We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

On the other hand, I can see why they’d immediately go on the offensive. There aren’t many things in the world less sympathetic than chemical companies. The more people learn about the actual policy being made here, the more likely they are to be upset, so best bet is just to head that off from the start.

Would we know if they already did?

Maybe that’s Bannon’s new role at Breitbart?

They are already talking about directly subsidizing coal mining jobs, even though coal has been economically eclipsed by natural gas in almost every way. We are truly in crazy town.


Electricity so cheap, we’ll pay you to meter it:

That doesn’t seem to make sense. I mean, why would they need to take it off the grid? Is it actually gonna overload something if it doesn’t get pulled off?

Seems like someone should be hooking a battery up to it.

Yes. To a certain extent you can manage fluctuations with pumped storage and so on, but I don’t know how much capacity Germany has for that.

Shouldn’t they like… have a mechanical battery thing set up?

If you have too much power, even storing it in an inefficient manner makes more sense.

This is one way to pay people to set up battery systems. They get paid to suck in the power now, and paid to feed back into the grid later.

Balancing the grid is a big deal, and one of the big potential problems with many renewable power sources. As I understand it, if there wasn’t enough load on the grid, the alternating power cycle rate would go up and that would mess up a lot of things that rely on it being constant.

Ya, seems like the easiest way to deal with this is to do shit like run a water pump to pump water up a hill or something.

Or buy some of those power walls from Tesla.

Flywheels!

Bonus: risk of catastrophic failure causing massive explosions!

If i 1) lived off the grid and 2) were a hillbilly and 3) had ample sources of sunlight, i’d make a solar powered water tower/turbine. Pump water up the tower in the day, use falling water to generate electricity at night.

Bonus: it can also work as a still for your moonshine!

Same idea, melts salt into lava, then boils water on demand.

I was out there a few weeks back southwest of vegas, and saw some other crazy looking solar plant… I’ll see if I can find some pictures of it.


I hadn’t read much about evaporation engines, so this was an interesting read. Looks to be a nice niche technology for certain areas, such as dry locations that need to prevent losing water to evaporation anyway.

Trump will save us!

Two things about this…
It seems like the utility is significantly limited by practical concerns, in that the power output would be extremely small compared to the input. Given that the input is generally going to be the sun, it seems like literally any solar panel is going to provide dramatically higher energy conversion rates.

Second, I’m not seeing why using bacterial spores for this actually makes sense. The fundamental mechanism of this is just “things swell up when exposed to moisture”. I gotta imagine that there are innumerable non-living chemical substances which exhibit the same sort of expansion process. Hell, basically anything that absorbs water kind of needs to do this by definition, doesn’t it?

Massive Government Report Says Climate Is Warming And Humans Are The Cause

Obviously this is news to no one, but what is surprising is that the report wasn’t squashed somehow. Shouldn’t a Trump appointee have killed this thing?

Oh, well, that explains it.