https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo

The thing is, you want the turn signal to turn on before the start of the turn, so other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists can react.

Uh oh - a linguistics Wikipedia article.

And here I was, planning to work.

Why thank you

Doesn’t our current energy production add something like 5 orders of magnitude less than insolation? How many multiples of our current energy production before the effect is non-negligible?

It’s not so much a joke as a recitation of a tired stereotype

Bravo - very well-reasoned response.

Also can someone explain why we use solar panels instead of mirrors that heat up water and spin turbines? Almost every other method of producing energy uses that and from my understanding its more efficient and probably cheaper.

This is called concentrated solar power, and there are operating facilities representing less than 2% of total worldwide solar capacity (as of 2017): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

In short, as with most things, the answer to “why don’t we do more” is that it’s more expensive than the alternatives. Because the “feedstock” (sunlight) is free, efficiency doesn’t matter much unless land is expensive. The complexity of these systems is also much greater than PV, leading to higher capital and operating costs.

The promise of concentrated solar is that it can serve as energy storage as well (the hot heat transfer medium can continue to heat water and generate power into the night) meaning it has greater potential for base load power than PV. Plus, I think power towers look damn cool.

I think your conversion is off. There’s 4,184 joules per gram of TNT, not per ton (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent). Your calculation is off by six orders of magnitude. The first poster’s calculation is correct.

What’s interesting about the facility in the article is that it’s not capturing carbon from fossil fuels: it’s capturing CO2 generated from the fermentation of ethanol. That means the CO2 came from plants (corn), which is known as biogenic CO2. If low carbon electricity is used to capture biogenic CO2, the net result is a lowering of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s in addition to the energy content of the ethanol, which could displace fossil fuels.

Carbon capture isn’t the sole solution, but could be part of it.

In this case, the carbon is being captured is a concentrated stream resulting from ethanol fermentation (point source capture). It’s more efficient than capturing carbon from the air (direct air capture) due to the much higher initial concentration.

Missed opportunity:

“This is a panther’s favorite show.”

“What is Leopardy?”

Serious salvia flashbacks from that headline image.

deleted by creator

It’s a cool idea, but has not worked well in practice. The plant referenced in the 2016 article you linked (Crescent Dunes) stopped operation in 2019 due to performance and cost issues. It appears to have restarted after the original owner filed for bankruptcy and sold the asset, but at a lower capacity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project

I thought the original post was satire - list all of the privacy issues, then throw in “Privacy <3” at the end. Seriously, almost every one of those points has a potential privacy issue.

Guess I was being too generous.

Which is great, but I’m sure your plant deionizes the water before using it in the electrolyzers, right? So the water is still being purified, just not by a public water plant.

This is not correct. All commercial electrolyzers need very pure water as a feed to the system. PEM and SOEC electrolyzers use the ultrapure (industry term) water directly, while alkaline electrolyzers combine it with potassium hydroxide. Using sea water will very quickly result in non-functional equipment.

It looks like it regularly goes on sale that cheap on Amazon, at least in my region:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0BVFS94J5

I can’t tell if these crypto people (comparing the energy use of banking to Bitcoin) are dumb, or if they think everyone else is.