Bill Gates is heading a $1 billion venture fund to combat climate change

[RERT]

Yes, I was taught about pumped storage when I was in school, in the 70's. There was a site Dinorwig (sp?) in Wales. Don't know if much has happened since. The sites are very specialised. You need a big lake you don't mind rapidly draining and filling at the top of a nice big mountain. I guess with fossil fuel the only real need was/is to cover brief spikes - the proverbial "everyone puts the kettle on at half time". Diurnal storage for the UK would be one BIG reservoir!

[NotAPhysicist]

That sounds familiar..

Anyway, yes, techs been around for a while. Relatively cheap, pretty reliable. You need the space though (and a lot of water).
As an alternative I've heard people talk about basically just digging up a lot of rock and effectively using that as the mass you are moving around to store or generate power. Not sure anyone is doing that but maybe a sensible competitor? Hmm.

[ladajo]

What about large scale flywheels for short term. And, using existing dams with added pumps to store excess for overnight and longer demand peaks?

[happyjack27]

What about large scale flywheels for short term. And, using existing dams with added pumps to store excess for overnight and longer demand peaks?

Beacon Power was developing modular 1MW flywheels for grid storage.
They got a considerable amount of government funding.

http://beaconpower.com/

note since flywheels have such fast response time, they can also be used for frequency regulation (keeping the electricity at 60hz sinuosiodal)

as of now, they have 3 plants operational and on the grid. this is their plant in new york:



That's 200 flywheels, 20MW. In addition to energy storage, it provides 30% of frequency regulation to the area,

[NotAPhysicist]

Some interesting write up of beaconpower and flywheel storage in general: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/fossil- ... rs-rebound.
This is a couple of years old but I would assume still somewhat relevant, I'm curious to know how things have progressed since then.

[ladajo]

Nice, now we just need to add recirc pumps to existing hydro and press on.

[NotAPhysicist]

Sorry, I'll stop, but this was interesting too, it helpfully shows some cost comparisons https://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/04/en ... n-5-years/.
Again a little dated and again it would be curious how the assessment looks now.

[paperburn1]

Not to sound like an elon musk fanboy ... but
That is the whole point behind the wall battery. not that it powers your whole house but it eats up peak loads and powers up doing slumps. Making it a self regulating Distributed battery for load management.

I would prefer local storage for my power generation but beggars can't be choosers , (or at least shouldn't be but that's a story for another time.)

[Diogenes]

Nobel Laureate Smashes the Global Warming Hoax




https://youtu.be/TCy_UOjEir0

[ladajo]

Not to sound like an elon musk fanboy ... but
That is the whole point behind the wall battery. not that it powers your whole house but it eats up peak loads and powers up doing slumps. Making it a self regulating Distributed battery for load management.

I would prefer local storage for my power generation but beggars can't be choosers , (or at least shouldn't be but that's a story for another time.)

Maybe in the not so distant future, home flywheel storage will be on the market. My thought is that instead of one large wheel, a home unit could be made up of a metric butt-ton of small wheels. I understand there is a cost/utility curve that goes with this. However, my entry thought is that one big wheel is not the right answer, as is a gazillion little wheels. From a safety perspective and construction costing, probably a bunch on little wheels is the better path. When I worked manufacturing a bunch of years ago, we used large mechanical flywheels to smooth out machine surges. The wheel(s) would eat them up and you hardly noticed anything. We did live in fear of one of them coming off its foundation, there would have been a trail of destruction leading to its parking spot for sure. These were 6ft, 8ft, and 10ft wheels made of iron/steel.

Some wheels from back in the day were really serious. Imagine a large bank of these 100 Ton wheels lined up and rolling for energy storage, using magnetic or superconducting bearings:

[happyjack27]

Nobel Laureate Smashes the Global Warming Hoax




https://youtu.be/TCy_UOjEir0

I don' t think you understand science.

it's not about people, it's about facts and data and experiment and observation.

posting a link to a video by one person who's probably not even a climatologist doesn't magically destroy all the facts and data.

that's not how it works.




so anyways, i tested out my climate denial debunker engine with the words "Ivar Giaever".

Here are a few of the first results:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-g ... ntist.html
https://skepticalscience.com/latest-pre ... ience.html
http://dialoguesonglobalwarming.blogspo ... -liar.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsfQaOGW1Zk
https://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the ... eptic-scam

even got a video in there - nice to see that the video searches work! that result wasn't particularly relevant, thou.

the very first result, on the other hand, primo relevante!

I found this part especially amusing, from the video:

"I am not really terribly interested in global warming. Like most physicists I don't think much about it. But in 2008 I was in a panel here about global warming and I had to learn something about it. And I spent a day or so - half a day maybe on Google, and I was horrified by what I learned. And I'm going to try to explain to you why that was the case." - Ivar Giaever (emphasis added)

in the future please test any of your brilliant glorious PRATTS ( http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Point_refu ... sand_times ) on the debunker engine before posting here.

here's the link again: https://cse.google.com:443/cse/publicur ... b_pytebcxg

[Maui]

Refugees in northern Syria and Iraq suffer as region sees first snowfall in 25 years

Heavy snowfall and freezing conditions in the northern Syrian province of Deir Ez Zor have added to the difficulties of locals in the area displaced by fighting.

