Friends,
Let us discuss alternative and renewable energy sources. Anything non-fossil goes.
>Solar
>Wind
>Hydro
>Biological
>Geothermal
>Nuclear (?)
How do we bring about a cleaner future?
natural gas
>go home
>plug in car
>fill with natty gas
>burns fairly clean
>cheap, abundant, existing infrastructure
>works with existing ICE engines, even better with future fuel cell vehicles
>>53514090
>How do we bring about a cleaner future?
Dyson sphere covered sun or bust. Everything else is half measures.
Nuclear all the way. To bad the public won't let it happen due to ignorance and fear mongering.
>>53514090
By making it economical without having to rely on government (which means taxpayer, aka your, assuming you're not a NEET) subsidy money.
Make something clean that's cheaper than coal and within 25-30 years you'd be generating a huge percentage of the world's power with it.
>>53514209
What about nuclear waste?
>God tier
Solar in 100 years
Thorium
Fusion (if it exists)
>Ok tier
Hydro
Geothermal (totally science fiction tho)
>meh tier
Gas (because cheap)
Tidal
Wind (this and above are just too inefficient)
>just bad tier
Oil
Biomass
Solar now (creating panels is shit for the environment, expensive, memeworthy, only 15% efficient and only lasts 10 years meaning you fuck the environment again when you get them reinstalled. Nope. Stick with oil or gas)
>holy shit what the fuck are you doing?
Coal
Any coal
Chinese coal
Indian coal bought from Queensland through breaking the great barrier reef
Just stop the coal
An ideal future of energy is just long lasting CNT solar panels stuck everywhere.
>>53515157
Forgot uranium, it gets stuck in ok tier below thorium because uranium has the potential to start wars and thorium much less so.
That being said, I don't care what China uses provided it's not coal.
>>53514566
There would be practically no waste, if countries used fully developed safer and more efficient methods of nuclear energy. Only problem is, that means they would have to use actual uranium, not leftover shit they gather from weapon experimentation. Too bad the general public is too brain dead to actually know/insist on this though.
>>53514160
No
You retard no
Step in wrong direction
No such thing as "clean" natural gas....
>>53514090
currently:
>solar isn't efficient enough for large portions of the world, due to low sun energy exposure
>wind is loud, large, and inconsistent. also tends to kill birds and needs quite a bit of maintenance on the large scale
>hydro is great, but there aren't enough places to utilize it
>bio fuel is a bit iffy because it creates the same pollutants as fossil fuel, and is hard to produce. Corn ethanol isn't even worth producing due to the energy expended to make it
>Nuclear is incredible as long as it has funding to be maintained. re-energizing spent fuel can also cut down on the waste issue by a huge margin
I'm moving from a location that uses diesel turbines for power to one that uses coal turbines as well as nuclear
0rgon3 energy
>>53515366
Love living in the only state that uses primarily nuclear
Not to mention the number 2 is hydroelectric
>>53515157
Fusion will never be feasible because there will never be worthwhile neutron shielding
Stop taxing the shit out of carbon based fuels so there can be some fuckin money thrown at new ideas.
Also nuclear is best :^)
>>53515476
single digit power per KW-hr?
>>53515587
I don't know what you are trying to ask, please elaborate
nuclear is the way to go.
fucking hippies though.
>>53515611
oops. I meant power costs.
>>53515366
My state is mostly coal (from a neighboring state) and some nuclear.
>>53515611
They're asking how much you pay per kWh
>>53515657
Virginia or NC?
>>53515621
Right now it is $0.1394/kwhr
It increased by $0.03/kwhr after the October floods so they could put the money towards repairing dams (south Carolina had the thousand year flood last October and it wrecked a good number of dams through the state)
>>53515675
Also the majority of that cost goes towards repair of the lines in storms
Korea is the god of nuclear power now
>>53515683
Which we have a shit ton of storms
Btw our state has a 100% buyback of power if you go solar and end up feeding the grid with your system
>>53515476
Slovakia here
>>53515698
power buyback is the best idea for any energy plan
imagine a decentralized power grid, running off of various power types from every home
>>53515713
Yup, my area is covered in trees but I have a river running through my property I plan on connecting a basic paddlewheel system to (before you question me, know I am a electromechanical engineer and I've already done the calculations for it)
Should easily supply me enough for every month except August. And I should be able to make a hundred per month in the winter
>>53515363
Natural gas produces much less pollution than oil fuels. It's also one of the few things that's actually feasible to implement - much of the infrastructure is already built. Then from there you can go to hydrogen. Half this shit is a money sink, NG is actually possible and better than oil or coal.
