politics Post Election Thread: Democracy Dies In Darkness And You Can Help

[Ulric]

Oh Solyndra, that brings back memories. Abound solar was a miniature version of that out here in Colorado. Basically, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled through Abound into the pockets of prominent Dems in the state, then the company declared bankruptcy.

 

We can all agree that reducing pollution is a good thing. However, some of us disagree with the proposed solutions to something that might not even be a problem that we can solve. For example, we use oil for so many things, we would have to find a frightening number of alternatives to a wide variety of products to end our dependency on oil. Only a fraction of it is burned as a fuel. We could very reasonably replace coal fired power plants with nuclear, but hippies are strangely opposed to cleaner, more efficient, reliable electricity production. This is compounded by a lack of even the most basic understanding of how our electrical system works.

 

I guess my complaints are that nobody is willing to look at realistic solutions to being more efficient and reducing pollution, and instead are trying to force through programs that are thinly veiled scams to enrich and entrench politicians and their donors.

 

I remember a local news segment a while back with one of the higher ups from Vestas, a large wind turbine manufacturer. There was talk about ending subsidies for wind energy, and his response was that doing so "would kill our business". If you business model relies on the government taking away money from people to alter the markets to make your product less uncompetitive (I'm not going to say that it makes it competitive, because no power in the universe can make wind competitive with any real form of electricity generation for an industrialized country) you don't have a business, you have a charity at best, and more realistically, a fraudulent enterprise.

 

Wind is garbage, solar is garbage, the numbers for "renewable energy" are skewed by the inclusion of burning biomass (wood, cow shit, etc). It's all a scam, and the people making money off of this are strong proponents of the Religion of Anthropogenic Climate Change, because it lines their pockets.

[Xoon]

22 minutes ago, Ulric said:

Oh Solyndra, that brings back memories. Abound solar was a miniature version of that out here in Colorado. Basically, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled through Abound into the pockets of prominent Dems in the state, then the company declared bankruptcy.

 

We can all agree that reducing pollution is a good thing. However, some of us disagree with the proposed solutions to something that might not even be a problem that we can solve. For example, we use oil for so many things, we would have to find a frightening number of alternatives to a wide variety of products to end our dependency on oil. Only a fraction of it is burned as a fuel. We could very reasonably replace coal fired power plants with nuclear, but hippies are strangely opposed to cleaner, more efficient, reliable electricity production. This is compounded by a lack of even the most basic understanding of how our electrical system works.

 

I guess my complaints are that nobody is willing to look at realistic solutions to being more efficient and reducing pollution, and instead are trying to force through programs that are thinly veiled scams to enrich and entrench politicians and their donors.

 

I remember a local news segment a while back with one of the higher ups from Vestas, a large wind turbine manufacturer. There was talk about ending subsidies for wind energy, and his response was that doing so "would kill our business". If you business model relies on the government taking away money from people to alter the markets to make your product less uncompetitive (I'm not going to say that it makes it competitive, because no power in the universe can make wind competitive with any real form of electricity generation for an industrialized country) you don't have a business, you have a charity at best, and more realistically, a fraudulent enterprise.

 

Wind is garbage, solar is garbage, the numbers for "renewable energy" are skewed by the inclusion of burning biomass (wood, cow shit, etc). It's all a scam, and the people making money off of this are strong proponents of the Religion of Anthropogenic Climate Change, because it lines their pockets.

I find it funny how solar and wind is the most popular renewable energies in media. 

 

First of all, even if we could be make perfect solar panels, they would still be too unreliable because of weather.  Really sucks when your city breaks down because of a cloudy day isn't it? 
You know what the best part is? My bloody country is trying to build out solar power, the got damn hydropower king, with 90% hydropower. Just looking at a solar map shows how ludicrously stupid this is. 

All this because we built a few gas powerplant/refineries in case we need urgently more power.

