Sustainable Energy, USA and worldwide

Oh hell yes. I've long suspected that generating useable electricity has been major bottleneck in the viability of fusion power. Can this technology be back-ported to older reactor designs or is it unique to this style of reactor?

Edit: dangling tag.

Edited by KnightofLsama on Dec 24th 2022 at 1:43:23 AM

Yeah I always found how we needed to get stuff spinning for energy production felt kinda... limiting.

Behold, we started fusion! And now we just kinda have the plasma spin around I guess...

No spinning = no current, we kind of need that, whether it be the magnetic field doing the spinning directly or spinning some other thing that causes a magnetic field and bit of wire to rotate.

And then to convert it into mains-voltage AC anyway for interoperability, but that's just normal.

Mankind has created many interesting ways to boil water.

For making tea and/or electricity.

"Executive Summary Report on the Inhabitants of Planet Earth...

Summary of Common Activities: The indigenous intelligent lifeform seems obsessed with the number of different ways they can boil water.

No, really."

I've seen a lot of variations that went on like this:

"Muahahahahah, behold! I finally learned how to harness the forbidden power!"

"You maniac! What are you going to do with that power?!"

"Oh, I will tell you what I will do. With this power I am going to...boil water and spin turbine!"

Yale Environment 360: In Europe’s Clean Energy Transition, Industry Turns to Heat Pumps. Seems to be a promising trend: European households have been using heat pumps for decades, but the spike in gas prices from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is now increasingly spurring heavy industries to invest in them as well. Heavy industrial processes generate lots of heat, so there's more for their heat pumps to capture and loop back into the system: it's a win-win.

Financial Times: India's industrial conglomerate Adani Group is planning to invest $50 billion to create "the world's largest green hydrogen ecosystem, backed by a $2.4 billion subsidy package from the Indian government. Critics have accused the plan of "greenwashing", as Adani is one of the world's largest coal producers — their Carmichael mine in Queensland has taken a lot of flak for its potential effects on the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. I suppose that converting the Indian energy infrastructure to green hydrogen would help offset some of that impact, though — the country already enjoys relatively cheap renewable energy, which could theoretically ensure a positive feedback loop for affordable green hydrogen production.

Doesn't read like greenwashing to me - it reads like the company sees a profit opportunity, especially with government grants.

I mean, I get that we reflexively suspect energy companies of being Toxic, Inc., but We Care about money.

Edited by Ramidel on Jan 21st 2023 at 10:48:43 AM

Solar energy is a renewable source, but is there a way to make solar panels out of renewable materials?

Not quite yet. The framing materials (typically aluminium and glass) can be recycled easily enough, but the actual cell is usually made of layers of silicon doped with charge-carrying metals like gallium and silver.

Silicon melts at a very high temperature (1,410 °C, close to that of iron), which makes high-grade electronic wafers costly to both produce and melt down. Once you've melted it down, you'd still have to separate the dopant metals from the silicon through complex chemical/electrolytic processes that we can't yet affordably pull off at scale. Overall, the process is just so costly and complicated that it's easier to just dump the silicon wafers instead of recycling them.

There are non-silicon materials for solar cell that are gradually taking off, like lead halide perovskites and cadmium telluride thin films — but these are based on toxic heavy metals that are even more difficult to safely dispose of than doped silicon, much less recycle. The waste issue is honestly one big downside to solar power that we're still struggling to get a handle on.

There are flexible models of solar panels that are made by printing silicon thin films on some kind of flexible backing material (typically a plastic). These flexible backing materials are easy enough to recycle on their own, but like a lot of recyclables, they come with a downside: they don't last very long outdoors, which is a pretty big minus as solar panels go.

In that case how about all wooden windmills? Apparently wooden nails are a thing.

Maybe somewhere down the line, but we're talking about moving structures that 1) are exposed to the elements, and 2) constantly experience large amounts of force. Let's just say there's a reason we don't usually resort to wood for engineering projects with those criteria; the qualities that make wind turbines durable in operation are the very same ones that make them hard to dispose of afterwards.

Reuters: Norwegian police detained Greta Thunberg at a protest demanding the removal of two wind farms from Sámi land in the Finnmark. Seems that the Supreme Court of Norway already stripped the two wind farms of their operating licence in 2021 after deeming them to be in violation of Sámi cultural rights — yet they continued to operate, because there's a lot of messy downstream effects when you disconnect and dismantle major power plants.

You know a wind farm is doing something shitty when Greta Thunberg protests it.

Yeah, I thought that was some sort of weird typo at first.

Via Twitter/X, apparently a German energy company has begun dismantling a wind farm in order to mine more coal.

Quoting South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: "What the hell is wrong with German people?"

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 22nd 2023 at 4:45:53 AM

That sounds like the kind of shit a German energy company might do, but do we have a source that’s not just a captioned picture on social media? We should hold ourselves to better standards than “an internet meme told me”.

You're right, I should have looked past the social media post.

The first hit is from a news site called WION, but has a very heavy anti-green bias.

Also found one from EU Observer, but it's paywalled.

Weirdly, I am seeing hits on the same story from October, 2022. It seems to keep getting reported over and over again.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 22nd 2023 at 4:57:31 AM

So why do they do this?

It might be that it’s being reported again but that it’s happening again. It seems that there’s a set of wind turbines next to the coal mine, so when they decide to expand the mine they take down a turbine and dig up the land beneath, then a few years later they’re done digging in that hit and want to expand again so another turbine comes down.

Germany is very dependent on coal for energy, it’s a big energy consumer due to having a modern industrial economy with a fair amount of manufacturing. Comparatively France uses a ton of nuclear while the UK uses more wind, plus more nuclear and has secure access to natural gas.

Germany was shifting heavily towards natural gas, but that’s obviously fallen apart due to recent events. It also hasn’t helped that their natural gas shifted has been used to phase our nuclear instead of coal.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 22nd 2023 at 10:10:07 AM