FORUMula1.com - F1 Forum

[CookinFlat6]

The US navy are working on synthesising jet fuel from seawater onboard their carriers, i assume fuel suitable for cars could be synthesised too. Power the plant from solar and there you have it, solar powered, carbon neutral ICEs. Efficiency through the whole process and production volume might be problematic however.

For me there's great attraction in a plan that grows fuel offshore. powered by the sun, fed on our cities waste water and CO2. Well done by the NASA team proving it and even better they are publishing their work as open source. >>Yet another good article here<<.



Below is a little technical but still readable

[pdfview]http://miascuderia.com/media/biofuel/omega.pdf[/pdfview]

Please dont pollute this clean thread (pardon the pun) with the usual monotonous dribble of spermatoza

THIS thread is about SOLAR (the hint is in the title) - Its not about our flights of fancy or cheap mastubatory and/or ego tittilations.

Its about Solar and whats possible now, NOT what 'we would like' given logistical miracles, there are lots of other threads to go and masturbate over while trying to sound even vaguely interesting or able to think for your self

NO SMUT OR FANTASIES ON HERE PLEASE!!!!!

[CookinFlat6]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-02/un-sees-irreversible-damage-to-planet-from-fossil-fuels.html

This is reality for those interested in an alternative to the dripping sperm

Humans are causing irreversible damage to the planet from burning fossil fuels, the biggest ever study of the available science concluded in a report designed to spur the fight against climate change.

There’s a high risk of widespread harm from rising global temperatures, including floods, drought, extinction of species and ocean acidification, if the trend for increasing carbon emissions continues, a panel convened by a United Nations body said today in Copenhagen. Humans can avoid the worst if they significantly cut emissions and do so swiftly, it said.

“We must act quickly and decisively if we want to avoid increasingly disruptive outcomes,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in Copenhagen. “If we continue business-as-usual, our opportunity to keep temperature rises below” the internationally agreed target of 2 degrees Celsius, “will slip away within the next decades,” he said.

The report is designed to guide policy makers around the world in writing laws and regulations that will curb greenhouse gases and protect nations most at risk from climate change. It will also feed into talks among 195 nations working on an international agreement to rein in emissions that envoys aim to reach in Paris in December 2015.

“We need to get to zero emissions by the end of this century” to keep global warming below dangerous levels, Ottmar Edenhofer, chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Institute, outside Berlin, and a co-author of the report, said in a telephone interview. “This requires a huge transformation, but it doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice economic growth.”

Nobel Prize

The report is the culmination of five years of unpaid work by thousands of scientists, who sifted through research into all areas of global warming and condensed the conclusions into a single document that summarizes the most relevant findings. The panel, which has won a Nobel prize for its work, last carried out the exercise in 2007 and has become more certain about the threat since.

“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” according to the report. “Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions which, together with adaptation, can limit climate change risks.”

Narrative Sought

Delegates from about 120 nations spent the past week combing through the report line-by-line to ensure dense scientific findings were put into words understandable to a policy maker. Countries had submitted more than 2,000 comments about an earlier draft of the text, with U.S. envoys pushing for a “threading narrative,” and European Union officials saying the storyline “looks fragmented.”

Today’s study sought to link three earlier reports by the panel. Those detailed the observed physical impacts of climate change, the resulting damage and the tools governments have at their disposal to curtail emissions.

“It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Youba Sokona, another report co-author. “But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change.”

Exxon Mobil

Companies including Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell Plc have said they don’t see a danger of their assets becoming “stranded” as a result of climate-change regulation.

Ambitious emissions-reduction measures would shave just 0.06 percentage points off annualized economic growth this century compared to a business-as-usual scenario, the UN panel said. That doesn’t factor in the benefits of reduced climate change linked to human health, livelihoods and development, it said.

Other key findings highlighted by the panel include:

-Manmade greenhouse gas emissions have pushed atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide to levels “unprecedented” in the past 800,000 years.

