Guest essay by Eric Worrall
What would it take to make renewable energy viable, and reduce emissions from industrial processes?
MIT professors Asegun Henry, Ravi Prasher & Arun Majumdar had a series of meetings with Bill Gates in 2018. The result of those meetings is a recently published paper which describes five thermal challenges which must be overcome, to curb industrial CO2 emissions and make renewable energy a viable solution to the world’s energy needs.
MIT’s Asegun Henry on “Grand Thermal Challenges” to Save Humanity From Extinction Due to Climate Change
TOPICS:Climate ChangeEnergyGlobal WarmingMIT
By JENNIFER CHU, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AUGUST 16, 2020
…
Q: What are the five thermal energy challenges you outline in your paper?
A: The first challenge is developing thermal storage systems for the power grid, electric vehicles, and buildings. Take the power grid: There is an international race going on to develop a grid storage system to store excess electricity from renewables so you can use it at a later time. …
The second challenge is decarbonizing industrial processes, which contribute 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The big actors here are cement, steel, aluminum, and hydrogen. …
The third challenge is solving the cooling problem. Air conditioners and refrigerators have chemicals in them that are very harmful to the environment, 2,000 times more harmful than carbon dioxide on a molar basis. …
The fourth challenge is long-distance transmission of heat. We transmit electricity because it can be transmitted with low loss, and it’s cheap. The question is, can we transmit heat like we transmit electricity? …
The last challenge is variable conductance building envelopes. There are some demonstrations that show it is physically possible to create a thermal material, or a device that will change its conductance, so that when it’s hot, it can block heat from getting through a wall, but when you want it to, you could change its conductance to let the heat in or out. …
Read more: https://scitechdaily.com/mits-asegun-henry-on-grand-thermal-challenges-to-save-humanity-from-extinction-due-to-climate-change/
The abstract of the paper;
Comment
Published:Five thermal energy grand challenges for decarbonization
Asegun Henry, Ravi Prasher & Arun Majumdar
Nature Energy (2020)
Roughly 90% of the world’s energy use today involves generation or manipulation of heat over a wide range of temperatures. Here, we note five key applications of research in thermal energy that could help make significant progress towards mitigating climate change at the necessary scale and urgency.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0675-9
Sadly the MIT paper is paywalled, but in my opinion this pretty much seems to confirm the findings of a team of Google engineers in 2016, and pretty much everyone else who genuinely attempts to calculate the exact cost of our glorious green revolution, rather than simply cheerleading punishing carbon taxes and leaving the implementation details to the engineers.
Deployment of current generation green technology is a waste of money.
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Only five grand challenges to conquer? Any single one of them would be enough to render the chance for success 50/50 at best if time is of the essence.
Overcoming the challenge of pay walled articles.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0675-9
Six grand challenges: He has 3 pre-basal cells lurking on his cheek.
Agreed.
The technology is fiction. And not even close to being science fiction.
Except for number 4:
There must be a way to use then transmissibility of electricity to provide heat somewhere else…
Use the heat to make steam, use the steam to run a turbine that drives a generator. Fluids other than water with a lower boiling point could be used to recover lower temperature heat.
Bingo
M, the issue is efficiency. Typical thermal power plant efficiency is about 33%. Then there are transmission and distribution losses, which average around 5%. Overall, call it 30% end to end, since the conversion back to heat is nearly 100% efficient.
He’s hoping for some way to get a lot more than ~ 30% of the heat to the far end … seems possible.
w.
Baseload combined cycle plants run in the range of 45-60% efficiency, before transmission and distribution losses. Of course, a CCGT can be easily scaled and built very close to the users, cutting transmission losses.
W, about true for Rankin cycle thermodynamics ( the best is superhot pressurized steam Nicol alloy tubes, so called HELO plants reaching up to 45%, see essay Clean Coal in ebook Blowing Smoke for details. But a simple factory built double cycle Nat Gas CCGT does an easy 61% net thermal efficiency.
Water at critical temperature is ~380C. It has a specific gravity of 0.32kg/litre. The boundary between liquid and gas has disappeared, meaning no joules are required to make liquid into steam. Unfortunately it is indeed a universal solvent with overdrive. It dissolves gold, tantalum, tungsten, platinum group metals and everything else and drops it out of solution when the temperature drops and or pressure drops below ~35(?)MPa. Welcome to the formation of mineral deposits.
