Reply With Quote
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AGW is political issue for Repug/VWRC, not a scientific issue
Pew Poll Finds Clean Energy Is A Political Wedge Issue for Republicans
Energy has turned into a contentious campaign issue in 2012, pitting “drill-baby-drill” against “clean energy now.” But multiple polls now make clear that the clean energy issue is a winning one for progressives.
The way the media and cable TV frame the national debate may make it seem like there’s an even split between supporters of fossil fuels and supporters of renewable alternatives. However, a new poll from the Pew Research Center finds that clean energy has far more support than fossil fuels support across the political spectrum — except among conservative Republican males.
The poll illustrates how clean energy has become a wedge issue among Republicans moving into the presidential election. This is precisely what has happened on climate (see “Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming“).
Pew found that 52% of Americans believe “alternative” resources are the most important energy priority for the country. That’s still a substantial increase over oil, coal and gas, which received preferential support from 39% of respondents.
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews...r_republicans/
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Repugs WEAKEN America by relentless pushing their divisive, polarizing, dishonest WEDGE issues. Their are millions of duped, ignorant, shilling American sheeple to help suck down Repugs propaganda and lies. The Reugs' "America is broke" is their idea of patriotism.
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Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-25-2012 at 05:13 PM.
lol...I slapped you the last time you tried to pull this bull .
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191796
Nat gas driving this?
Germany wanting to dismantle it's Nuclear Energy program completely and sub renewable energy.
Yeah...just what I thought. About zero relevance to our situation.
Good bit from Der Spiegel
Quick summary:
Electricity prices have been soaring in the last few years, driven in part by heavy renewables subsidies.
Darrin wants all of those prices to be blamed on the subsidies, of course.
Long summary:
Reality, as always is more complicated than his simplistic worldview, i.e with probable run ups in the EU for coal and natgas. I haven't seen the specific figures for the EU but globally prices for both have gone up a bit, so I would imagine that no small amount of that run up has been due to fuel prices.
Even bigger though, is their snap call to retire all their nukes after the Fukushima up in Japan, which is proving too much of a barrier in practical terms.
The Germans have a MUCH more ambitious goal of cutting CO2 emissions, and have been investing heavily in renewables.
What will happen is that they will have to cut back, and allow the market some time to catch up.
The US is not Germany however. One can draw a cautionary tale about pushing too much top-down reform with subsidies, but the US with its continent- spanning size has a VAST renewable energy potential largely untapped, and relative to our economy/government etc, we have put very little into the effort.
The most economical and profitable places to put renewables haven't been even close to being fully tapped yet.
I'm sure his confirmation bias will tune out everything after the "but" above. Not really a good analogy.
I would point out the desert southwest gets far, far more sun than Germany does.
Sorry about the huge gifs, but it shows the solar potentials of the countries well:
(edit) Berlin is at the same la ude as Newfoundland in Canada, hundreds of miles north of Maine.(/edit)
Last edited by RandomGuy; 05-25-2012 at 05:02 PM.
and PopTech continues to ignore this thread.
Can't blame him.
That's funny. You found the same article.
Of course you didn't really finish reading the whole thing, but hey. You tried.
(pats Darrin on the head patronizingly)
You tried little guy.
The list grows....
ooooh1!!!!!1!!!
Now I have a precioussss lissst.'
BUWAHAHAHAHAHA
He really isn't going to answer any of those questions.
Wow.
"when does solar produce the most energy?"
Really? that is too much to ask?
Wow.
Yep.Good bit from Der Spiegel
Quick summary:
Electricity prices have been soaring in the last few years, driven in part by heavy renewables subsidies.
Darrin wants all of those prices to be blamed on the subsidies, of course.
Long summary:
Reality, as always is more complicated than his simplistic worldview, i.e with probable run ups in the EU for coal and natgas. I haven't seen the specific figures for the EU but globally prices for both have gone up a bit, so I would imagine that no small amount of that run up has been due to fuel prices.
Even bigger though, is their snap call to retire all their nukes after the Fukushima up in Japan, which is proving too much of a barrier in practical terms.
The Germans have a MUCH more ambitious goal of cutting CO2 emissions, and have been investing heavily in renewables.
What will happen is that they will have to cut back, and allow the market some time to catch up.
The US is not Germany however. One can draw a cautionary tale about pushing too much top-down reform with subsidies, but the US with its continent- spanning size has a VAST renewable energy potential largely untapped, and relative to our economy/government etc, we have put very little into the effort.
The most economical and profitable places to put renewables haven't been even close to being fully tapped yet.
I'm sure his confirmation bias will tune out everything after the "but" above. Not really a good analogy.
I would point out the desert southwest gets far, far more sun than Germany does.
