LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Quote from JedRothwell

Why? Do you like paying twice as much for electricity as you need to? Solar and wind are cheaper than gas, even with batteries. They are getting cheaper every day. Gas turbine manufacturers are in trouble because the power companies do not want their machines. Why do you want us to use obsolete technology?

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424

You don't get it. I also burn wood. The post was about the rigidity of orthodoxy in solving problems. The environmentalists don't want people to burn wood. Natural gas would be better, so give people a choice.

Quote from Curbina

As much as I like solar, and by experience of living in the part of the world where solar should be the most easy choice (Atacama desert) I currently deal with a sore shoulder from cleaning 36 solar panels that I had cleaned 2 weeks ago. Maintenance is really a pain on the neck in a desert environment. This is for powering an hydroponic irrigation system, totally off the grid, a project I have been working on for the past 9 months for a client.

Cleaning bot powered by electricity might avoid further body pain.

Quote from nickec

Cleaning bot powered by electricity might avoid further body pain.

How about a bot for cutting firewood? At the moment I'd settle for one that could cut down trees less than 6 inches in diameter. I've been mostly cutting serviceberry trees. Lots of back pain.

Quote from GRMattson

How about a bot for cutting firewood? At the moment I'd settle for one that could cut down trees less than 6 inches in diameter. I've been mostly cutting serviceberry trees. Lots of back pain.

Hey, as we get older, how about a bot to take care of our "daily hygiene requirements" so our children don't have to...

In all seriousness, I think that Boston Dynamics new general purpose bot can cut down your trees after it is programmed. But I think a special purpose "yard trimmer bot" is what we need -- imagine not needing to do our own landscaping on the front lawn and in the garden.

I'm looking into the Berkeley CO2 absorption material as something that absorbs more than (iirc) 50x its weight in another material sounds like we are not hearing the entire chemistry.

--anonymous coward

Berkeley news on the invention:

Capturing carbon from the air just got easier - Berkeley News

A new type of porous material called a covalent organic framework quickly sucks up carbon dioxide from ambient air

news.berkeley.edu

It removes a portion of it's mass per cycle:

"When 400 ppm CO₂ air is pumped through the COF at room temperature (25 °C) and 50% humidity, it reaches half capacity in about 18 minutes and is filled in about two hours. However, this depends on the sample form and could be speeded up to a fraction a minute when optimized. Heating to a relatively low temperature — 60 °C, or 140 °F — releases the CO₂, and the COF is ready to adsorb CO₂ again. It can hold up to 2 millimoles of CO₂ per gram, standing out from other solid sorbents."

CO2 has a molar mass of 44 g/mol. So, this stuff each cycle absorbs 88 mg per gram of the absorbent -- much more reasonable 9% of its mass. Then the power is heat cycled to 60C and it will out gas the CO2 presumably into some kind of sequestration system. The absorbent is then regenerated -- like a conventional desiccant pack. I would assume (without being a chemical engineer) that farms of this stuff in an appropriate apparatus, perhaps heat cycled with direct solar radiation, could act as a CO2 concentrator on an industrial (global) scale. What I like thermodynamically is that we can use cheap unconverted solar heat as the engine for this phase. I know far less about the next phase thermodynamically in carbon sequestration once the CO2 has been concentrated as a gas. And I also don't know about the thermodynamic expense to manufacture the absorbent and then to recycle it to new once it degrades after the 100 cycle lifetime mentioned in the article. But it sounds like a step on engineering us out of the CO2 trap we are creating by quickly burning the last 2 billion years of photosynthetic carbon fossilization.

-AC

Here is an article with lots of interesting info and good graphs:

China is racing towards a future powered by wind and solar | CNN

www.cnn.com

QUOTE:

Chinese solar is now expanding so fast that by the early 2030s, the country will generate more power from the sun than the amount of electricity the US will consume altogether, according to the International Energy Agency.

WOW!

12-Day Wind Drought Has German Utility Executives on Edge