 

We are also building out windpower here, because a damn makes our valleys look too ugly, ironic isn't it?:
 

 

 

Honestly, solar is very good in a private or individual setting, but it is bloody useless in a national sense unless your country is located in the optimal solar locations. Same goes for windpower, it varies widely, and has to break to avoid the generator from overloading in strong winds. Both need a energy storage medium to be effective, like , I don't know, hydropower! Funny isn't it? 

Or you can supplement it with fossil fuels or nuclear power.

 

 

I honestly only see a future in hyrdopower because of its ability to store potential energy, and thermal power since it is pretty much constant. 

Supplement this with nuclear power and you pretty much has the cleanest possible power generation.

 

You could of course exploit local geography with solar, wind or tidal current power. But they will never become mainstream. 

 

 

I really love the irony of the transport sector too. Regular folks has to be taxed for fuel and the cars has to be efficient and media panics about emissions. But in comparison to the shipping industry, the worlds car pollution is a drop in the ocean. 

 

 

[Donward]

In the PAC Northwest we have shit tons of hydropower (Grand Coulee, etc) and one 40 year old WPPSS nuke plant in Hanford keeps up by producing (I believe) something like 15-20 percent of the power in this state.

That hasn't stopped them from covering Eastern Washington with billions of dollars in wind turbines. Oh, and when those wind turbines generate power, the dams are forced to divert water over the spillways instead of turbines so as not to overload the system.

[Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect]

Wind turbines create an excess of energy at night, when the grid is less taxed. In some parts of the US, this makes our energy costs go negative. 

 

That's right. They pay you to keep the lights on.

 

Some companies are trying to harness this excess via chemical means with more efficient electrolysis of water.

[Toxn]

13 minutes ago, Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect said:

Wind turbines create an excess of energy at night, when the grid is less taxed. In some parts of the US, this makes our energy costs go negative. 

 

That's right. They pay you to keep the lights on.

 

Some companies are trying to harness this excess via chemical means with more efficient electrolysis of water.

There's also thermal storage, mass storage (pump water back up into dams during off-peak time) and gigantic lithium ion battery banks.

 

Solving the storage issue will make a lot of alternative energy sources much more viable.

[Xoon]

15 minutes ago, Toxn said:

There's also thermal storage, mass storage (pump water back up into dams during off-peak time) and gigantic lithium ion battery banks.

 

Solving the storage issue will make a lot of alternative energy sources much more viable.

Again, this is why hydropower is so damn good. Use whatever renewable you want, and supplement the rest with hydropower, and when you have excess, pump the water up in the dams again. 

[Toxn]

4 minutes ago, Xoon said:

Again, this is why hydropower is so damn good. Use whatever renewable you want, and supplement the rest with hydropower, and when you have excess, pump the water up in the dams again. 

We use a pretty extensive pumped storage scheme (~1600 MW total) here to balance out load and take over if a plant goes down.

 

Unfortunately; being a semi-arid country means that your dams are always going to be at risk, so I don't think we'll ride that wave much further. Others think differently:

http://www.microhydropower.net/rsa/

[Lostwingman]

Water, truly the wonder substance.

[Xoon]

2 minutes ago, Toxn said:

We use a pretty extensive pumped storage scheme (~1600 MW total) here to balance out load and take over if a plant goes down.

 

Unfortunately; being a semi-arid country means that your dams are always going to be at risk, so I don't think we'll ride that wave much further. Others think differently:

http://www.microhydropower.net/rsa/

Nuclear power seems like the best bet here. 

[Toxn]

13 minutes ago, Xoon said:

Nuclear power seems like the best bet here. 

Our government agrees.

Pity they scrapped our local nuclear capability in the early 2000s and now want to lease a bunch of plants from the Russians.

[Donward]

The issue of pumping waters back into dam reservoirs is that there are other user groups that need that water. Salmon (and other species) migration. Farmers and irrigation. Plus flood control. 

[LostCosmonaut]

In my ideal world, we would use nuclear for base load, with the rest made up by other stuff, depending on what's economic in a certain area. Wind and solar could maybe be part of that second bit (my gut tells me few places without some sort of government subsidy), but you'll need something else for when those aren't working. I really like geothermal energy (renewable, not dependent on weather/time of day, doesn't have any catastrophic failure modes that I'm aware of), but like wind and solar it's limited in geographical effectiveness.