The arid province, which is mostly desert, gets barely any rain and some areas had not seen snowfall in more than a quarter of a century until freezing conditions hit over the weekend.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 85016.html

North pole 50 degrees warmer than normal this week

You know it seems hard to get a clear picture of long term climate changes based on individual weather reports. I have an idea. We should start tracking the weather over time at locations all over the globe including via ocean buoys. We should also use satellites to monitor global temperatures from space and calibrate those against ground-based measurements. Then maybe we’ll finally have a clear picture of whether the global climate is changing.

Who can we talk to about getting this going?

[Maui]

Sounds like decent news. The obvious questions are what is the power factor of each generation type, I.e how many MWh will each actually deliver in a year - intermittency again. And questions on regulation - is there regulation artificially depressing the load factor on gas/ raising it on renewables? And of course, the figures can't be understood without knowing whether there is any subsidy being paid.

Even ignoring CO2, there is enough real pollution from coal burning and coal mining that only those economically impacted can have any regrets about its passing. But sadly it makes cheap power. So I guess the Americans on food stamps are among the economically impacted - was that 46 million? I'll check in a minute....

I don't think it’s wrong to balance the cost of environmental programs against human welfare programs. Heck, you could take it even further than this—just 7% of our federal budget could end hunger worldwide

But you and I both know that --at least with the GOP in complete control of Washington—that the cost of food stamps aren’t going to be balanced against the cost of clean energy programs. They are going to be balanced against the taxes we pay regardless of how many other programs are cut.

What I think makes a lot of sense to balance against the cost of clean energy programs is the cost of displacement and/or seawalls that would be needed for coastal cities. I am not saying necessarily that the cost of these programs in the short term is justified in the long term. I am saying this is the tradeoff I think makes the most sense to start with when considering cost of low-carbon programs.

But also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, renewable energy will continue to drop in price while fossil fuels will not. Doesn’t it make sense to position ourselves well for the energy sources that will be used 20-30 years from now? Wouldn’t it be good to have a smart grid that can take advantage of much more (cheap) renewable energy even without batteries? Wouldn’t it be good to be leaders in the energy technologies that countries all around the world are and will be paying to install?

[pbelter]

I don' t think you understand science.

it's not about people, it's about facts and data and experiment and observation.

I am very surprised you would say that after insisting that 99.9% scientists agree with AGW.
I have already demonstrated that in the study the data was manipulated and no more than 0.3% scientists expressed any opinion but what does it matter what people think if "it is all about facts and data and experiment and observation"?

Talking about data, how about the experiment we first discussed where one jar with air had 400 parts per billion of CO2 and the other had roughly billion parts per billion of CO2. That is a 7 orders of magnitude more of CO2 than in atmosphere and still no noticeable effect on temperature.

7 orders of magnitude!

I think 7 orders of magnitude is a significant number that allows to draw conclusions.
Critics of the experiment say that the sample was not big enough. I don't buy that, because then why would some go to lengths to falsify it as Al Gore and Bill Nye did, but let's entertain that thought.

Lets take a bigger sample, such as an entire continent.
Have you heard that Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4 Million Years
http://www.noaa.gov/south-pole-last-pla ... -milestone

If CO2 causes warming I would expect severe melting so what happened?
Antarctic Ice is at its historic high as documented in the NASA links I provided in my previous posts.

Now if CO2 was responsible for warming, wouldn't increase in CO2 cause more warming and less ice?
As we discussed in this forum, the raw satellite data shows that there is no warming since 1998, that is 18 years in which human civilization produced about 25% of the CO2 as we see concentrations rising steadily from 315 parts per million in 1960 to to 400 ppm now.
One should expect that 25% increase in CO2 would produce some effect but we see global average temperature this year is roughly the same as in 1998.

How about the Mars warming correlated with Earth? Is that just pure coincidence?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... ge-retrea/


You keep saying that 99.9% scientists agree with AGW implying that if so many say so it must be true, but a the same time continue to wave away the facts and data, then you claim it is all about facts and data.

[happyjack27]

Refugees in northern Syria and Iraq suffer as region sees first snowfall in 25 years

Heavy snowfall and freezing conditions in the northern Syrian province of Deir Ez Zor have added to the difficulties of locals in the area displaced by fighting.

The arid province, which is mostly desert, gets barely any rain and some areas had not seen snowfall in more than a quarter of a century until freezing conditions hit over the weekend.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 85016.html

North pole 50 degrees warmer than normal this week

You know it seems hard to get a clear picture of long term climate changes based on individual weather reports. I have an idea. We should start tracking the weather over time at locations all over the globe including via ocean buoys. We should also use satellites to monitor global temperatures from space and calibrate those against ground-based measurements. Then maybe we’ll finally have a clear picture of whether the global climate is changing.

Who can we talk to about getting this going?

Not sure about the other stuff, but when you mentioned satellites, NASA came to mind as an obvious choice.

Also I think well need a central place to collect and organize all of this data. Sort of like a national climatic data center, if you will.