The Energy Thread

paging Ed...

somewhere on ILX (I don't think it's in this thread), you discussed the process by which you/your employer were "writing down" oil assets? Can you maybe find that for me?

If anybody else can dig it up, thanks in advance

kind of bump, because actually i'd be quite interested in that as well, but also to record a chance encounter flying back from Glasgow earlier in the year, that had a slightly Ballardian flavour to it.

Had taken my seat by the window, and a well-groomed late thirties early forties man in a relaxed but expensive suit sat down beside me, having had a short discussion in Spanish with the person in front, and then turned to me said hello, and asked me what I'd been up to in Glasgow, in the accents of 'international English', (slightly soft 'classless' tones and deracinated vowels) which, being expressive of a non-English-speaking background is quite exotic and appealing to me. I explained briefly, wary of a bore, but felt it was polite to ask him also what he'd been doing.

Turned out he'd been setting up an offshore windfarm. He was an an engineer who specialised in renewable energy. This was certainly interesting enough to want to continue, and he told me a bit about the engineering challenge about fixing large windmills in often turbulent seas, and the heavy duty sub-marine structures required.

I said I felt that as an industry outsider it was often difficult to get a sense about the effectiveness of renewable energy from the press and media generally.

He gave me a bit of energy 101 (stuff i could have probably worked out, but which it was useful to be told clearly and by an expert) - that the big problem was not generating energy, it was storing it, and that for anything bigger than a mid-sized house, batteries were unfeasible. He also pointed out that the only large-scale battery or way to store energy available on earth had used the same technology for thousands of years, which was that of damming reservoirs.

The well-known consequent problem for energy sources like windfarms and solar power being that their main power sources are variable and intermittent in force.

The UK energy sector is required to use any resources of renewable energy *before* using non-renewable energy power generation. I need to be careful about my terminology here because, as this person pointed out, renewable energy is not the same as 'clean' energy necessarily, and 'clean' or 'green' energy is not the same as renewable energy. Renewable energy sources include wind and solar power, but also chip-wood burning generators (a quickly growing industrial use a friend of mine who started out as a woodcutter and woodland manager is currently making a sizable amount of cash from). 'Clean' energy can, I believe, also include nuclear energy, which is not renewable. Some of this categorisation is ignored or confused in much media coverage I think.

I asked if we'd reach a stage where we could rely totally on renewable energy (let's stick with that phrase for the moment). He said that in fact there have been numerous days in recent years where 100% of the UK's energy requirements had been sourced using renewable energy. However, at times of high levels of usage, the amount generated wasn't sufficient for national requirements.

There is a slogan, he said, being used in the industry and in government, which is 20 by 20 - that is to say, 20% of yearly energy use being provided using renewable energy by the year 2020, and I believe that a 25% level was being set for 2025.

What were the biggest challenges? He asked me how long I expected a power plant to be in use for. I suggested a couple of generations. He said it was about 25 years. He then asked what sort of time frames banks looked at when investing. 7 years? He said it was actually more like 14, but with a 7 year break/assessment point. Then he asked how long governments tended to plan for, and I laughed and said 'an electoral cycle?' and he said 'right.'

He explained the challenge they had was securing the large amount of funding required to set up a windfarm, and his job, which was in part salesman (unsurprisingly, given his smooth but not unpleasing conversation), was to secure funding from lots of different places.

There are some more details, which were probably interesting, but which I've forgotten, but we moved on to talk a bit about my work and some of the challenges there, and also about his family, and it was here that I felt something almost sinister sitting to one side of him, something in the way he talked about his wife and children. It was very proprietorial, there was a strange sense of anger and need to control that seemed to come from frustrations with his father. They 'won't do' this, of course 'they don't understand the details'.

