Posted May 5, 20178 yr Except Cleveland Cities all over the U.S. are pledging to go 100 percent renewable. http://grist.org/briefly/cities-all-over-the-u-s-are-pledging-to-go-100-percent-renewable/ "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 7, 20178 yr New (to me) sustainability idea in today's Financial Times: A London company called Pavegen has invented a floor tile that generates electricity from the compression/decompression cycle of footfalls. Inspired by the mobs of pedestrians in Waterloo Station, the tile generates three joules of electricity every time somebody steps on it. The idea is that enough "free" electricity could be created to light the walkway. If the walkway is crowded, there would be lots of light, but even a single pedestrian could generate enough light to make walking safe at night with lights blinking on as the pedestrian passes. The article was light on cost/benefit data, but I thought the concept was nifty. A test in Wash DC failed for technical reasons and fewer footfalls than predicted. They're working on it. :-) Remember: It's the Year of the Snake
June 8, 20178 yr The FT uses a paywall, but here's the company's site: http://www.pavegen.com/about/ Remember: It's the Year of the Snake
June 8, 20178 yr Much like the WSJ, it's not paywalled if you find it through Google haha. Very Stable Genius
June 28, 20177 yr Perhaps not the correct thread, but this is good news for the longevity of the safety of our water. https://clecityhall.com/2017/06/28/city-of-cleveland-receives-3-4-million-hud-grant/
June 29, 20177 yr This is embarrassing. CLE, we must do way better. "Cleveland's recycling rate was 13.6%, a 2% decline from 2015." https://t.co/546X7vlhOK "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 29, 20177 yr Yeah that's pretty bad. It's not like city makes it difficult to recycle either. It's easy if you live in a house. But if you're in an apartment, especially downtown, it's quite difficult to recycle. If the building doesn't offer it, and no where I've lived ever has, then you have to take it to a dumpster yourself. But the city has removed most of the recycling dumpsters.
July 22, 20186 yr Cleveland's draft Climate Action Plan is out, and it includes some lofty renewable energy goals -- https://t.co/NH67r3Wcrv cc @sustainableCLE @CLEReadyfor100 "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
March 29, 20196 yr This is very cool. Its sold out unfortunately and I would have loved to go on this tour. But I post it here in case another tour is scheduled or if there is enough interest that people request one. Exploring Cleveland’s Hidden Waterways - April 6 "The names Kingsbury Run and Walworth Run denote decayed Cleveland landscapes. In 1820, nevertheless, such areas were places of growth. Here, spring-fed streams gave clean water for drinking, brewing, refining and slaughtering. Yet as they also received noxious wastes from those activities, the runs became fouled. By 1900, all of Cleveland’s small waterways were buried as sewers and forgotten. Now, even as Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River are improved, the runs languish. The tour explores the city’s hidden waterways with an eye to history and restoration. We will consider the means to rebalance natural and human demands for our place. Tour begins & ends at Cleveland History Center....Tickets are $20" https://www.wrhs.org/events/exploring-clevelands-hidden-waterways/
April 19, 20196 yr Budish's State of the County speech pledges $5 million to plant trees. Good idea, but in my area we learned not to give them away. I hope the county only subsidizes the purchase of trees; the property owner needs to have some investment. Free trees don't get watered or otherwise cared for; free trees are dead trees in a year. Remember: It's the Year of the Snake
April 21, 20196 yr Fascinating: https://www.facebook.com/162099340623849/posts/1178048645695575?sfns=xmo https://www.facebook.com/events/2272704256322090/?ti=ia
August 7, 20195 yr How about by 2025?? Thirty years isn't a serious commitment..... "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
August 7, 20195 yr 2 hours ago, Terdolph said: No one will ever survive on "100%" renewable energy in an urban environment. These sorts of ridiculous goals just make everyone cynical in the long run and take attention away from goals that are actually attainable. Just learned a new energy biz word: dispatchable. It means capable of providing power “on demand”. Solar and wind in particular are not dispatchable, particularly for high energy density applications like cities and industries. Perhaps when storage methods get more efficient that won’t be the case. But they have to get dramatically better.
