dabenham, I agree that we are in line for a reduction in numbers to 1 billion or so, but I think the survivors of the Great Reduction will be too busy trying to eke out a living with subsistence farming to worry about gene editing!
its a short read at 80 pages, and a good one too. C.S.Lewis
Mots,
If you ever bring your electrical engineering stuff to market, I would LOVE to learn how to operate AC household and shop appliances, at mid-day, directly off an abundance of solar panels. Great idea about running the freezer and water heater at mid-day as a way of “saving” energy for the less sunny hours.
I agree with mememonkey that Chris embraces local solar usage for homes and has shown us his home PV and solar thermal set-ups a number of times.
I appreciate your exploring how a shop or home can be wired for direct DC solar use. You are at the forefront of this movement. When you can, show us how we can do this too.
Yes, as Mememonkey said, there’s a bit of a strawman built up there Mots.
I happen to have solar on my own home, and I’m a big fan of it. I think where we disagree is in scale. At the individual level solar makes a ton of sense, especially if people can modify their actions and behaviors around the sun’s and weather’s schedule.
But I also don’t have any illusions that my solar panels will be industrially replaced at some point in the future if/when they wear out and the world is trying to live entirely off of the sun’s and wind’s output.
To create a solar panel is a major industrial undertaking that is currently almost entirely funded by fossil fuels, with diesel being the most vital.
We don’t have a way of rebuilding the entire industrial supply chain using only the output from solar panels. It currently cannot be done.
Can it?
I have my doubts, because of the low EROIE’s that accompany grid scale solar installations which have to include the costs of making the site, and maintaining the panels. That involves cleaning, protecting, replacing and rebuilding throughout the lifecycle.
It’s non-trivial. Things happen. Sandstorms, pollen, hail, tornadoes, earthquakes, vandals.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of individual components that go into converting DC to AC, which remains a necessity at scale so that electrons made here can be shipped a long distance to be used over there.
I’m not hostile to the idea of solar, as you seem to imply, but skeptical. I’ve read as many EROEI studies as I can get my hands on. None of them has made me feel particularly good about anything except for alt energy to be a wedge of the pie giving us some more time.
And that would be a fantastic thing, if we used the time wisely.
To do that, I believe people need the facts as they stand. Right now, those facts include the idea that a full-cycle solar industry operating in perpetuity off of itself while still providing enough surplus to run the rest of society at a complexity level sufficient to make more panels, is just that. An Idea.
One with relatively poor math beneath it.
We need a very complex response to the future, and solar certainly has a role, but it cannot be the starring role as we understand things today. Not without making enormous changes to our lifestyles, which you, admirably, have done.
We’re going to need a big mix of things, including nuclear (thorium, fusion hopefully), LENR (if it’s real), vastly re-made building codes to require less HVAC, mass transit, and localization efforts to pull it off.
I think having the right narratives in play is essential to that transition,. If it’s to happen.
Hi Sandman, thanks for your interest.
- I will be in N Virginia near you at the end of July and can bring devices.
- I am selling, but only in Japan now (or to people I know in the US). I often go to China (at Chinese govt expense) and show off my stuff there.
- I cannot do fridge/freezers but rely on regular (old) technology for that.
- Most (non-fridge) appliances are already DC or DC compatible EXCEPT for their mechanical switches. My invention (used for over 5 years) is >99% DC but has a brief interrupt that protects switches by removing spark activity. Computer power adapters actually are 10% more efficient on the DC because they are DC and suffer power factor correction problems with AC used presently.
- To start with it is best to connect about two kw of panels to an existing electric water heater(s) to start the process of electrical resilience and use excess power for occasional power tool, coffee pot etc usage. My system automatically prioritizes and allows easy expansion into a grid.
WHY this is efficient and simple/cheap: I do NOT change voltage (responsible for much complexity/cost and a great deal of inefficiency (look at any charge controller and inverter: the thing is mostly heat sink and fans to throw away wasted power). My box lacks a regular heat sink and fan. Also I dont convert DC to AC to DC.
I can run split unit heat pumps (these in Japan use DC compressors for the last ten years) with a second box that I build. But I am still optimizing a system that will automatically turn off/drop off the heat pump compressor when a cloud goes by and hope to have that finished by July…
The whole point is to avoid batteries and expensive equipment, to achieve a higher EROI.