Sorry about the huge gifs, but it shows the solar potentials of the countries well:
(edit) Berlin is at the same la ude as Newfoundland in Canada, hundreds of miles north of Maine.(/edit)
Clear skies and lower la udes make a substantial difference in solar efficiency.
Not real practical where I'm at, in Oregon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2...=plpp_play_all
Thinking that we can maintain the status quo is so unbelievably ignorant.
Check the wind map.
Heh, either it is sunny or it is windy, in most place in the US. Some have both.
Oregon has better wind potential than most of Texas.
Yes, but sometimes too much.
They were planning to build windmills at a point in or near the Columbia gorge. They abandoned the idea when they feared the wind gusts would be too strong for the towers, without really spending too much money on the structures.
Has a tornado ever hit a wind farm yet?
Thought this was an interesting article talking about how various solar technologies can produce more smooth and consistent power 24 hours a day.
http://www.nrel.gov/news/features/fe...eature_id=1788
Thermal Storage Gets More Solar on the Grid
February 14, 2012
Abengoa is erecting more than 3,200 mirrored parabolic troughs at its Solana plant near Gila Bend, Ariz. When at full operation, the CSP plant will serve more than 70,000 homes.
It's 4:45 on a sweltering August afternoon, and the rooftop solar panels are starting to lose juice. The sun's lower angles and that huge cottonwood tree are interfering with the efficient photon-to-electricity transfer.
What is an environmentally conscious — but air-conditioning-loving — homeowner to do?
Peak demand for electricity in the United States typically hits between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., which doesn't quite line up with the sun's schedule. It's fortunate that the sun is high in the sky during many of the hours when the air conditioning is in demand. But in summer, people tend to need air conditioning during the dinner hour and beyond, when kitchen appliances are whirring, lights are on, and TVs are blaring.
To the rescue comes concentrating solar power (CSP), a technology being tested and deployed by utilities in America's deserts and southern Spain.
New analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has found that CSP, with its greater grid flexibility and ability to store energy for as long as 15 hours, can enhance total solar power generation and actually give photovoltaic (PV) systems a greater presence on the grid.
PV panels convert photons from the sun directly into electrons for electricity — and are grabbing real estate on rooftops across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
CSP technologies use mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto receivers that collect the sun's heat. This thermal energy can then be used to drive a steam turbine that produces electricity for utilities.
Thermal Storage Can Even Out the Bumps
Like Edison and Tesla or Dempsey and Tunney, the two major solar energy technologies never meant to play nice. Each had its niche — and its dreams of market share.
But that's changing, said NREL analyst Paul Denholm, co-author with Mark Mehos of the study "Enabling Greater Penetration of Solar Power via Use of CSP with Thermal Energy Storage."
Think of power from PV as a roller coaster of highs and lows, and power from CSP, via thermal energy storage, as a gently rolling train.
PV panels and wind turbines contribute electricity to the grid, but without the ability to store that power, they cannot supply the grid after the sun sets, or after the wind dies. Even passing clouds can cause drops in the amount of solar energy that gets on the grid.
Large fossil-fueled and nuclear power plants can't be quickly stopped or started to accommodate variable energy sources such as solar and wind energy.
CSP can even out these ebbs and flows because it can store power and ramp up output when the amount of direct wind or solar power drops.
Grid Flexibility is the Key
"It all gets down to grid flexibility," Denholm said. "What sets of grid technologies do you deploy to make the grid respond faster and over a greater range to the input of variable energy such as solar and wind?
"If you can't respond quickly, you end up potentially throwing away wind and solar energy.
"We know that the more wind and solar you add to the grid, the harder it is to balance the grid and maintain reliability."
A CSP plant works by heating a heat transfer fluid that is used to boil water to make steam. But because of thermal inertia, by the time that fluid gets through the system's pipes to the power plant, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes have passed.
When a cloud passes over a PV panel, the drop in energy production is immediate. But because of the 10 or 15 minutes of thermal inertia, a cloud passing over a CSP tower doesn't cause this immediate drop. Nor is there the immediate surge when sunlight returns.
"The change is more gradual," Denholm said. "That's one reason CSP can bring a greater quality to the grid."
Still, the greater potential for CSP — and for CSP helping PV to expand its role on the grid — is its capacity to store the energy it captures from the sun for several hours, making it a source of reliable energy after the sun sets.
"CSP can fill in that gap in the evening when there's peak demand for electricity," Denholm said. "Together, the solar resource can provide all that peak demand. And together they can reduce or eliminate the need to build new power plants for those peak periods."
Molten Salts a Low-Cost Solution
Thermal energy storage at CSP plants "is low-cost because it's not exotic," Denholm said. "It's some large tanks with some media to store energy before you use it to boil the water." The best medium for storage available today is molten salt, NREL's Greg Glatzmaier said.
