Another thing to keep in mind with solar is that so far we have been optimizing primarily for cost, rather than land use. This means installing panels at a high angle, far apart from each other to minimize shading and maximize energy captured per panel. If land is ever the limiting factor we can tilt solar panels at a shallower angle to reduce shading problems or just accept a certain amount of shading in the morning or evening. This could reduce land use by a factor of 5 or more.
Reverse osmosis desalination does have some capital and operational costs, though, but you're not far off. 5 billion m^3 or 4 million acre-feet would still only be about 2.5 B per year. The problem is that if you fill up the Colorado River the farmers that own the water rights will just drain it down again because they don't pay based on the quantity they use. Or if they do pay based on quantity the price is much lower than the cost of desalination. Desalinating large quantities of water without fixing the water rights situation would be like minting pennies out of gold.
What I mean is that a solar panel of any given size will produce electricity that can be used to desalinate an order of magnitude more water than a device like this of the same size. The device in this article desalinated 5.8 liters per square meter per hour in full sun, which means this 10x10cm device actually desalinated 58ml of water in an hour. A 10x10cm solar panel would produce enough electricity in an hour in full sun to desalinate approximately 600ml of water using reverse osmosis. A solar panel that was 1 square meter would generate enough electricity to desalinate about 60 liters of water in an hour in full sun.
This is incorrect. The statistic of 5.8 liters per hour is actually liters per hour per square meter. A 10x10cm panel would produce 58ml per hour in full sun. If you instead put a solar panel with 20% efficiency and used the electricity for reverse osmosis you would produce about an order of magnitude more water per square meter. This may have lower capital or operational costs, though, and it is certainly more decentralized, so it could be useful in some situations.
According to this source [1] flights departing GVA generated 1.3 million tons of CO2 in 2018. According to this source [2], jet fuel generates 3.16 kg CO2 per kg of fuel. Multiplied by approximate fuel density and we get 2.57 kg CO2 per liter. We can therefore estimate that GVA consumes approximately 500 million (1.3 billion kg CO2/ 2.57 kg CO2 per liter) liters of fuel per year. Jet fuel contains about 35 MJ of energy per liter according to [3] so that's about 17.5 PJ. If the process to convert electricity to jet fuel is 50% efficient, that's 35 PJ. That is equivalent to a 1.1GW reactor running at 100% capacity. At the global average capacity factor of 80%, that's about 1.4GW required. Half a dozen is probably a pretty large overestimate. Alternatively, this would require around 6GW of solar, although 6GW of solar is probably quite a bit cheaper than 1.1 GW of nuclear power.
The main problem is that -- especially with laser fusion-- you are not inputting 1 unit of electricity and getting out 1.2 units of high grade heat. You are inputting 100 units of electricity, most of which is lost as low grade heat through wires, cooling devices, etc to power a laser that outputs 1 unit of photons. The fusion adds a bit of energy, but not enough to surpass the 100 units you put in. I don't know the exact efficiency of these lasers, so 100x may be wrong, but I think I'm in the right order of magnitude.
“The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis,” says Lambert. “These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”
Leggett adds,: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that. The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”
The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.
They are not necessarily lying, but they are clearly an outlier. My spending is maybe a few percent higher and prices for some of the things I buy are even down recently. Everyone has a different experience, which is why we have aggregate statistics to quantify what the overall effect is.
Price levels actually did drop compared to June. If anything I bet people are more likely to interpret this incorrectly by believing that prices are still rising compared to last month, just at a lower rate. They are not, it's just that with a n indicator that compares current price levels to price levels a year ago it takes a while for the rate to come down, even if prices stay still or slightly decrease.
I think that chart shows that things are going back to normal. The reason weekly earnings were at an all time high in q2 of 2020 is because the low wage earners all got laid off because of the pandemic. Now that things are going back to normal, the low wage earners are going back to work at approximately the same real wage (although nominally it's probably a bit higher because of inflation).
I have never understood that sentiment. If you define long term energy storage as being able to discharge at max power for a day or a week you are penalizing superior storage technologies for no reason. Let's say that you have two technologies that have the same cost per KWh, the same round-trip efficiencies, etc. Now let's assume one of them has a maximum discharge rate of C/100 so that at maximum power it lasts for 100 hours. Let's assume the other technology has a maximum discharge rate of 1C, so at maximum power it lasts for 1 hour. For the same price, you could have either a system that only works for long term storage or a system that would be considered "short term" storage even though it has the same capacity and the same price as the long term option. There may be some exceptions, but generally whenever you have short term storage you automatically have the option of long term storage as well by just discharging at a lower rate.
