LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

    • Official Post

    any countries with renewables providing base load yet? Are Germans still as exited about renewables as they were 10 years ago?

  • any countries with renewables providing base load yet? Are Germans still as exited about renewables as they were 10 years ago?


    Switzerland has renewables since more than 100 years 80% of the electricity is from hydro... That's the main reason we did not push solar. We in average always did export about 50% of our nuclear electricity highly profitable during rush hours what no longer works as business model. Today solar is ideal to cover the midday peek on energy demand based on cooking & air-condition.


    A solar island solution also saves 20% of the average total grid transmission loss. The best storage solutions today are medium size flow batteries. Solar on a roof also helps to cool the building etc..


    In Germany only the old energy mafia is not excited because the cost for 1kwh from the dirty brown coal is much lower than wind (around 2c) . It's a license to print money. They - like the Chinese - prefer to destroy the whole landscape in favor of profit. (Like the US that is flattening the Appalachian mountains.) We not even talk about the CO2 and climate change.


    There is no way around to 100% renewables. All European countries are committed to this target.

  • any countries with renewables providing base load yet? Are Germans still as exited about renewables as they were 10 years ago?


    Yes Norway has done 100% renewable for 100+ years.


    And Hydro Power in Norway could probably become a large scale battery for all of Europe.


    There are already several cables to/from Norway - Europe, and more is being built as we speak. So Norway will become Europes battery at some time in the future..


    So all we would need is Solar + wind + Pumped Hydro as storage.


    Some batteries should be added for fast acting grid stability as done i Australia with huge success ;)

  • Hi everyone,


    Just found this analysis that Disected the BS movie from Michael Moore and Jeff Biggs


    As I stated earlier and is confirmed here, the Moore movie presents a lot of outdated claims, which is NOT facts by present day.


    The analysis reveals that renewable information from 2005 and 2010 is used as "facts" in the movie, which is absolutely no longer are part of present facts, and was not real facts back then..


    And "Just have think" also agrees with me on biomass and biofuel, good.


    External Content www.youtube.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    • Official Post

    Who else is thinking that many other countries on this planet can possibly live like Switzeland and Norway?

  • Renewables should be called 'Intermittablels'. We need to add materials needed to manufacture storage or transmission (there is always sunlight somewhere, there is always 5 o'clock somewhere, blah blah) to Zephyr's numbers.

    While the tech itself is feasible as a niche or supplement it only exist now due to massive subsidies and the fact that traditional produce base load.


    Germany had subsidies in the past. Nowadays they are more or less gone and the big energy companies have lobbied a ton, so that coal is still prefered over gas here, our solar industry is destroyed and currently the goverement is also working on destroying the wind power industry. Despite all these political problems for renewables they are still growing. That is because they are cheaper than regular energy even with all the burocratic bullshit you have to deal with here, if you want to install pv on your roof .


    And we are talking about germany with 1600 sunshine hours a year compared to 2500 in many parts of spain. In april we had many days with 50-70% of overall electricity production from renewables. This technology is not a niche anymore - even here in germany with problematic regulation and little sunshine. Renewables + gas power plants + power to gas is the future of energy generation and does not need a single battery storage or other crazy storage technology. If there is enough renewable overproduction (converted into gas) the gas plants will only run from november to february with not much load.


    Edit: Just to make it clear. We have very little hydro (1-2% ?) energy in germany - so I am just talking about wind and pv.

