Anybody know anything about Solar or Geothermal energy?

Zakharra wrote: *nods* Mass transit just isn't practical for most of the US either. It's only a practical solution for large cities. I live in the countryside as well and there is no way that mass transit, or even taking a train/bus into town would work (you'd have to take multiple trips just to get everything you need if you were shopping in bulk). You can pack a car or truck with what your getting and make it all in one trip. That's not possible with public transportation.

You can fit more into an inter-city train's baggage car than you can in even a 2.5 ton farm truck, let alone a "personal vehicle" of any size.

A mass-transit, electric powered system would require a different mindset that the post-WWII "Me First" attitude of Americans. Of course, Amazon and E-Bay might well dominate the Market-place much sooner than the R/W.

In the era of J.C Penney, Montgomery Ward, and other mail-order companies, it was possible to order everything from diapers for the baby to highway bridges for the town -- it just wasn't possible to get overnight delivery. It really wasn't necessary for most rural people to go any further than the nearest railway station.

Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

I don't hate Internal Combustion Engines, I hate the fact that they turn fossil fuels into air pollution and use up (burn) a finite resource that has better uses.

In the real world, I'm an advocate of converting the installed base of IC engines to Hydrogen or some other renewable, less polluting fuel. I'm an advocate of rational, economically feasible, mass transit both inner-city and inter-city.

Safehold has the opportunity to avoid the installed base of IC engines that so limits real-world solutions to fuel shortages and ecological issues.

Zakharra wrote: Any engine, even a steam engine or a stirling, would be polluting if it burns fuel for heat, so you'd still have pollution by driving no matter what. Fossil fuels such as oil burn faster and produce a lot more energy for each unit burned than anything out there. It's one reason we still burn it and why ethanol fuel is bad. Ethanol or alcohol based fuels simply aren't near as effective or efficient.

There is a huge difference between one or two large fossil fuel fired generating plants powering catenary wires, charging batteries, or electrolyzing water for Hydrogen fuel, and millions of IC engines spewing poison all over the region. Not to mention that Electricity doesn't have to be generated by burning fuel of any kind.

For "farm" uses, electric is feasible with a decent Grid or local generation (such as a small scale hydro-electric plant,) but even more feasible is locally generated fuels for IC engines or fuel cells such as Methane from animal and plant waste or local natural gas wells (where possible,) or even Ethanol/Methanol distilled on site from non-food sources, (or even from excess food sources, but the key is excess food sources. Farms have numerous potential sources for energy that don't involve burning finite resources or shipping fossil fuels across half the planet.

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Any engine, even a steam engine or a stirling, would be polluting if it burns fuel for heat, so you'd still have pollution by driving no matter what. Fossil fuels such as oil burn faster and produce a lot more energy for each unit burned than anything out there. It's one reason we still burn it and why ethanol fuel is bad. Ethanol or alcohol based fuels simply aren't near as effective or efficient.

There is a huge difference between one or two large fossil fuel fired generating plants powering catenary wires, charging batteries, or electrolyzing water for Hydrogen fuel, and millions of IC engines spewing poison all over the region. Not to mention that Electricity doesn't have to be generated by burning fuel of any kind.

For "farm" uses, electric is feasible with a decent Grid or local generation (such as a small scale hydro-electric plant,) but even more feasible is locally generated fuels for IC engines or fuel cells such as Methane from animal and plant waste or local natural gas wells (where possible,) or even Ethanol/Methanol distilled on site from non-food sources, (or even from excess food sources, but the key is excess food sources. Farms have numerous potential sources for energy that don't involve burning finite resources or shipping fossil fuels across half the planet.

Let us propose that Safehold is a relatively young planet and hasn't the vast oil fields of Mother Earth.
This would spur technology on a different path.

Zakharra wrote: Any engine, even a steam engine or a stirling, would be polluting if it burns fuel for heat, so you'd still have pollution by driving no matter what.

