Tag: energy

90% renewables by 2030

Renewables like solar and wind are plunging in price. But there are impediments to powering a grid entirely, or even primarily, with renewable energy. How far can they go? A new paper suggests that wind and solar could power 60% of the US’s electricity needs, given a national grid, without any energy storage, and without massive overbuild. Another 20% of the grid’s electricity would come from CO2-free hydro and nuclear.

Cold Fusion

on reputation traps.

there’s a sociological explanation why few people are willing to look at the evidence. They put their reputations at risk by doing so. Cold fusion is tainted, and the taint is contagious – anyone seen to take it seriously risks contamination. So the subject is stuck in a place that is largely inaccessible to reason – a reputation trap, we might call it. People outside the trap won’t go near it, for fear of falling in. ‘If there is something scientists fear, it is to become like pariahs’. People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence.

2019-06-11: Google is getting into the game.

This work should produce data that will be of interest to people beyond the remaining cold-fusion believers, and similarly, the team’s work on heated metal powders and hydrogen required them to make advances in calorimetry that could also prove useful. And the hydrogen-saturated palladium electrode work led to new data about the effects of such high loading on the metal structure, and how to measure these reliably.

China coal plants

China would try to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants by 60% by 2020, reducing CO2 emissions by 180M metric tons

this is about 2% of world emissions
2020-01-04:

China is set to add new coal-fired power plants equivalent to the EU’s entire capacity, as the world’s biggest energy consumer ignores global pressure to rein in CO2 emissions in its bid to boost a slowing economy. While the rest of the world has been largely reducing coal-powered capacity over the past 2 years, China is building so much coal power that it more than offsets the decline elsewhere

Energetics of future minds

Unless one thinks the human way of thinking is the most optimal or most easily implementable way, we should expect de novo AI to make use of different, potentially very compressed and fast, processes. (Brain emulation makes sense if one either cannot figure out how else to do AI, or one wants to copy extant brains for their properties.) Hence, the costs of brain computation is merely a proof of existence that there are systems that effective – the same mental tasks could well be done by far less or far more efficient systems.

Power Bank phone

You couldn’t be further out of touch with your “iphone”. Uhe interesting developments aren’t going to happen in the places pundits obsess about.

1 thing that quickly became clear when I spoke to people is that the number 1 reason they bought the phone is to use it as a power bank. Ghana is currently experiencing a severe power crisis — city-wide blackouts of 36 hours or more have become the norm in the capital, and a brisk business has grown around selling power banks, which are small portable rechargeable batteries that can be used to charge small electronics such as MP3 players and, yes, phones.

$5.3T Energy Subsidy waste

Subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas were $5.3T worldwide in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer ($1.8T), followed by the United States ($0.6T), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3T). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global CO2 emissions by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2% of global GDP. The figure likely exceeds government health spending across the world, estimated by the World Health Organization at 6% of global GDP, but for the different year of 2013. They correspond to one of the largest negative externality ever estimated.

Microbatteries

A high-performance 3D microbattery that could be integrated into microchips at production volumes has been developed by researchers. Miniaturizing a battery to fit in a microchip is a major challenge, but it would be important for providing power to microscale devices such as actuators, distributed wireless sensors and transmitters, and portable and implantable medical devices.