BruceMcF’s Recent Comments

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  As the designated corridors help ...

  ... underline, its not just "the Coasts" ... there are substantial opportunities for big chunks of flyover country.

  California and the Northeast Corridor are highly likely to get big shares of the $8b, but they are also very expensive to build ... California because their distances force them to starting out with a bullet train approach, and the Northeast because the Northeast Corridor is such a crowded, gadawful mess.

  But that's OK, because out here in flyover country, a lot less money goes a much longer way. For example, while the first stage of California HSR from San Francisco to Anaheim via the Central Valley and the LA basin is $46b, the Triple C corridor in Ohio would give change back from $2b, launching the cornerstone of the much more extensive Ohio Hub 110mph Rapid Rail system.
  

  Virtually Yours, BruceMcF Energize America 2020

  On The stimulus bill provides serious money for high-speed rail posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 13 Responses

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  'Reliability' is rhetoric, not reality

  jeffgreen11 at 9:29 PM on 16 Feb 2009

  Its time to show that renewable energy can do the job with a demonstration town. Preferably a small rural one that would have wind, solar, biomass, caes, (compressed air energy storage).

  But that is playing into the Coal frame.

  The fact is that for any given renewable energy resource, the supply over a wide area is more stable than the supply in a smaller area. A single wind turbine is extremely volatile, a wind farm less volatile, several wind farms in the same wind resource less volatile, and several wind resource regions spread across a thousand miles less volatile.

  And the greater the diversity of volatile renewable energy sources, the less volatile ... wind plus solar is less volatile than wind alone, wind plus solar plus wave less volatile than wind alone, wind plus solar plus run-of-river hydro plus wavepower less volatile than wind plus solar alone, and so on.

  Which means that solving the problem for a small town is overkill ... its easier to solve the problem for the country than to solve the problem for a state, and easier to solve the problem for a state than for a small town, because the greater the diversity of the power sources, the less problem there is to solve.

  And, indeed, coal may be part of the answer -- not mineral coal, of course, but biocoal. Direct conversion of biomass into charcoal under pressure in sealed containers is far more thermodynamically efficient than any other means of producing a biofuel, especially since power can be co-generated from the exhaust, where liquid biofuel production processes are power consumers rather than power generators.

  Given a national inter-grid network of HVDC transmission, the existing hydropower capacity as readily dispatchable energy, supply-following power demands, and some supplementary dispatchable renewable power source such as biocoal, and of course substantial mining of current gross power waste, the "problem" of reliability is revealed for what it is ... a rhetorical strategy to portray a collection of solvable technical problems as some kind of massive hurdle to be cleared.

  It is a rhetorical strategy founded on people's difficulty to think in terms of system capabilities and system solutions, and not a serious critique.
  

  Virtually Yours, BruceMcF Energize America 2020

  On Superb NYT story captures both coal's peril and the barriers to its elimination posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 38 Responses

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  Wolverine has nailed it ...

  ... this is the "oh, these things are not normal" framing, that takes all the downsides of the status quo for granted.On Old Man Winter declares war on renewable energy posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 33 Responses

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  An excellent example of cost to own ...

  ... versus cost to buy. Up front these look more expensive than hi-tech flash battery recharge or energy wasting hydrogen, but this approach eliminates the big question of "what do you do when your batteries wear out and the car has half its life left" ... the depreciation and replacement of the batteries are built into the financial model of the recharge stations. And it does without the wastefulness of hydrogen as an energy storage medium.On Electric-car infrastructure coming to California's Bay Area posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

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  Excellent discussion ....

  ... however, note that the following completely contradicts the thrust of the remarks of David Roberts:

  ... are obscene, as are the trade barriers for biofuels.

  The idea that the US, with more than twice the average world biocapacity, can have a "sustainable" energy source that is imported is quite idiotic. If the rest of the world follows the US lead with that "sustainable" energy system relying on imports "from elsewhere", it implies that we need more than Two Earths worth of biocapacity.

  The trade barriers to biofuels are close to the only ecologically sound energy policy that the United States presently has.

  And the "ecologically sustainable" ethanol from Brazil is already displacing food crops and ranching into newly deforested lands in the Amazon ... and that at levels of production less than the current production in the United States. So for the US to replace its current ethanol production by imports from Brazil would required more than doubling Brazilian production ... and somehow that is going to happen without impacting on the Amazon rain forest, when the current ethanol production in Brazil is already having impacts?
  

  Virtually Yours, BruceMcF Energize America 2020

  On Bearded freak hippie discusses biofuels with Bill Scher posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses