strainer

>If we export more green energy than we import coal energy then we can pretend that that the coal did not actually get released into the air as pollution.

That exchange is plainly not carbon neutral. Exporting green energy does usually contribute to reducing fossil fuel usage at destination - that cant reasonably be denied. It sounds like you believe the figures are being officially "double counted". But I'm quite doubtful that international agreements really allow for such plain mis-accounting , the idea more likely comes from the kind of confused climate skeptic literature, which imagines that climate science and whole green energy movement is a scam.

> We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.

That is plainly carbon neutral. If you plant and grow trees sustainably, cut them down and burn them, it is absolutely carbon neutral. It can even be carbon negative as rootmass is left to build soil, and benefit wildlife too - depends on how intelligently its done.

If you phrase your statement more succinctly its easier to see the plain sense in it:

> We plant trees ... and then we ... turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral.

In a bit more detail:

  Grow trees and turn them into fuel - that's carbon negative. 
  Burn the fuel - that's carbon positive. 
  Do both together - that's carbon neutral.

Perfectly elementary really \"/

The claims that nuclear has been "misregulated into a pulp" and that new designs can be economically developed which are much better than 20 and 30 year old designs, are also evidence free opinions.

> That’s a cudgel to ignore the fact that being anti-nuclear means being pro-fossil fuels.

I dont think so. We may have a common competitor yet also be in competition. Solar and wind have very complimentary output patterns (combining two variable sources produces a less variable source even without the modest degree of anti correlation which is present between wind and solar). Nuclears output pattern really begs to be constant, it never wants to ramp down because there is almost no savings, whereas solar and wind can clash but also leave each other demand windows.

Heh, well maybe - adopt an Elon Musk development strategy : "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." it more than works for his projects, but if you're competing for policy support and you happen to get your 20 year gusts this year it looks really bad, even if a low percentage of turbines actually caught them from a bad direction and happen to need new blades.

Also with offshore windfarms, the big extra expense is in installing the towers and cabling. They are getting significant subsidy to be built for 15 year power purchase contracts, but once those towers and cables are built the farm can remain very valuable at the end of the contract, if refurbishment is required it could be remarkably cheap especially with a fleet of specialized ships to it carry out, some of which are already at work putting them up.

> > and larger blades raise cut in speeds > That is not necessarily true, it depends on the allowed degree of pitch ...

I think you are correcting a different matter here. Blade diameter in practice dominates the amount of power a which turbine can be designed to generate at lower windspeeds, aerodynamic design choices have to work with whatever diameter is provided. Increasing diameter involves significant expense and the entire reason it is payed is to raise cut in / raise generation at lower speeds / increase capacity factor.

> Suffice to say that wind power is generally installed for 20-30 year life-span

Not in recent years. 15 year contracts for windfarms are the current norm. I've read this often while following industry news and it can be observed from querying the different times [1]

> after that they become un-economical to operate both due to increased maintenance costs

Its not known to be the case that they'll become uneconomical. It may just be more economical to upgrade them, there is uncertainty involved which is the manufacturers bet.

Its a great commercial advantage of wind farms (and solar) that they can be relatively quickly online and make a profit on investment in 15 years rather than seeking 30 or 40 or 50 year supply contracts as some competing technologies do because of higher construction costs.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=industry+contract+for+wind+15+year

I don't believe its a term in general use in the industry (of large wind turbines). Since "survivable" means "might survive" - that's not a very useful engineering target. Wind turbines have to be rated to reliably withstand specific gust speeds, so talk of certain speeds being "survivable" should be non-technical.

Afaik modern turbines are specified to reliably withstand an "extreme 50 year gust" estimated by their locales "Wind Class" [1] Some headroom is likely as with all large constuctions, building, bridges.. The matter of what stronger gust speeds might be survivable by the majority of installations is not specified.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61400

> Spacing of machines is a pretty tricky balance and if the wind patterns start changing in unpredictable ways that will be a very hard thing to design for.

It sounds like you do have confident experience of modern wind farm specification and design.

I read that wind turbines are commonly built now with relatively over sized blades because after decades of development designers have greater confidence in their gust survivability and control mechanisms, and larger blades raise cut in speeds making better use of the most expensive part - the generator.

With your experience in these matters, can you say what percentage of modern wind turbine installations have been seriously damaged by being under specified to unpredictable wind conditions ? And very roughly what level of increased damage we might be talking about here from potential change in wind patterns.

> but society needs wind to be significantly overprovisioned to avoid burning carbon.