Possible, sure, if there’s no deadline to complete the solution. Take five hundred years if you need to.
Since WE only produce 3% of the CO2 annually, What difference would us reducing CO2 by that per cent make? The vast majority WE caan’t control.
Well said! I am surprised that the climate terrorists did not yet know about ths.
“The question is, can we transmit heat like we transmit electricity?” When you really think about it, the answer is a clear and resounding yes and it is being done in practical (but limited) fashion today, as it was over 130 years ago.
Two methods of accomplishing this: one is piped steam, the other is piped hot water.
Here in the US, the prime example of piped steam is NYC which has over 100 miles of installed steam pipe, some sections dating back to 1882 (ref: https://www.amny.com/news/nyc-steam-system-1-20146953/ ). As this article notes:
“Steam serves more than 1,500 buildings, including the Empire State building, The United Nations, Rockefeller Center and multiple museums and hospitals. It is used for several functions, including heating, cooling, cooking and sterilizing.”
Other nations offer prime examples of widespread piped hot water systems in large cities, under the generic name of “district heating” (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Size_of_systems ). Chief among these are Iceland, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.
The Wikipedia article on “district heating” has this interesting tidbit:
“In 1890, the first wells were drilled to access a hot water resource outside of Boise, Idaho. In 1892, after routing the water to homes and businesses in the area via a wooden pipeline, the first geothermal district heating system was created.”
So for piped steam or piped hot water:
— pipes are analogous to electrical wires,
— fluid temperature is analogous to voltage,
— mass flow rate is analogous to electrical current, and
— transmitted usable thermal power is analogous to transmitted usable electrical power.
Sure, we need much, much better thermal insulation to extend such piped heat systems from a hundred or so miles extent to a thousand or so miles extent, but that’s just a matter of engineering. And consider that mankind has no issues at all with making natural gas pipelines and oil pipelines that pump large amounts of fluids over thousands of miles of length, similar in distance to the largest transmission lengths of today’s electrical grids.
“The largest in the country, the City of Boise’s geothermal heating utility delivers the naturally heated 177° water through a network of pipes that as of 2019 warmed more than 6 million square feet of building space – a number that’s growing rapidly.”
https://www.cityofboise.org/departments/public-works/geothermal/
Are you talking about building hundreds of miles of pipelines? Don’t you read the news? Somehow, and I don’t know how, the warmunists will find some reason to oppose that – regardless of what’s running through the pipes.
High pressure(>3000psig, hi temperature>300F). It just skips the step of converting back and forth between steam and electricity. That said, it’s probably limited to 10’s of miles due to heat losses.
which highlights the need for modular, small small, self-contained nuclear reactors for a low density power grid.
Yes, it’s called a heat pump. No, you don’t transmit the heat, you transmit the electricity to concentrate local heat.
The oceans and atmosphere do heat transmission on a vast scale. Gulf Stream spares Old Blighty a Canadian-style winter.
Transmit heat like electricity.
Plasma could do it, but then that’s a pretty tough nut to crack, ain’t it?
As soon as we master plasma, we’ll have power “too cheap to meter” from fusion generators, right?
Sad to say, MIT is deep into climate change. The president, an electrical engineer, has all the heft of a gender studies solon when he pontificates about climate change. To ‘save humanity from extinction’ due to climate change? I’d expect that sort of silliness from the NYT.
And, just supposing, what if there is no point to decarbonization? What if any danger from CO2 is exaggerated, if it isn’t out and out invented?
It doesn’t much matter if Harvard or Barnard are all in on the climate turkey.
But MIT? That’s a bummer.
Thank God for Richard Lindzen.
I attended M.I.T. as a graduate student 1959-61. The professors are Massachusetts liberals, plain and simple. Back then their economics professors were claiming the Soviet Union was going to surpass the United States economically. That type of liberal garbage thinking there has never changed. With respect to the effects of CO2 emissions, we are doing future generations a big favor by burning coal. The earth has been carbon deficient ever since the meteor which killed the dinosaurs also ignited the forests and buried the result, giving us much of the coal we have today. A recent study on the age of coal deposits clearly showed that many of them date to 65 million years ago.