I see so many people talk about the Boots theory, and while I don't disagree, there's another side to the story. What if you buy a really nice pair of boots that will last a lifetime and then a couple years later you move to a beach town where you wear sandals all day? Or what if you get paralyzed and have no need for durable shoes? The point is that life is unpredictable and both your circumstances and preferences can change quickly. Also, to extend the analogy further, imagine you have a dog that decides that your boots are a good chew toy. A dog can tear a hole in a pair of $50 boots almost as easily as a pair of $10 boots. I t doesn't matter if the boots last a lifetime of normal use if they get destroyed in six months by an abnormal event.
According to the source, "Current man-made and natural ISA emissions total over 100,000 tonnes and have many beneficial climate effects". They are not advocating for doing anything particularly new, just scaling up those (partially natural) emissions by a factor of 2. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Forest fires are natural, but we would need to study very carefully before we attempted to double the amount of forest fires by artificial means.
In my opinion, though, it would take some pretty strong evidence that this would be actively harmful to dissuade me from wanting to run large scale experiments. Shoot, if leaded gasoline had the potential to slow down climate change it might even be worth bringing it back, considering the damage that climate change has already begun to cause and is projected to cause.
A single patient may receive multiple prescriptions per year, so the number of patients will be lower than the number of prescriptions. According to this source the number of patients taking metformin is 17 million.
According to this source[1], the average student loan debt for a new 4-year graduate in 2020 is $28,400. Of course, this is highly variable depending on the student, but $150-200k is not typical for a 4-year degree.
That was my thought at first as well, but thinking about it more, if abusers find out that genetic testing is routinely happening they will just not allow the victim to receive medical treatment at all, which would be worse for the victim than the status quo. Worst case scenario they would get rid of the evidence completely, either by forced back-alley abortion or murder.
I think the person you are replying to is suggesting using PV panels to heat a thermal mass (using resistive heating or possibly a DC heat pump) to avoid the expense of an inverter and other electronics necessary to connect to the grid. This is actually a pretty good idea now that PV panels are a much smaller percentage of the total cost of solar nowadays.
Clostridium botulinum is anaerobic, and live in soil, so living humans are not a particularly good host. Dead humans could be, though, so natural selection would favor strains that efficiently returned themselves and their descendants back to the soil.
The only risk is losing out on greater gains from investing in a higher yield asset. Keep in mind that the yield on these will probably drop in 6 months, since the dividend is adjusted semiannually. If inflation keeps going the dividend will stay high, but other assets will also appreciate due to inflation.
It may have been a judge that appointed the firm, but it's kind of suspicious that he would appoint a firm that had previously represented Chevron to represent the US Government. That seems like a pretty big conflict of interest.
Maybe the researchers meant 230 Kwh above the reaction energy of pure carbon and oxygen. That makes the math check out, since 2,485/(2485+230)=91.5%, which could be rounded up to 92%. It would also square up with the estimated costs of $100/ton, since industrial electricity prices can go as low as 0.03 to 0.04 USD.
I wish I could read the source to verify, but unfortunately it's behind an academic publisher paywall.
Currently it's actually the opposite in some ways. Vehicles with a GVWR of at least 6000 lbs (2700kg) that are used for business can be deducted 100% in the first year, no matter what the business use is. This leads to a lot of white collar consultants buying giant luxury trucks or SUVs to drive around town meeting clients rather than luxury sedans.
Their system is designed to easily start and stop to take advantage of wholesale wind and solar electricity rates, which are more like $0.02/kWh during certain parts of the day and times of the year. They sacrifice uptime for even cheaper electricity. If their capital costs and fixed opex are low enough this is a good strategy.
Monopolies are often created through innovation, either through lowering costs or increasing quality above competitors. Carnegie Steel, for example, used the Bessemer process to drastically lower the cost of steel and thus drive competitors out of business. Google used innovation to make searches much better and faster.
There are certainly other ways to create a monopoly, such as regulatory capture, illegal activities, and price dumping, but natural monopolies due to superior levels of innovation do exist. The reason we generally want to avoid monopolies isn't because of the way they are created, it's because of the damage they can cause after they are firmly established.
To be fair, cow's milk is also about 90% water. You're right, though, that the ingredient cost using commodity oats and rapeseed oil should only be about 4-5 cents per liter. The price of cow's milk, on the other hand, is a lot closer to the price of the inputs (corn, alfalfa, grazing land, etc.) which are about 16 cents per liter.
I'm hopeful that eventually the price of oat milk will approach the cost of its inputs, but it might take a while.
There's no environment in space, so displacing heavy industry on Earth (which does have an environment) with industry in space would theoretically be a good thing. This depends on exactly where in space you do this, though, and the number of rocket launches on Earth required to support heavy industry in space could have a significant impact on the environment.
Your estimate is off by an order of magnitude. An 18650 cell with 11 watt hours of capacity would have about 0.9 grams of lithium. A kg of lithium could create around 12 KWh of batteries, which would store 12,000 KWh based on 1,000 cycles.
I don't know for sure, but based on current lithium prices I highly doubt that current lithium extraction processes use less than 50 KWh per kg. That's a really small amount of energy for such a useful material.