 

The best answer at the moment for variable loading is probably clean natural gas. Or build enough nuke plants to provide well over base load and use excess power to pump water uphill for use when needed (but now we're back to the issues with hydro like Don mentioned).

 

Coal is trash and should not be used. Even disregarding the implications for climate change (which I believe is real), shitting particulates into the air is bad.

[Xoon]

30 minutes ago, Donward said:

The issue of pumping waters back into dam reservoirs is that there are other user groups that need that water. Salmon (and other species) migration. Farmers and irrigation. Plus flood control. 

 

 

When it comes to the salmon migration,  it should not really pose a problem. Just look to Norway. If it was really a big problem, we would not have such a huge fishing industry (In comparison to other sectors in the country.

[Ramlaen]

We had a drought here a few years ago and there was a big fight over how much water to spill over the dams for salmon vs holding back for farmers.

[Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect]

3 hours ago, Toxn said:

There's also thermal storage, mass storage (pump water back up into dams during off-peak time) and gigantic lithium ion battery banks.

 

Solving the storage issue will make a lot of alternative energy sources much more viable.

 

Only decent thermal storage are alkali metal or sodium towers, and they are like 16% lab efficient so more like 10% efficient in real life. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali-metal_thermal_to_electric_converter

 

Water is decent but only under the assumption that you have tons of water and will never ever have to pick between crops and energy. 

 

Gigantic lithium battery banks is pants-on-head retarded. 

 

The only viable energy storage (going pure electricity to some other type) is chemical at this point. Find stable chemicals were we can store energy into bonds, such as with electrolysis, for use in the grid for load spike mitigation. 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Any thoughts on Thorium Reactors?  The Chinese seem very taken with the concept.

[Collimatrix]

54 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Any thoughts on Thorium Reactors?  The Chinese seem very taken with the concept.

 

I wrote about it a while back here.  I don't think I've learned anything new that radically changes my thinking.

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Cheers.

[Toxn]

6 hours ago, Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect said:

 

Only decent thermal storage are alkali metal or sodium towers, and they are like 16% lab efficient so more like 10% efficient in real life. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkali-metal_thermal_to_electric_converter

 

Water is decent but only under the assumption that you have tons of water and will never ever have to pick between crops and energy. 

 

Gigantic lithium battery banks is pants-on-head retarded. 

 

The only viable energy storage (going pure electricity to some other type) is chemical at this point. Find stable chemicals were we can store energy into bonds, such as with electrolysis, for use in the grid for load spike mitigation. 

Just laying out the mooted options.

 

My personal bet would be hydrocarbon synthesis, because if it ain't broke...

[LoooSeR]

Quote

@realDonaldTrump
We have made more progress in the last nine months against ISIS than the Obama Administration has made in 8 years.Must be proactive & nasty!

8 years? "We"?

[Collimatrix]

1 hour ago, LoooSeR said:

8 years? "We"?

 

By "we" he means "Vladimir Putin and I."  Trump is a Russian plant, remember?

And that was his plan to get rid of ISIS in 30 days; let the VKS take care of the problem.

[Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect]

 

 

[Jeeps_Guns_Tanks]

2 hours ago, Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect said:

 

 

 

That's not really in her book right?

[Ramlaen]

Pretty sure it's not, there are a lot of joke pages going around.

 

[Donward]

So a kid volunteers to mow the lawn in the White House's Rose Garden and then the Internet happens.

 

 

And then this tweet is picked up by the conservative media complex like FoxNews, DailyWire and Bill Kristol with the appropriate level of finger waggling.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/09/17/ny-times-reporter-slammed-after-saying-boy-mowing-white-house-lawn-sends-bad-signal-on-child-labor.html

 

If I were conspiratorial minded, I'd all think this was a setup from the beginning were it not that New York Times reporters really are that stupid and insular with how far separated they are from the real world.