Molten salts are abundant and not very costly. They behave themselves, neither decomposing nor volatizing at the high temperature needed in a CSP plant — about 565 degrees Celsius (°C).
At a typical molten-salt CSP plant, the salts are stored in two tanks, one much hotter than the other.
In the case of a power tower CSP plant, in which the mirrors focus the sun's rays on one receiver atop a tower, the lower-temperature tank is at about 293°C, while the higher-temperature tank is at 565°C, Glatzmaier said.
The salt is pumped from the "cold" tank to the power tower, where it collects the solar energy that's focused on the receiver, raising its average temperature. The salts then descend into the "hot" tank, where they can maintain this very hot temperature for several days, though typically they are used within hours.
The salt in the hot tank is then sent to a heat exchanger that generates the steam needed to turn the turbines at a power plant. The turbines generate electricity that goes to homes and businesses.
As they exit the steam generator, the salts cool, and by the time they return to the cold tank, they measure at about 293°C.
When the sun is shining, the CSP plant can take the salts out of the cold tank, heat them up at the tower's receiver, and then dump them into the hot tank for storage, Glatzmaier said. "If you come to the end of the day and the hot tank is pretty full, you can keep generating electricity by withdrawing the salts from the hot tank to generate steam."
It's a continual balancing act. If all the salt is in the cold tank, no stored energy is available. If it's all in the hot tank, there's plenty of energy stored for later use, but nothing to replenish the system.
Molten salts tend to freeze at about 200°C, so as long as the two tanks range between 293°C and 565°C, the salts are in no danger of reverting to a solid state. At room temperature, the salts look like powdery white table salt. At the higher temperatures in a CSP plant, the salts look like water.
The molten salts used for storage are a mix of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is mined from dry lake beds in Chile, in surroundings similar to the Utah salt flats. Potassium nitrate also occurs in nature and is mined in Chile, Ethiopia, and elsewhere.
Plants with Storage in Spain, Nevada, Arizona, California
Abengoa Solar is building a 250-megawatt CSP plant near Gila Bend, Ariz., that will cover 1,900 acres and use 900,000 mirrors to direct sunlight to heat a working fluid inside its tubes. The plant's six hours of thermal storage mean it can deliver electricity after the sun sets to approximately 70,000 homes.
The 19.9-megawatt power tower run by Gemasolar near Granada in southern Spain is configured to store enough energy during the summer to provide solar-generated electricity 24 hours a day, Glatzmaier said. In the winter, when there's less sunshine, electricity comes from more conventional sources a few hours each day. The system aims to power 25,000 homes and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 30,000 tons a year.
SolarReserve is building the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Tonopah, Nev., which will use molten salt to store the sun's energy as heat for several hours. It will include more than 17,000 mirrors to focus the sun's light on a tower 640 feet high.
BrightSource is building an even larger CSP project in the Mojave Desert near Needles, Calif., that will have storage for just a couple of hours a day — but this will be enough to serve more than 140,000 homes during peak hours. Company executives say the plant will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 400,000 tons per year.
PV/CSP Symbiosis Makes Economic Sense
The cost of PV has been plummeting, and it has a cost advantage over CSP. But CSP has the advantage of storage, and so teamed with PV can improve the benefits and bottom lines of both technologies. Storage does raise the price of a CSP plant, but "if you're running your turbine more hours in a day, you're amortizing your turbine cost over more generation time, and there's a real cost benefit there," Glatzmaier said. The bottom line: when storage is added to a CSP plant, it increases the value of its electricity — both its energy value and its capacity value.
Solar plants also can store energy in batteries, but at least for now, that approach is quite expensive. Other thermal storage technologies being investigated by researchers include phase-change or thermal-chemical storage.
Denholm and Mehos caution that the preliminary analysis in their study will require more advanced grid simulations to verify the actual ability of CSP to help wind and PV gain a larger presence on the grid. An important next step, they say, would be more complete simulations using utility-grade software. That will answer questions on the realistic performance of the generation fleet, transmission constraints, and actual CSP operations.
22.24 GW of PV-Solar Output in Germany — New Record!
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/05/25/...=Google+Reader
So let's get a running score card of questions posed to PopTech, that he has not answered so far, and to be fair, he hasn't has much of a chance to answer some of them.
1) What does this imply for future coal/gas prices to US consumers of coal and natural gas?
2) From the 2006 line, how much off was their prediction of coal prices in 2010?
3) When does solar produce the most energy?
4) X/0
Is this operation going to get you a relevant bit of data to decide on the ultimate efficacy of the investment?
5) What affect would this have on the data you presented?
6) Can current methods profitably extract the oil from the formation noted in the article of the OP?
