19 replies to this topic

[Kalimaster]

We all can agree that green energy is a good thing, right?

Solar energy.

Solar plants require large areas of land to work, and even upon a small scale such as a roof top are rather expensive, much more than what the average home owner can afford. To make a solar cell, especially upon the scale that is desired by politicians now would require strip mining upon an unprecedented scale. Not to mention that some toxic waste is created by the creation of a solar cell. How much toxic waste would be created for a massive scale solar energy product across the nation?

The batteries for cars and to store solar power, again more strip mining and then more toxic waste.

Wind farms, bird lovers hate them as they kill birds upon massive scale. Work at one sometime, you will spend each day bagging up dead birds.

Killing the planet to save it, just dose not work.

[Zimm Kotare]

There are better implementations of Solar Cells. Tesla does Solar Roof Tiles which look like and replace roof tiles, it's also possible to make windows act as Solar Cells. Think of every glass skyscraper window capturing the energy the sun throws at it.

As for storage, batteries aren't always great environmentally, but that's only one form of battery. Consider a dam where water is pumped by green electricity into the dam. When you need the energy back, open the dam and feed a hydro plant.

Then you have wave energy, which is just huge.


Now. In terms of "killing the world to save it" arguably the negative effects of green energy are significantly less than those which, as well as requiring environmental harm in their construction (concrete is not a friend to the environment), then continue to damage the environment during their useful life.

Technology and science are a path, lots of dead ends and detours, but each step takes us further away from the bad, the ignorant and the harmful. If we never did anything because it wasn't a perfect solution, we'd never do anything. Like you said at the start of your post: it's a good thing (but to paraphrase/extrapolate) just because it's not perfect yet, doesn't mean it isn't worth moving further down that road. Eventually, if we haven't left it too late, we'll get to where we really need to be.

[Kalimaster]

I have to agree with you on wave energy, and thank you for bringing this one up.

But why waste energy to pump water back into a dam when gravity already can fill one.

In a study in California, 26.5 million pounds of toxic sludge were created during the production of solar cells between 2007 and 2011. To just have enough wind towers for the current households in the U.S., 1/8th to 1/4 of the land mass of the United States would have to be transformed into wind farms, meaning loss of crop and massive deforestation. Then to get the materials, massive strip mines upon an unprecedented scale.

[Maddermax]

Trying to fact check any of this information leads down a black hole of right-wing editorials and anti-green energy think tanks, which makes me pretty sure it's bunk.

I guess there's a lot of manure being stirred up in the US to try and push back against the "New Green Deal"? The politicization of environmental conservation in the US, and the anti-science beliefs it exported to conservative movements around the globe, are an unfortunate blight on the world, and we'll be dealing with the ramifications of it for generations.

Edited by Maddermax, 12 February 2019 - 05:55 PM.

[Zimm Kotare]

I don't doubt that making green tech has its downsides, but suspect they're little different to the cost to the world for your smartphone, laptop, fridge etc.

I'd say, use your own logic on this one: making a fossil fuel power station requires many of the same components and technologies, plus concrete (which is actually pretty awful for the environment). Then, once you've built it, it's pumping out all that pollution.

Even if green tech is costly up front, it's relatively cheap thereafter. Non green is costly at every point. But like I said, it's all a ladder. You can skip some rings sure, but technology is built off the back of what proceeded it. New ideas, revolutions in tech, they take time. Are we to wait and do nothing? Or take each step we can to be better, knowing that each brings us closer.

Plus, as Maddermax stated, you've got to super careful about what facts and figures you internalise.

As for the dam pump. It's just an example, if youve made power but don't want to store it with a battery, that's one way of storing the energy.

[LordNothing]

just because humans commit mass suicide by climate change does not mean the world will end.

one of my hobbies is keeping tabs on fusion research. not because i agree with the greenie speech that seems to start out every article, video, and documentary on the subject. all they are doing is alienating would be right wing investors who want murica to have polywell equipped naval vessels bristling with railguns, thus making it easier to steal everyone's oil. and if that works we can use the spinoff fusion torch drives to stripmine other planets. we will probably still irreversibly destroy the planets biosphere, but at least we will have the energy budget to afford to make synthetic air/food/desalinate water/etc.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 February 2019 - 08:19 AM.