I still have a small law office and am developing an olive farm. Due to lack of time, I cannot push this very hard. I built a grid in the Congo rain forest they had Ebola there more recently and I cannot go back but hope to go to another place that needs low cost electricity.
Best regards
Mots
Very few people even in the industry understand solar. Solar cells dont act like batteries and also create a form of electricity that is much closer to what the end user needs, but corporate infrastructure forces conversion to this 100 year old bizarre stuff known as 60 hertz AC which, by the way has killed many people over the years due to the need for grounding one of the sides. (when I checked 2 yrs ago about half of US solar DC circuits were ungrounded and thus safer although the aluminum frames need grounding).
Fossil fuel often comes from a very large surface area locked up in a rock (isnt that diffuse?) but we dont consider it diffuse because it gets purified later.
Solar is extremely concentrated. If you take two high voltage/current wires + and minus and touch them together you quickly appreciate this. Also it is much easier to transport and share and blend.
Unlike fossil fuel, solar gets cheaper and easier to get (lower EROI) with time, courtesy of much of the same technology that gave us Moores law. I explained before that I discussed with an engineer expert who told me that if silver prices get high, they can make using copper instead of silver and two companies already did this. Not science fiction. I was a patent attorney for a major manufacturer and saw these changes over ten years.
I read many EROI papers too and conversed with some authors. I am convinced that the big difference between high EROI papers and low EROI is due to the globalist corp approach versus the DIY operator who puts panels on his roof himself. HOWEVER such small operators underestimate their true costs by large margins. If I were limited to using existing equipment off the shelf and standard hook ups I would not be enthusiastic at all about solar and would have low EROI: all equipment is less efficient than stated, most are not even rated below 10 or 20% light level because efficiency is extremely low. Everything wears out (breaks) MUCH more often than anyone realizes. Some people pay more for inverters etc than solar panels and the equipment often is replaced at least twice during the life of the panels. I have a large number of broken/blown inverters, charge controllers etc. I am not a believer in the present system of solar technology installations and know first hand that the believed EROI for DIY is not what is expected. However I learned that the biggest factor towards lower EROI at the non-corporate level is behavioral- life style changes. THIS is what I am focusing on and there is an important story here…
This field is in great ferment. However, unlike that for fossil fuels, costs (energy needed to get the energy-EROI) is genuinely dropping (significantly actually) with time. Thus, installations at least in Asia are increasing exponentially… What was that about the exponential function?..
Best regards
Mots
I thought what they are finding out is that many of the traits we’d like to select in our offspring are actually the combination of many hundreds or thousands of genes. And changing one gene can have many unintended consequences. Sure, we may find a few unhelpful genes, like those that cause major diseases, and we can “fix” those, then why not do it. If we could have designer babies, what traits would be select anyways? We could argue that all day. Nature is fine with the trail and error method, but are we?
Selective breeding may still be the best and simplest option. Ones parents would simply “assist” in the marriage selection process, and the community would socially reject pregnancies outside of wedlock. Wait a second, maybe humans already had that figured out. (Note, I personally feel it’s completely unfair where communities place that social burden on their women alone. Men should be 50% responsible. And we have the technology to know which man it was, and to simply quit a pregnancy.
-Travis
I live in Australia’s capital, Canberra, a city of about 430,000 people located in the Australian Capital Territory or ACT. It’s a beautiful, low-stress, well-designed city in a beautiful setting, and has been described as one of the great human achievements. By virtue of a well-educated populace in a government town, we have a remarkably far-sighted set of local politicians — I am actually rather pleased with many of them — and we have legislated a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2020. We are in fact on target to meet that goal using a mixture of wind and solar, although we’re still connected to the national grid.
Here’s a report from the ABC which saves me a lot of typing.
Rooftop solar panels are plentiful, and the ACT is are working towards making the ACT’s power grid intelligent via smart meters, software, domestic & EV betteries, and so on. Were it not for baseload power requirements, it would be possible for us to sever ourselves from the national grid.