7) Tell me, according to this table, what is the minimum LEC cost for:
conventional coal based on 2009 prices per mWh?
For wind?
8) If a scientist expresses a belief that a non-scientific theory has the same credibility as a scientific one, does that indicate one should assign more or less credibility to that scientist overall?
Moved to the other "pseudoscience" thread.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 05-29-2012 at 03:02 AM.
-delete-
Not important, and meant for the other "pseudoscience" thread.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 05-29-2012 at 03:03 AM.
I showed you the IPCC report from 2001 that clearly showed that they considered the equilibrium and partial pressures you are discussing or rather parroting from the non peer reviewed study.
I have a question: why do you not consider the CO2 transfer exchange coefficient?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...67064508004311
Here is a study that discusses it. Your 'analysis' does not consider that, nor the ocean circulation, thermal layers, reactions with the ions that form, the effect of organisms etc.
How can you possibly think that your 6th grade science project level 'analysis' is in any way shape or form more predictive than studies that include all of the above?
So...
You cherry pick something that contradicts and call it fact.
If you read Dr. Glassman's work, he explains why the IPCC is is error, and sites source material to back his claim up. Is this material the IPCC used?
You should keep your confirmation bias in check.
Can you explain why the known solubility sciences are in error? That's what it would require.
Last edited by Wild Cobra; 05-28-2012 at 03:22 PM.
I didn't point out a contradiction. I pointed out an omission on your part. I would further point out that your numbers are 100% made up.
Again:
You are calling out RG for not responding to your gross simplification. Answer my question: why do you not consider those factors and how can you possibly think your simplification is more indicative of what will happen?I have a question: why do you not consider the CO2 transfer exchange coefficient?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...67064508004311
Here is a study that discusses it. Your 'analysis' does not consider that, nor the ocean circulation, thermal layers, reactions with the ions that form, the effect of organisms etc.
How can you possibly think that your 6th grade science project level 'analysis' is in any way shape or form more predictive than studies that include all of the above?
Show me the part in the Glassman non-peer reviewed study --which even the hack PT discounts-- that says IPCC was in error. You initially claimed they did not account for solubility; I showed you you were wrong. I am guessing that this again is one of your 'suppose' moments.
And you accusing me of confirmation bias is like Eazy-E criticizing someone for bad language.
Answer the questions.
WTF...Seasonal changes in the surface water pCO2 and the sea-air pCO2 difference over four climatic zones in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans are presented. Over the Southern Ocean seasonal ice zone, the seasonality is complex. Although it cannot be thoroughly do ented due to the limited extent of observations, seasonal changes in pCO2 are approximated by using the data for under-ice waters during austral winter and those for the marginal ice and ice-free zones.
When it is under the ice, there is no exchange.
Approximated? To what degree of error?
This may work for an annual change, but over consecutive years, the scaling should return to 1.The net air–sea CO2 flux is estimated using the sea–air pCO2 difference and the air–sea gas transfer rate that is parameterized as a function of (wind speed)2 with a scaling factor of 0.26.
They at least acknowledge the sinking and sourcing.This is estimated by inverting the bomb 14C data using Ocean General Circulation models and the 1979–2005 NCEP-DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis (R-2) wind speed data. The equatorial Pacific (14°N–14°S) is the major source for atmospheric CO2, emitting about +0.48 Pg-C y−1, and the temperate oceans between 14° and 50° in the both hemispheres are the major sink zones with an uptake flux of −0.70 Pg-C y−1 for the northern and −1.05 Pg-C y−1 for the southern zone.
This study, even with it's flaws, in no way disagrees with what I say. It does not address numeric estimates of what the ocean would sink and source if it had not warmed.The high-la ude North Atlantic, including the Nordic Seas and portion of the Arctic Sea, is the most intense CO2 sink area on the basis of per unit area, with a mean of −2.5 tons-C month−1 km−2. This is due to the combination of the low pCO2 in seawater and high gas exchange rates. In the ice-free zone of the Southern Ocean (50°–62°S), the mean annual flux is small (−0.06 Pg-C y−1) because of a cancellation of the summer uptake CO2 flux with the winter release of CO2 caused by deepwater upwelling. The annual mean for the contemporary net CO2 uptake flux over the global oceans is estimated to be −1.6±0.9 Pg-C y−1, which includes an undersampling correction to the direct estimate of −1.4±0.7 Pg-C y−1. Taking the pre-industrial steady-state ocean source of 0.4±0.2 Pg-C y−1 into account, the total ocean uptake flux including the anthropogenic CO2 is estimated to be −2.0±1.0 Pg-C y−1 in 2000.
Please...
Explain why you think this study invalidates what I say.
This should be interesting.
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