  • Focusing on efficiency as a major shortcoming of PV is silly. When the fuel source is essentially unlimited and free, efficiency is not an important factor. It only comes into play in the form of economics and physical area. As far as economics is concerned, the important metric is dollars/watt, and that just keeps coming down. As far as physical area is concerned, it is of course, very important when it comes to home solar. If you don't have enough roof space (or backyard space for a standing array) to get the power you need, then you have a problem. But in the big picture, the total amount of space that needs to be covered with solar panels to produce all the energy we need is surprisingly small and quite practical. It is not just an interesting fact that the sun provides more energy to the planet in an hour than the human race uses in a year. There are vast tracts of flat, unused land that could be employed and it doesn't add up to any kind of environmental catastrophe, as scare-mongers try to claim. There have been many studies on this topic and you can hunt them down if you'd like. People ranging from Dr. Richard Perez to Elon Musk have beaten this topic to death. The argument that renewable energy sources are a blight on the land is, for the most part, bogus. Comparing some wind turbines or solar arrays to belching smokestacks is frankly stupid.

    • Official Post


    This is good information, but the fact remains, "renewables" are nowhere near to powering civilization.


    The older footage not labeled with dates in Planet of the Humans is wrong. When I am putting my doc on cold fusion together, the earliest video I have is from 2011, and it wll be labeled as such. It is important to show context and dating is one way of doing that.


    Also, I agree the population issue was not fully analyzed either. I was reminded from Carl Page's lecture at MIT that education makes women have less children, and that were we to educate people around the planet more, we would have less people. Consumption by those people is another issue. Unfortunately, the world is clammering for more power, food, amenities, so that people can live like rich Americans, and that is not sustainable. What to do? Powerdown:

    ....a strategy that will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and reduce the human population humanely but systematically over time. https://newsociety.com/books/p/powerdown-pdf

    Will the Americans who can't even wait one month to go out and get a haircut and are willing to let tens of thousands more people die from a virus rather than stay home going to powerdown? Sadly, not unless they have to. (And I believe they will have to.)

    I did a "unit conversion" activity with first-year liberal arts students based on UNDERSTANDING ENERGY Math Review

    Module 1 – Unit Conversion CEE 107A/207A/EARTHSYS 103 (a Stanford U course) where we showed that a Nissan Leaf emits only 1/3 of the carbon than a gasoline powered Honda Civic. (see attached)

    In the computation, natural gas is used for charging. That is good because that is less carbon than coal, and I am in favor of this. Yah. But coal is still the majority of power sourced for electricity. According to BP data (not my first choice for data but something I have on hand) natural gas production increased 40% and coal increased 22% over ten years. And when we talk of grid-tied systems, let's remember the grid itself loses what is the number about half the power generated?


    Claim: The entire grid system has to go eventually. Our grid in the US is already falling down, and in fact, at one point in the northwest US, new wind capacity couldn't even be connected because it could handle the load. AND it is not being repaired because there is no money or will to do so. Sigh.


    Also, see https://www.iea.org/news/renew…cades-of-strong-expansion   Renewable capacity growth worldwide stalled in 2018 after two decades of strong expansion


    "New net capacity from solar PV, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and other renewable power sources increased by about 180 Gigawatts (GW) in 2018, the same as the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest data. That’s only around 60% of the net additions needed each year to meet long-term climate goals"

    and


    “But the IEA’s analysis shows the world is not doing enough. Last year, energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.7% to a historic high of 33 Gigatonnes. Despite a growth of 7% in renewables electricity generation, emissions from the power sector grew to record levels.”

    file-768x350.jpeg



    I always put in energy examples to my basic skills math class that utilize "renewable" energy, meanwhile advocating for cold fusion as the real solution. So look, I am not saying NO to "renewables". We should investigate everything! We need to get off of fossil fuels ASAP. But I am seeing solar as a stopgap, a transition, a back-up, until we get nuclear.


    But "renewables" are not actually renewable, and, they don't come close to providing what humans want from power.
    Transportation alone is using so much gasoline and coal is powering the majority of systems. See https://ourworldindata.org/gra…city-generation-by-source


    The facts remain, only the energy density of nuclear power will give us the power humans want at this time.


    And not the dirty nuclear of yore (long ago!), but new small modular reactors and dammit cold fusion. We need a breakthrough for sure, but with proper funding for multi-testing pathways we could do it.


