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.
When is all said and done, you can can choose to ignore reality.
However, you still get to suffer the consequences of ignoring reality.
California is currently suffering the consequences of ignoring reality.
If Death Valley is close to record temperatures that occurred in 1934, then it is
very clear that CO2 is not the knob on the thermostat that controls temperature, otherwise
the temperatures would be much higher.
So implementing policies to elimate CO2 production from all industial processes is not only futile,
it is foolish.
Assuming is dangerous, and often makes the one assuming a fool. Assuming that we are faced with extinction level danger, or even significant negative outcomes, from human caused “climate change” is a great example of this.
Why are Bill Gates and those three MIT professors complicating things so much?
I’ll make it all much more simple, with only ONE challenge needing to be met to accomplish all that they want: find a way to circumvent the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Now, get to it!
Why isn’t there serious research on the direct conversion of the energy released in a nuclear reaction into ELECTRICITY. I know it can be done because some of the detectors used to monitor power for “tilt” and ‘evenness” pof power generation, that were inside the rector worked on this principle. Even if only 30% efficient recovering that and adding that to the electricity generated by a steam turbine give you 65% efficiency. Then add thermal conversion of the heat dumped into the atmosphere, adding another 10 or 20 percent.
“Why isn’t there serious research on the direct conversion of the energy released in a nuclear reaction into ELECTRICITY.”
For nuclear reactions of the fission kind, scientists discovered how to convert nuclear radiation directly into electricity way back in 2008 (see https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13545-nanomaterial-turns-radiation-directly-into-electricity/)
For nuclear reactions of the fusion kind, scientists and engineers have spent decades and countless dollars trying the find a way to use those types of reactions here on Earth to produce electricity in a PRACTICAL manner.
This amounts to “serious research”.
BTW, we can, and do, directly and continuously convert the energy from a large, natural, nuclear fusion reactor—safely located at a distance of 150 million kilometers from Earth—directly into ELECTRICITY via widespread technology know as photovoltaic solar cells. The energy of the Sun’s associated fusion reactions reaches earth in the form of photons which strike the solar cells to directly produce electricity.
What, no perpetual motion?
“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”
I have 10 of these devices, they are called windows!!
Sorry, Dave, I hadn’t seen your comment when I wrote mine (below).
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. …
We get told to listen to the experts but any who insisted on this before pushing renewables would not have kept their position as an expert.
“ There is no physical evidence demonstrating that adding carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing a dangerous greenhouse warming in the atmosphere, thus warming the earth.”
This is one of the conclusions of the recent paper by William van Wijngaarden and William Happer.
It is trite to say it is central to the global warming debate.
It has been made as a statement by realist climate scientists countless times.
One claim by alarmists is that there are “human fingerprints” which provide direct evidence of such dangerous warming .
In this regard, Dr. Myles Allen gave a slide presentation to Judge Alsup in the San Francisco v. Chevron litigation.
One crucial slide was centred on the claim that OLR ( Outgoing Solar Radiation) has declined at the top of the troposphere between 1977 and 1996 based on spectrograph or similar readings by Japanese and NASA satellites.
If OLR was declining, and less radiation was moving to outer space, that would reflect greater and potentially dangerous warming of the Earth’s surface.
His Honour, being knowledgeable in physics, noted that the slide did not provide the evidence that Dr. Myles claimed.
In fairness to Dr.Allen, he later chastised himself for presenting the wrong slide and complimented the Judge on his acuity.
However is this “fingerprint of human caused warming” as direct evidence correct?
I have lost a comment on an earlier thread here where reference was given to the Centre ( NOAA ?) which collects month by month records of OLR.
It was claimed by the commentator that there was no indication of a decline or variance of any significance in the OLR record over the period 1977 to 1996 or later.
Can anyone firm this up for the record?
I will answer my own query-
NOAA Climate Data Record ( CD-R) of Monthly Outgoing Long Wave Radiation (OLR) Version 2.2.
I need further investigation to determine if the OLR is increasing or decreasing.
There is also an NCR daily CD-R.
Engineers know that heat can be transmitted some distance by the use of remarkable devices called pipes a development apparently unknown at MIT. You will find them in building hot water systems in your own house and in some home and industrial heating systems as well. Many Russian cities provide heating services from central electric power generating stations condenser water and so called process heat is similarly provided to some industries.
I hope this information is of some use to the authors.