>>53515772
that's awesome, how much power are you estimating?
>>53515783
Only if you don't account for methane leakage in the fracing process which is the only reason natural gas is so cheap
Methane is a whole different level when it comes to greenhouse gases
>>53515795
Between 45 and 55 kwh per day, and I made my efficiency calculations for the poncelot to be around 40% when in reality it should get closer to 80%
>>53515807
Fracking*
>>53514090
Geothermal+striling's engine best way to make energy
>>53515862
geothermal needs to be done very carefully though, it has been shown they cause minor earthquakes
>>53515366
>hydro is great, but there aren't enough places to utilize it
Build dams using the potential energy of flowing water to generate electricity, problem solved. New problem: angry residents complaining about spoiling the view and fleeing wildlife.
Solar array covering 1% of sahara desert can produce enough power for the planet earth.
>>53515921
Wouldn't sandstorms kill the array?
>>53514090
who cares, global warming is a scam tbhwy sensai
>>53515937
>>>/x/
>>53514090
Water is actually pretty good, it's stable, can't contaminate anything, has next to no emissions and you can use it to store energy for peak usage times. See sylvenstein speicher.
>>53515932
Need to do more research to answer.
>>53515932
also efficiency of power lines makes that claim bullshit
why is nuclear so bad? Why do normies seem to hate it and think it's the devil. Is it not the most efficient?
Also, Hydrogen, that'll be the fucking king
>>53516008
the waste is covered in scary symbols and ITS TOTALLY AN ATOMIC BOMB GUYS
also hydrogen isn't really a form of energy generation, just a storage medium.
>>53516008
Because people are too fucking stupid to maintain their plants, look at Japan, they didn't look after their shit and it backfired big time
>>53516054
is hydrogen fuel not a thing?
>>53516087
you have to make it, which is done by exerting energy and separating it from oxygen in water. when the fuel is used, it recombines with oxygen when it burns and becomes water again. think of it as a dense liquid battery more than an energy source.
>>53515157
What's wrong with biomass?
Or, I should say, what's the cleanest way to harvest biomass?
The saying goes trees are 3% efficiant at harvesting solar, store energy for 100+ years with less than 1% losses, and you can filter the smoke out.
Anyway, I still happily support solar as it is now, as despite the damage it's doing now, if a supported industry means enough funding to make clean panels in the next 100 years then we're fucking gold.
Also, my idea for future energy: Mealworms.
Feed mealworms all our scrap styrofoam, then build hundreds of billions of tiny treadmills.
Or feed the mealworms to chickens, put a chicken coop at the top of a hill, with the mealworms on the bottom, chickens lay eggs on top, eggs weigh down a conveyor belt generating energy, chickens walk down hill, eat mealworms, walk back up, then the cycle repeats.
Me being stupid aside, I wish there was a clean way to harness biomass. I mean, I end up with so much of the fucking stuff, trees, foodscraps, animals, now I can even convert styrofoam into the god dammed stuff. HOW HARNESS CLEAN?
>>53515291
>uranium
Liquid thorium reactor or GTFO.
>>53516008
>why is nuclear so bad?
because people are stupid and incompetent when it comes to nuclear
and you can only maintain vigilance for so long before you burn out and can't work there ever again
>>53516130
ah okay, thanks for clearing that up for me
>>53516144
I read one of the most effective ways to make biofuel is with algae farms. you could take otherwise unusable swamps and use them to make fuel. that said, biofuel is still an oil to be burned just like fossil fuels.
>>53516087
You put water in a tub and add electricity, then you get hydrogen.
You need to get the electricity from somewhere.
>>53516146
Indian Point plant tried it, it's now the decommissioned "unit 1"
molten salt reactors also have a nasty habit of slowly eating the components needed to control it.
