Posts by Daniel_G

As you can see all this ocean acidification and warming has really taken its toll on the Great Barrier Reef! 🙄

Except the Nature Climate Change paper is complete bull poo poo. Peter Ridd, the Australian authority on the GBR, found that corals actually thrive on warmer temperatures and ocean acidification is not a thing. Whatever signal they claim is in the empirical data is lost in depth, diurnal, and season variation. In fact my close friend is an authority on marine diatom ecosystems and his data unequivocally proves that additional CO2 does change pH but in the opposite direction (higher) not lower because the climate scientists who came up with this ocean acidification story ignore biology and focus only on chemistry. Take any diatom based ecosystem and add CO2 and with the addition of sunlight the pH goes up not down. Oh and back to the Great Barrier Reef situation with all the ocean acidification and warming what happened to total reef coverage? Hint: it’s at record highs. Sucks when the data doesn’t fit your narrative.

Quote from JedRothwell

That is awful.

The average retail cost of electricity in the U.S. is $0.16 /kWh. 1 MWh is $160. 142 MWh = $22,720. 1 bitcoin = $26,010. So if bitcoins fall below $22,000 they will not be worth mining. Let us hope that happens. They were below that for most of 2022. Click here on the 5 year tab:

https://www.google.com/search?…US942&oq=1+bitcoin+in+usd

This is a good one to hook up to your 300MW wind turbine

I think that was clarified multiple times. MTI has been closed and a new company started with myself and Mizuno as major shareholders.

Alan has requested I update this thread with our work. We have established a good relationship with two independent and highly credible labs, and possibly one more in the works. We have one successful test which showed significant XSH which showed the exponential temp. vs. XSH relationship. That experiment dropped off at higher temps so we went back to our lab and now we are almost ready with 5 pairs of new reactors. We have also received some support to upgrade the calorimeter at one of the labs, and this work is almost completed so we will start a new round of testing this month. The results from the first experiment showed >13W XSH at its peak with about 3W total uncertainty for about 11W at 95% confidence and 120W input power and about 540°C reactor temperature.

The advice of Alan Smith has been taken seriously and we have made plans to include transmutation data as an additional endpoint. To achieve this we have made the reactors in pairs, one of which will be randomly chosen to run as an XSH experiment and then after producing XSH for some weeks we will do an acid wash of the interior of these reactors and run the resulting dissolved metals through ICP-MS for elemental analysis.

One of the labs has a spectrometric scintillation gamma/neutron detector so we will have that data but the experimental setup is not optimized for radiation detection and minimum energy detectable is about 20keV so not expecting anything exciting there. Our team continues to grow as our new lab was just completed so things should start to speed up soon.

Stumbled across this article from US Naval Inst

For reference this is the analysis I quoted on calculating how much storage would be needed for fully renewable power in California. It shows 25,000GWh but I used 30,000 because the 25,000 was calculated from actual historical data without any safety factors.

hi Jed. I’m happy you mentioned Lazard and LCOE because this is actually quite a controversial subject. There have been well publicized ongoing debates regarding LCOE wether it’s actually a useful metric and as far as I can tell the experts do agree on one thing: that LCOE is a useful way to compare very similar systems such coal vs natural gas generators.

The LCOE metric had diminished credibility when it compares intermittent renewables vs dispatchable fossil fueled systems because once renewables reach a certain percentage of the mix, more and more costs of intermittency are pushed onto the grid and these are not accounted for.

Secondly, battery storage prices you quoted are for short term storage from 1-4h only. But grids need long term storage to go to fully renewable energy. Prices for long-term storage according to Lazard are from $470-$1000/kWh. To put that in perspective, in depth analyses of a hypothetical fully renewable grid have been done for California.

In this example below, they used the lowest actual figure they could find quoted for California which was $600/kWh. Experts more or less agree that Ca would need around 30,000GWh of grid based long term storage of Ca were to go to fully wind and solar.

The cost of long term storage alone for Ca alone would then become $18T (with a T) dollars. That’s nearly 500% of the total annual GDP of Ca.

Then you might argue that well if regional grids were to connect then the loads could be smoothed out and the cost of storage could be reduced. As it happens these analyses have all been done and the conclusion was that it doesn’t matter how you scale it. It’s always a large multiple of GDP. Flow batteries are also included in the analysis. The basic numbers don’t change.

I hope you could take the time to read the energyforgrowth link below and we can hopefully continue this discussion as for what it’s worth previously worked closely with RMI and Amory Lovins who even wrote several books about a previous company I ran (he coined the term “negawatts” for the efficiency work we did. Amory Lovins was a big promoter of wind and PV and a highly influential person in this field. But after studying this issue very carefully I feel it has become a dead end and will never lead to net zero which absolutely must do as a civilization. They’re more and more industry experts sharing this opinion.

LCOE and its Limitations - Energy for Growth Hub

energyforgrowth.org

In the case of computers performance went up exponentially, prices came down and the overall market increased. For wind, revenue is decreasing, cost per MW is increasing. The market is saturated despite all renewables supplying only 13.5 Etajoules out of 600, if the market is puttering out now, surely this is a harbinger for a dismal future. In sharp contrast if you look at Lenovo’s sales trend, the market continued to increase. There is no analogous improvement in performance in the wind turbine industry. In fact as makers innovated larger and larger turbines both capex and opex have increased. I don’t believe the PC market is in any way comparable. Europe and UK saw negative market prices for wind power. I don’t want to use strong words here but the honeymoon of intermittent power sources is ending. The cost of intermittency will not decrease to anything feasible unless some unforeseen breakthrough is forthcoming. Quite a number of highly competent industry professionals are also singing the same tune.