Otto cycle in practice is 20% efficient. Discontinuous combustion is inherently incomplete and gives pollution problems. More efficient (~35% for Stirling, steam isn't one number) means less fuel burned; continuous means less pollution. Stanley Steamers really did produce nearly no tailpipe emissions. If the same billions of dollars of investment had gone into that technology we'd have a much smaller problem today.

Zakharra wrote:Fossil fuels such as oil burn faster and produce a lot more energy for each unit burned than anything out there. It's one reason we still burn it and why ethanol fuel is bad. Ethanol or alcohol based fuels simply aren't near as effective or efficient. What are the ling term effects of fossil fuels on agriculture? I was under the impression that overfarming and such would do in the soil, not burning gasoline/diesel.

Fossil fuels are a very obvious short-term benefit. Long term, we get melting ice caps and unpredictable weather. Farming is enough like work without unpredictable weather. (Consider 2012, only worse, and five in a row. That would be very bad, and that seems to be where we're headed.)

We also get toxicity due to fossil-carbon-derived fertilizers (too much phosphate is a related but distinct problem) but mostly we're totally dependent on machine agriculture; 1% of the population grows the food, if you go back and look at animal traction with machines it's around 50%. (This is an interesting transition to go through, presumably also for Safehold; even Old Charis still has a lot of large landlords, which will make it more interesting.)

Bio-anything as a source of liquid fuel is just monumentally inefficient solar; you can't get even 1% conversion efficiency of sunlight into plant with terrestrial plants, and then you can't ferment the whole plant. People are trying, and they might get there, by genetically engineering micro-organisms to more completely convert the crop; you're still starting at that 1%, that's your absolute efficiency ceiling. Even if you can produce algae at 5% solar conversion efficiency it looks really bad next to solar cells.

Zakharra wrote: Cities? So you want everyone packed into highrises because that is an efficient use of space? That doesn't seem very healthy for anyone, mentally or physically, to be forced to live like that. I know I'd hate living in a city. I like having lots of space around. For such a population dense area, you'd need a LOT of mass transit to move millions and millions of people around. That means more trains, buses and taxis (assuming you'd allow buses and taxis). That's a lot of fuel being burned anyways just moving people. It would also limit what you could carry so stocking up on groceries would be harder since you wouldn't be able to buy in bulk without a personal vehicle.

You do realize that more than half of everybody lives in cites, and the trend is increasing toward the city side? They can't be completely awful!

The cost and (importantly!) land area per person is less for pretty much any form of ground transport except cars. Do the thought experiment -- 50 people is 40 cars, or fifty bicycles, or one bus, or a third to a half of a subway car. How much road area does each require?

Once the city gets past a certain size, you can't use cars because there isn't room for enough lanes of traffic. 2000 cars per lane per hour is doing really well. One subway line turns out to be able to move 50,000 people an hour pretty straightforwardly. That's ~20 lanes of traffic if nothing goes wrong. If you want the economic benefits of a dense city -- and they're large! -- you need something other than cars.

Highrises are fine if the folks building them aren't constructing a collection of closets to maximize their condo sales, but what I actually want would be most easily described as the housing equivalent of credit unions. What gets built tends to serve the needs of capital rather than the residents; the fix for that is to make it easier to pool capital co-operatively for the purpose. Shared walls, more floors, and generally compact housing allows things like shared heating/cooling (suddenly the 12 residence unit can afford that big buried water tank heat sink for the heat pump! the soundproofing is, etc.) and leaves more land available for parks and pleasances.

Oh, and if you live in a city, you can get your bulk groceries delivered. It's cheaper than keeping a car by plenty some lots.

Zakharra wrote:The wars happen anyways. People find reasons to kill each other no matter what.

[snip]

Nukes are a really good reason to learn how to not set out to kill one another in job lots.

Zakharra wrote:It was clear in the 1970s that we should have been developing better and cleaner running more efficient engines. Until there is somehing that can equal the effectiveness of oil/gasoline/diesel engines nothing is going to replace it

Which is one of the reasons I like ammonia as a way to store protons; easy to synthesize, store, and it's pumpable. And the conversion tech both ways exists.