Should be "...overprovisioned in order to completely avoid burning any carbon relying on wind power alone"

> Storage is really hard. We don't know how to meaningfully do it yet.

This is plainly misunderstood. Storage can already be bought, currently costs between 165 and 305 $/MWh [1]. And the price reliably drops as there is more demand and development in it. There is no huge demand for storage yet. Long term storage can actually take the form of carbon neutral fuels and use existing thermelectric plants to generate when required. No "maybe" about that, its existing commercial tech.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/

Studies are finding waste heat from thermo-electric plants may not be insignificant. In this study [1] "energy consumption" is a shorthand for all human heat emissions from combustion engines, industrial processes and thermo-electric plant generation / consumption, etc. A large portion of human heat release can be attributed to thermo-electric generation. Electricity consumption accounts for 18% of energy use, with generation around 30% efficient that means coal,gas and oil power stations account for somewhere around half of global fossil fuel burn. [2]

From: Nature - A new global gridded anthropogenic heat flux dataset with high spatial resolution and long-term time series (2019) [1]

> For example, Zhang et al.5 found that energy consumption could lead to increases in winter and autumn temperatures of up to 1 °C in the mid- and high latitudes across North America and Eurasia. Ichinose et al.1 found that the maximum anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in central Tokyo, Japan, was as high as 1,590 W/m2 in winter, resulting in warming to a maximum of 2.5 °C. Moreover, anthropogenic heat can affect wind speed because it reduces the stability of the boundary layer and enhances vertical mixing. In view of the effects of anthropogenic heat on climate at local and continental scales and the increasing consumption of energy worldwide, the potential significance of anthropogenic heat as it relates to global climate change over a long-term period should be further studied using techniques such as global climate models.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...

This school equates simulation with being, so that if consciousness is simulate-able then it exists as consciousness. The interpretation of simulations is as far as we can tell in the mind of a beholder, but simulation hypothesis has come to accept that anything which can compute, can create realities on equal footing with the common reality which our consciousness seems to help connect us to.

On one hand it is a wonderful outlook where computation and imagination creates universes as real as our universe feels to us (or rather as real as each creatures individually experienced universe seems to them). On the other hand, it does concern me that our own and fellow creatures experiences are perceived by this school as formally attributable to controllable processes, distinguished in "reality" only by beholders individuated interpretations, be they someone, a convincing replication of someone, or anything really which any individual decides to treat as conscious or not.

Ah so effectively none of the Hev photons reach the ground. I see the papers include the "Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes" data. I wouldn't have expected imaging to be practical because cherenkov is kind of scattering, but they seem to be able to triangulate individual collisions. Thanks for the correction.

Its not really wrong. The atmosphere absorbed most of it but some made it through because there was so much of it. The atmosphere happens to absorb most of the high energy wavelengths involved, it also absorbs many low energy wavelengths. There are 'windows' of wavelengths which get to pass through to different degrees. The details are intricately grasped by quantum electrodynamics, but don't really lend themselves to accessible wording.

Some captured CO2 might be used with cheap electricity to make carbon neutral fuel - which is of course a form of stored energy itself. A pilot project in Germany is doing this[1]:

> The green hydrogen will be combined with carbon dioxide captured from the cement plant to produce synthetic methanol, which would then be refined into carbon-neutral synthetic kerosene (ie, aviation fuel), for use at the nearby Hamburg airport. The airport is hoping that 5% of all fuel used there will be carbon-neutral by 2025.

[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/offshore-wind-to-pow...

Relevant light scattering occurs in the atmosphere between the satellite and the telescope. It also occurs between every other light source, across the universe, and the telescope. Thats why the satellites contribution to light scattering is tiny. Even in the morning where one might catch the sun - the sky is already lightened.

Hard or soft optical adaptations to remove atmospheric distortions are far more demanding than processing required to remove low magnitude satellite trails, which is already developed and required on occasion.

Im broadly aware of a range of techniques which can be involved in adaptive optics. The quality of debate seems very low to me and not worth laboring words on when people are imagining low power satellite trails represent a big challenge to astronomical image clarity.

I have not seen any information that light from these satellites could scatter and brighten the night sky a significant amount. This article just shows their paths are visible on a sensitive image, but the paths themselves amount to tiny fraction of the image. There is no claim they added significantly to the overall exposure. With their being bright planets and stars already present in the sky, I don't expect they could.

Adaptive optics should be able to adapt to any number of satellites traveling, quite predictably and diminutively through their frame of capture.

