[StarvingLion]

"From a relative point or differential costs we can see that are not impossible and sometimes are even better than today numbers." Which obviously explains why the world has abandoned hydrocarbons and runs primarily on alternative energy sources.

Might want to rethink some of those assumption. Just saying: even while one can try to defend those assumptions one still has to justify them to the fact the overwhelming amount of energy consumed on the planet is from fossil fuels. If those assumptions have failed for many decades and continue to appear invalid today (especially in light of decreased oil prices, low coal prices and an expanding global market for NG) when will they become impactful factors?

Rockman,

the replacement of fossil fuel capacity for the generation of electricity, where BTW oil and therfore oilprice is no factor, is already so fast that large companies with too high share of FF are in trouble. You only have to look at the big utilities in Europe, some are real zombies.

To use as reference point a year decades ago is a useless exercise, FF capacity competes with RE at the price level of 2015, and there is no hope that the situation will improve for FF, quite contrary.

Other point is of course, that external costs are not payed for with a price of 70 USD/barrel, so the current advantage of FFs is to a certain extend a book-keeping trick, not a fair assessment of macro economic costs which have to be paid in the long run.

For me the only interesting question is whether the rate of change is sufficient, IMHO one can not longer dispute the fact that it is happening.

Lets repeat that last sentence:

"For me the only interesting question is whether the rate of change is sufficient, IMHO one can not longer dispute the fact that it is happening."..

There you have it. Total corruption. According to Ulenspiegel:

Growth rate is the only thing that matters

Ponzi finance at its finest. It doesn't need to make any sense, just that it has the highest growth rate and the simple fact that brainwashing works!

Your growth rate will meet a concrete wall because it is a scam.

[StarvingLion]

That takes the low score for me as the stupidest thing I ever heard anybody say. Not only have electronic devices transformed the world, they have had more impact than virtually anything else mankind has done, with the possible exceptions of Agriculture and powering a technological civilization with FF's.

That both of those larger inventions of mankind are also the prime reasons that the human race has destroyed the ecosystem, is beside the point.

Now note that you were able to make that incredibly stupid comment because of the efforts of me and many other EE's. In the not so recent past, you would have labored mightily to write or type a letter to a newspaper, and the editor would have shaken his head in wonder as he wadded up and then consigned your ignorant comment to the circular file.

I encourage you to keep going, under every username on every forum you frequent. The scale of intelligence must have a point of origin, after all.

There were a couple of things I want to point out to you as well. California was and is a good place to find a good paying job, and Silicon Valley is the best part of the state. I earned a good (not even unusual) white collar income that eventually reached the low six figures the last few years of my career, and my small house is worth 8X what I paid for it in 1986. How do those figures compare to wherever you call home?

That many people here in California are batsh!t crazy I will not dispute. That is why I am moving away after retiring. I mostly like the place - there are no equals to the Sierra Nevada Mountains when it comes to camping - but this place has two huge infestations of Democrats in the SF Bay Area and the LA Basin, and those folks are simply incapable of rational thoughts, or of keeping their thieving hands off of other people's money.

"...electronic devices transformed the world"

Yep, its been the driving force behind world communism for a long time now, and also the insane suicidal notion that combustion is evil. I admit what I am doing here is nothing useful. The entire internet is a wasteland.

Didn't need a chip to build an atom bomb. Built plenty of "dirty" industry without chips. Internetworked digital computers are a heaven for invisible surtax, records alteration, property and civil rights stripping, etc...that is about all its good for.

The Great Individualist is no match for The Machine.

[StarvingLion]

Actually I'm almost certain that that disaster-waiting-to-happen called California will jump the tracks by 2018. The upcoming 'California Crisis' (the economic reality that their civil infrastructure will have to get far more dense while tripling their population to 120 million (it was 92000 in 1850) to "pay" for the "new" "prosperity") will be the final nail in the coffin for renewables making way for an even more "greener" (useless) "solution" called fission reactors. Considering the "educated" phd dummies in Germany desperately want to be just-like-California, it will be ironic and highly amusing. The unbelievable growth Eulenspiegel is banking on will be instantly crushed, another speculative disaster much like ThyssenKrupps Brazillian Adventure Gone Bad.