[The Basilisk]

Kali you are asking the same toxic, and plz forgive me, stupidly wrong questions all alternative energy and alternative technology sceptics are asking.

You are asking how much waste is produced at the MOMENT by starting up the usage of alternative energy forms when the real question is how much effin deadly toxic and devestatingly destructive waste you can save and recover when stoping using the BS we are using at the moment.

That current alternative energy technologys are far from perfect is a point nobody does argue about...expecialy current non cumbustion fuel power storage technologys.

But always remember who we have to thank for that we....after hundrets of years...are still using basic thermodynamic energy conversion techniques when electrodynamic or electromagnetic technologys should be advanced far further.

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

We can always go nuclear and top it of with the windy, solar power.
But honestly instead of preventive measures that doesn't have a big impact anyway nor that the big polluting countries in the world will go green anytime soon, it would be better to invest in measures that will make it easier to adept to the changes.
Heck if the computer mojo predictions are fake at least you have the insurance to catch the blow.

[Zimm Kotare]

That is all.

Edited by Zimm Kotare, 14 February 2019 - 08:05 AM.

[LordNothing]

The Basilisk, on 13 February 2019 - 10:37 AM, said:

Kali you are asking the same toxic, and plz forgive me, stupidly wrong questions all alternative energy and alternative technology sceptics are asking.

You are asking how much waste is produced at the MOMENT by starting up the usage of alternative energy forms when the real question is how much effin deadly toxic and devestatingly destructive waste you can save and recover when stoping using the BS we are using at the moment.

That current alternative energy technologys are far from perfect is a point nobody does argue about...expecialy current non cumbustion fuel power storage technologys.

But always remember who we have to thank for that we....after hundrets of years...are still using basic thermodynamic energy conversion techniques when electrodynamic or electromagnetic technologys should be advanced far further.

like internal combustion engines have a horrible 25% efficiency. and the typical for solar is about 22.5%, so its really not a huge difference, its just the latter isnt dumping tons of carbon in the air when you operate it. and i cant imagine that manufacturing internal combustion engines being any cleaner than producing solar panels. forging and machining is very energy intensive and puts a lot of carbon in the air.

you could probably get another 10-15% from burning fuels in a power plant by recovering waste heat, and you can also better treat or sequester exhaust products. you dont have to carry a big heavy engine block and transmission anymore. and while batteries are currently pretty heavy, next gen batteries will bring a huge increase in energy density. perhaps replacing the ac motor+transaxle you find in the tesla with bldc hub motors and use more composites in the chassis you could get the overall weight of the vehicles down.

less mass requires less torque to move about meaning less energy storage, less weight in batteries, smaller lighter motors and a general decline in the amount of wattage you need to go anywhere. from an engineering standpoint if what you loose in transmission, conversion, charging, storage, conversion again (you can get away from this with bldc motors), and conversion to torque is more than what you saved at the power plant, its inferior. it sounds like a lot of those systems are in the > 95% efficiency range so you don't loose as much as you would think.

you also have to consider the infrastructure costs for delivering fuel/power. sending trucks to 100 different gas stations is probably not as efficient as sending a train to a power plant. and compared to putting power down the line its huge. investing in electric transmission infrastructure will certainly come in handy if we implement next gen fission plants, or even fusion plants when those come online sometime in the next 100 or so years.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 February 2019 - 12:21 PM.

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

Zimm Kotare, on 14 February 2019 - 08:03 AM, said:

That is all.

Energy independence, not at all, did you know that burning wood and other biomass is considered 'green'?
Heck here in the Netherlands we let Canadians cut down their forests and we import it so it can end up being burned and spouted in the air.
Probably more countries do something similar so bye rainforests.

Welp nuclear power is sustainable and heck if fusion reactors become a thing we could replace the nuclear power plants.

Green jobs or more like more government depended jobs?

Cities in the Netherlands are pwetty livable already and our water is clean too, don't have a clue about air but it's better then Murican, chinese, Indian cities.

And of course our children are already quite healthy.