The increased CO2 is increasing farming productivity. That will become even more important as the coming ice age, brought on by the Milankovitch cycles, reduces the amount of land available for crops due to the shortened growing seasons away from the equator, plus the colder oceans absorbing atmospheric CO2, as they did during previous ice ages.
A friend of mine, met him through our vintage car club, is a well-to-do retired engineer and MIT graduate. He’s the nicest, most generous guy you’ll ever meet, but suffers from the worst case of TDS I’ve yet encountered.
A true idiot-savant, eh?
It’s really just an ask for money (funds-a call to action). “Concluding remarks It seems inconceivable that we can achieve deep decarbonization without technological breakthroughs in thermal science and engineering. Yet, thermal science and engineering has not received as much attention from the research community and funding organizations. Here, we have highlighted five unique challenges in this realm, which, if addressed adequately, can each potentially produce gigatonne-scale reductions in GHG emissions. Given that
energy and climate is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, we hope this will serve as an intellectual appeal and a call to action for the broader research and development community.”
It is a shame that solar and wind are being held out to be the saviour of electricity generation, and just need a wee bit of storage to pull it through the lull when the wind doesn’t blow for a week, or a 1500 mile circular low pressure slowly transits an entire sub continent and dims the solar PV output to next to useless, especially in winter. This is a mistake that cannot be corrected because the premise is wrong, that wind and solar have a big part to play in future electricity generation. If anything, it is a complete and utter failure, with low density power per sq mile of installed capacity, and then it is junk asynchronous electricity with not even a plan to recycle the garbage at its end of life, which is relatively short at about 20 years and then it is landfill. What a waste, with rolling blackouts where it is implemented too much.
At least burning/gasifying garbage or wood waste is spinning reserve base load electricity and on that merit alone, is a much more valuable product being base load electricity supply for as long as you have fuel. Whether you agree or disagree with burning garbage and wood waste is total different argument. It is only a small component of the energy mix, and the waste has to be dealt with anyway. I don’t advocate biofuel as any type of large type permanent solution, especially if it is to ‘lock’ up carbon, because it doesn’t; it is just temporary as long as it is locked up which is short term in the scheme of things. It is part of the terrestrial carbon cycle and is short term manipulation of a small part of the carbon budget for the good Earth.
The long term solution is nuclear and it will win the day, because there is really not any other choice in the long term. It is the most dense of electricity supplies, or if you wanted a lot of steam to process the oil sands, a hybrid operation would make the most sense generating electricity and steam for oil sands production. Western Canada has a lot of oil/gas to offer North America for its energy security (and the world) for a fairly long time, and moving to a nuclear solution would solve a lot of problems with one fell swoop. We really need to promote advanced and nuclear electricity for the solution to long term energy security. With cheap electricity, you can manufacture any carbon product we need, and by that metric, we will always be a carbon based economy, whether it be efficiently sourced fossil fuels for the next 100 years, or synthetic fuels manufactured from cheap abundant electricity for 1000 years. There is probably nothing better coming down the pipeline than electricity.
I find it amazing how any intelligent group of engineers can talk about 5 Grand Challenges concerning Energy and the Future and not recognize that fission-driven nuclear power MUST sit a the center of any effort to decarbonize.
I will believe that I am listening to serious people when they premise the decarbonization discussion on nuclear.
I will believe that I am listening to serious people when they can prove that increasing atmospheric CO2 is a serious problem (it is not, it is hugely beneficial), and is primarily driven by fossil fuel combustion (it is not, it’s mostly driven by natural causes).
The entire climate-and-energy scam is based on several proven falsehoods, any one of which should have ended this debate decades ago.
THE CATASTROPHIC ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING AND THE HUMANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISES ARE PROVED FALSE
thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming-cagw-and-the-humanmade-climate-change-crises-are-proved-false.pdf
ALLAN MACRAE is absolutely correct. Clear thinking people must speak out against the false concept that man-made CO2 is driving climate change. The simplest way is to ask why the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period were hotter than today when CO2 could not be the cause. We really must become active in opposing this idiocy; please speak out. Anyone who understands the scientific method understands that the CO2 scam hypothesis must be rejected.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=feynman+scientific+method&docid=608039039879417668&mid=3E42F83570A3E8D106643E42F83570A3E8D10664&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
“At least burning/gasifying garbage or wood waste is spinning reserve base load electricity and on that merit alone, is a much more valuable product being base load electricity supply for as long as you have fuel.”