August 7, 20195 yr 2 hours ago, Terdolph said: No one will ever survive on "100%" renewable energy in an urban environment. These sorts of ridiculous goals just make everyone cynical in the long run and take attention away from goals that are actually attainable. You have an amazing tendency to avoid letting information get in the way of your desired opinion. At this early stage of the development of renewables, the biggest barrier to going to 100 percent renewables are the utilities themselves. So increasingly, cities are creating their own energy utilities. Vancouver, BC is at 98 percent renewable. The reason why it's not at 100 percent is because the region's utility generates "only" 93-97 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Several other large cities will get to 100 percent in a decade or less, including Auckland, Nairobi, Oslo and Seattle. So keep on reading and dazzling us with your informed opinions. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
August 7, 20195 yr In my dreamworld Hydro would be installed on the north side of the breakwall. There's the constant flow of water from the north which could turn generators.
August 8, 20195 yr FYI.... Scotland’s floating turbine smashes tidal renewable energy records https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/scotland-floating-turbine-tidal-power-record-sr2000-scotrenewables-ofgem-a8503221.html Meanwhile, look at how much power (10 gigawatts) is generated from wind energy in the North Sea... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in_the_North_Sea "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
August 8, 20195 yr 15 hours ago, GCrites80s said: The Right demands everything on Earth be "dispatchable" at all times. More like modern culture expects it. We're just blunt about the reality.
August 8, 20195 yr 14 hours ago, Terdolph said: The hydro for the Great Lakes is already there: at Niagara Falls. All of the really good hydro power places have already been taken, and many are being removed for environmental reasons. The Scots tried something similar in the north sea with wave power in the 70's I think but it didn't work out. One other interesting point about Cleveland. Muny Light stopped generating any power at all for a time in the 70's (80's?) and just re-distribluted power from Hydo-Canada it was so cheap. The power related engineering frontiers of the near future are storage and transmission far more than generation. Heinlein spotted this as early as 1982 (Shipstones). I suspect others did sooner. Fusion would be a game changer for sure. Though I do sometimes suspect more politicians than are willing to admit it buy into the wrongheaded "giving an idiot child a machine gun" analogy. Edited August 8, 20195 yr by E Rocc
August 8, 20195 yr 7 hours ago, E Rocc said: The power related engineering frontiers of the near future are storage and transmission far more than generation. Agreed. 18 minutes ago, Terdolph said: It's great that the Scot's got their sea power to work, it has been a long time coming. The maximum output of all of them (3 Gw) is about what one nuke plant would generate (and the nuke plant output is continuous 90% load factor). I don't know where you are getting your North Sea wind power number. I look at that chart and don't see any facility that is generating more than about 300-400 Mw (about the size of a coal fired power plant) and that is at capacity. Most wind farms don't generate anything most of the time, the coal fired plant can increase or decrease energy production on demand. True, but we are still in early-stage development of these alternative energy sources. Utility-scale wind and solar seems to be about where personal computers were in the late '80s-early '90s. Germany is a much larger and more industrial nation than Scotland, if you prefer a better example of how far behind the US is. They don't quite have the transmission issues that we do, but Germany could be comparable to some regions of the US. Germany is up to 30% renewable power generation and is aiming for 65% by 2030. We are at least as technically competent as Germany and should be aiming higher. We just agreed to finance the retention of old nuclear plants, so those should be around to provide peak power when needed. Why not aim for producing the rest of our power locally and from renewable sources? While storage (and transmission) will likely be where we need the biggest breakthroughs right now, we're not that far off. Large battery storage systems are already in use in some places, providing real world experience that will make the next generation of storage even better. NOACA says there are about 1.8 million registered cars in Northeast Ohio. On average nationally, 2% of new cars are electric, and that number is on an upward trend. The Greater Cleveland Automobile Dealers Association typically reports sales of around 200,000 vehicles in Northeast Ohio every year. A Nissan Leaf has a 40 kWh battery pack. The Chevy Volt has about half that. A Tesla Model 3 can be anywhere from 50kWh to 75kWh. So if we assume at least 2% of new cars will be electric, that puts 40,000+ electric vehicles into Northeast Ohio each year for the next ten years, assuming an average battery capacity of 30 kWh (low estimate, particularly since battery capacity is likely to increase over this time), that's 1.2 million kWh of storage capacity being added every year. What if we could use that stored electricity during times of high demand, buy it back from the owners? With the right incentives to increase electric car sales, renewable energy generation, fixed permanent storage (Tesla Powerwall type), and some small technological improvements, this is doable. Cleaner air and lower variation in generation costs would benefit all of us. Fusion definitely seems to be a bit further off.
