Tar_alcaran
@Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 2 hours ago:
You’re right in that I used yearly numbers and wrongly used them as daily numbers. The stats are from the central statistics bureau, and unfortunately it auto translates poorly www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83989NED
The numbers include use of gas and coal for heating and industry, which often get ignored by people (mostly because it makes us look fucking terrible in renewable power stats).
- The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous.
It is, in fact extremely generous, if you’re using the solar+storage method. But let’s go with this and I’ll demonstrate what it means in practice.
Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
You just made the switch from “energy used” to “electricity generated”. For a country that still does most of its heating with imported gas, that’s a big difference. The real amount of non-fossil energy is about 18%, call it 80% fossil.
- Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
So it’s 50% of 80% of 2600/365, or 2.8 petajoules. So that’s only 10 of those facilities. Not great, not terrible. But that’s not the point. Nor is it important that their demo facility has a height difference twice that of the whole country.
Let’s stick with the “one night of power store is plenty”.
That’s true, but only if you can use solar to power your whole day. In other words, to make do with only 1 night of storage, you need to generate all your power for 24 hours in December during December daylight hours. Assuming it doesn’t snow, one solar panel produces about .15kwh on a december day (working off of 2% of yearly production happening in december, and 300Wattpeak panels), or 540kj.
So you’re right, we only need to build 10 facilities twice the height difference of the entire country, to save one average night of power. Unfortunately in order for that to be true, we would also need to cover about 960.000 hectares in solar panels, which is roughly twice the total built up area in the country, including roads.
And that’s assuming you keep a perfectly level energy use throughout the year, and a perfectly level production during December. Neither of which is true, and generally the worst days for solar production are the worst ones for use as well.
On the bright side, if we can put down two extra cities worth of solar panels for every city, we’ll probably have no issues building 600m tall hills by hand as well.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 12 hours ago:
There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
Well, I don’t know about you, but the nearest hill to me is 200km away, and a whopping 300 meters above me.
Also, scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I ha etl
So let’s store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).
Let’s round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that’s 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitants.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 12 hours ago:
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
What?
For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn’t even build the facilities is “a few decades” even if we free power and infinite money.
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 12 hours ago:
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
- Comment on Anon questions our energy sector 12 hours ago:
Most of those didn’t involve the magic rocks, and most didn’t hurt anyone.
More people die creating the building materials for a powerplant (or a windmills, or a solar panel) than ever during operation. The numbers really don’t matter.
I honestly don’t care what we do, as long as we stop burning coal, oil and gas. The way I see it, every nuclear plant and windmill means we all die a little later.
- Comment on Marine Scientists 18 hours ago:
Although if you’re deep underwater and your gun gets “wet” its probably because whatever kept you from being crushed into a pulp just failed.
- Comment on Another of God's cruel tricks. 23 hours ago:
Not nearly enough blood.
- Comment on spite 1 day ago:
Sounds like a desperate attempt to get more people citing you.
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 2 days ago:
Just plowed my first spaceship into the middle of an asteroid field. Thank the devs for a making a “First trip to other planet” autosave!
- Comment on But yes. 2 days ago:
That’s from building nuclear weapons though, not power
- Comment on But yes. 2 days ago:
Don’t skip the betavoltaic battery, (or the brand-name: Betacel), which turns beta-radiation directly into electricity. They used them in the 70s to power pacemakers, since batteries were kinda shit back then, and implanting Prometium into people is just too epic not to do.
Nowadays we have tritium-decay betavoltaic batteries, on satellites, buried or underwater sensors and probably some too secret military stuff.
- Comment on lab supplies 2 days ago:
$500 for a single glass bottle?
- Comment on Fastest Animal 1 week ago:
But what about the Meriadoc Falcon?
- Comment on lab toys 1 week ago:
Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation.
See, it’s not superstition. Scientists all say so.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2077 released in December 2020. Almost 4 years later, what is your opinion on it? 1 week ago:
I’m a HUGE cyberpunk fan, so I made the mistake of buying it at release. Some of my most impressive issues:
- Trees would draw “on top” or in front of everything else, even when blocked by other objects. So in greener areas, my entire screen was filled with trees.
- The scripted driving sequences would get me stuck in “driving mode” about half the time after the scripted sequence is over.
So, I refunded it, outside of the refund period, but they were nice to me.
When the expansion released, and everything seemed a LOT better, I bought the game again, and I loved it! It’s a pretty OK game, with a great story and absolutely amazing sidequests.
- Comment on Know thy enemy 1 week ago:
Yes, a potential future application, in a system where we basically always have more renewable electricity than we can use could see some great hydrogen-based storage in hydrogen.
But that’s not the world we live in today.
- Comment on Know thy enemy 1 week ago:
Hydrogen is just worse natural gas. They crack natural gas to produce hydrogen, and its fucking terrible. Hydrogen creates about 4 times more CO2 than diesel, simply by how the vast majority of it is manufactured
- Comment on Penguins 🐧 2 weeks ago:
We made the dodo extinct despite it being so gross they Dutch sailors nicknamed it the “walgvogel” or “revulsion bird”.
- Comment on How to improve your Lemmy experience 2 weeks ago:
No I haven’t.
- Comment on Has Dr. Strange ever given a diagnosis mid fight? 3 weeks ago:
A life-ectomy, so to say
- Comment on my boss hates this one simple trick 3 weeks ago:
Ahhh, killing everyone in the room just so Sigma doesn’t get another 200 bucks from you.
- Comment on Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four 3 weeks ago:
Those are for academic books, not novels. And you’d still sort everything within a category alphabetically by author and then by title (usually)
- Comment on Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four 3 weeks ago:
I’ve never seen that outside of videogames
- Comment on Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four 4 weeks ago:
I used to work in a library, and I hate this. We used to have both a “2001: a space Odyssey” and a “two thousand and one: a space oddesey”, sorted based on the spelling.
- Comment on Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four 4 weeks ago:
Caveat, not including multipliers, like “273 billion”
You mean 273e9?
- Comment on Redneck warning system 4 weeks ago:
I have a switch in the wall that the previous owners thought was so important, they chiseled out the brick wall to install it, but I can’t figure out what it does.
But I’m not brave enough to actually remove, so it’s going to be the mystery switch forever
- Comment on In sickness and in health 4 weeks ago:
Wow, this shitpost really hit its mark!
You also forgot my main issue with a LOT of smokers: just throwing their garbage on the ground.
- Comment on Fallout 4 is a great game with big flaws 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, it was immediately obvious there wasn’t a kid anymore. “Person wakes up from cryo and everyone is old now” is a super common trope, and they’re trying to use it as a big reveal. I spent most of the game wondering which badguy he was
- Comment on Magic Mineral 4 weeks ago:
My grandparents old farm had an asbestos carpet under their current carpet. I’m very very happy I was around to spot that, and for having audited a lot of abatement companies.
- Comment on Magic Mineral 4 weeks ago:
Doesn’t burn, really hard to wear out, you can just dig it out of the ground, easy to shape and repair.
Except it kills people, and it hurts the whole time they’re dying.