And even, most countries will not turn green definitely not the big polluters in the world so in the end a small bunch of countries may be serious about going green but haven't invested in measures to lighten the impact of the climate changing so in the end true or not true your still f*cked.

[LordNothing]

thing about some of these forested locations is that trees like to pop up like weeds. i got hired to do some yard work and was told to ignore the dandelions and pull the pine saplings. did it again the following year and sure enough it was the same deal. sure beats removing a stump a few years later, that job is not fun. and it wasnt a handfull, i needed a wheelbarrow before i was done, and this was a small yard. pretty sure the canadians practice good forestry habbits. i live in a rainforest and thanks to the greenies nobody can use those resources and they would renew themselves at an extremely rapid rate removing carbon from the atmosphere. trees can grow faster than you can cut them down if you dont clearcut.

i think the problem is a lot of greenies are city dwellers and dont know how things actually work in the sticks.

Edited by LordNothing, 15 February 2019 - 09:24 PM.

[Kalimaster]

I would like to say that I have not been in contract with any right wing groups or anti green people. I just checked out a few facts, as every coin has two sides.

The country has hit a 22 trillion dollar debt. Add a couple more zero's to that, and that will be the deficit when green energy is put into place. Basic math, simple, effective.

Now there is one thing also. The planets orbit is also not stable. Some drift in and out from the distance to the sun. That means hotter and colder temps. Not to mention volcanic action. During the age of the big lizards, the climate was stable for millions of years, and was warmer. Could the earth have a natural tropical climate? And it is trying to return to it?

[LordNothing]

i live in alaska and im not the only one here sick and tired of having the federal government tell us what we can do with our very abundant natural resources. drilling in anwar is the big one. if you go to anwar what you will find is a lot of tundra, so the best way to drill there is to build one platform and do horizontal drilling, otherwise the logistics of supporting the operation wouldnt make any sense. they make it sound like we want to nuke the whole area or turn it into a massive industrial site. i dont think one little installation is going to piss off the caribou too much.

if the greenies really want to save the planet they would invest in fusion reserch. and not the big money projects like iter. i mean it will probibly work, but the post demo production plant is not going to make much sense economically. the developing world would never be able to afford them. that old joke about fusion always being 20 years away, thats just how long it takes to build a bigger tokamak. we have put way to many eggs in that basket, and the failed nif project that will never work do to the inefficiency of lasers (scientific breakeven is not engineering breakeven). tokamaks only fuse cash into broken dreams.

im a big supporter of polywell. their reactor be so small compared to the iter/demo monstrosity. you could put it in a cargo container (you could also fit it into an atlas), take it to a traditional coal fire plant, and hook it up to the existing generator loop and boom cheap power. they are also making heavy use of simulations to test various parameters to find the best configuration for their machine, which is a lot faster than building a new machine every time you need to test something. its no wonder emcc is pushing for commercial implementation by 2030. and they aint the only ones either. lm's machine is somewhat interesting (namely that its not a damn tokomak) and many others, and all with budgets a couple orders of magnitude less than whats already been spent on iter.

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

Kalimaster, on 16 February 2019 - 08:34 AM, said:

I would like to say that I have not been in contract with any right wing groups or anti green people. I just checked out a few facts, as every coin has two sides.

I mostly just watched the greeny take on climate on TV and then the righty take on youtube.
Did that so much I can't handle it anymore both of these groups are so freaking annoying.

[Zimm Kotare]

How about this: sides, in anything, are pretty godamned idiotic. Politics, they undermine democracy, environment, they polarise what should be a simple matter of science and responsibility. Sports... Well. They're fine. Until idiots do idiot things.

Anyway. What I'm getting at is this: let's put asside the notion of sides and look at basics:

We currently have but one home among the stars. We may, one day have more, but as any good mechanic or medical professional will tell you: better to maintain/take care of what you have, than try and replace it when it's failing.

Now, maybe you believe climate change is bull, or that it's natural as is, or, maybe you feel an urge to do everything to fight it.

Whatever your position, more trees look better than concrete, less cars smell better than gridlock, and harnessing freely available wind and solar energy do not eject particulates into the atmosphere, once running.

But more than any of that, one day you may become a parent. Maybe you already are. What do you want to leave behind? What sort of world do you want your kids to enjoy?