When it comes to baseload power, a set of pumped hydro locations has been identified around the entire country, sufficient to meet our entire needs for many years. This in the second-driest continent on earth! But I doubt that our coal-controlled neoliberal federal government would ever move to capitalise on this asset. Coal is so cheap to dig up and burn locally for electricity and it’s so easy to sell overseas and just ignore the fact that a large Chinese corporation just cancelled a huge mine proposal citing lack of viability and anyway CLIMATE CHANGE IS A MYTH, got that?
Solar panels are proliferating. My house has 32 panels, and other houses have even more. For a while government subsidies were available to help with the intial cost of purchase and installation of panels. I expect the few remaining federal subsidies to be removed now that the COALition has come to power. (Although there’s still the Senate to get around, but I don’t know how the numbers stack up.)
Speaking personally now, thanks to the PV system our domestic electricity bills have dropped considerably, by a factor of 4 or more, until they’re almost trivial. We have solar hot water, although 3 cloudy days in a row and we need to turn on the gas booster. We still use gas for heating and much cooking, and the gas bills are definitely not trivial! We’d like to reduce our dependency on gas but the cost is an issue, and it’s great to have a backup energy source for the (so far) infrequent and short blackouts. We have a storage battery attached to the PVs, but it has failed twice in service and we are waiting for it to be replaced under warranty. Doesn’t help that the battery manufacturer (an Australian company, well-respected in its field) has abandoned the domestic market and is concentrating on the mining sector. The solar and battery installers are hugely busy and the wait has been an annoyingly long one.
But none of this could have been manufactured or installed without the easy availability of fossil fuels. In this I must agree with the neoliberal federal government and Chris Martenson and Gail Tverberg and others: we do have a need for fossil fuels. Australia has some crude oil but imports most of its transport fuels. My unhappiness is of course that I want to pursue a fuel policy that reduces carbon emissions, while the neolibs think that all their problems are solved by exporting coal and letting someone else deal with the emissions.
Canberra people are definitely reacting against the atomising and deadening effects of neoliberal economic theory and practice. Community groups are numerous. My wife and I are building community connections as best we can, such as a local suburban group revitalising the local shopping centre, and a group of volunteers working the Canberra City Farm. More than a few of us are growing some of our own food in our front yard and back yard and at the City Farm. There could be a very bright future in Canberra for urban agriculture.
We don’t agree with the notion some people have of rugged, independent survivalism, one little family unit against the world. We think our future is best faced by being part of our local community, and ideally that community can and should extend to the entire city population! United we may stand; divided we will most certainly fall.
It was a sustainable method until unchecked human population growth got the upper hand. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wood+fired+steam+locomotion&atb=v154-1&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=3U2D20I5zMI
[caption id=“attachment_374110” align=“alignnone” width=“263”]
simple inverter with clocked 3-phase input[/caption]
I do agree that your first use should be direct; the second use should be simple storage; the third use can be inverting.
I also understand that for somethings such as refrigeration, AC may be better. But (see pic) I don’t get what is so hard about inverting, if it’s needed. A simple clock, a counter, a few power mosfets… maybe even a power capacitor or three in series… and then you take the output into a variable transformer, take that output through a filter, and I think you’d be golden. Am I missing something?
Artist credit to Robert Byron
Department of Health: Prepare for wildfire smoke now (KIRO 7 News)
"The Department of Health is advising Washingtonians to prepare now for upcoming smoky days and unhealthy air quality that is expected this summer.
While inhaling wildfire smoke isn’t good for anyone, certain sensitive groups are more susceptible to health problems. These groups include children, adults over 65, people with heart and lung diseases, people who have had a stroke, people with illnesses and colds, pregnant women and people who smoke.
On especially smoky days, people should limit outdoor activity and stay indoors. Symptoms from smoke exposure can include watery or dry eyes, wheezing, sinus irritation, headaches or chest pain.
What you can do now:
* Look at air quality reports in your area
* If you or someone you know has heart of lung disease, including asthma, ask a doctor what precautions you can take when air quality is poor. Have necessary medication on hand
* Buy a portable air cleaner and create a “clean” room to spend time in when the air isn’t healthy"
Photo credit KIRO News 7
This wildfire season could be the worst for Washington State (YakTriNews)
"GLEED, Wash. - Firefighters across the state are gearing up for another heavy wildfire season; with 300 wildfires already this year, the Department of Natural Resources is predicting this could be the worst yet."