There are at least three other potential energy storage mechanisms -- abiotic, non-fossil methane, aluminium, and nano-electrode batteries of some chemistry or other (though I really hope not titanium/chlorine!) -- able to displace fossil carbon.

It'll take a certain amount of collective political will, though.

(And hopefully these are also good answers.

Castenea wrote:

Graydon wrote:Personal transportation is a fine thing; anybody with three kids doesn't want to take the subway with only one adult available for kid wrangling. People do live out in the country. Machine traction for agriculture is essential. It doesn't have to be powered by IC engines or fossil carbon, it's just that's what we happen to have, in large part because of the Great War and historical accidents around aircraft.

The historical ignorance is breath taking. Hit and miss one lung engines of under 30 HP were rapidly displacing all other engines out on farms from 1890 to 1910, well before the first world war.

Stationary engines, though, not generally mobile. Not suitable for automobiles. The great big development effort for aircraft engines got Otto cycle engines from ~80 HP to ~400 HP, much lighter per horsepower, and vastly more reliable. That made a big difference to what people knew how to do as automobiles started to become common.

Castenea wrote:Steam traction engines had two problems on many farms, obtaining fuel and obtaining water. There was barely enough thatch on a farm to fuel the engine, and getting it into the burn box took a lot of labor. Then there was the issue of getting water, as most steam engines were used on farms did not have condensers.

The hit and miss gasoline engines were lighter, faster to get operating, and cheaper to obtain and run. Gasoline powered tractors were lighter than steam tractors.

Deficiencies of steam tractors might be viewed as a development problem; condensers, flash-tube boilers, and the ability to run off locally produced methane would have all been good things. (Nor do you always want the tractor to be lighter!) Steam traction didn't get that development effort in part because there was no obvious reason for it; all this money had been sunk in Otto-cycle engines, and there were lots left over, and (comparatively) lots of trained mechanics.

TN4994 wrote:Let us propose that Safehold is a relatively young planet and hasn't the vast oil fields of Mother Earth.
This would spur technology on a different path.

Whether Safehold has huge reserves or not, it currently doesn't have an oil industry providing motor fuels. If it isn't given an incentive to develop an oil industry emphasizing fuel production, it won't matter how big the oil reserves are or are not.

I get the impression that the fledgling stage of oil production in OTL is replaced by Fire Vine cultivation for lubricants and lamp oil. That would tend to steer thinking away from drilling to increasing cultivation, I think.

Weird Harold wrote:

TN4994 wrote:Let us propose that Safehold is a relatively young planet and hasn't the vast oil fields of Mother Earth.
This would spur technology on a different path.

Whether Safehold has huge reserves or not, it currently doesn't have an oil industry providing motor fuels. If it isn't given an incentive to develop an oil industry emphasizing fuel production, it won't matter how big the oil reserves are or are not.

I get the impression that the fledgling stage of oil production in OTL is replaced by Fire Vine cultivation for lubricants and lamp oil. That would tend to steer thinking away from drilling to increasing cultivation, I think.

Biolube and biofuel might well become more pronounced on Safehold.
Look a what biotech has been done in Cuba and South America.

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote: *nods* Mass transit just isn't practical for most of the US either. It's only a practical solution for large cities. I live in the countryside as well and there is no way that mass transit, or even taking a train/bus into town would work (you'd have to take multiple trips just to get everything you need if you were shopping in bulk). You can pack a car or truck with what your getting and make it all in one trip. That's not possible with public transportation.

You can fit more into an inter-city train's baggage car than you can in even a 2.5 ton farm truck, let alone a "personal vehicle" of any size.

A mass-transit, electric powered system would require a different mindset that the post-WWII "Me First" attitude of Americans. Of course, Amazon and E-Bay might well dominate the Market-place much sooner than the R/W.