Worst case scenario, by trying for green (without joining any coalition), you might make the world better. Or at least, not worse.

[kf envy]

seeing how the goldilocks zone is moving away from Sol an the fact that the earth is on the tail end of the goldilocks zone no level of going green is going to fix anything to fix climate change. but it is to bad under an un resolution so called official climate science are not allowed to use any data about Sol effect on earth is to be used in any of there prediction models.

[LordNothing]

Alexandra Hekmatyar, on 16 February 2019 - 07:41 PM, said:

I mostly just watched the greeny take on climate on TV and then the righty take on youtube.
Did that so much I can't handle it anymore both of these groups are so freaking annoying.

both sides are equally nuts. yet every election we are told we have to pick one of them otherwise were wating out vote, and people fall for it every damn time. i always vote third party candidates, even if i dont like them. send a message to both sides that they need ti check themselves into the funny farm.

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

kf envy, on 17 February 2019 - 10:33 AM, said:

seeing how the goldilocks zone is moving away from Sol an the fact that the earth is on the tail end of the goldilocks zone no level of going green is going to fix anything to fix climate change. but it is to bad under an un resolution so called official climate science are not allowed to use any data about Sol effect on earth is to be used in any of there prediction models.

And this is why I keep saying that it might be better to invest in the means to handle the changes of the climate instead of putting solar panels and wind turbines everywhere.

LordNothing, on 17 February 2019 - 10:58 AM, said:

both sides are equally nuts. yet every election we are told we have to pick one of them otherwise were wating out vote, and people fall for it every damn time. i always vote third party candidates, even if i dont like them. send a message to both sides that they need ti check themselves into the funny farm.

We don't have that problem here with a 2 party system gladly, plenty of choice parliament here got around 13 parties in it.
Honestly I did stop voting myself for 5 years but a new party came last year so I'm giving them a chance for 2 terms to see what they can do if they get bigger.

[Lily from animove]

remember when all that CO2 was part of the lifecycle? No, thats fine because it was a long time ago. CO2 isn't that bad, the climate change isn't that bad, it's just a change and lazy status quo people will have issues with it.

What IS bad iss till that we consume more ressources than are renewable, because the day will come when these are gone, and gone will be when mostlikely wars for it start (pretty much default behavior of mankind when stuff gets roo rare). Or some rich societies let just millions of others die off.

The real problem of solar cells is the efficient use. It makes no sense to put them on cars at all, because whats the use? The tiny charge the car may get? It's useless whenever the car parks in a non sunny place. It is sueless when the car is charged as the powergeneration is lost.

I do believe for a global scale solution we might have to utilise Hydrogen paired with wind and solar power. remember that weird place of sand, with muc sand and more sand? pretty lots of energy to get there, and all we need is to make soem feraking huge channel there that brings in water form the anyways rising ocean. This we can at any time and full scale of the cells and wind generators use to generate hydrogen. And hydrogen is easily transported anywhere to be consumed. Best part about it is, it also generates some water which isn't hard to get rid of. So in a proper future we might have local hydrogen powerstations to support cities with power in shich cars utilise power and anythign else. But the hydrogen is produced in global regions where solar cells can be utilised the most time at the highest efficiency. maybe, depending on the safety we can apply, we could even transport the hydrogen via pipelines.

Also, everyone on that, oh no, plastcic in the oceans thing, and lets not produce stuff of plastic blah blah. Yeha how does it get there? Because people are idiots not using trashbins usually in well devloped countires this stuff goes to recycling or gets burnt and never reaches the ocean unless someone throws a bottle into a river. But lets go with that diea of "no plastic anymore", The firts question si what else? paper? do people even imagine how many plant thingies we would need to grow to substitute that? Every ressource is renewable, even oil the true matter is how much/time we have available for it, oil is pretty bad, trees are much better, but surely not infinite/specific timeframe. So one of the big issues is single use packaging.

The biggets current issues is, we are already too many people on this planet to regeneratively live of it's ressources. So going green would mean reducing our numbers, but capitalism is a system of growth so capitalism will never lead to such a system as it is en expansive system.

Edited by Lily from animove, 04 March 2019 - 01:50 PM.