Right on- but here in The People’s Republic of Massachusetts- woody biomass is hated and declared to be “worse than coal”.
Conservation and efficiency are still the best bet for now, except to a Democrat.
It’s amazing that they can dream up these fantasy solutions. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could transfer energy automatically from one place to another, like a Star Trek transporter? Yeah, that’s science fiction and they seem to think such things are possible. Wow.
We have made huge advances in electronics and data processing, according largely to Moore’s Law, but this rate of improvements does not apply to energy storage, which has been limited by actually chemistry and energy density, unless you want to pretend you can actually harness antimatter.
We can hold antimatter (positrons) from big accelerators in magnetic confinement. It’s just dangerous as hell at any significant quantity for energy generation if the containment fails. And it takes a hell of a lot more input power to make antimatter than you get back.
Jevons Paradox. Look it up.
Ghee’s Anthony! Never use that picture again. I’d rather see Alfred E. Neuman.
Alfred E. Neuman is out getting plastic surgery, how about Naomi Oreskes?
I thought we did!
I m astounded that these MIT folks assuem that renewable energy is the solution to anything – wind and solar are 16th century technologies that are NOT made reliable by simply finding a storage medium, cheap or not. Haven’t these jokers ever heard of Gen 4 nuclear power in the form of small
modular molten salt reactors? Bill Gates has conributed lots of money on one particular design.
In May
“In the latest effort to revive the United States’s flagging nuclear industry, the Department of Energy (DOE) aims to select and help build two new prototype nuclear reactors within 7 years, the agency announced last week. ”
When there are 10 producing at grid scale, 10 more under construction, 10 more in planning with financing, and 100 more in line — that will be proof of concept.
Until then “There is no joy in Mudville.”
Amen to that….
And what would it take to make it necessary?
As if it would have any effect.
https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/human-co2-emissions-have-little-effect-on-atmospheric-co2-discussion/
Their study begs the question – why do it at all? There is no evidence that human CO2 emissions are harmful. Actually there is more evidence that they are helpful as most plants grow best with more CO2, and require less water. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on green fantasies that could be used to actually improve people’s lives.
“ The last challenge is variable conductance building envelopes. There are some demonstrations that show it is physically possible to create a thermal material, or a device that will change its conductance, so that when it’s hot, it can block heat from getting through a wall, but when you want it to, you could change its conductance to let the heat in or out. ”
This one is solved. It is an ingenious invention called a window, which has the amazing property that it can be either opened or closed.
I’m surprised the big brains at MIT have never heard of those.
Openings plus whole house fans. Where I live it is sometimes possible to make a useful difference just by opening everything possible (windows in three rooms, patio door in another) — if there is enough useful breeze. However, even with a large floor fan running all night, when the outside air is still, the inside temperature stays much hotter than the outside. Same problem in reverse when the outside winter temperature is nice enough that it would be helpful to get it inside.
A properly designed fan, exiting into the space above the ceilings, then out through vents, could solve the problem.
Aren’t these “whole house fans” called “attic fans”? That’s how ours is used! Pull out heat into the attic when the house is too hot and pull in heat from the attic when it is too cold.
An attic fan is a fan that is placed in the attic itself, either in the gable, or sometimes on the roof. It draws cool air into the attic.
A whole house fan is placed in the ceiling of the house and exhausts air from the house into the attic.
Two different things.
Some people in dry climates still use evaporative coolers to cool their homes and businesses. Also known as swamp coolers. These double as whole-house fans.
I like to call them outside awareness panels which it sounds like these MIT bigwigs need to get out and about in more often.
I believe Bill has fancy automated ones in his Medina, WA house.
~~ open – – close – – change color — show videos — stop light & IR — toast bread
Buildings have insulation and ventilation to block heat and let it in or out as is their objective. They are looking for something along the lines of feathers on a chicken, but probably made of nano-materials…..
Why they can’t use the proper names escapes me … Electromagnetically induced transparency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_induced_transparency
There are several groups playing around with meta materials that can do it by organizing the quantum properties … search “EIT metamaterials” if you are interested.
