Earth Hour 8.30 pm

There is no energy crisis.
The world is awash with energy.
There is an honesty crisis.
Monopolies lie about things to make even more money and gain more control.
Monopolies suppress that which would make their products obsolete.

Dense plasma focus fusion.
Cheap, clean energy which at present consumption rates would last about...oh, a billion years.:eek:
So, whatever, about this earth hour.
More propaganda for the idiocracy.

Besides, even petroleum (as dirty as it is) renews itself, as it does not originate from dino crap, but is a bacterial product.
 
shawn said:
Dense plasma focus fusion.
Cheap, clean energy which at present consumption rates would last about...oh, a billion years.:eek:
Click to expand...

Really? This is nuclear energy you are talking about? Cheap? Clean? No. Last a billion years? Nuclear waste sure does.


shawn said:
Besides, even petroleum (as dirty as it is) renews itself, as it does not originate from dino crap, but is a bacterial product.
Click to expand...

Renewable petroleum? On what scale of time? 3 billion years?
 
shawn said:
Besides, even petroleum (as dirty as it is) renews itself, as it does not originate from dino crap, but is a bacterial product.
Click to expand...
Petroleum does not renew itself so fast! If it did countries all around the world would produce there own! Unless you know something no one else does?
 
You want to speed things up a wee bit, then you need to turn up the heat.
LS9 ( LS9, Inc. > Home ) is a start-up in California which is custom making bacteria to convert cellulose into petroleum, relatively fast as well.
As for the dense plasma focus fusion:
http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/focus_fusion_reactor/
Read it for yourself.
Reactors feasible for under 1/2 a mill$$
Clean in the sense that dangerous radiation has a life of minutes/hours and not thousands of years.
Plus they have a technology developed to capture the emitted x-rays and convert it into energy which is then sent out into the grid.
It is a great idea.
 
http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/focus_fusion_reactor/ said:
Focus fusion reactors - reactors that use hydrogen-boron fuel and the dense plasma focus device - are expected to provide virtually unlimited supplies of cheap energy in an environmentally sound way.
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This sounds very similar to the "safe and unlimited energy" that nuclear reactors were supposedly going to provide when they first came on-line, but we've since discovered that nuclear energy is not safe, and it's not clean. I can't help but wonder what the dangers of this esoteric "dense plasma focus fusion" are. How stable is one of these wonder capacitors? That sounds like a whole lot of energy in a very tiny space.
 
shawn said:
Maybe read the stuff on the website link before you spout off ya joker.
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I know a bit about this. Enough to know it is as yet an experimental technology. Transferring it to large scale energy production, even if it works, presents enormous hurdles. Where as already proven renewable ones do not. Not saying we should not investigate emergent technologies by any means but we should be concentrating on the virtually limitless renewable resources we can already harness.
 
It is experimental true, but their experiments have yielded very encouraging data.

I do agree that there are many other very good technologies as well.
utilizing ocean motion using buoys with counterweights inside which operate hydraulic pump motors to generate electricity is a good one that is clean and reasonably safe.
There are a lot of very good solar technologies available.
Geothermal is also a very smart way to generate power.
Fission plants are just stupid though IMO as the danger is so great in so many ways.
 
Was it worth it?

Hour of no power increases emissions

And it gets worse: the event could cause higher overall pollution than if we just left our lights on. When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight. Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you're essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you'll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production.

Hour of no power increases emissions | The Australian
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As an Electrical Engineer, the whole concept gave me a chuckle deep inside. As often is the case, the well-meaning environmental tree-hugging wackos were the cause of more damage to the environment that they prevented. Power generation being what it is, suddenly unloading the grid at a specific time and then causing it to resume the normal load at a set time causes every power plant on the grid to surge and rebalance. The pollution emission controls at each plant became unstable when the load changed and they take several seconds to several minutes to readjust. The result in both cases was a big puff of black smoke and extra pollutants being emitted from the stacks during the period of instability until the automatic controls could tweak themselves and rebalance to the new load. The only exceptions would be hydroelectric, solar, wind and the ever-evil nuclear generation systems.



Nice idea, in theory, but poor execution in reality.
 
rebis said:
As an Electrical Engineer, the whole concept gave me a chuckle deep inside. As often is the case, the well-meaning environmental tree-hugging wackos were the cause of more damage to the environment that they prevented. Power generation being what it is, suddenly unloading the grid at a specific time and then causing it to resume the normal load at a set time causes every power plant on the grid to surge and rebalance. The pollution emission controls at each plant became unstable when the load changed and they take several seconds to several minutes to readjust. The result in both cases was a big puff of black smoke and extra pollutants being emitted from the stacks during the period of instability until the automatic controls could tweak themselves and rebalance to the new load. The only exceptions would be hydroelectric, solar, wind and the ever-evil nuclear generation systems.