In the era of J.C Penney, Montgomery Ward, and other mail-order companies, it was possible to order everything from diapers for the baby to highway bridges for the town -- it just wasn't possible to get overnight delivery. It really wasn't necessary for most rural people to go any further than the nearest railway station.

But one person can't carry all of that. That's the problem. You're limited to what you can carry and that's it. In the old days, people would meet the train with a horse drawn wagon to haul large amounts of goods they had bought. It wasn't just what one person would carry easily.

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

I don't hate Internal Combustion Engines, I hate the fact that they turn fossil fuels into air pollution and use up (burn) a finite resource that has better uses.

In the real world, I'm an advocate of converting the installed base of IC engines to Hydrogen or some other renewable, less polluting fuel. I'm an advocate of rational, economically feasible, mass transit both inner-city and inter-city.

Safehold has the opportunity to avoid the installed base of IC engines that so limits real-world solutions to fuel shortages and ecological issues.

Isn't hydrogen, as a liquid or gas, even more volatile than gasoline? And don't hydrogen tanks leak the hydrogen over time?

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Any engine, even a steam engine or a stirling, would be polluting if it burns fuel for heat, so you'd still have pollution by driving no matter what.

Otto cycle in practice is 20% efficient. Discontinuous combustion is inherently incomplete and gives pollution problems. More efficient (~35% for Stirling, steam isn't one number) means less fuel burned; continuous means less pollution. Stanley Steamers really did produce nearly no tailpipe emissions. If the same billions of dollars of investment had gone into that technology we'd have a much smaller problem today.

Perhaps. Still though, efficient stirlings weren't possible back then because of inefficient seals and inadequate metallurgy technology. The IC gasoline/diesel engine was more effective and reliable, especially as an engine that could move a vehicle.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote:Fossil fuels such as oil burn faster and produce a lot more energy for each unit burned than anything out there. It's one reason we still burn it and why ethanol fuel is bad. Ethanol or alcohol based fuels simply aren't near as effective or efficient. What are the ling term effects of fossil fuels on agriculture? I was under the impression that overfarming and such would do in the soil, not burning gasoline/diesel.

Fossil fuels are a very obvious short-term benefit. Long term, we get melting ice caps and unpredictable weather. Farming is enough like work without unpredictable weather. (Consider 2012, only worse, and five in a row. That would be very bad, and that seems to be where we're headed.)

We also get toxicity due to fossil-carbon-derived fertilizers (too much phosphate is a related but distinct problem) but mostly we're totally dependent on machine agriculture; 1% of the population grows the food, if you go back and look at animal traction with machines it's around 50%. (This is an interesting transition to go through, presumably also for Safehold; even Old Charis still has a lot of large landlords, which will make it more interesting.)

Bio-anything as a source of liquid fuel is just monumentally inefficient solar; you can't get even 1% conversion efficiency of sunlight into plant with terrestrial plants, and then you can't ferment the whole plant. People are trying, and they might get there, by genetically engineering micro-organisms to more completely convert the crop; you're still starting at that 1%, that's your absolute efficiency ceiling. Even if you can produce algae at 5% solar conversion efficiency it looks really bad next to solar cells.

Weather is weather. There's nothing we can really do about it, so I am not going to worry too much about it.

We can make the farming work with better methods and paying attention to the techniques and such. So I'm not too worried about that.

The efficiency of solar cells isn't exactly good either. It's better than most things but it's not efficient for industrial use. Nor is it an effective use of space to put solar panels everywhere there is reliable sunlight. I do agree though bio-fuels suck. A lot. They are very inefficient.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Cities? So you want everyone packed into highrises because that is an efficient use of space? That doesn't seem very healthy for anyone, mentally or physically, to be forced to live like that. I know I'd hate living in a city. I like having lots of space around. For such a population dense area, you'd need a LOT of mass transit to move millions and millions of people around. That means more trains, buses and taxis (assuming you'd allow buses and taxis). That's a lot of fuel being burned anyways just moving people. It would also limit what you could carry so stocking up on groceries would be harder since you wouldn't be able to buy in bulk without a personal vehicle.

