Comments on: Somber Sober Energy Thoughts

By: bird houses for sale

bird houses for sale — Tue, 24 May 2011 01:28:55 +0000

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By: fajar

fajar — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:45:29 +0000

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By: JP

JP — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 17:06:36 +0000

I would add that besides fossil fuels being stored solar energy, by the photosyntesis process (which has the highest efficiency good), you have to add to that the energy given by the internal heat of the earth and the potential energy (in terms of pressure)… hydrocarbons= carbon chains+ water+heat+pressure. Basically could we say that photosyntesis is nature own “solar cells” ? as such, if one assumes that 10% of the earth was covered by forest, corals, etc… that stored energy for millions of years, then got some energy from earth temperature, then we could know how much stored energy -i.e. hydrocarbons- there is, theoretically… comparing to what we have in reserves, we would know how much is remaining to be discovered, and then how much longer we can rely on hydrocarbons energy… As you mention, 200 years?…
But there are other types of energy that you did not consider, namely the fusion, which is the – or one of – nuclear reactions in the sun and that we try to reproduce on earth… the good news is that this one is, in principle, quite eco-friendly, with no big -long- radioactive decay elements… it could be an almost infinite source of energy… Also, an interesting development is the advent of the “mini” nuclear plants, developped in the US, that, just to name one, google is using to power their server farms and that , according to this article:http://www.physorg.com/news145561984.html… that would simplify a lot the electricity grid distribution problem, with more dedicated, “ad-hoc” small grid systems, that could be used for electric vehicles charging purpose and other…
Some people are even talking about outer space power generation stations that could transmit via lasers the energy generated, to a satellite dish type station (like in France, Font-Romeu)…
The more dangerous problem with CO2 pollution, and why it is important to act now in order to find alternative ways, is that the release of methane, a much higher potential greenhouse generating gas, at a tremendous rate from the melting bottom of the artic ocean and soon from the siberian permafrost…. this is a process than cannot be stopped easily, even by stopping the use of hydrocarbons, and can lead to disastrous consequences… Hence “we” cannot continue to pollute the same way…If it was for me, I would choose the nuclear option, with the new plants that are less dangerous, well regulated and controlled…and progressively the fission nuclear plants.

By: 123blogblog

123blogblog — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:25:45 +0000

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Converting The Sun’s Heat Into Electricity | Conservation — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:48:49 +0000

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By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:49:49 +0000

JLG, thank you for the insightful post. Modern cars are indeed obscenely inefficient.

It seems we need to think past them as the first and most important part of the solution to our energy consumption problems. If we think of the problem in terms of an entirely different discipline (I’ll use raytracing, but there are many other useful fields you could choose for an analogy), it seems like we have more fertile ground to investigate:

The first step in optimization a raytracing system is to implement trivial rejection. The goal here is to restructure the problem to make culling out work that does not factor into the desired solution. This can incur an upfront cost, but for the long run it enables doing close to zero work for a significant part of a given problem and provides the easiest and biggest payoff in energy savings. For transportation that would be not moving via powered vehicle when not absolutely necessary and replacing those movements with walking, bicycling, rickshaws, etc. Unfortunately we’ve designed most of our population centers to need a car to to perform the most basic of activities. They have essentially become wheelchairs without which would be unable to perform daily tasks required to survive. A better public transportation system would alleviate this (see item #2), but optimizing our population centers for the common use cases would enable us to perform daily required tasks at the highest levels of efficiency and save energy for tasks that absolutely require it.

Then once you have discarded all of the unnecessary work, you batch the remaining work into the biggest buckets possible to run in tight loops of identical and efficient computations. For example you would group all of your ray triangle intersections tests together and then perform these tests in tight SSE loops for intel chips, or formulate the problem so it can be run on a modern GPU which is optimized for executing many identical computations in parallel. The powered transportation equivalents in increasing levels of efficiency are carpools, shuttles, buses, trams, rapid transit systems like the NY subway and finally trains.

After all of that is done, then you profile the system as it is running and focus optimization on the areas that will make the bigget improvement in overall efficiency. Reducing car usage by 90% would provide a bigger overall energy savings than making them incrementally more efficient at tremendous cost. Those resources should instead be focused on solving the first step of the optimization and this approach aligns with the famous quote by Sir Tony Hoare: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

I sure wish I have your gift of self-expression!

Best regards,
Ben