Fitted with external shutters a window can be turned into a wall. The French (can’t speak for anyone else) use shutters and windows very efficiently to keep cool in summer. Open windows and shutters early in morning to cool house. Once outside temperature starts climbing and the sun is higher, close the shutters on sun facing side of the house and windows. On old stone built houses this keeps the interior relatively cool. It can cope with heatwaves of several days without the need for airconditioning. At night and in winter keep the shutters closed to stop expensive heat radiating out; although we use curtains as well as shutters.
You can tell houses owned by British expats in France, and presumably elsewhere in the world, they are the ones who never close the shutters except when they are on holiday.
“Five Grand Thermal Challenges to Decarbonise the Global Economy” All for nothing.
The incompetent leading the opportunistic.
Why don’t we just mandate that all electrical generation come from desktop fusion using water as the reactive medium?
— Average green politician that got a “D” in Rocks for Jocks, which was their only science class.
“2,000 times more harmful than carbon dioxide on a molar basis.”
they really had to twist to get there….wonder how long it took them to figure out a way to make it sound worse
I think we could end the “carbon” problem overnight. Instead of calling CO2 “carbon,” let’s call it “carbon dioxide,” also known as the fundamental building block of life.
Scissor:
Maybe the problem they (eco-theologists) really want to solve is depopulating the planet of the carbon-based lifeforms that walk on two legs. The MIT group and their ilk are just looking the
other way while begging for funding.
Short of some really magical thinking there is no way renewables scale to support a 21st century
economy or its current popualtion.
And thanks for the Sci-hub link!
a molar basis?
That bites.
They had to take it in quite a ways to bite with their molars. I guess it could be worse.
The way some people think that the way things are done nowadays are ill founded and backward – they do not have mechanical engineering degrees as I do. they think that things are done deliberately wrong just to keep them oppressed or something, hilarious.
Title of the Post: MIT: Five Grand Thermal Challenges to Decarbonise the Global Economy
Here we go again: Taking carbon and CO2 and turning them upside down, making them pollutants instead of necessary components of life on this rock we live on. And War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
The solar panel was invented back in 1954 (I looked it up) — 66 years ago. Damn things are a year older than I am. If we still can’t get wind and solar to work after all this time, it’s because they are poor, low density energy sources among other things (like intermittency.) Do any of those brilliant MIT light bulbs know anything about energy density? Does Bill Gates?
Stop trying to fight physics. You can’t make a low density energy source into an acceptable and usable energy source by pouring money down a rathole trying to overcome the problems with the energy source’s physical nature.
I commend Bill Gates for putting some of his wealth into developing 4th gen nuclear power — He might be on the right track with that IF (big IF) he can get it to work. I believe I recall reading that the energy density of nuclear fuels is at the top of the energy density list — they probably leave wind and solar far, far behind in the dust.
We are all doomed if the Green New Deal becomes law sometime in the years ahead. Stupidity will do that.
Excuse my rant…I feel better now.
“You can’t make a low density energy source into an acceptable and usable energy source by pouring money down a rathole trying to overcome the problems with the energy source’s physical nature. ”
But you can make a lot of rats rich by doing so.
CD,
the first recorded mention of a steam engine was by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st Century AD. It then
took almost 1500 years before the first commercial steam engine and another 100 years before Watt and co made it efficient enough to be widely useful. So 66 years for the development of solar cells is nothing. And certainly they work extremely well if you find the right application like growing opium
(https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/05/16/cheap-solar-panels-boost-the-afghan-poppy-crop)
How much work was done by anyone on steam engines during that 1500 years?
I love how the only way people can justify their faith in renewable energy is by inventing ever more fanciful, bad analogies.
Izaak:
Didn’t the old steam engines run on wood or coal? I may be wrong here, but I think wood and coal are more energy dense than sunshine or the wind.
CD,
Energy density has nothing to do with the practicality of an energy source unless you
are trying to making something mobile. And once an energy source has been converted
to electricity or some other form of energy the original energy density is irrelevant.
There is more than enough solar energy hitting the earth every day to supply all of the world’s
energy needs for the next billion years or so. Capturing that power and storing it is hard and there is as yet no ideal solution. But there is no reason to think it is impossible.
