part of the grid. You can’t take out the national power grid if we don’t have one.
The picture I shared shows rooftops in Tel Aviv.
of course, this is highly regulated, not personally available, right?
Being sold under federal license. And last I heard, back-ordered for years.
Can you give a reference for this technology? I google Low Energy Nuclear Reactors (LENR) and all that seems to come up are remnants of the cold fusion ‘technology’. Thanks.
Remarkable fact I just learned today: gasoline has more hydrogen per unit of volume than does liquid hydrogen.
Manfred Arcane: Look up “Small Modular Reactor”. There are many different designs being kicked around.
Tom Meyer, ED: Yeah, cool isn’t it? Chemistry can be very counter-intuitive.
Safety features for “small modular reactors” sound good, but I think safety is more a matter of degree. Some features look good, then a Tsunami and an earthquake come along and hit at the same time and the safeguards fail -> reactor meltsdown:
“Many of these SMRs are being made using passive safety features and inherent safety features. Passive safety features are engineered, but do not require outside input to work. A pressure release valve may have a spring that can be pushed back when the pressure gets too high. Inherent safety features require no engineered, moveable parts to work. They only depend on physical laws.[17]
Safety features[edit]
Since there are several different ideas for SMRs, there are many different safety features that can be involved. Coolant systems can use natural circulation – convection – so there are no pumps, no moving parts that could break down, and they keep removing decay heat after the reactor shuts down, so that the core doesn’t overheat and melt. Negative temperature coefficients in the moderators and the fuels keep the fission reactions under control, causing the fission reactions to slow down as temperature increases”
The reactor withstood the earthquake and tsunami with margin to spare. Obscene, culpable, predictable, cultural mismanagement created the meltdowns.
For all the many flaws of the reactor, it did its job. Too bad the same cannot be said of the corrupt and secretive government/industry cabal overseeing it.
Like Kursk, this was an understandable disaster converted into a shameful debacle through cowardice and pride.
At first I thought: wow! then I thought about it again and realized that that’s the difference between light molecules and heavier molecules. Liquid volumes are affected by the number of molecules but the number of atoms in the molecules that make up gasoline is quite a bit higher than hydrogen molecules (H2).
Thanks for the info.
The public has to buy in. How do you convince them the same can’t happen in our country. It’s a challenge.
#172 if there’s some connection between that and the point you raised and my response, that’s cool.
These days it’s so hard to figure out which thread I’m following. This isn’t the EPA disaster thread, is it?
I just want to say, I love the way this thread has diverged. I’ve learned so much just from posting a video. Classic Ricochet! And it’s the members who make it great.
Thanks guys.
Larry, I haven’t been ignoring your question. I have been wracking my brain, and the truth is, I can’t come up with any examples. I’m just hopeful that this might work, because we’ve seen lots of smart, principled people crash and burn when they try to educate a public (and a media establishment) that would rather think in black & white terms.
Can’t tell if you are being sarcastic here or not. Oh, well, the damage is done.
Hmm, I missed this. Who were you thinking about for example?
Among my favorite truthtellers are Michele Bachmann, Phil Gramm, Dick Cheney, and Ted Cruz. When you look at their actual positions, I consider these to be sensible moderates. But because they outright reject the premise of their interviewers, they developed reputations as firebrands. I don’t see Carly as any less committed to principle, while she uses her common-sense approach to pick up moderate supporters on The View and elsewhere. She’s able to deflect the question by telling you where she stands, disagreeing without delegitimizing the views of her interviewer. The audience sees the interviewer as a stand-in for themselves.
@Manfred
I was sincere. We’ve been educated by the back and forth between SoS and iWe about Carly’s record and measuring business leadership generally. And Dan Hanson has been a treasure on energy tech, among other things. Others have contributed interesting tidbits and perspectives, including you. This is the best of Ricochet.