tht

mikethemartian said:

tht said:

mikethemartian said:

It is nice to know that you can remove the battery without using those pull tabs.

He’s not a good pull tab puller, as theoretically, those pull tabs make removing the battery a clean process. 

He just used isopropyl alcohol to remove the battery. The usual way to do it. 

I was under the impression that the glue used was more difficult to dissolve than that.

dewme said:

I suppose it comes down to whether you spend your design and engineering investments on utilitarian product attributes like flexibility, reusability, and compatibility or you spend them on making sure your singular product is the absolute best and most aesthetically pleasing and user friendly design it can possibly be regardless of pragmatic concerns.  

hexclock said:

tht said:

hexclock said:

tht said:

This bill speaks to how reticent people are to change. This bill is only about reporting, not actually doing something. We need bills to do something! Every and all things must tried. Write the bill to enforce >1b companies to be carbon neutral.

Even in California, there is a strange hesitancy. They are going to test out this idea of covering a waterway with solar PV for some hundreds of feet. Hundreds of feet? The passivity here is crazy. Hundreds of feet?! It should be hundreds of miles. California, you will need water. Lots and lots of fresh water. The best option is desalination. You will need basically free energy to do it. Just completely overbuild solar PV by 2x, 4x your peak demand needs. Cover every single waterway and river with solar PV.  Not completely always in the shade covered, but covered. Then use that "free energy" to power desalination plants, batteries of all kinds, direct air capture to gas or to ground. Put in a serious carbon tax to get everyone to turn over.

Cover the waterways with solar panels? That’s insane. 

No, it is the right thing go do and CA should have started doing it 10 years ago. Just like they should have started putting solar PV over parking lots and roofs. They should also require making roofs and roads white or other high albedo color. CA is testing it out:

https://www.tid.org/about-tid/current-projects/project-nexus/

CA, just like every other southwestern state in the USA is under continuous water supply stress. Long term, decades, they are drying out with hotter climates and less rain. Aquifers are nearing empty. Reservoirs are below normal. Increasingly hotter climates means there will be more evaporation from waterways, reducing the amount of water. The water is also hotter, driving down fish populations. There is a 240 mile long aqueduct from the Colorado river at Lake Havasu to LA county. At some future date, the Colorado river isn't even going to make it to Lake Havasu as this water source goes away.

Solar PV over these canals, bayous, streams and such will reduce evaporation, keeps the water cooler so that there is more oxygen in the water for fish and the ecosystem; all while providing power. So, this course of action is a win, win, win. This also works for agriculture and even some types of livestock/ranching.

I could see placing them over man-made channels and reservoirs, but natural streams and ponds? Small fish (fry) eat microscopic organisms that need sunlight to live. Seems like grasping at straws that would cause more damage, like pounding huge pylons into the sea floor for wind turbines which is destroying the natural fish breeding grounds and probably kills whales, but hey, try it out there in Cali and let the rest of us know how it worked out. 

mayfly said:

tht said:

mayfly said:

tht said:

mayfly said:

If you asked the same question, you'll get an estimate of:
Total Cost = Total Capacity (in MW) * Installation Cost per Watt

Total Cost = 800,000 MW * 1,000,000 W/MW * $2/W = $1.6 trillion to $2.4 trillion, once again ignoring the ongoing costs of operation.

So it's really only about $168,421,052.63 per resident in Los Angeles county. Figure a home has 4 residents, and you're talking some real money.

There is definitely something wrong with your numbers. 800,000 MW is 800 GW of power. CA peak power usage is 30 GW or so. TX peak power usage is 85 GW. For the whole state! LA county isn't going to be using that much.

Los Angeles county used 65,000 GWHr in 2021. On average, that means 65,000E+9/(365x24) = 7.4 GW power, every hour of the day and night. Using $1/W for grid utility installation costs, that's $7.4 billion dollars. LA Co has 10m people. So $740. You really should multiply by 4 for capacity factor and use about that amount for storage. So, $7400 per person in LA Co. That is pretty conservative, cost more than it should, ballpark cost for a solar+storage system to cover a persons electricity consumption.

Not bad really, as the ROI is less that 5 years. Power in CA is like $0.3/kWHr! Per capita in LA Co, people are paying $2000 per year for their electricity consumption. Everyone should be adding solar PV to their house.

Everyone should. But we shoud do it for our descendants, not for anything else.

But at this point, sustainables and desalination are pipe dreams, and will remain so as long as there are lawmakers with vested interests in maintaining the status quo (lobbyist money, or as in West Virginia, where Gov. Jim Justice owns a coal company, and his Senator Joe Manchin was CEO of Enersystems coal brokerage, and enriched himself to the tune of $5 million and his son is now running it).

The future is either nuclear & conservation or extinction. Probably both. All the other ideas I've seen here are commendable, and are sadly politically and economically impossible.

Don't limit the options and don't think we can't do it. We are technological society and we can do this. We're late, but the time to start is always today.

Everything will and must be developed, funded, and be put into mass production. The future isn't an either-or. It's all of the above. Like I said earlier, the time to start is always today, at every single level, from the easiest action of weather stripping, to buying renewable energy plans, to voting, to electrifying everything.

Solar+wind+storage are inevitable as they are riding economies of scale, are the cheapest forms of energy, and is in the early adopter phase of the market penetration cycle. Homeowners are about 5 to 10 years away from being able to disconnect from the grid and only relying on solar+storage. This is true for every single "flat" building as well. They will be able to participate in virtual power plants. This is going to do strange things to economics of utility scale generation and the grid itself. There's going to be a lot of stranded assets and bankruptcies. 

Those are big dreams, there, podner! And that's just what they are. No one with the power to enact them has the will or the political and economic capital to pull it off. We'll just keep on using more and moare fossil fuels, until they're gone, do to war to steal them from other countries until that's gone, and then build more nukes. That's our destiny. That's our legacy to our children and their children.

But I admire your optimism.