Izaak Walton August 17, 2020 at 7:20 pm
Not on my planet. I have plenty of room at my place for my high-energy-density fossil fuel fired generator to give me kilowatts when the grid goes down. No way I could run my shop and my house on solar even if I covered every square foot with solar panels. Energy density is absolutely important in lots of situations. Just the purchase of the huge amounts of land needed for solar and wind farms distorts the economics, especially in small or densely populated countries where all land is expensive.
w.
Willis is correct Izaak.
The amount of land area, solar panels and other resources needed to condense or concentrate sunshine and convert it for practical use here in a 21st century world is inanely massive, and it is exactly for the reason you stated. Sunshine is thinly spread out all over the world.
If you know of a practical way to collect sunshine from huge land areas and condense or concentrate it without massive numbers of solar panels, let us here it. I remember one study that said billions — yes billions — of solar panels would be needed just to displace all the energy the USA gets from fossil fuels and nuclear power, and the panels would have to be replaced EVERY 20 YEARS. The raw materials which would have to be mined for tens of billions of panels makes fossil fuel extraction look positively green in comparison. And the vast majority of solar panels installed in the USA are not manufactured here, they are made in China, Germany and elsewhere.
As Willis said, the economics of such a massive project makes solar way beyond practical. Izaak, are you sure you have a good understanding of the concept of energy density? Energy density has EVERYTHING to do with an energy source’s practicality.
CD,
I am not trying to deny that there are a lot of issues with solar power. Oil is an amazing fuel source which has resulted in amazing benefits for the world over the last 120 years or so. But it is a finite resource and sooner or later in the next 100 years or so it will run out. Have a look at “sustainability without the hot air” (https://www.withouthotair.com/ )
which shows clearly that the only long term viable energy source that we know how to use is solar. Sooner or later we are going to have to transition to solar power and figure out how to do so.
Izaak Walton August 17, 2020 at 11:43 pm
Izaak, allow me to let you in on a secret. It’s called “nuclear power”, and at present, it is the only long term viable energy source that we know how to use. Unlike solar, which requires fossil backup because it is unreliable, nuclear power is 24/7 despatchable power.
Gotta say … the fact you’ve never heard of nuclear is kind of concerning …
The folks over at http://www.withhotair say that we have enough uranium to power the world for 1,000,000 years, so they obviously think it is a long term viable energy source … so I’m not clear why you think solar is the only answer.
w.
Willis,
Withthehotair says that nuclear power is sustainable only if we figure out a way
to extract it efficiently from sea water and use breeder reactor technology. Neither of which have been demonstrated at scale. And which is estimated to take about the
same area per person as solar power.
Nuclear power would be a better option than renewables. But no one knows how to
scale it up to power the entire world and no-one (apart from perhaps the military) has any reliable idea about how much uranium can be economically extracted.
The only source of energy that we know how to exploit using today’s technology and that can power the world for the next 1000 years is solar power. If we include energy sources that might work then uranium from seawater and fusion come into the mix.
Izaak, here’s what they say:
Sounds like long term to me … and in any case, looking out a thousand years is madness. In 100 years the odds are great that the power source will not be anything we’re using today. After all, we haven’t used the same main energy source for more than a century in a while …
w.
Willis,
the average American uses 250 kWhr/day so supplying 0.055 kWhr/day per person
from nuclear power just isn’t going to cut it. And in 100 years the laws of physics
won’t have changed and so the possible energy sources are still going to be the same
as today. Expecting a new energy source to turn up is like expecting magic is going to
arrive in time to save you.
“And in 100 years the laws of physic won’t have changed”
How true that is.
Wind and solar will still be totally unreliable
Battery storage will still be minimal.
CO2 still won’t cause and warming.
“But there is no reason to think it is impossible.”
Keep up the fantasy, based on lack of understanding of physics.
Izaak is going to invent a method to compress unicorn farts !
“Energy density has nothing to do with the practicality of an energy source “
ROFLMAO !!
Comic relief !
Given that a large proportion of what is claimed to be “global warming” is the UHI effect, how much “global warming” will be added by covering millions of acres of land with black PV panels? Given that the efficiency of PV panels drops considerably when covered by a thin layer of dust, dew, pollen or winter snow/frost (to say nothing of bird droppings), how many times a day do they need to be cleaned? And by how many people? And with what? How many PV panels will be rendered useless by the average summer hailstorm? So many questions, so few answers..