-Giving the world a two-in-three chance or more to cap the level of warming since the 1800s at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) requires total emissions since 1870 to be limited to about 2,900 billion tons of carbon dioxide, two thirds of which had already been emitted by 2011. Policies to cut emissions may devalue fossil-fuel assets and reduce revenues for fossil-fuel exporters.

Sea Level

-The global average sea level has risen by about 19 centimeters (7.5 inches) since 1901 and is likely to rise by 26 centimeters to 82 centimeters this century.

-The global average temperature has risen by 0.85 of a degree Celsius since 1880, and the panel predicts a gain of 0.3 degrees to 4.8 degrees for this century.

Economic damage resulting from climate change accelerates with increasing temperature. An increase of 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures would cut economic output by as much as 2 percent. The panel said there were “limitations” in this analysis.

Future scenarios that limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees, an internationally agreed target, involve almost quadrupling the share of zero-carbon technologies in energy supply. These include wind and solar power, nuclear reactors and fossil fuels equipped with carbon capture and storage equipment.

Cost reductions and performance improvements in renewables enable governments to decarbonize their economies at a price that’s lower than ever, according to Samantha Smith, who leads the climate program at environmental group WWF.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report sends a strong message around the world.

“The longer we are stuck in a debate over ideology and politics, the more the costs of inaction grow,” Kerry said today in an e-mailed statement. “Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids.”

[CookinFlat6]

He Ripped Their House Off the Grid and He's No Hippie: Tales of the Solar Middle Class
By Mark Chediak
Save

Source: Dave Greene via Bloomberg
Leihulu Greene, from left, Sabina Greene, Regina Greene and Dave Greene stand for a photograph next to the solar system in the backyard of their house in Honolulu, Hawaii.
David Greene woke up one day and fired his power company. It wasn’t that hard to do.


Greene, 48, is neither a hippie nor a survivalist and his environmental leanings are middle of the road. He runs an air-conditioning repair service out of his home and lives in the suburbs, not the woods.

It’s just that his three-bedroom house near Honolulu is in a place with America’s highest electricity rates -- 38 cents a kilowatt-hour compared with the 13-cent national average. Fed up, Greene put solar panels on his roof and batteries in the garage to store the excess juice. He told his utility to come get his power meter.

“I enjoy being off the grid,” Greene said. “It’s an independence thing. It’s cool to say you don’t have an electric bill.”

Solar Energy

Even better, Greene calculates he’s spent about $58,000 on a system that will pay for itself in six to eight years -- factoring in that he now mostly avoids gas stations by charging his hybrid Toyota Prius from the rooftop solar system.

Greene remains something of an outlier. While there are no official U.S. government estimates of how many Americans live off the power grid, the Snowmass, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute says anecdotal evidence suggests it’s much less than one percent of the nation’s utility customers. About 147 million people get their power from the grid, according to data from the American Public Power Association.

Off the Grid

“Over time, many U.S. customers could partially or completely eliminate their usage of the power grid,” Morgan Stanley analysts Stephen Byrd and Timothy Radcliff wrote in a July report.

Greene’s liberation is possible because it’s a propitious moment in the rooftop solar revolution. The technology is moving into do-it-yourself territory and prices have plunged 64 percent since 2010, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. You can now buy solar panels at Ikea.

Related: While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Happened to Solar

“It is no longer a sign of a hippie to have solar panels, it’s the sign of a savvy homeowner,” said the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Leia Guccione.

While the cost of solar-tied home storage batteries remains uneconomical in states with low power prices, such as Louisiana and West Virginia, that also may change. One barometer is that the price of batteries powering electric vehicles has dropped by a third since 2011 and may slide another 45 percent by 2022, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Expensive Electricity

The situation in Hawaii, where Hawaiian Electric Co., the state’s major utility, burns fuel oil to generate the nation’s most expensive electricity, makes it ripe for defectors. Mom-and-pop solar companies have already begun to do for some consumers what Greene has done for himself.