You do realize that more than half of everybody lives in cites, and the trend is increasing toward the city side? They can't be completely awful!

The cost and (importantly!) land area per person is less for pretty much any form of ground transport except cars. Do the thought experiment -- 50 people is 40 cars, or fifty bicycles, or one bus, or a third to a half of a subway car. How much road area does each require?

Once the city gets past a certain size, you can't use cars because there isn't room for enough lanes of traffic. 2000 cars per lane per hour is doing really well. One subway line turns out to be able to move 50,000 people an hour pretty straightforwardly. That's ~20 lanes of traffic if nothing goes wrong. If you want the economic benefits of a dense city -- and they're large! -- you need something other than cars.

Highrises are fine if the folks building them aren't constructing a collection of closets to maximize their condo sales, but what I actually want would be most easily described as the housing equivalent of credit unions. What gets built tends to serve the needs of capital rather than the residents; the fix for that is to make it easier to pool capital co-operatively for the purpose. Shared walls, more floors, and generally compact housing allows things like shared heating/cooling (suddenly the 12 residence unit can afford that big buried water tank heat sink for the heat pump! the soundproofing is, etc.) and leaves more land available for parks and pleasances.

Oh, and if you live in a city, you can get your bulk groceries delivered. It's cheaper than keeping a car by plenty some lots.

I do realize that. I also realize that that isn't a healthy trend either. It's forcing cities to expand more and more and making people pack themselves in tighter and tighter, which brings its own problems.

The delivery vehicles, trucks and such still need to use the roads to deliver goods to the businesses. That alone is thousands, tens of thousands of trucks a day in major cities and a LOT of heavy road usage.

Cars though allow people to go places that trains/buses can't/don't go. It's six of one, half a dozen of another.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote:The wars happen anyways. People find reasons to kill each other no matter what.

[snip]

Nukes are a really good reason to learn how to not set out to kill one another in job lots.

And when was the last time a nuclear war broke out? Nukes don't stop wars or make them impossible. They just set an upper limit.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote:It was clear in the 1970s that we should have been developing better and cleaner running more efficient engines. Until there is somehing that can equal the effectiveness of oil/gasoline/diesel engines nothing is going to replace it

Which is one of the reasons I like ammonia as a way to store protons; easy to synthesize, store, and it's pumpable. And the conversion tech both ways exists.

There are at least three other potential energy storage mechanisms -- abiotic, non-fossil methane, aluminium, and nano-electrode batteries of some chemistry or other (though I really hope not titanium/chlorine!) -- able to displace fossil carbon.

It'll take a certain amount of collective political will, though.

(And hopefully these are also good answers.

It would take an immense amount of political will, backbone and intestinal fortitude to do that. Especially if the money men and the public don't want it.

Weird Harold wrote:

TN4994 wrote:Let us propose that Safehold is a relatively young planet and hasn't the vast oil fields of Mother Earth.
This would spur technology on a different path.

Whether Safehold has huge reserves or not, it currently doesn't have an oil industry providing motor fuels. If it isn't given an incentive to develop an oil industry emphasizing fuel production, it won't matter how big the oil reserves are or are not.

I get the impression that the fledgling stage of oil production in OTL is replaced by Fire Vine cultivation for lubricants and lamp oil. That would tend to steer thinking away from drilling to increasing cultivation, I think.

