BF2S Forums First World Problems

globefish23 wrote:

Jay wrote:

You do understand that every joule of energy has to come from somewhere right? Whether it's from burning gasoline in the engine, or coal in a power plant to fill a battery, the energy ultimately comes from carbon. If you ride on a train, you have a carbon footprint from the overhead electric lines. Just because it is out of your immediate vision does not mean it doesn't exist.

Yes, but you can produce energy with hydro, wind and solar power in a power plant without a carbon footprint.
You can't do that directly in a car or a train.
Power plants are also more efficient with up 90% efficiency from cogeneration and use of both electricity and heating.

Also, renewable sources (like biomass) is also preferable to burning gas and oil.
We need the latter for much more than producing energy and driving cars.
Synthesizing plastics or producing chemical and pharmaceutical products from wood on the other hand is still near impossible.

So, the only logic step is to further increase sources like hydro and wind power as much as possible and wherever possible.
Not by ignoring it all and looking for ways to find and extract for oil and gas.

You can not have more than a fraction of your energy sources coming from renewables. Please stop believing Green propaganda. ktnxbai.

Tidal, Hydro and geo-thermal don't count as renewable?

It is true that power stations have to be outside my front door because power travel though. you have a good point.

PrivateVendetta wrote:

It is true that power stations have to be outside my front door because power travel though. you have a good point.

Stick to flying planes please.

PrivateVendetta wrote:

Jay wrote:

The problem really has nothing to do with power generation. Generation is easy. It's storage that is the problem. Batteries are expensive, toxic, and for the really high end ones, they require Rare Earth Minerals which China has the majority of, and is hoarding.

back to one of the first points about energy having to be made somewhere, and electric vehicles etc. just shift the generation from the vehicle to the power station - power stations are multiples more efficient at producing the equivalent power required for 10 cars than 10 petrol engines are they not? I'm not going to comment on batteries, I know nothing about them being made, and you're probably right about the actual footprint.

No, not really. Have you ever compared the cost of heating a home with electricity versus gas?

With gas (or oil) heat, you buy the gas from the gas company, pump it into a furnace and send steam throughout the pipes of your home in order to heat it. If you have electric heat, you'll pay about three times as much. Yes, they're boiling the water in their steam plants for you, but they lose a ton of efficiency when they convert that steam into electricity, lose more of it when they transport the electricity to your home, and when all is said and done, you've tripled the cost for the same gain.

A gasoline powered engine has a certain efficiency rating attached to it, usually in the 25-30% range i.e. 25-30% of the energy it produces when it ignites gasoline is transferred into usable power via the pistons, driveshaft etc. 70-75% is lost to the atmosphere as heat exhaust.

A modern steam plant (i.e. all non-wind, photovoltaic etc.power plants) has an efficiency of around 40-45% tops. After conversion, transfer, and losses in the battery, I guarantee that you end up using more energy to run a battery driven car than you would by simply burning the fuel directly.

It just allows people to make the unpleasantness go out of sight, out of mind, kind of like all the environmental regs did with our heavy industry. Chase em all out, get rid of the smokestacks and turn the old factory into parkland, except it just moved to the other side of the planet and pollutes more than ever now

And I'm going to assume someone running a 2L engine is going to use a shit load more equivalent power than someone using an equivalent battery motor that just draws the power it needs to get it somewhere?

Last edited by PrivateVendetta (2012-03-16 13:14:07)

FatherTed wrote:

Jay wrote:

The problem really has nothing to do with power generation. Generation is easy. It's storage that is the problem. Batteries are expensive, toxic, and for the really high end ones, they require Rare Earth Minerals which China has the majority of, and is hoarding.

it's not so much that china has it all, while being called rare earth, they're surprisingly common - far more than silver/gold for example. it's more a case of china got in very early on getting to grips with finding+extracting it. everyone else is basically decades behind

I'm not a geologist, but I do know that they have at least half of the worlds supply. They recently made huge finds in Greenland... and in the Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan

your point on renewable energy is a good one though, it's not green (at all) at the moment but the more attention/research/money it gets, hopefully the better and more viable it gets. until then we should be shovelling money into nuclear and moving away from coal/gas/oil imo (except for places where nuclear really isn't viable because of the geology)

the fukishima one is a funny example, people declare nuclear unsafe and blah blah 50yr old design... it still took a fucking earthquake AND a tsunami to make that old facility go critical. yet the germans cancel all their plans to construct new reactors germany, the land renowned for chart-topping earthquakes and tsunamis

FatherTed wrote:

the fukishima one is a funny example, people declare nuclear unsafe and blah blah 50yr old design... it still took a fucking earthquake AND a tsunami to make that old facility go critical. yet the germans cancel all their plans to construct new reactors germany, the land renowned for chart-topping earthquakes and tsunamis

the land with the least sunny days and largest concentration of solar

irregardless, they were dumb to place their energy security on oil and gas. as far as natural resources go, all germany really has is (some) coal and an assload of iron. they have a little bit of uranium, but the majority of the stuff in their reactors comes from france, which comes from africa. hedging your bets on some renewable (germany doesn't have the coastal or geothermal options scotland or the scandanavian countries have) and coal/oil/gas all from russia is very shortsighted.

The King of Derp wrote:

Thermo was actually one of my favorite classes. If you lived in an ideal world and could ration power and force people to use it at certain times, and could keep the overall population within the constraints of whatever power is being generated, then sure, renewables are viable. Except you can't, so they're not. When it's cold you need power to heat homes, except when its cold you generally have a lot less sunlight to play with i.e. solar is supplemental only. The wind does not always blow i.e. wind generation is supplemental only. So unless you plan on constructing massive battery banks and about four times the number of plants that are necessary to keep a grid going during optimal conditions (because 75%+ of the time, conditions are non-optimal), then you're living in a fantasy world. You claim to be an engineer, but obviously they left logic out of your curriculum.

Yes of course, non-carbon energy and temporary energy storage are unpossible
It just takes a little planning and lateral thinking, for example:

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-11-07/asia … _s=PM:ASIA

http://beyondzeroemissions.org/zero-car … ralia-2020

But we've been over this before, you didn't get it the last time either, despite being shown it is feasible, demonstrated and in commercial use.

And I did a real engineering degree, not a two-bit boat management course at community college
Lateral thinking is hard to teach too.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-03-16 16:59:05)