High-cost power states like California and New York may, within a decade, also see a surge in home solar-battery installations like Greene’s that give consumers the ability to cut the cord, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which studies energy efficiency.

Companies such as SolarCity Corp. and SunPower Corp. are already undercutting the notion that utilities are the only game in town, with solar-and-battery packages that make them de facto power companies.

Parker Ranch

Homeowners aren’t the only ones seeking to sever ties with the grid. On the big island of Hawaii, the 130,000-acre Parker Ranch is considering a plan to bypass its utility by building a microgrid with wind farms and hydroelectric plants for its operations and the nearby town. “We can beat the utility’s rates,” said Neil “Dutch” Kuyper, chief executive officer of the ranch.

Hawaiian Electric is aware of this dynamic. The utility said it hopes to cut rates by 20 percent over the next 15 years by increasing its deployment of renewable energy to 65 percent of its power mix.

As for Dave Greene, his passion for solar has never been about saving the planet. He’s a lifelong tinkerer who remembers as a kid putting together electronic kits with solar-cells he bought at Radio Shack. Later, he built turbo-charged cars and raced them on remote streets around Honolulu until an engine blew up and he refocused on less hazardous hobbies.

Greene honed his electrical skills in the U.S. Army, where he trained intelligence officers in power generation and equipment repair. When he bought his first condominium in suburban Honolulu in 1989, he installed solar panels on a backyard shed and hooked them to golf cart batteries to see how much power he could generate.

Early Results

The answer was not much. Solar back then was still considered space-age technology -- panels were expensive and inefficient by today’s standards -- and Greene figures he blew about $2,800 on that solar lark. “I try not to think about how much I paid,” he said. “Cost matters not when it’s your hobby.”

When he moved to his current three-bedroom home about 15 years ago, he brought the solar system with him. His business repairing air conditioners and swimming-pool pumps was going well, so he had a little extra money to expand the setup.

More than two years ago he realized two things: His utility bills were astronomical, and solar had become mainstream and far more affordable. He did some quick calculations and realized his long-held fantasy -- to stop writing big monthly checks to HECO, as the company is known -- was in reach.

“I said, ’this is crazy -- it’s time to get off the grid,’ ” Greene said.

Power Ultimatum

There were issues, both domestic and technical. Greene’s wife, Leihulu, 48, had borne his solar hobby with good grace, but the leap from the grid seemed risky. She had her own hobby, making pottery and ceramics with an electric kiln, which gobbles a huge amount of power.

She issued an ultimatum: “You can’t get off the grid until you can run my kiln,” she told him.

The kiln wasn’t the only challenge. The house sits near a gulch that blocks the island breezes in sultry Oahu, and to stay cool the Greenes run electricity-sucking air conditioners almost around the clock. Their two teenage daughters like to watch movies on the flat-screen TV, play games on their Sony PlayStation, run their aquariums and fire up their laptop at all hours.

Household Consumption

At that point, nobody was much interested in giving up their lifestyle for Greene’s obsession. “It’s not uncommon for my wife to have two microwave ovens running at once while the TV is on and both washer and dryer are running while she’s brewing tea in the coffee maker,” he said. “If she can’t do all of the above, she gets irate.”

So Greene converted a stove and clothes dryer to run on propane. He put in energy-sipping LED lights. He rigged up a separate solar cell and battery system for charging mobile phones and powering outdoor lights, alarm clocks and bedside fans. And he installed a solar-powered hot water heater.

Then he reinforced the central power network, adding more solar panels to his roof. He spent $8,000 on industrial-sized nickel-iron batteries that he thought would last longer than the lead-acid batteries he was using. His goal: to store enough extra solar power to last through the night and cloudy days.