    Planet of the Humans shows in a visceral way that "renewables" are not actually renewable, and have a greater cost than is apparent. I'll agree their analysis is not entirely accurate, but it is not entirely wrong either. Nevertheless, I still find this movie to be a Prequel to "Planet of Water Fuel". That's what we need to move forward, everybody together, in a humane way that treats our natural world with the respect it deserves.


    THANK YOU for your advocacy of "renewables". You are doing a good job maintaining integrity of the field.

  • I realize that this is an LENR site and for many if not most people here, LENR is the answer - often regardless of what the question is. But let’s talk about LENR and global energy.


    I direct the following to those who accept the overwhelming evidence of AGW. To those who don’t: move along. It is a waste of time to reason with you.


    When promoting LENR as an alternative to renewable energy sources, consider their relative status in terms of what can be done NOW or at any predictable point in the future and read this article:


    https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ne…logy-wont-save-the-planet

  • Germany freaked out with wind and solar and lost decade of progress in nuclear energy now has to use coal instead.

    German CO2 emissions are down since 1990 thank's to renewables.

    Nuclear cannot be built fast enough to matter. It takes 15 year to build a single nuclear plant.

  • I fail to see why people shy away from fast neutron fission breeder technology.

    Not only does it renew its inventory of fissile material, it produces more than it consumes.

    It's like having a wind turbine that not only produces energy from the wind, but produces extra

    wind for those turbines downwind of itself.

  • But "renewables" are not actually renewable, and, they don't come close to providing what humans want from power.

    Transportation alone is using so much gasoline and coal is powering the majority of systems.


    The facts remain, only the energy density of nuclear power will give us the power humans want at this time.”


    These “facts” are nothing more than highly debatable opinions. Ruby, you should at least describe them as such because most knowledgeable people would declare them to be demonstrably false. You are free to hold those opinions and promote them, but don’t present them as any sort of facts.

  • Germany freaked out with wind and solar and lost decade of progress in nuclear energy now has to use coal instead.


    You just talk nonsense... They still (not instead) use coal and the mafia who owns it tries to stop wind by heavily financing the ruling mafia.

    • Official Post

    I never understood the activist wing of the environmental movement. 30-40 years ago, if you asked them what would replace the coal/nuclear they were protesting against, they would say wind/solar. Which at the time even they knew was impractical for many reasons, but that "inconvenient truth" did not matter to them. And now that solar/wind is finally practical, what do they do?..why protest, and obstruct against of course. :) Go figure with these people.


    Safe to say, that were it not for their activism against the same things they advocated for just a few years ago, the past 15 years would have seen even more growth in renewables. How much more progress will be lost just because of this new Moore video? The "China Syndrome" movie alone did great damage to nuclear. Will this documentary have as much a negative impact? I doubt it, but it could definitely set back some projects in the works.


    Speaking of the China Syndrome; at least some of the older leaders of the green movement have done a 180 on nuclear. Looking back, they realize how wrong they were to have played a role in killing the planets best source of CO2 free energy. Little too late for the big traditional plants to kick back into gear, as they have become too costly. But as Carl Page, Ruby and many others have said, there are newer, smaller scale versions ready for market.


    Doing that will take getting all the activists on board though, as all it takes is one person filing a lawsuit to throw a wrench in the machinery to make it come to a grinding halt. Unfortunately, I do not see that happening anytime soon.

  • Maybe volcanoes could be tapped as heat/geothermal power sources more intensively than they have been, all that energy going to waste


    The springs of Puna had some troubles with angry Kiluaea..2018

    External Content youtu.be
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    They have resolved their diiferences..two years later..hopefully .

    The geothermal plant may expand capacity

    https://www.bigislandvideonews…-puna-geothermal-venture/

    http://www.ililani.media/2020/…s-commission-tackles.html

Supporting researchers for over 20 years
Want to Advertise or Sponsor LENR Forum?
CLICK HERE to contact us.