Decelerating Delta S

The Gas Economy, Round 2

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:59:23 +0000

In the 1990s, natural gas was considered to be the fuel of the future, especially for electrical generation. Then, prices spiked at the beginning of the century. Now that gas prices have fallen once again AND some legislation regarding greenhouse gases may finally be coming through, the use of natural gas for electricity generation is looking up once again.

An article, titled Cap and trade: unexpected friend to gas industry on Energy Bulletin today mentioned the very logical point that the hotly-debated Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill for greenhouse gases will actually be a boost to the gas industry.

Hydraulic "Fracking" techniques (which have their own environmental consequences) have been developed to fracture shale which is otherwise not permeable enough to allow gas to be extracted at any appreciable rate. Last summer, gas drillers were leasing land in Northern and Western Pennsylvania at an incredible pace. With high natural gas prices and possibly 500 trillion cubic feet to be exploited in the Marcellus formation alone, it was like 1849 all over again. The collapse of prices meant many of the drillers as well as aspirations of big bucks in the people who had leased their land fizzled away.

Gas by Wire

The gas resources are still there, however, and it is likely that with greenhouse gas controls and low gas prices electric utilities will begin using their gas-fired plants more and their coal-fired plants less, especially the smaller, less-efficient coal plants. Drillers will return as demand increases.

Combined-cycle natural gas power plants are remarkably efficient; they combine the open Brayton cycle gas turbine for primary generation and a steam-based Rankine cycle to generate additional electricity using the "waste" heat of the gas turbine. The best plants built top out at around 60% efficiency, whereas ..

Hybrid Power Plants

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:12:10 +0000

Solar thermal electricity generation is often touted as one of the most promising renewable energy solutions due to its lower cost and higher efficiency on a large scale compared with photovoltaics.

While promising, building such a plant is still expensive. I have recently gained interest in a hybrid power plant concept - using solar heat to aid in the generation of steam at existing fossil-fuel power plants. It combines the political popularity of the word hybrid with the generators and turbines already in place at existing coal-fired power plants to make a solar system which has the capacity to be cheaper and more effective (e.g. more watt-hours of solar pumped out to the grid) than a standalone plant.

It is obvious that hybrid power plants are not a long-term solution to the problem (just as hybrid cars are not), but looking at our current electrical generation mix (50% coal, 20% nuclear, 20% gas, 7% hydro, 3% everything else) it is clear that more renewable energy is necessary and has not been delivered. Anything that can make use of existing equipment and integrate renewable energy into the system is worth pursuing, especially if it can be done in a way that is cost-competitive with fossil fuels (which have most of their real costs externalized).

Such a plant would produce a constant electrical output. The amount of solar power will vary throughout the day and based upon weather conditions. Coal burn in the boiler would be modulated based upon solar radiation, keeping the amount of steam flowing to the turbine more or less constant.

SEPARATE WATER CIRCUIT IS USED FOR THE ARRAY TO AVOID HAVING TO WITHSTAND THE FEEDWATER PRESSURE. A BYPASS SYSTEM IS ALSO INCLUDED TO ALLOW COAL-ONLY OPERATION.

Advantages:

The Ideology Conundrum

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:23:17 +0000

A few days ago, an article was written in the Telegraph speaking of how the city of Flint, MI is considering the elimination of many abandoned properties due to the shrunken population and revenue drain resulting from the city caring for property and land which is no longer inhabited.

Upon reading (some of) the comments section, I became slightly ill to my stomach and contemplated throwing the computer out the window. 845 comments were posted to this article as of 2:50 PM June 17...an absolutely immense number.

First of all, the majority of people posting comments to this article read the headline and then scanned the page, saw the name "Barack Obama" in the article, and automatically began spewing endless garbage about how our "freedoms are being taken away" and how Obama is "worse than Jimmy Carter" and society is "reverting to socialism/communism/statism/totalitarianism/fascism/insert favorite non-capitalist economic ideology here" If they have (D) after their name, they are lower than scum. Jimmy Carter told the people to turn their thermostats down two degrees and make a few sacrifices like they did during the World Wars. I guess those sacrifices aren't patriotic as they used to be...

(It really says something about us when we are seen using "fascism" and "socialism" in the same context, or stating that "capitalism == democracy" )

Many other commentators automatically reverted to the backup plan: "If all else fails, and I know nothing about the issue, and don't have time to read the article, Blame Bush!", blaming the economic problems (the tremors of consumer society consuming itself toward oblivion) on past presidents - Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush. I ..

MS Exchange Server Horrors

Sat, 23 May 2009 03:22:57 +0000

If anyone out there uses Microsoft Exchange...I happen to administer one and had a horrifying 10 hours with it today/yesterday.

NEVER, EVER uninstall the SMTP portion of IIS on a Windows Server running Exchange (I believe that I did it by accident). NEVER EVER! Your mail server will crash and burn even after you reinstall SMTP.