“Energy density has nothing to do with the practicality of an energy source”
Whatever your degree is in, it has nothing to do with engineering, does it.
The lower the density of your energy source, the larger you have to make your power plant in order to collect it.
If you think that the size of your power plant has nothing to do with practicality, then no wonder you are a global warming alarmist.
Izaak, running out is much closer to 500 years from now, rather than 100.
You are arguing that we need to make ourselves poorer, so that our distant ancestors won’t have to face the pain of becoming poorer in the time.
Stupid argument. The end result is still having our distant ancestors be poor, the difference is the lifestyle of those who live in the meantime.
Wealthy under ours, poor under yours.
Regardless, let the future solve the future’s problems, using technology that we probably haven’t even dreamed of yet.
We don’t have large scale uranium mining from water or breeder reactors because the first isn’t needed and the second is fought tooth and nail by greenies.
Even if neither turns out to be workable, we still have 10’s of thousands of years worth of uranium in land based mines.
Izaak, would you please specify why it’s impossible to build lots of nuclear power plants,
yet covering millions of acres with wind and solar is no big deal?
Nuclear waste can be re-processed, France has been doing it for decades.
Izaak Walton August 18, 2020 at 1:11 am
That’s calculated over 1,600 years. From your paper, the amount of minable uranium on the planet is enough to provide 330 kWh/capita/day until the year 2180 using current technology. And if you include ocean uranium that goes up to 4,200 kWh/capita/day … works for me
The fact that the laws of physics won’t change has been true forever … and despite that, in the last few hundred years we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear power. So claiming that there will be no shift in our power source because “physics” is easily historically disproven.
Next, recoverable reserves of any element is determined by technology. That’s why the proven oil reserves haven’t fallen despite use. Twenty years ago natural gas proven reserves were tiny. Now they’re giant, despite ongoing use of gas.
And that doesn’t even count the huge reserves of methane hydrates, which are estimated to contain more energy than the world’s reserves of gas, oil, and coal combined.
So yes, Izaak, in the next century we are very likely to be using methane hydrate or thorium reactors or some other currently unused fuel in our energy mix, despite “physics”.
w.
Willis,
I am bemused by your apparent belief in the power of technology to solve all the world’s problems except that of building a better battery. Can you explain why you think mining the sea floor for methyl hyrdates is likely to be both practical and produce a energy return >2 sooner than building a bigger and better energy storage system for solar power?
Izaak Walton said:
Mmm … a couple things in that regard.
First, the only part of an automobile that didn’t change at all from 1920 to 2020 is the automobile battery. From beginning to end it’s been the same lead-acid battery. The dashboard changed, the electrics became electronics, the metals used became much stronger and resistant … but from beginning to end it’s been the same lead-acid battery. Absolutely identical technology.
So your idea, that batteries are just like all the rest of technology, advancing in leaps and bounds, able to be pushed into new forms and combinations … sorry, not true. Edison was hired to build a better battery. He tried literally hundreds and hundreds of possibilities … and came back to lead-acid.
So that’s one problem. Then there’s the money question. The battery doesn’t just have to work. It has to work well enough to succeed in the marketplace.
Then there’s the materials question … Elon Musk’s cars use cobalt. You have to move something like 50,000 tons of cobalt ore to get enough cobalt for each car. You planning to mine that using electric bulldozers?
Then there’s the safety issue. We’ve seen it in the burning of electric cars. California is building a 730 MWh battery in Moss Landing. It will hold the energy of about six hundred TONNES of TNT. That’s about three times the energy of the explosion that just destroyed downtown Beirut.
So … do I think we’ll build a better battery? Sure … but if the past is any guide, unlike many other technologies, improvements will be slow and incremental.
However, you haven’t grasped the nettle. The size of a battery that can power even a small city for a day is beyond comprehension. So batteries plus renewables won’t work. You get a week in the winter with little wind or snow and people will start freezing. There’s an excellent article on this here.