In the end, nearly every inch of roof that sees sunshine was covered in panels. There are more panels on the slope of his backyard. A room off the garage resembles a mini-transformer station with wires snaking out of control panels and knee-high industrial batteries lining the floor.

‘Meter Locked’

When all was ready, the Greenes took the plunge in March 2013. Hawaiian Electric removed the meter from the side of his house, leaving an empty hole with a white tag that reads “meter locked.”

HECO estimates that only a handful of customers have done what Greene has done. “As batteries become more affordable, it may allow more people to leave the grid, but we don’t expect it to be a big factor,” said Peter Rosegg, a company spokesman.

Greene has spent a lot of time fine-tuning his system. The expensive new batteries didn’t store as much electricity as he’d hoped. Even with all his power-bolstering and efficiency measures, the air conditioners taxed the system, running down the batteries until the family was left without power some days.

There were mornings when there was no electricity for the coffee maker or the microwave. More than once, Greene’s teenage daughter Sabina said she dressed for school in the dark.

Running Smoothly

Now things are running more smoothly. He’s added a backup gas generator that fires up automatically when power gets too low. He rigged the air conditioner to shut down before overtaxing his system. And he installed another set of jumbo batteries for $18,000 that he says is doing a better job of storing electricity from the solar panels.

Greene said he also set up his Prius to charge mostly from the rooftop solar system.

The family has also adjusted its energy habits. On some sunny days, Leihulu will dash home during her lunch break to run the washing machine, taking advantage of excess power churning out of the solar panels.

As for her pottery kiln, she can use it only if the family agrees not to run the air conditioning, microwave or other power-sucking devices. Otherwise, “Poof! Everything goes off,” she said.

Despite all this, Greene is ecstatic that he made the move. And it’s not just about the money -- it was also the challenge of being a pioneer. “I choose to go to the moon,” he said, “not to be mediocre.”

As for Leihulu, she’s slowly become a convert. And when battery technology improves to the point that they can store two to three times the energy as they do now, HECO may see a mass defection, in her opinion. “A lot of people are going to do the exact same thing Dave is doing and will go off the grid,” she said.

[CookinFlat6]

For me there's great attraction in a plan that grows fuel offshore. powered by the sun, fed on our cities waste water and CO2. Well done by the NASA team proving it and even better they are publishing their work as open source.

This is the previous standard of monotonous dribble of sperm I specifically want to avoid in this thread

Nothing to explain, if you're wanting to create algae from waste materials that would be one way. I'd place the algae farms as near as possible to some of the greatest carbon polluters on the planet, the electrical power generation plants - plenty of food for them there.

.
Researchers may some day find a way to solve the nutrient problem by extracting and reusing nitrogen and phosphorus from the algal residue, but the biggest difficulty to scaling up is more intractable: how do you get your hands on all that CO2? Even if algae-growers could tap every last smokestack in the US, that would only be enough to produce about 75 billion litres of algal biofuel per year, according to Pate's calculations. That's less than 10 per cent of the world's current transport fuel needs. Moreover, tying biofuel production to fossil-fuel-burning industrial smokestacks merely wrings a second round of energy out of CO2. "This just postpones emissions," says Jonas Helseth, director of Bellona Europa, an environmental foundation based in Brussels, Belgium.

where does the battery in your mobile phone gets its rare earth elements [/quote]

Wish I had a choice. Where do you fill up your car?

You dont have a choice to a mobile phone????
You are forced to use your mobile phone and keep those poor slave workers at work???

[overboost]

Now with dropping oil prices pushing gasoline to less than a dollar a litre I can stop driving my hybrid and can buy myself a hopped up flat 6 and not worry about paying the bills. No worries!

[CookinFlat6]

[youtube]09-GbpOd9T4[/youtube]

[CookinFlat6]

OMFG, surely no one is that sad, but it makes sense

Spanky - F2004 - Overboost - boycott

[Hammer278]

Now with dropping oil prices pushing gasoline to less than a dollar a litre I can stop driving my hybrid and can buy myself a hopped up flat 6 and not worry about paying the bills. No worries!