Nice idea, in theory, but poor execution in reality.
Click to expand...
Namaste Rebis,

Please provide documentation of same.

I personally think you are full of it.

My contention, you may be correct in theory but in actuality, which plants which puffs of smoke which load??

8:30 PM reduced usage time...most businesses closed except for restaruants, bars, gas stations, stores etc....none of those turned off their lights or stopped electrical usage...maybe 5% of the population did but I doubt it. So we probably saw at max a 2% fluxuation in usage...just my guesses...

This has got to be nothing compared to what happens at 7 am, 8am, 9am every day when buildings all over the areas are coming on line almost simultaneously...

Pardon me, I don't know you but your starting off with "the well-meaning environmental tree-hugging wackos", sounds ominously like some ditto-head parroting Hannity, Limbaugh etc..
 
Please provide documentation of same. Review the federally and state mandated emissions reports and incident reporting of the individual power plants. They are public records and are issued at the end of each month.

I personally think you are full of it. That is really going to keep me up at night worrying, but by all means, if you can't defend your position with facts then result to personal attacks. My credentials are: I have a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and that I have worked in that field for 34 years. I claim no expertise in any or all of it, but you might want to consider giving me reasonable credit for knowing a thing or two about my field.

My contention, you may be correct in theory but in actuality, which plants which puffs of smoke which load?? Coal-fired to a certain extent, but the most noticeable will be gas-fired and diesel generation stations where the engine governors tend to respond quickly to load changes. The coal-fired plants have more of a lag between the time the electrical load demand changes and the steam demand for generation changes. Unfortunately, they also experience greater upsets from the load changes becasue (depending on the size of the plant) the operators can only step things up or down about 30 megawatts a minute. That is a relative small change, but smoke scrubbers and similar devices only work well when the load is stable. If a big puff of carbon and sulfur comes through, they overload and if the carbon suddenly reduces, they are slow to respond and pinch back. This results in more CO2 and water emissions in one extreme or carbon and sulfur in the other.

8:30 PM reduced usage time...most businesses closed except for restaruants, bars, gas stations, stores etc....none of those turned off their lights or stopped electrical usage...maybe 5% of the population did but I doubt it. So we probably saw at max a 2% fluxuation in usage...just my guesses... Then why bother to do it when it is meaningless by your own admission? In reality, I think it would be a much smaller load shift. A sudden uncompensated shift of 2% in the load on the national grid would be catastrophic.

This has got to be nothing compared to what happens at 7 am, 8am, 9am every day when buildings all over the areas are coming on line almost simultaneously... Those are planned load changes and the operators make adjustments to account for them. The demand and load throughout the day changes from minute to minute, but it is a controlled shift based on past experience and this shift is forcast and is compensated by adjustments in generation locally and regionally. It is a surprisingly delicate ballet of shifting and juggling, but it all works out so well that we tend to take it for granted.

Pardon me, I don't know you but your starting off with "the well-meaning environmental tree-hugging wackos", sounds ominously like some ditto-head parroting Hannity, Limbaugh etc.. Thank you. Please do not think that calling me a conservative is an insult. If we are going to result to name calling, your whining about my post sounds a lot like I would expect to hear from Bill Mahr, Nancy Palosi or Michael Moore. Who to you think is more insulted by being compared to their respective icon?
 
This whole exercise was a farce.
If people want to do something about pollution there are lots of energy saving devices one can opt into that actually do something all year round.
they save you money and cut down on one's power consumption.

There is actually NOTHING anyone can do about global warming.
All we can do is something about pollution.
I remember before all the GW BS came to be I heard lots of enviromentalists and they all talked about pollution.
What ever happened to that???
Why stop and jump on the BS wagon.
Pollution is a big problem and needs to be addressed.
Water pollution, air pollution, soil pollution, EMF pollution.
All big issues and all anyone can seem to talk about is GW which we can do NOTHING about.

CO2 is not a pollutant.
No CO2= no O2 and no food.
Rather than CO2 capture which is the latest technology talked about by the oil industry people.... how about, say...methane capture?
That would make more sense as methane does far more damage to the atmosphere and has no measurable benefit to anyone other than a fuel source.
 
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