All the useless paper engineers with their useless paper nuclear reactor designs (useless cad models and useless software code) will jump up and down with excitement for 20 minutes only to be completely ignored as the procurement officers that is California outsource all electrical generation to China for the mere price of sovereignty.

This is what defines progress since the arrival of the chips: 10x more people, 1/10th the living space, and 10x more corruption.

[KaiserJeep]

As does California, so do the other 49 states - just a few years later.

You will get more respect around here if you lay off the sarcasm and concentrate more on the grammar. Your source of subject should ideally bear some resemblance to the thread topic.

You forgot to mention Germany's new construction of coal plants to replace the nukes - while talking about renewables.

I'm ready to write off Europe anyways. After lecturing the USA for years on race relations, they let hundreds of black refugees perish in the Mediterranean. They have conclusively shown themselves to be rac!st pr!cks.

[Ulenspiegel]

Considering the "educated" phd dummies in Germany desperately want to be just-like-California, it will be ironic and highly amusing. The unbelievable growth Eulenspiegel is banking on will be instantly crushed, another speculative disaster much like ThyssenKrupps Brazillian Adventure Gone Bad.

All the useless paper engineers with their useless paper nuclear reactor designs (useless cad models and useless software code) will jump up and down with excitement for 20 minutes only to be completely ignored as the procurement officers that is California outsource all electrical generation to China for the mere price of sovereignty.

This is what defines progress since the arrival of the chips: 10x more people, 1/10th the living space, and 10x more corruption.

You are so stupid. Do you actually understand that we Germans give a shit how it is done in CA? If you were intelligent you would understand that RE solutions are of course different in Germany and US states like CA. Do not project your stupüidity and ignorance on others.

[Ulenspiegel]

As does California, so do the other 49 states - just a few years later.

You will get more respect around here if you lay off the sarcasm and concentrate more on the grammar. Your source of subject should ideally bear some resemblance to the thread topic.

You forgot to mention Germany's new construction of coal plants to replace the nukes - while talking about renewables.

I'm ready to write off Europe anyways. After lecturing the USA for years on race relations, they let hundreds of black refugees perish in the Mediterranean. They have conclusively shown themselves to be rac!st pr!cks.

WTF should somebody take you serious when you are unable to get the simple facts straight:

1) There is not one coal power plant in Germany in the pipeline due to the shut down of NPPS. That is very stupid propaganda and tells more about you than the Energiewende.

2) The situation in the Med is a direct result that US government destroying states (Iraq, Syria, Lybia with European assistance) without being able to raplace them with something stable. As in no case Germany was involved I simply beg you political moron to use your brain before talking, insults backfire.

Was stört es die Eiche, wenn sich die Wildsau an ihr reibt.

[KaiserJeep]

Was stört es die Eiche, wenn sich die Wildsau an ihr reibt.

A literal translation may not be the best option, but that's always the case with idioms. So here goes:

"What does the oak tree care if a (wild) boar scratches itself on it?"

The meaning is, of course, "you may try, but you will never get to me", but whoever uses this kind little proverb calls the addressee a pig... and in a highly arrogant way, too.

Very well, I've got YOUR number, now. I wish you the very same sentiment, openly without attempting to hide it in another language.

Perhaps you would be willing to explain the 26 massive new coal plants that Germany has constructed since it renounced Nuclear Power. The last of these I believe was a huge 800 MW plant that went online in March 2015 in Moorburg, just outside of Hamburg.

We CAN do arithmetic, you know. We understand that the only thing that allowed the German domestic power market to increase the renewables share from 28% to 32% was a decline in power exports. Certainly German investors are taking huge losses in these coal plants, it was never the plan to idle them.

To its credit, Vattenfall thought it was building not only a coal plant that was needed, but also one that is highly efficient. The average coal plant in Germany has an efficiency below 40 percent, whereas Moorburg easily reaches 45 percent. But the original plan was to recover so much waste heat with a connection to a district heat network serving the city of Hamburg that overall efficiency might have exceeded 60 percent. Citizens of Hamburg, who opposed the plant altogether, rejected the connection of their district heat network to the new coal plant in the hopes that the plant would be stopped altogether.