We disembarked at City airport, but happened to meet again on the tube from City, and he struck up conversation in a more jocular tone, about what men could expect from women - something along the lines of 'you've got to know how to get what you want, right?' followed by a wink. I found all this allied with his general bland approachability and appearance, and clear intelligence, unpleasant and irritating, especially as I've always been terrible at knowing how to get what I want, or even what I want in the first place, and perhaps slightly naively dislike generic assumptions about men and women, or me for that matter. The sinister configurations or disjunctions of his personality, which had been only latent or possibly even projected earlier in the journey, had now become more clearly visible - these configurations being unreformed personal beliefs as hidden components of his futuristic manner and job. It was this that reminded me of Ballard.

He gave me his card and said I should get in touch as it had been pleasant talking to me. I think I may have thrown it away, though it may be buried in with the heap of other business cards lying around in drawers at home. I felt both repulsed and intrigued - I have no desire to see him at all again, and am at the same time curious to know more.

What in the world is Lockheed Martin smoking

The annoucement seems premature, as all Skunk Works® has announced to date is a plasma chamber where the plasma provides most of the magnetic field confinement, structured so the field increases as particles depart the high pressure/fusing zone. LM is speculating the small size and short development cycles of its design will permit ramping up pressures and energy payback in a way that's not possible for massive tokamaks of the traditional magnetic confinement approach.

A talk from Charles Chase on LM's design from last December.
http://www.youtube.com/JAsRFVbcyUY?t=4m37s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY

There's no discussion from LM on how they'll deal with the 14.1 MeV neutrons flying out at 0.173 c from the deuterium-tritium fusion cycle. These cause all sorts of problems like transmution, embrittlement and cracking in reactor materials. Nor how they'll source their tritium, a rather expensive material. They're probably planning on breeding it by irradiating a lithium blanket within the reactor with all those neutrons, but even ITER isn't sure how that will pan out.

Most of this stuff is well beyond my expertise, but I've been casually following fusion research since I first learned the word "tokamak" in a 1980 Omni magazine article.

Man this sounds promising.

most of the reaction I've seen is people acting like this is totally bunk, but would Lockheed fucking Martin just come out with something silly like that?

I know there's other things in the news but this seems like a big deal.

I like the part where every revision doesn't require a bunch of different governments to pony up billions of dollars.

The more I look into it, the more I think tritium supplies will be the obstacle to D-T fusion. The ITER project (alone) will use most of the world supply, and I'm not convinced breeding tritium in a lithium blanket (basically, use molten lithium as the plasma chamber coolant, and pull ditritium gas from it) will work. And of course, if it does work, everyone with one of these can turn any fission triggers in their arsenal into much higher yield H-bombs. So much for powering volatile Africa or South Asia.

Tesla Powerwall is back-ordered through the summer of 2016 already:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8561931/tesla-38000-powerwall-preorders-announced

Forbes is not impressed:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/05/01/why-teslas-powerwall-is-just-another-toy-for-rich-green-people/

paging Ed...

somewhere on ILX (I don't think it's in this thread), you discussed the process by which you/your employer were "writing down" oil assets? Can you maybe find that for me?

If anybody else can dig it up, thanks in advance

― sleeve, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 8:41 AM (7 months ago)

Its basic accounting - the assets in question are judged unlikely to be worth the value they're carried on the books, so some or all of the "book value" is removed from the assets column on the balance sheet, and becomes a loss on the income / P & L sheet. Its a paper loss, not representing a current unrecovered cash outflow, but because it reduces income a write down can be used to reduce tax liabilities.

There's a fight going on in Nevada that contains, in microcosm, all the struggles and challenges that face utilities in the 21st century.

It centers on a Las Vegas–based company called Switch, which runs power-hungry data centers in southern Nevada. Like many firms these days, Switch wants electricity that is cheaper and cleaner than what it can get through its local utility, NV Energy. In fact, Switch wants to go 100 percent renewable.

So it asked the Nevada public utility commission (henceforth PUCN) for permission to defect from the utility and procure its own power on the open market. Four big casino companies — Wynn Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International, Caesars, and the Las Vegas Sands Corp. — got in line behind it, requesting to jump ship as well.

Yesterday, the PUCN rejected the application, saying that Switch would have to stay in the fold a bit longer.

What's going on? How can a company defect from a utility at all? And why wasn't Switch allowed to do so? And what does it all mean? Good questions!

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8767927/switch-nevada-utility

tone of that article is really grating

Consumers are quickly coming to view energy not as a utility commodity like tap water but as a differentiated collection of products and services, a bazaar at which they should be allowed to shop.

consumers are fucking stupid then

This is exciting: http://electrek.co/2016/05/02/price-solar-power-fell-50-16-months-dubai-0299kwh/

those are big utility projects, so the cost metric is a bit skewed towards razor-thin margins, but yes it is impressive and encouraging.

ok i watched one of the kirk sorenson thorium videos and i've totally drunk the kool-ade. let's do this

yeah i've been curious about it for a while now, and the cynic in me says (w/o data) that we're not using it because a) there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported or b) Big Energy interests are actively suppressing it

when they realise all you need to do to acquire it is send out a truck to drive over fields of it they'll love it

admittedly the video i watched is redolent of the sort of conspiracy theory magnum opuses the internet excels in but sorensen says several times that he thought the same thing - "there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported" - and went to grad school in Knoxville to find out, and everybody was like nope, you're right

the bit of the video that i actually found most interesting i still don't quite understand - about producing jet fuel out of seawater (related vid here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3495016107 ). the guy makes a good point about aviation: electric planes don't exist and won't exist. you still need some kind of energy-dense hydrocarbon to make these things fly. but how any of that relates to nuclear i don't quite get

ah i guess the idea is that the electricity required for electrolysis has to come from somewhere? and that's where thorium (or what have you) comes in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9TR9G5bd7w
I don't know if there has been any talk about DAPL around here, it's something I've been following closely.

kinda wish there was a thread for #NODAPL, we'll see where it goes after today. heavy shit going down.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/27/developing_100_militarized_police_demolishing_nodapl

from yesterday:

https://cldc.org/2016/10/26/update-militarized-police-presence-at-standing-rock/

https://www.tesla.com/solar

this seems Actually Good

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/17799094/california-100-percent-clean-energy-target-brown-de-leon

Energy industry is fucking bonkers right now, so much is happening in CA

see also: new cash rebates for battery storage being offered in CA and HI

everybody wants everything to be electric from clean energy sources (sucks to be you SoCal Gas!)

I want nearly all energy to be electric so I can keep burning natural gas to cook

otmfm

though if the utility figures out how to harvest biogas and pipe it to my house at sufficient scale I'll happily burn that too. Anyway the electricity mix in my state is like 80%+ hydro 😎

where are you... Colorado?

Seattle iirc

here's an overview of the new CA legislation:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/on-to-the-governors-desk-what-100-clean-energy-means-for-california#gs.U3FXrJs

It makes more sense to use methane/natural gas for space heating and cooking heating over electricity on efficiency grounds, but in the future the methane will be provided by excess renewable energy.

I fully expect a much worse case scenario for global warming than most, but should society recover, there's a high likelihood it will be with a methane infrastructure providing energy storage/generation/end-user heat production.

I haven't probed deeply into it, but I expect that there are already feasible and demonstrated solutions to every one of the technical problems associated with stopping fossil fuel use completely.

The biggest and most intractable problems are that such solutions would require a massive recapitalization of our energy infrastructure, coupled with removing many trillions of dollars worth of assets from financial markets. I fear that won't happen until the disaster is already so far advanced that the collapse of society is already well underway.

I fear that won't happen until the disaster is already so far advanced that the collapse of society is already well underway.

no need to fear, we're likely already past the tipping point

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609642/the-year-climate-change-began-to-spin-out-of-control/

there are a lot of ways to collapse, though. the task now is to mitigate it as much as possible.