>>53516177
I'm talking raw biomass, as in trees and dead people, you can convert that shit into biofuel, but I'm looking for a cleaner way to harness the energy.
>>53515835
Dude thats ridiculous, good work. I've played around with a homemade wind turbine with 5 2 meter long blades and a generator with 3 plates of 8 big ass neo magnets each and 2 stators sandwiched between them. I was getting nowhere near output like that on a good day, lucky to break 7 kwh.
>>53516191
>>53516144
Can be energy expensive to make, can have just as many pollutants as oil and you're still burning things to spin turbines when there are better heat generation techniques.
It's renewable... But oil is everywhere, which for the moment negates the two and sticks it on par with oil. Oil isn't actually bad, but we can only keep this up for 20 to 100 years max before we just need to leave the ancient fossil fuels behind.
Just coal is actually bad. Unless you like your meat with that real flame grilled taste, there is no reason to use anything coal or similar. Coal miners literally need to be convinced to quit their jobs, because that's why we still do coal since we don't want unskilled people to be jobless (laughably, but skilled underemployment is a-okay!).
Lastly, current solar isn't bad either, but at the moment it's a bad meme on par to those horrible, pretentious hipsters who "hate capitalism" with their shiny iPhones. You're buying these things for the environment, but the production of it and the battery for it is causing as much damage as just sourcing your energy from a fossil fuel power plant. Give it less than 100 years and I'll be very disappointed if all children of everyone reading this does not have solar panels.
>HOW HARNESS CLEAN
It's not just clean, it's renewable and it's accessibility too. Geothermal would beat hydro if there were more than two places on earth where it could work, hydro would beat any nuclear if it didn't require a fast flowing river (and potentially destroying habitats).
Besides thorium, there is currently no good power generation techniques. Everything sucks.
>>53515157
Fusion has been done by heating deuterium in a vacuum chamber but it puts out very little energy for the energy you put in, can be very handy for neutron bombardment though.
>>53516347
And again by using anodes and cathodes to pinch ionized gas (lithium? Hydrogen? Dunno), but again it doesn't produce much energy. The dream is to create something like a hydrogen bomb or cobalt bomb and control the reaction.
Actually, the dream is creating energy out of extremely common elements. We turn hydrogen into something as energy rich as uranium and we're on easy street with free blowjobs and coke tasting.
>>53514090
>Nuclear (?)
Nuclear energy is fossil. You run out of fissable uranium, you got nothing.
>>53516008
Because there is no place where you could store the waste. And Tschernobyl anf fukushima were kind of scary. I still need a geiger-counter if I want to eat boar.
Energy pro here let me clear up some misconceptions
>thorium is less of a nuclear bomb threat
Not really
It's more difficult but still easy to make a bomb with the materials required to make a thorium reactor (Th232->Pr233->U233 U233 is fissile thus bombs)
It is however notable that U233 bombs are clunky compared to Pu239 bombs but this means little in the way of a nuclear threat
>current solar panels suck and are bad for the environment to make
Sort of
Solar panels are profitable and quickly pay themselves off in ideal locations like desserts but there's one huge problem
>energy storage
No power at night is far from no problem and energy storage is expensive (batteries) or low efficiency (electrolysis&fuel cell ~40%)
>wind
Wind power is sort of doable in some places but overall sucks more than any other energy tech used today
But when it does work it works pretty well
>geothermal
Too difficult in 99.99% of places
Otherwise geothermal is king
>hydroelectric
Dams mess up everything
Floods
Earthquakes
Ecological disasters
Local climate change
Dams are very bad for the area around them
Otherwise 10/10
>nuclear fusion
Not going to happen this decade and probably not going to happen for 50 years
Also it turns hydrogen into helium in the most common proposed reactions and in all cases turns lighter things into things closer to Fe56
>natural gas
Regardless of whether or not its a good idea to use natural gas were about to be forced to because the methane stores on the arctic sea floor are going to melt sometime and letting that methane go would heat the planet a few degrees celsius very quickly
>problems with nuclear
Nuclear weapons
That's all
No really
>biofuel
Photosynthesysers are <5% efficient
Biomass collection is <100% efficient
Biomass conversion is <100% efficient
It's more effective to use solar panels to electrolyze water
>but muh green
No
I think that's all
>>53514090
> fusion
http://www.iter.org/
>>53515157
>geothermal
>science fiction
What world do you live in?