I suggest you boycott that sick lunatic hiding in your skull feeding you insanities to spout out here.

[What's Burning?]

Why else would overboost bother to post in a dormant thread in which he'd previously not had any input? I mean I know some tifuzzy are seriously deranged in the head but it's a pretty sad commentary.

Makes enjoying the pathetic state Ferrari is in even mo'better.

[CookinFlat6]

It make sense that the only person able to match the sheer bran damage level thickness that stretches to creating a temp username to spew rascist abuse in frustration at his team and driver getting owned by Crocket and Tubbs

Could only be the same brain transplant medical curiosity

And the time zone fits as well as the instinctive and natural support from sagi, who doesn't need usernames etc to latch on to the most meaningless and witless poster in any conversation

Anytime now overspanked will "introduce" a mrs underspanked and forget which login is which

[overboost]

Now with dropping oil prices pushing gasoline to less than a dollar a litre I can stop driving my hybrid and can buy myself a hopped up flat 6 and not worry about paying the bills. No worries!

I suggest you boycott that sick lunatic hiding in your skull feeding you insanities to spout out here.

What is this about Hammer278? You have a problem if I decide to drive a Porsche? My neighbour has one now and he is having good luck with it so why not.

The neighbour on the other side spent a bunch of money on solar domestic hot water but it turned out to be a waste as the savings were small and the snow just sits on the panels all winter anyway. The savings are completely gone now that heating oil is so cheap, 85c/l or so.

Better off using the extra cash on something fun and then I can always sell it later and maybe make a buck or two. I guess common sense is something you struggle with??!

[Hammer278]

Now with dropping oil prices pushing gasoline to less than a dollar a litre I can stop driving my hybrid and can buy myself a hopped up flat 6 and not worry about paying the bills. No worries!

I suggest you boycott that sick lunatic hiding in your skull feeding you insanities to spout out here.

What is this about Hammer278? You have a problem if I decide to drive a Porsche? My neighbour has one now and he is having good luck with it so why not.

The neighbour on the other side spent a bunch of money on solar domestic hot water but it turned out to be a waste as the savings were small and the snow just sits on the panels all winter anyway. The savings are completely gone now that heating oil is so cheap, 85c/l or so.

Better off using the extra cash on something fun and then I can always sell it later and maybe make a buck or two. I guess common sense is something you struggle with??!

A good-luck Porsche? That's a nice one Spanked. You trying to butter up WB?

[What's Burning?]

...and to think I was hot chatting with Mrs. Spanky.

[Hammer278]

...and to think I was hot chatting with Mrs. Spanky.

Dude I always told you that Mrs Spanky was one 'slippery' character. A 'wife' who logs in to post high compliments about her 'husband' and talks so much about Vietnam (a place her 'husband' frequents to bed women and 'he' hinted it himself), logs in once in a blue moon to talk nothingness and disappears whenever Spanked is at war and getting battered by Cookin.

Thank goodness "Grandpa" and "Grandma Spanked" never figured out how to logon. Not forgetting the many "Spanked Juniors' out of wedlock from his trysts in Vietnam.

[overboost]

It make sense that the only person able to match the sheer bran damage level thickness that stretches to creating a temp username to spew rascist abuse in frustration at his team and driver getting owned by Crocket and Tubbs

Could only be the same brain transplant medical curiosity

And the time zone fits as well as the instinctive and natural support from sagi, who doesn't need usernames etc to latch on to the most meaningless and witless poster in any conversation

Anytime now overspanked will "introduce" a mrs underspanked and forget which login is which

cookin please remove your lies pertaining to rascist comments or temp usernames immediately. Your belittling of the suffering people have endured over hundreds of years just for the sake of a cheap one liner on a racing forum is disgusting.