I agree that greenhouse gas warms the world. It is just that the ghg is NOT CO2.
The only greenhouse gas that has a significant effect on climate (climate includes temperature) is water vapor. It helped make the planet warm enough for life as we know it to evolve. Humanity has been causing the water vapor to slowly increase for millennia as a result of increasing irrigation. Irrigation and other water vapor sources began to increase much more rapidly around 1960.
Water vapor has been accurately measured worldwide only since Jan 1988 when it began being measured as total precipitable water (TPW) by NASA/RSS satellite. One of the reasons the Global Circulation Models are wrong is that they calculate the WV from the temperature instead of using the actual WV measurements which are greater.
Blaming CO2 for warming is shallow penetration of science/physics. Analysis using data from Quantum Mechanics calculations by Hitran reveals that water vapor increase has caused about 10 times more ground level warming than CO2 increase. The cooling effect of more CO2 in the stratosphere apparently cancels the small contribution to warming of more CO2 at ground level with the result that CO2 has no significant effect on climate.
WV has been increasing about 1.5% per decade which is MORE THAN IS POSSIBLE from feedback from temperature increase. Most (about 96%) of the WV increase is a result of irrigation increase. All of the human contribution to climate change is a result of increased water vapor. https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com
The problem is that the more energy we use, the hotter the planet will get. This is down to basic thermodynamics, heat and entropy. It has got nothing to do with CO2. Renewables won’t help and neither will nuclear.
For example look at California. The average surface power output due to human energy consumption in California is 0.63 W/m2. This increases the average surface temperature of the entire state by about 0.3 °C compared to pre-industrial times. In LA and the Bay Area it will be even hotter because the power density will be even higher.
Still, it’s not as bad as Pennsylvania (0.5 °C rise), or England (0.7 °C) or Belgium (1.0 °C).
If you want a fuller explanation of the physics see
https://climatescienceinvestigations.blogspot.com/2020/06/14-surface-heating.html
and
https://climatescienceinvestigations.blogspot.com/2020/07/28-lateral-thought-1-suburban-heating.html
But this problem is not going away, because there is no way human energy consumption is going to decrease over time. All automation needs energy. Without automation we will be back in the Middle Ages and no-one is going to vote for that.
Somebody didn’t think of clouds. They cover about 62% of the planet on average and account for nearly all of the albedo. http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com
Slarty, globally human energy use amounts to 0.04 W/m2. ASSUMING that the temperature is a function of the forcing, a very large assumption, that gives us a change in temperature on the order of 0.02°C.
Assuming that at some point in the distant future we use ten times that energy, that’s a warming of 0.2°C … lost in the noise. If we had no thermometers and the world warmed by 0.2°C, nobody would even know.
w.
A *****ing miracle.
Certainly no science or engineering solutions exist.
First grand challenge is to actually PROVE that CO2 at any possible raised atmospheric concentration, is actually harmful in any way to the environment !
So far, NADA, .. harm exists ONLY in models and alarmism.
The bottom line is it is ridiculous to try to solve a problem when there is no evidence the problem actually exists.
Bill Gates and the MIT professors need to establish that CO2 is actually doing what Alarmists claim it is doing in the Earth’s atmosphere, before deciding if anything needs fixing, or not.
First things first, Bill. Prove there is a problem before tryng to fix it. Assumptions are not evidence. All you really have are assumptions, Bill, if you are honest about the Human-caused Climate Change situation. There’s not one solid piece of evidence you can point to.
That goes for all the other Alarmists, too. You could prove me wrong by providing a solid piece of evidence, but you won’t, because you can’t, because there is no such solid evidence.
That’s the state of Climate Science today.
This is the Global Warming Potential nonsense from the IPCC.
I like the second challenge decarbonising industrial processes that generate CO2, where cement and steel is cited as the worst offenders, but completely missing the irony that wind turbines need the most cement and steel of all.
Ssshhhhh.. you weren’t supposed to look behind the curtain..
Bill Gates … NIA – never invented anything.
. purchased DOS, on-sold it to IBM
. ripped off Lotus 1-2-3
. ripped off Wordperfect
. ripped off Apple Lisa interface to create a vile little shell of an operating system called windows
Correct! He’s a business man.And,judging by his latest video ,(check out realclimate science.com),he’s now either a raging Malthusian or completely off his rocker.Wait a minute.That’s the same thing!