Photo credit KIRO News 7
This wildfire season could be the worst for Washington State (YakTriNews)
"GLEED, Wash. - Firefighters across the state are gearing up for another heavy wildfire season; with 300 wildfires already this year, the Department of Natural Resources is predicting this could be the worst yet."
We had 18 consecutive days with rain from April 20th to May 7th in the outskirts of NYC.https://weather.com/news/weather/news/2019-05-08-northeast-rain-fatigued-but-might-catch-break-soon It is a lush verdant green everywhere here. Cloudy most days. Just like PNW is supposed to be. So strange to see so many rainy days here. Things seem backwards. I feel for the people out west. Tough times and more to come.
Michael
The number one problem with boosting or bucking or any kind of inversion is that the transformer core saturates, which forces use of 5X oversized equipment for simple refrigerators. When you turn on a motor, especially compressor, there is a gigantic pulse-rush of electrons (current pulse) which saturates any inductor and essentially shorts it out magnetically. This is why most small invertors will NOT drive your little 160 watt fridge, and a genuine 1000W inverter is required to start/operate that small refrigerator. A smaller problem is that transformers are inherently designed for an optimum voltage and current (I have done many experiments along the lines you describe and a transformer designed for one voltage etc does not work well for another). Also a sufficiently large sized transformer is extremely expensive. Also at best the thing loses 10% power as heat unless you are always operating at its optimum point (nearly impossible) and spent tons of money on it.
Power MOSFETS dont turn on immediately and act as resistors during the time it takes to turn on: this is the main source of their inefficiency. They are susceptible to damage from voltage spikes and wear out from the above described heat. Recent modern MOSFETS have lower on resistance (heat loss when turned on) but still generate heat loss. Capacitors however are usually the weakest link and most equipment has capacitors that are designed to wear out within about 5 years, because otherwise you would never buy them because they are too expensive. This problem with electrolytic capacitors has been around from the beginning of the electronic age. Also, they are not perfect in other ways and have electrical series resistance and change with time etc. Our Platonic ability to “think” about a perfect circle, square, transformer, capacitor, MOSFET is in strong contradiction with the cold hard reality that such perfect circle, square transformer, capacitor MOSFET simply does not exist.
Mots
Buy Bitcoin as a hedge. Consider how much fiat you have deployed to coffee and consider buying yourself a digital coffee. Start stacking now. HODL or close.
You speak of the current surge upon startup. The cheap solution used on our AC/heater blower is a starter capacitor. It’s not the best, but it works.
You could gear the compressor for startup… and that would also help. Get your compressor up to speed, then switch gears (bike chain might be all that was needed, but lower efficiency; actual gears or a variable gear set might be better) to bring it up to full power.
I agree that it isn’t one-and-done simple. But I also don’t think it’s that hard.
You size your transformer to what you regularly need; and then you control your needs to fit the envelope.
Also I sketched a 6-phase E/M inverter. If you need better power quality, there is no limit to the number of input phases you could have.
… except in a very general way and as a spectator, not a participant. OK, so we have a technical discussion here about ways and means of converting DC to AC. That’s good for raising awareness, but what’s someone like me who is rather clueless in the sparks and juice department to make of it and do with it?
Unless someone comes up with commercial, off-the-shelf equipment, which I understand already exists, then I cannot build my own. There’s more than a few workshops around town which could feasibly construct inverters and other electrical items, but when the substances really do hit the fan, how long will the electronic components be available anyway?
If I were you I would attend the workshops and buy 3 of everything you need and especially buy stuff that is bigger than what you need. (Chinese made is still cheap for now and even brand name stuff is Chinese…)
There is no cheap solution for compressors. All starter motors have starting capacitors that help alleviate the smaller pulses. Talk to an inverter dealer in your area.
I dont have any more time for conjecture and chit chat and will not comment further.
”they’ve stolen our future!” Is an expectation based statement. The future is just time that hasn’t happened yet. No one can steal it.
the implication is that the future you assumed you would have, or believe that you should have, has been stolen. And that is correct, in all the ways Chris laid out.
I think the best thing I can do is equip my kids physically, spiritually and morally to face the future they will (likely) have. Again, that future is not what I or anyone else wants, but I would be remiss to launch them unprepared into it.
Thanks to all the contributors in this community for providing me ideas and inspiration to make this millennial family a little more resilient each day.