In the end, we end up with the worst of all possible worlds: a coal plant that is a quarter less efficient than it could have been and unlikely to produce enough electricity to pay for itself anyway. The upside is that Hamburg now has a gigantic coal plant that is not only relatively efficient, but also ramps up and down quite well for a coal plant. And it will be on hand to restart the grid after a blackout – if Germany ever gets one.

You didn't actually believe your lying politicians, did you? If the price of power in the EU were not so depressed right now, thanks in large part to renewables in other European nations and a huge increase in cheap nuclear power exported from France, Germany would today be burning huge amounts of coal in those newly constructed coal plants, spewing carbon dioxide into German skies while exporting power to other EU countries. THAT was the original plan, the one derailed by actual circumstances. German power plant investors are awash in red ink, and only a simpleton would believe they planned it that way.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/germany-opens-giant-new-coal-plant-it-no-longer-needs-40255

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-26/germany-s-new-coal-plants-push-power-glut-to-4-year-high

http://energytransition.de/2014/06/german-coal-conundrum/

Now I'd like to know just how kind and welcoming the German people are to those black African refugees. How many of the tens of thousands of boat people has Germany agreed to absorb and care for?

[Subjectivist]

About freaking time! Intermittent sources of power require massive storage capacity which is freaking expensive if you want a modern American lifestyle like 99% of the world population does.

[Outcast_Searcher]

It is the very real start of a movement that recognizes that powering the world with 100% renewables is a myth – and that chasing a myth will not get us to our global goal of meeting the world’s increasing energy needs while reducing carbon emissions and successfully combating climate change.

In 2017, The Myth of Powering the World with 100% Renewables Has Started to Crack

Hmmm. And according to the WEO graph in the article, in 2040 most of the world aside from the EU STILL projected to be burning coal for OVER 20% of their electricity production.

Either the greens ala Tony Seba et al or the standard predictors re burning fossil fuels en masse for electricity generation as far as the eye can see are very very wrong about the future economics of Solar PV in the coming two decades.

Else, why in HELL is virtually everyone burning SO MUCH coal over 20 years from now if its so dirty and terrible? At least surely moving to almost all (seemingly dirt cheap) natural gas would be far better if Solar PV isn't going to get much cheaper as the greens forecast. (I understand this in the third world which has limited capital and wealth per capita, perhaps, but not in the first. And if PV backed up by batteries is going to be so cheap as to put most utilities out of business, then what gives?

AdamB, you tend to talk sense and facts in these areas. Any insight? Because something doesn't come REMOTELY close to adding up here.

[dohboi]

“Fossil-free steel” plant planned for Sweden [depending, of course, on where the hydrogen itself comes from! ]

Process would use iron ore pellets; and hydrogen rather than coke or coal. Emissions would be water instead of CO2.

SSAB, LKAB AND VATTENFALL TO BUILD A GLOBALLY-UNIQUE PILOT PLANT FOR FOSSIL-FREE STEEL
https://corporate.vattenfall.com/press- ... ree-steel/

Animation available here: https://twitter.com/unfccc/status/960171351410581505

[Tanada]

“Fossil-free steel” plant planned for Sweden [depending, of course, on where the hydrogen itself comes from! ]

Process would use iron ore pellets; and hydrogen rather than coke or coal. Emissions would be water instead of CO2.

SSAB, LKAB AND VATTENFALL TO BUILD A GLOBALLY-UNIQUE PILOT PLANT FOR FOSSIL-FREE STEEL
https://corporate.vattenfall.com/press- ... ree-steel/

Animation available here: https://twitter.com/unfccc/status/960171351410581505

If they use Hydroelectricity/Geothermal electricity to split water to get the H2 gas needed then maybe this will be a carbon free process. I am willing to be impressed but first show me where the root energy supply to manufacture the Hydrogen comes from.

[dissident]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584454/

Peroxide is basically the perfect fuel.

1) It can be stored long term and does not require compression like H2 which also happens to leak at serious rates from any container.

2) Combustion of H2O2 does not produce NOx as does the burning of NH3. And CO2 from the combustion of CH4.