“ 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.“. Well it just so happens that this problem has already been solved. The material is a rigid transparent silicon-based substance, which can be used in fairly thin sheets. A single sheet is sufficient in some circumstances, but some situations may need two or even three sheets with the specification of the gap between them being very important. But the really clever part of this invention is that it is movable, with the movement usually controlled by a hinge, though other mechanisms can be used. The material can be produced at very reasonable prices. It’s called “glass”, and when it is set up with the special mechanism it’s called “window”. There’s another variation with slightly different features called “door”.
Don’t forget the latest development in this field, “skylight”.
Mike Jonas,
In fairness, the challenge is specifically stated to be “variable conductance” of building envelopes, easily seen be referring to thermal conductance through walls and ceilings.
Thermal conductance refers to heat flow through material substances (solids, liquids, gases, plasmas).
The opening and closing of windows (even double pane windows) is overwhelming one of enabling or preventing, respectively, CONVECTIVE heat flow. For air anywhere near STP and at reasonable breeze velocity (say, above 1 fps), convection heat flow is one to two orders of magnitude higher than conduction heat flow, for a given delta-T. This is the fundamental reason that HVAC system have to use “air movers” (aka fans), instead of relying on just the thermal conductance of the air inside a building, to establish more-or-less uniform temperatures throughout air spaces.
This issue of a building’s conductance is challenging only in the context of large buildings (i.e., large surface area) where the issue of convective heat exchange between inside air/outside has already been eliminated or minimized . . . the term “sealed office skyscraper” comes to mind.
They missed the most important and fundamental challenge of all…. providing assured and affordable energy on demand, in the quantity required, when needed, by all who need it.
Here’s another take on the paper:
How would you write a paper that says “wind and solar are not viable” without speaking against the powers that be on wind and solar?
Write about what it would take to enable wind and solar to overcome their limitations.
ie: time of production, storage, reducing power demands,
The fourth challenge is kind of silly since we do that already with electricity. We alter energy in the form of heat to electricity, transmit it efficiently, and convert it back to heat (or mechanical energy) at the point of use. On second thought, maybe just make some diamond crystal heat pipes with ideal insulation.
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. …
Already exists. Windows with sun and thermal blocking blinds like Duettes. When it’s cold and sunny outside, and the building is too cool, you open the blind letting the sun in. When it’s hot and sunny outside, and the building is too warm you close the blind and run the a/c. When it’s cool outside, like at night, and the building is too warm you open the windows. This has been done for centuries but it would be easy to automate now.
There goes that darn Eric Worrall again with his insistence on bringing considerations of physical reality into discussions of energy systems. Let’s be frank here and admit that this man has no sense of tact, and habitually disregards any notions of courtesy whenever he enters a discussion. This is the sort of man who goes around telling six year-olds that there is no Santa. If I were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I wouldn’t date him.
“Save Humanity From Extinction Due to Climate Change”…
Well, there’s your problem right there – make a bunch of stupid assumptions about something that isn’t a problem and isn’t caused by Man, come up with stupid answers. I’m sure whatever they propose to “save” us will be with other people’s money, not their own…
And as Mencken said, the urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it. For leftists you can remove the “almost”.
IT WOULD BE HELPFUL IF SOME OF YOU WOULD VET THIS new connection of dots:
Weakened earth magnetic field = less ocean mixing|movement = less CO2 absorbed = more natural CO2 in air
A search will find results for these five lines:
Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field [of Earth] has lost around 9% of its strength (ESA)
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has weakened by 15-20% in 200 years. (UCM)
CO2 levels rise when Atlantic Circulation is weak and fall when it’s strong. (EOS)
CO2 levels in the air have increased over 40% since 1880 (climatechangenews) [from 0.000291 to 0.000414]
Natural CO2 is 95% of overall
There’s also atmospheric stilling right along with ocean slowing.
And NOAA pointed out the covid shutdown didn’t make a dent in CO2 levels at Mauna Loa Observatory
Some scientific papers try to address the link between magnetic field and water movement.
Scientists see this but remain confused. They continue to blame all that extra natural CO2 in the atmosphere on humans, as they know they must, to not be cancelled.
[quote]
The oceans as a whole have a large capacity for absorbing CO2, but ocean mixing is too slow to have spread this additional CO2 deep into the ocean. As a result, ocean waters deeper than 500 meters (about 1,600 feet) have a large but still unrealized absorption capacity, said Scripps geochemist Ralph Keeling.