>>53518168
Reality
Drilling deep enough so that you can pump water down there to be superheated can only be done in one or two locations, Japan being one of them and they're into nuclear because it's cheaper than even this.
Geothermal anywhere is science fiction as fuck, as unlikely as large scale fusion reactors in the next 10 years
>>53518132
How are nuclear weapons the only problem with nuclear? What about waste and missing security?
>>53518199
Waste from thorium, iirc, is radium and has uses.
Waste from uranium is almost always turned into bombs.
>>53518132
It's cute how you said you disagreed, but actually agreed and was like "sort of, not really..."
>>53514090
The problem is that even if the energy itself is removable, the materials for building the machinery to obtain it are not. We won't run out of solar energy any time soon, but we will run out of rare earth metals to build solar panels.
>>53515515
No, tax the shit out of carbon and then fund that idea map.
>wind power
>safe
>wind power
you can literally burn regular saltwater with the right radio frequency
why haven't we done anything with this yet?
retarded ADHD milennials skip to 1:20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0ATfoBgo
THORIUM
H
O
R
I
U
M
>>53518229
Solar panels in the distant future can be made out of elaborately organised carbon...
>>53518235
Taxing energy can have drastic consequences. No good.
>>53518239
Yeah everyone hates wind. Even greenies think its dumb, actually, even wind proponents think the contemporary technology is dumb.
The best wind turbines are actually vertical blades that meet at the top and bottom, but everyone uses propellers because lolaeroplanes
>>53518235
Where do you live
I'm willing to be a carbon tax would kill your economy as I can't think of anywhere on earth that could survive a legit carbon tax
>>53518239
>number of deaths: 0
>>53518283
>financial damages: 350,000$
>>53518278
Then let's discuss solar panels again in the distant future.
What about waves instead of wind?
>>53514090
I think the bigger issue isn't a "cleaner" method than what's available, but to bring larger parts of the world up to speed. Countries don't want to move away from coal use because its cheap and available.
How about hyrogen power plant
>>53518315
Tidal isn't bad, but again, it doesn't work everywhere and the cost to build might outweigh the energy output.
CNT solar panels are being developed now, but the tech went quiet so I assume they're competing for something big.
>>53518333
Happen to live near a fast flowing river? No? You're shit out of luck.
>>53518339
I mean hydrogen
Sorry
>>53517429
>Nuclear energy is fossil
>>53518345
You mean burning hydrogen? Or electrolysis?
Burning hydrogen might work, but as someone else pointed out you got to use energy to create hydrogen and it might not equal out. I'm told electrolysis can create energy when extracting hydrogen from water, but I'm not sure how nor do I know if this works on a large scale.
Solar man. Solar. Free energy from the biggest fusion reactor for hundreds of AU. Just got to wait for the technology not to suck.
>>53518357
Kind of is, but really actually isn't.
>>53518324
No, countries don't want to move away from coal because muh jobs. There are whole communities where 60% of the men work at the coal mine, shut it down and whole towns or communities close.
Again, somehow this is more important than halting outsourcing of skilled jobs.
Yeah it's stupid. A coal miner deserves a job more than a modern engineer.
>>53518393
>Kind of is, but really actually isn't.
>kind of is
No, fucking idiot. You're backpedaling because you've realized what you said is completely idiotic.
>>53518442
I didn't say it nor would I say it, but I've heard it argued and I'm not going to sperg out about it.
>>53518283
>number of mobile phone charger casualties: 1
>>53518280
>caron tax would kill your economy
Heh.
Maybe if you're Botswana.
>Piezoelectric
We need to harness this more. Under floor mats, highways, roads, gas station stops, etc. Literally free energy thats the most free at just about any place.
>>53515807
almost completely correct. That is why companies capture it, otherwise money out the door.
Also, where I live our gas contains H2S. Come back and tell me that our companies are letting that leak too.
>>53516212
Nature of a river
Would it be possible to generate more wind power via parabola like concentration of wind? Something like a "net" type narrows air moving in and out?
>>53515157
Geothermal is pretty dank for heating and cooling buildings, my dawg.