In any case the market really needs what LENR is promising I think we both agree on this.

Hello Jed. Firstly we do agree on your final conclusion that LENR will be inherently cheaper than all possible alternatives.

So what I hope is a respectful debate on wind and solar should finally become moot if we all achieve our aims here.

You mention that you didn’t see evidence of increasing costs so I have outlined some key points from the papers mentioned in the article I quoted.

If the wind power business is so competitive and has a bright future, one would expect suppliers to maintain healthy profits to continue to invest in future development. As you can see from the following chart this is clearly not the case. There are many reasons given for this but industry analysts are not writing shining outlooks for the future.

Secondly, wind farm operators seem to have underestimated lifecycle maintenance costs. And finally grid operators are starting to force costs of intermittency on to wind operators.

For the record I was a huge supporter of wind and solar for a long time but started to see cracks in the foundation for a while now. Let’s hope the LENR progress goes well so we won’t have to discuss these issues more!

Time to accept that wind farm costs are not falling

There is a widespread belief that wind farm costs are falling and will continue to fall, but as OEM losses mount it's time to re-assess

watt-logic.com

Wind is not profitable and costs are increasing.

Quote from Fm1

you are kidding right?

https://www.nationalgrid.com/s…%20achieving%20net%20zero.

I hope in the future lenr becomes viable but till that happens wind and solar along with fuel cell, and battery tech are taking us to the future

You said currently commercially viable. Hydrogen will never be competitive to alternative energy sources. LENR will. Hydrogen is an energy storage material not an energy source akin to fossil fuels. You must use highly material intensive technology powered by coal to produce the solar panels and wind turbines, you must then electrolyze water to produce it and then store it then use fuel cells containing expensive precious metals to convert it back to electricity but that’s only for grid apps. If you want to use it for transport you have to compress it, pipe it at extremely high pressures through metals which will become brittle or other materials which are not currently in significant use. The experts reporting to the board of the oil companies I know were completely negative about any potential commercial viability. Yes Toyota has a car which they sold how many? A few fuel busses exist for showboating. Perhaps you know more than the highly paid consultants reporting to the oil companies and if so, more power to you. We see a viable path forward only for nuclear of some form.

Quote from Fm1

it's not snooty at all, it's present day reality, oh, and thanks for taking on my 28 hours a day to make things better. I just don't think it's heroic but I do agree some form of nuclear will be in the mix. Hydrogen is the future.

The goal is not to be a hero. It’s to provide another option for humanity. Hydrogen is not an energy source and never will be in the chemical sense. LENR is the only way hydrogen will be commercially viable. Show me a hydrogen energy solution that is currently commercially viable to use your own argument.

Jurge I understand why you are cynical but things are changing. I have friends in the oil business and they are most definitely not sending dark sunglassed dudes to kill LENR researchers. They are looking where the best place to invest their money is going to be. The bureaucrats are not quantum physics gurus nor are the oil executives. The discussions in the board room from direct sources is they don’t have any idea what product they will selling in the coming twenty years.

If you look at the global energy mix fossil fuels are increasing due to more wind and solar not decreasing. Why do you think Shell and BP are the biggest investors in wind and solar?

Quote from Fm1

these are marketable technologies, what do you have?

That’s a very snooty response for the LENR forum. It’s the reason I work 28h a day. And in any case if you do the analysis the countries with higher solar and wind power actually have a higher carbon intensity so regardless of what we are developing or not, the point remains. Some form of nuclear will be the only way forward for humanity.

Solar farms are everywhere. Not just restricted to desert locations. Even if we assume there’s no risk for hail damage, we still have EOL disposal issues. This issue cannot be just swept under the rug. Solar and wind will be the energy source for a thriving civilization. The numbers don’t work. Why we have to debate this on LENR forum? This is not Solar pv forum. We are all here to provide a better solution for the world. Portable scalable dispatchable power will always win in a free market.

It’s all related to economics and the inextricable physics of highly diffuse and intermittent power sources. Your analogy about wind screens is not appropriate. Each panel is more akin to a foam box or paper plate in that simply transporting it to a recycling facility is more costly by a large factor in making a new one.

Have you ever held a modern poly silicate PV cell in your hand? They are very thin and brittle. That is only one dimension of the problem with PV and wind. Slowly people are coming to realize that it’s a dead end path.

Hail damaged solar farm panels must be landfilled.

Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm

Baseball-sized hail took out a 5.2-megawatt solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday, as part of a giant supercell thunderhead that moved across eastern…

cowboystatedaily.com

Each panel contains about $3 worth of recoverable metals. The transport costs are $12-25 whereas the cost to landfill them is about $1.

So the PV utopia will never exist. Nuclear in one of its forms is the only energy than can power civilization.

Solar/Wind are a dead-end and the sooner we realize this, the better.

Solar panels are starting to die. What will we do with the megatons of toxic trash?

Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years. That means the solar e-waste glut is coming.

grist.org

Even Grist a pro-renewable non-profit are starting to acknowledge this reality.

Takeaways from the MHI patent appeal are that 1)these patent lawyers don’t know how to write a patent or make an argument, 2) USPTO is clearly biased against LENR in almost silly way, 3) they are not going to allow handwaving references to AHE, 4) even a big credible name like MHI doesn’t get credence, 5) there is a large burden for the initial people to overcome these biases.

There may or may not be a political or military conspiracy. LENR if made practical would most certainly have defense implications. I tend to take a more pragmatic view that PTO staff are not current in the field and don’t read the relevant literature. The references they cite are ancient. A reasonable general rule is don’t assign that to conspiracy what can be explained by simple incompetence.