I got the impression that it was coal tar/oil that Merlin was thinking of. Fire vine oils seem to require a lot of processing to make it non-irritating to humans. Possibly more processing than refining natural oil into gas would require. If I remember right, it was the kraken and doomwhale oil that is the best atm, followed by the oil tree then the fire vine oil, but the fire vine has significant problems of being toxic to humans. Ther is mention on page 152 of there being extensive oilfields in southern Charis and Emerald Island and that the Safehold techniques for drilling and pumping water will work well for drilling oil wells. At the very least, there will be kerosene/gasoline/diesel for steam engine fuel (Merlin makes mention of Howsmyn's steam engines being about to her even better developed). Merlin also intends for the oil to be used in other things, namely petroleum jelly as a stabilizer for nitrocellulose-based propellants and explosives. But oil as fuel is definitely on the list of things to be developed. And I can see them making airplanes once the OBS and Proscriptions are overthrown, and that needs an IC engine.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Cities? So you want everyone packed into highrises because that is an efficient use of space? That doesn't seem very healthy for anyone, mentally or physically, to be forced to live like that. I know I'd hate living in a city. I like having lots of space around. For such a population dense area, you'd need a LOT of mass transit to move millions and millions of people around. That means more trains, buses and taxis (assuming you'd allow buses and taxis). That's a lot of fuel being burned anyways just moving people. It would also limit what you could carry so stocking up on groceries would be harder since you wouldn't be able to buy in bulk without a personal vehicle.



You do realize that more than half of everybody lives in cites, and the trend is increasing toward the city side? They can't be completely awful!

The cost and (importantly!) land area per person is less for pretty much any form of ground transport except cars. Do the thought experiment -- 50 people is 40 cars, or fifty bicycles, or one bus, or a third to a half of a subway car. How much road area does each require?

Once the city gets past a certain size, you can't use cars because there isn't room for enough lanes of traffic. 2000 cars per lane per hour is doing really well. One subway line turns out to be able to move 50,000 people an hour pretty straightforwardly. That's ~20 lanes of traffic if nothing goes wrong. If you want the economic benefits of a dense city -- and they're large! -- you need something other than cars.

Highrises are fine if the folks building them aren't constructing a collection of closets to maximize their condo sales, but what I actually want would be most easily described as the housing equivalent of credit unions. What gets built tends to serve the needs of capital rather than the residents; the fix for that is to make it easier to pool capital co-operatively for the purpose. Shared walls, more floors, and generally compact housing allows things like shared heating/cooling (suddenly the 12 residence unit can afford that big buried water tank heat sink for the heat pump! the soundproofing is, etc.) and leaves more land available for parks and pleasances.

Oh, and if you live in a city, you can get your bulk groceries delivered. It's cheaper than keeping a car by plenty some lots.

I had a thought of one reason why suburbs exist. Land and house ownership. In a city, owning a house and/or land can be very expensive. Most people in a city rent their residences rather than own them and the rent can be high. $800-2000 or so a month. That's very expensive. In a suburb, people can actually own their homes and the land its on, even if it is an acre, they can still own it and that puts them several steps above a renter. They have a residence that they aren't going to be kicked out of if they miss a monthly payment (renters can be tossed out if a month is missed, nor can the house payment be changed without it being an adjustable rate loan or something like that and then you know the rate it will adjust to and stay at. This means the house owner is building equity and if need be, something they can sell for a good deal more than they bought it. A renter shells out money for a place that is much smaller in area, has a lot more neighbors much closer to all sides, and is more vulnerable to being kicked out with nowhere to go and after 30 years of paying rent, they have nothing to show for it while the house owner has a house and land they can sell for a nice tidy sum if they don't retire on it.

Zakharra wrote: Isn't hydrogen, as a liquid or gas, even more volatile than gasoline? And don't hydrogen tanks leak the hydrogen over time?

Yes it is, and no it isn't.

If you don't ventilate hydrogen storage areas properly -- i.e. don't have roof vents for Hydrogen to escape through -- hydrogen can be very explosive.

However, if you have vents in the roof, so any loose hydrogen can escape containment, it never builds up to explosive concentrations

Hydrogen gets a bad rep because the Hindenburg blew up and they call fusion bombs "Hydrogen Bombs." It is actually safer to store and handle than propane, Methane, Butane, Natural Gas, gasoline or most other flammable vapors.