August 9, 20195 yr 16 hours ago, Terdolph said: It's great that the Scot's got their sea power to work, it has been a long time coming. The maximum output of all of them (3 Gw) is about what one nuke plant would generate (and the nuke plant output is continuous 90% load factor). I don't know where you are getting your North Sea wind power number. I look at that chart and don't see any facility that is generating more than about 300-400 Mw (about the size of a coal fired power plant) and that is at capacity. Most wind farms don't generate anything most of the time, the coal fired plant can increase or decrease energy production on demand. I've heard that a lot of wind farms struggle to even produce the energy that was needed to build and run them. And that sea based wind farms typically have special "challenges" related to transmission. Land based is of course rather rough on birds.
August 9, 20195 yr 14 hours ago, Terdolph said: There are just a lot of places in the US where there isn't any commercial wind, no elevation change for hydro (good luck building a dam anywhere) and as I said earlier you would have to cover all the arable land in the US to meet daytime electric power from solar. Transmission is a really big issue. Transmission losses are not linear with distance. There are a lot of places where solar and wind make sense, and they will be adopted there with or without government incentives. Then, there are a lot more places where they don't make sense and they wont be adopted there. Things will work out on their own even without government assistance. You can't subsidies these things forever, as Germany is figuring out. Instead of subsidizing them, you can simply mandate their use and force the marketplace to subsidize them. That's the problem with percentage laws like Ohio's. Inefficiency is rewarded so efficiency is not incentivized.
August 9, 20195 yr 16 hours ago, Foraker said: Agreed. True, but we are still in early-stage development of these alternative energy sources. Utility-scale wind and solar seems to be about where personal computers were in the late '80s-early '90s. Germany is a much larger and more industrial nation than Scotland, if you prefer a better example of how far behind the US is. They don't quite have the transmission issues that we do, but Germany could be comparable to some regions of the US. Germany is up to 30% renewable power generation and is aiming for 65% by 2030. We are at least as technically competent as Germany and should be aiming higher. We just agreed to finance the retention of old nuclear plants, so those should be around to provide peak power when needed. Why not aim for producing the rest of our power locally and from renewable sources? While storage (and transmission) will likely be where we need the biggest breakthroughs right now, we're not that far off. Large battery storage systems are already in use in some places, providing real world experience that will make the next generation of storage even better. NOACA says there are about 1.8 million registered cars in Northeast Ohio. On average nationally, 2% of new cars are electric, and that number is on an upward trend. The Greater Cleveland Automobile Dealers Association typically reports sales of around 200,000 vehicles in Northeast Ohio every year. A Nissan Leaf has a 40 kWh battery pack. The Chevy Volt has about half that. A Tesla Model 3 can be anywhere from 50kWh to 75kWh. So if we assume at least 2% of new cars will be electric, that puts 40,000+ electric vehicles into Northeast Ohio each year for the next ten years, assuming an average battery capacity of 30 kWh (low estimate, particularly since battery capacity is likely to increase over this time), that's 1.2 million kWh of storage capacity being added every year. What if we could use that stored electricity during times of high demand, buy it back from the owners? With the right incentives to increase electric car sales, renewable energy generation, fixed permanent storage (Tesla Powerwall type), and some small technological improvements, this is doable. Cleaner air and lower variation in generation costs would benefit all of us. Fusion definitely seems to be a bit further off. Powerwall has a lot of potential (yes, you see what I did there) but it's not quite up to what's needed to make sporadic energy sources viable. Yet. I'm definitely a fan of Elon's various enterprises and even his taste in women LOL (got the "Occupy Mars" shirt going for my half day at the weapons plant today) but if he ever tries to claim he hasn't read Heinlein's entire catalog I'm going to call bovine excrement. He's trying to be both Delos D. Harriman and Daniel Shipstone.
August 10, 20195 yr 11 hours ago, Terdolph said: The market always rewards efficiency. To the degree that it is permitted to, yes.
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