Sounds promising but I personally need more info or at least certification on new products safety characteristics. I wont go into an alarmist list, but some materials "based on silicone" are problematic and some are flat out hazardous. Probably this one is not, but more info is due.

The only well studied and clinically developed diet for people with serious irritable bowel diseases, known as FODMAP[1] focuses exclusively on minimizing specific types of sugar and carbohydrates. For a severely compromised digestive system, table sugar is likely recommended over dates as a sweetener because they are likely to contain 'free fructose' which may be fine or even better for normal digestive systems since it has lower glycemic index than glucose, but it is found to be complicating for people with serious digestion problems. This goes to show dietary sugar is not metabolically simple or equivalent as commonly thought.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5952847/

> solar panels don't last "a few years more" [than turbines]

This is not a point against solar, but the "lifetime" of wind turbine installations is misrepresented in the article. It states "the life expectancy of a wind turbine may be less than 15 years." and it links one 7 year old article to support that idea, which is known to be false except in the sly sense that for sure a windturbine may need repairs at any time.

Modern windfarms are commonly financed to be built and make a profit from investment by selling electricity for 15 years. After that contract is up, however much they require new blades and/or refurbished or modernized generators - extending their life is due to be much cheaper than putting entirely new ones in their foundations. The relatively short supply contracts are very desirable to investors, not a sign of unreliability.[1]

[1] https://www.intechopen.com/books/stability-control-and-relia...

If nuclear plants really do generate at about 2 cents per kWh, how come the most established and respected power industry pricing analysis finds that it costs over six times that - between 12 cents and 19 cents per kWh ?[1]

Where does the 2 cents figure come from? - A website commissioned explicitly to promote nuclear power industry. Have some discernment, please.

[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Totally solvable. We should have cracked down on leaks already, and have satellites coming on line to do so.

Here is a 30MW project in Germany, aiming for 700MW in 2030 to make hydrogen > methane > kerosene from renewable surplus electric and captured CO2 [1]

This articles language is almost absurd. As though economic power-to-fuel technology is some futuristic dream - its treated more mysteriously than fusion research and deep AI.

> One beacon of hope is the idea that we could use renewable electricity to split water to produce energy-rich hydrogen, which could then be stored and used in fuel cells.

The storage technology which 100% renewable power requires is already available, and economic - there just hasn't been much value in storage yet, since there hasn't been much surplus. All research discoveries and "strides" are showing that its going to get very cheap - pretty much as soon as there is policy to build it, or simply enough wind turbines and solar to employ it.

[1] https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/1870430/offshore-win...

Thanks. Tantalizingly, some plain efficiency measurements seem to be contained in articles supplementary material.

> "Online O2 detection also confirmed quantitative OER Faradaic efficiency with and without the presence of a magnetic field (Supplementary Fig. 17)."

But it looks to me like this effect is demonstrated as really significant already, for all the catalysts bar one. Application of it cant be far away. A bit like sticking a magnet on an engine block and getting loads more horsepower !

I think an efficiency improvement is also perhaps implied. They say a strong magnetic field doubles the current flow with no change in input voltage. Basically with V=IR and Power = I* I* R ,if the current has increased without change in voltage then the resistance has gone down.

In a perfectly efficient process all of the resistance would owe to H2O splitting, but we know that's not the case - about half the resistance energy was creating waste heat.

If its like an LEDs resistance which has a voltage drop component which produces light and a linear ohmic resistance which produces waste heat. This would be like getting twice the current (and light) across an LED from the same voltage.

Either the voltage drop has been reduced, or the ohmic resistance is reduced. Either way, we can lower the voltage and produce the same amount of light that was possible without the magnetic hack. Same current with less voltage is less power, for same amount of light or H2O split.

Thanks for the info on the paper - I haven't read it, just seen a number of reports of different approaches to space shielding, that seem to establish its a physical/industrialy modest possibility (for a global project). It would be very early stages for the details of any project, I expect a well funded competition for competing designs and to be surprised and educated by actual designs. It just seems the prelimary designs already discussed establish its physically not unrealistic if launch capability can be sorted. 20 years ago ideas of huge wind turbines planted at sea and even floating were considered by most to be impractical or unproven, but the basic facts supported their possibility as major power sources - the density of air, the intensity of wind, the existence of resilient ocean hardware like oil rigs, the existence of very large aircraft wings. There was no end of unresolved details that could be counted to dissuade, but the broad limits were already visible and attractive. Rather than a Manhattan project to race to those limits, industry has grown slowly to approach them with not that much special funding to help.