I eventually had to roll back the entire machine to the backups from the day before (a 3-hour process in itself, extracting 100 GiB from a USB hard drive file-by-file). I used to believe that backing up the entire disk every night (software and all) was a waste. Not anymore...

Oh, and Microsoft Exchange weighs in at about 350 MiB all by itself. My entire Debian server (with apache, php, mysql, ssh, samba, ftp, courier, postfix, etc.) is only about 375 MiB.

Defining Freedom

Sun, 17 May 2009 22:25:45 +0000

Industrial lobbying groups, chambers of commerce, and many politicians seem to always attempt to prevent the passing of any policy which may result in a change of mentality towards less materialistic consumption even if it offers us a healthier, more peaceful, and happier lifestyle.

These groups often win support by stating that environmental policy will result in a reduction of "freedom" - e.g. "they are going to take away your right to get rich, own two SUVs, live in a 3000-square foot house, and fly to Florida three times per year." It sounds ridiculous, but this is many people's vision of freedom. Reducing the amounts of oil burned to keep those cars on the road or the amount of gas used to heat all of the rooms in that McMansion which are never occupied is a serious infringement on the "rights" of many in our culture.

They often call these things "rights". I also have the right to breath healthy air, drink and swim in clean water, not have to worry about imperialistic tendencies for my country to obtain the resources needed for such consumption, live without my lifestyle being controlled by industry, eat food which is not modified and treated with artificial chemicals with unknown side effects, and so on. Big Industry is as much of a problem as big government - both need to be kept to a minimum if individual freedom is to prevail. Environmental impact will never be brought to a reasonable level when our culture promotes consuming as much as possible and getting as rich as possible. All of the science, engineering, and technology in the world cannot solve a problem which is rooted in our culture.

Read Kurt Cobb's article The Freedom Lobby at Resource Insights

Solar Thermal should take priority

Wed, 13 May 2009 14:13:50 +0000

With all of the interest in renewable energy in the United States, there seems to be a serious misalignment of priority.

Everyone seems to be buzzing about photovoltaic (PV) panels (which convert sunlight directly into electricity). Meanwhile, we have millions of electric water heaters all around the country which are guzzling up valuable kilowatt-hours in the name of heating water to coffeepot temperatures, and millions of homes with electrical resistance heating which convert the most versatile form of energy known to man into incredibly useless 72°F space heat. Energy may not be created or destroyed, but it surely loses quality. Try running your new ultra-fast quad-core PC on 72 degree space heat. Oh, yeah, the exhaust coming out the back of the PC is hotter than 72 degrees - if only we could violate the second law of thermodynamics...

My point is that we are concentrating far too much on creating electricity from the sun's dilute light and heat while at the same time we are turning electricity into dilute light and heat. Photovolatics are expensive. Solar thermal collectors (which skip the electricity step and directly utilize solar heat) are cheap. Why the focus on PV? If you have to power a plasma TV or computer, then PV is necessary. If you only need to heat water, cheaper and more efficient options are available.

A few steps to boost renewables and reduce coal:

Stop burning natural gas solely for heat.
Stop using electricity for low-grade space/water heating.
Burn natural gas in cogeneration units. Get the electricity from it, then take off the waste heat.
Use Solar energy to meet heating and lighting needs before venturing into producing electricity.

When you install a new fancy-schmancy $30,000 photovolatic array on your roof with feed-in back to the grid it is somewhat discouraging to ..

New Focus

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:45:45 +0000

I have decided to begin taking this web site in a new direction...

Any friends, recurring visitors, etc. will likely recall cbll.net (assuming you have visited prior to about four months ago). The name has been changed to Yeroc.us, and all URIs pointed at cbll.net will be permanently redirected (HTTP code 301) to yeroc.us.

I registered Yeroc.us in December 2008 and modified the graphical portion of the web site though it has not been until now that I have found the chance and energy to actually make significant changes to the site content. I registered in the .us top level domain mostly because yeroc.net was taken and yeroc.com throws off too much of a for-profit dot-com aura. The .us TLD does however represent my mostly US-foucused content. As the United States we are the largest consumer of natural resources in the world and have by far the world's greatest impact on the environment (quite a bit of that pollution in China is due to making widgets to be consumed in the United States). The US also seems to be (in general) behind Western Europe, the Far East, and in some ways the rest of the world in the field of ecological sustainability. Most of my writings about European practices and technology are directed at how they can be applied in the United States.

I began with eliminating all of the old blog content from public view; much of this content in my opinion is no longer truly representative of my views and certainly does not all conform to the "professional" level of language, research, and objectivity I would like to begin utilizing when discussing the human race's thermodynamic and raw material dilemmas. Dealing with the energy and environment issue is not as simple as putting up wind turbines and photovoltaic panels or switching to electric cars; it will require a CULTURAL SHIFT away from the "go big or go home" mentality. Our houses are too big, our cars are to ..