Finally, why? Why should we invest millions in unreliable, intermittent power supplies plus hugely expensive batteries when we have proven, tested, reliable fossil fuel power that will last us for a hundred years, to be followed by fusion or methane hydrates or some other RELIABLE 24/7 power. And even if it did work, which it doesn’t, why should we make ourselves uncomfortable so that the infinitely richer people of the year 2020 have it easier?
What is the point of this endlessly dicking around with expensive, unreliable, intermittent power? Don’t you understand that we tried that in California and as a result today as I write this our grid is teetering on the edge of collapse?
And more to the point, you don’t seem to care in the slightest that NONE of your brilliant ideas work without you putting your damn hands in my wallet and taking out money to subsidize your unworkable green fantasies. And for what?
Because if you think that powering the planet off of sunbeams and unicorn farts will stop the climate from changing, I have extremely bad news for you …
w.
Then there’s the safety issue. We’ve seen it in the burning of electric cars.
Can’t state that enough. I’m a firefighter (volunteer) and I can tell you that one of the calls we dread is a wreck with an electric vehicle. Can’t speak for the municipal guys, be we don’t have anywhere near the training to deal with those. Not just the burning, but you make a wrong move trying to extricate someone, you’re fried.
The Greeks didn’t need steam engines because they had slaves. It was the growing use of fossil fuels that allowed Britain to end slavery, because it eliminated the need for slaves.
The left whine about slavery while demanding we eliminate the very fossil fuels that allowed our ancestors to eliminate slavery.
Make of it what you will.
Dude did you ever atone for your earlier raciss remark? You need to do the work.
Say what? Who appointed you the racism police chief?
w.
I don’t know if the comment qualified as racist, but Izaak did declare that anyone who complains about illegal immigration is a racist.
There are currently exactly two uses of the word “racist” in this thread … both by you, Derg. There is one use of the word “immigration” … you also. Whatever someone supposedly said, it wasn’t here.
This is why I demand that people QUOTE THE WORDS THEY ARE REFERRING TO, to avoid wasting time like this. I have no clue where or when “Izaac Walton” said what you claim. And since “Izaac Walton” is an alias, when I get there I’ll have no certainty that this “Izaac Walton” is the one who said it.
So could you please take off your “Racism Control Officer” hat, and put on your science hat? All you are doing is stoking divisiveness, and that gets along far too well without help.
w.
Sounds like a jar of fleas to me.
(Russia’s Tsar Ivan Grozny (IV) would punish troublesome Boyars by requiring them to give him a jar of fleas. Their inability to fulfil this impossible task could then be used against them as necessary.)
5 challenges to overcome with no dates for when or if they can be achieved yet we have to get rid of the current generation technologies now, before there is a replacement.
Not good planning.
“What would it take to make renewable energy viable … ?”
A miracle or two would be a good start.
> excess electricity from renewables
Thinking there’s a leap of logic/physics in there someplace.
“MIT professors Asegun Henry, Ravi Prasher & Arun Majumdar describe five thermal challenges which must be overcome, to curb industrial CO2 emissions” i.e. fossil fuel emissions.
The other challenge is to explain why we need to curb fossil fuel emissions.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/06/tcre/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/14/climateaction/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/10/a-monte-carlo-simulation-of-the-carbon-cycle/
The Bill Gates solution
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/04/06/a-climate-action-business-model/
A straightforward reading of the article leads to the immediate conclusion that none of this will come to pass in this century.
Please make 538 copies and put one on every Congressman’s chair.
OK they won’t (can’t) read it, but a few may have staffers with some engineering experience.
See what contortions I go through to wring a little bit of comfort from this?
Politicians would probably take the list as suggested legislation and pass a law saying “Item 1 must be answered by 2025, item 2 must be answered by 2027” with no regard to the reality of if it CAN be done. That seems to be how they generally operate.
Of course, these MIT scientists are city folks, I am sure. Could we beat all of these so-called “thermal” challenges, wind and solar would STILL cause massive ecological damage and ruin quality of life for everyone outside of the cities. I can’t post it, but I’ve taken a skyline view of Boston (MIT’s home), and covered the high rises with wind turbines. If they want “renewables”, let THEM suffer the side effects.
Room Temperature Super Conduction would pretty much do the trick. Thing is we have been waiting decades and more between often slight advances and we still aren’t sure of the basic science.