The control coordination of trillions of L1 satelites doesnt strike me as a huge challenge to people already working in similar fields. I do some work on simulations and read about related technics. Control units just get individual and group call codes that they can respond to, in timed windows if helpful. A number of manager satellites beam signals to sectors and listen to responses. They could likely often pinpoint individual transmissions themselves with modern radar style tech, although trillion is a large number, sheilds will rarely eclipse one and other because they would be very dispersed and relatively small. They dont have to relay all messages individually through neighbours but perhaps could. The options for implementation are extensive but I believe familiar to network designers. They don't really have AI processing to do, its just a matter of maybe reporting their neighbors numbers so position can be determined and relayed so they know where to 'light-sail' and can receive schedules for when to let light past - if that becomes necessary or is deemed advantageous. Im just rambling but there are loads of possibilities for how to organize them. As a multi-node processor it would be rather slow because of the average latency between nodes being many kilometers, rather than millimeters to meters in a supercomputing cluster.

Good point about solar just transferring the energy. Im not sure how practical it is to brighten so many constructed surfaces like pavements and roads it makes a big impact and is tolerable to live with. An estimate that only 2.7% of the worlds land is urbanised, and 2/3rds being ocean... increasing its albedo significantly could be difficult. An advantage of space shading is it doesn't rotate out of play and can be concentrated a bit away from the edges of the globe where light is a bit more likely to reflect away.

Agreed it would be difficult and heavy to add minature gyroscopic and solar cell, comms and control unit to the 16 trillion disks proposal, since they are just 60cms wide. That plan seems basically like throwing confetti into L1, where it might get drifted away by solar ejections, out of stable orbit, in matter of years.

Since each of those disks is 1 gram and about 0.25 square meters, that scheme involves total of 4 trillion square meter shades orientated randomly. If shades are squares for simplicity and 8 meters in diameter, so 64 meters square and similar material would be 256 grams, add some stiffening and a control unit for say an extra 150 grams. Maybe a clever unfolding feature like an insects wing. Its a bit more material to launch but probably less than double at some control/shade ratio, and the tracking shades will block light about 30% more effectively than randomly orientated ones. Works out around 50 billion of the 400gram 8 meter wide shades with mini solar-comms-gyro units to produce. So I'm still overconfident in the practically of this kind of scheme, especially since cost to space has been minaturised since they previously had expert attention.

I have to admit its just one of those hunches Im hawking of late, cheers for following :)

When solar arrays are located over water they do alot of cooling because without them water reflects very little. Deserts already reflect a great deal of sunlight. Temperate land absorbs a great deal but it is in great demand for agriculture, aforestation and the remaining wildlife. Reflectors in space should be controllable, the power and gyroscopes required to rotate them at a snails pace can be tiny, a small percentage of the mass of the attached shade.

The physics work out very differently because a lot of different wavelengths, some invisible are absorbed by the atmosphere (co2 and other absorbers) before and after reflecting off the ground. Sunshade designs have been considered viable by expert reviews. Main obstacle has been considered the cost of launching them to L1 estimated at a few trillion dollars. Spacex superheavy system is predicted to shrink that to a few billion dollars - a week or some of the global military budget. It would also need much thicker reflecting material on the ground / at sea to cope with weathering, tearing and pollution. Space is mainly very empty, the shades can be made from surprisingly light materials, and as I described before, the whole thing can be controllable to react to weather events. On ground installations take time an effort to alter.

I expect this kind of sunshade is inevitable now and that pressure is mounting to build it, and it is extremely fortunate that a capability has developed to build it very affordably (for a global project) and rapidly (at a push - 1 year!). Its likely just a matter of years or decades before warming events and modelling generate enough rational alarm to empower a global body to take control of global and continental solar insolation levels. Many thousands of individual sunshades can tilt using low power gyros, even in hourly timeframes to alter exactly when and where shading is applied to Earths regions and live weather systems, and also use a long term light-sail effect to keep themselves appropriately positioned while floating through the orbit-ally unstable Lagrange region.

Unfortunately even recognition of a capability to build such a thing will certainly reduce pressure to rapidly de-carbonize, even the acidification of the oceans is hailed as solvable now by putting vast but affordable quantities of mined olivine them.

Human depredation, mis-consumption and mis-appreciation of natural systems (as well as each other) remain gravely destructive and tragic modern persuasions until the narrative is healed.