3) Fuel cells can use H2O2 as both the reducer and oxidizer and do not require a membrane.

4) Catalysts can be used to produce H2O2. The large energy penalty of electrolysis is avoided. There are are catalysts for producing H2 as well, but H2 has too many minuses as an energy carrier.

------------

5) This is not a joke: currently areas around heavy traffic can be partly O2 depleted thanks to combustion using gasoline and diesel. At 19.5% concentrations, O2 becomes biologically deficient for humans. H2O2 fuel cell combustion releases O2.

[lpetrich]

Except that hydrogen peroxide is rather difficult to manufacture. Hydrogen peroxide - Wikipedia describes two main methods.

Electrolysis of ammonium bisulfate. It makes ammonium peroxysulfate, when can then be hydrolyzed to ammonium bisulfate and H2O2.

Reduction and self-oxidation of anthraquinone. The reduction part is combination of anthraquinone with hydrogen using a palladium catalyst. Adding oxygen then oxidizes it, releasing H2O2.

Decomposing H2O2 releases a rather paltry amount of energy: 2.9 MJ/kg. Energy density - Wikipedia more than a good lithium-ion battery and less than a chemical explosive. It lists diesel fuel as having 48 MJ/kg and other hydrocarbon fuels as not much different, but correcting for its oxygen consumption gives 10.8 MJ/kg. I used
(CH2) + (3/2)*O2 -> CO2 + H2O

Carrying H2O2 along as an oxidizer means carrying a lot of extra weight without anything gained, since one can more easily get O2 for the surrounding air. The only exception is in outer space, where one has to take one's oxidizer along with one's fuel.

The production of H2O2 requires electrolysis, and it may be simpler to make hydrogen or ammonia from that process, and for hydrogen, do some Fischer-Tropsch reactions to get something that is easier to store.

[KaiserJeep]

Correct. In fact the Germans selected hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer for the ME-163 Komet rocket plane, the fastest plane in the world (702mph) right up until Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 through Mach 1:

The hydrogen peroxide oxidizer (called "T-Stoff") mixed with the blended methanol/hydrazine fuel (called "C-Stoff") in the rocket engine combustion chamber and spontaneously burned (hypergolic ignition). This was a very dangerous airplane that repeatedly exploded on the ground before launch or in the air when pierced by a single bullet from a bomber's machine gun.

However, it went 700mph when a front line piston engined airplane went 350mph when fully loaded with fuel and armaments. It also had a 30mm cannon, which could destroy another fighter with a single shot, or a large bomber with 4-5 rounds.

[ROCKMAN]

dohboi - "Process would use iron ore pellets". And what is the fossil fuel free source of those iron pellets?

[lpetrich]

dohboi - "Process would use iron ore pellets". And what is the fossil fuel free source of those iron pellets?

Are you talking about mining without using fossil fuels?

[ROCKMAN]

i - I'm referring to the implication that steel is being created without the use of ANY FOSSIL FUEL. Great if it reduces the total amount of ff used in the process of creating steel. But it still requires some utilization.

[ROCKMAN]

Interesting that a man with a reported net worth of $23.6 BILLION had to be induced with a $750 MILLION subsidy from the state to build his solar plant there. And now the state's politicians are wondering if they made a bad investment. At least Elon doesn't lay awake a night wondering the same thing. I guess that's how you become a billionaire. LOL.

"Inside Tesla's troubled New York solar factory" Reuters - Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) production of solar roof tiles has been delayed by assembly-line problems at its new publicly subsidized factory and difficulties producing a product that satisfies the aesthetic demands of CEO Elon Musk, eight former and current employees of both companies told Reuters.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesl ... SKBN1KT0DU

[GHung]

I'm wondering how many watts this thing could produce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbJPQlu ... e=youtu.be

If I lived in Alaska and had sled dogs, I would certainly find out. BTW: I don't have much use for people who don't like dogs.

[yellowcanoe]

I'm wondering how many watts this thing could produce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbJPQlu ... e=youtu.be

If I lived in Alaska and had sled dogs, I would certainly find out. BTW: I don't have much use for people who don't like dogs.

There are more people than dogs on the planet. Perhaps we should have people generating power this way!