Fort Myers and Electricity

DaSDGuy

Well-Known Member
Relevant

Babcock Ranch rests on higher ground than much of the surrounding area – at least 25 feet or more above sea level – which the ranch says is "beyond the reach of coastal storm surge." All of the buildings and structures in the community are developed to withstand winds of up to 145 mph, or what would be a mid-range Category 4 hurricane according to the Saffir-Simpson scale.


Cool. So all we have to do is build everything at least 25 feet above the mean high tide level and make sure it can handle sustained 145 mph winds. Right. We need to start bull dozing everything that doesn't meet specs and start building from scratch. And all you folks who live too close to the water can just give away your land. This won't take long.
 

Sneakers

Just sneakin' around....
What got me was the solar acreage required for just one town. 900 acres for 46,000 residents.

This town was constructed from the ground up with total storm resistance in the plan, and it obviously worked. Wonder how expensive it is to live there?

Other towns are built on the concept of "acceptable risk" to keep costs lower. You want to live here, you can expect this. Don't wan't to accept the risk? Don't live here.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.

This may seem like an impractically large amount of land but not when you put it in perspective. 21,250 square miles is a square about 145 miles on each side . The U.S. has 3,797,000 square miles of land. Only about half a percent of that would be needed to provide enough solar energy to power the country.

Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:

  • 40,223 square miles – this is the size of the land leased by the oil and gas industry (according to the US Bureau of Land Management).
  • 18,500 square miles – the amount of federal land offered for lease to the oil and gas industry in 2017 alone.
  • 13,000 square miles – the US land that has been impacted by coal surface mining [1]
  • 49,300 square miles – the land used to grow corn for ethanol (USDA reports 91 million acres of farmland produced 14.99 billion bushels of corn in 2021, of which 5.2 billion bushels were used to for fuel alcohol)
  • 17,120 square miles – the estimated surface area of US roads (8.8 million lane-miles at an average 10 feet wide).
  • 49,400 square miles – the total amount of US land used for lawns (NASA reports there are 128,000 square kilometers of lawns in the US).
  • 22,000 square miles – the size of the Mojave desert, located in southeast California.
  • 2,200 square miles – the amount of Appalachian forests that have been cleared for mountaintop removal coal mining by 2012.
  • 3,590 square miles – a best guess at how much land is used for parking lots.


 

Sneakers

Just sneakin' around....
It's not just the area required for the panels, it's also the loss of vegetation under them, loss of ground water replenishment, currently non-existant recycling of failed panels, ...the environmental side of the coin.

Are the environmental impacts worse than using natural gas?
 

Kyle

Beloved Misanthrope
PREMO Member
It's not just the area required for the panels, it's also the loss of vegetation under them, loss of ground water replenishment, currently non-existant recycling of failed panels, ...the environmental side of the coin.

Are the environmental impacts worse than using natural gas?
Not to mention how scenic the country will become!

solar-panels-and-wind-turbines-with-mountain-landscape-under-blue-sky-green-energy-concept-2J5JPBN.jpg



Maybe they can get STUCKEYS to advertise on the windmills to make a little extra bank.

I'm sure the view of Half-Dome or Yosemity Falls, over top of an array of panels won't suffer too much.
 

Hijinx

Well-Known Member
Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.

This may seem like an impractically large amount of land but not when you put it in perspective. 21,250 square miles is a square about 145 miles on each side . The U.S. has 3,797,000 square miles of land. Only about half a percent of that would be needed to provide enough solar energy to power the country.

Here are some other examples of land use in the range of tens of thousands of square miles:

  • 40,223 square miles – this is the size of the land leased by the oil and gas industry (according to the US Bureau of Land Management).
  • 18,500 square miles – the amount of federal land offered for lease to the oil and gas industry in 2017 alone.
  • 13,000 square miles – the US land that has been impacted by coal surface mining [1]
  • 49,300 square miles – the land used to grow corn for ethanol (USDA reports 91 million acres of farmland produced 14.99 billion bushels of corn in 2021, of which 5.2 billion bushels were used to for fuel alcohol)
  • 17,120 square miles – the estimated surface area of US roads (8.8 million lane-miles at an average 10 feet wide).
  • 49,400 square miles – the total amount of US land used for lawns (NASA reports there are 128,000 square kilometers of lawns in the US).
  • 22,000 square miles – the size of the Mojave desert, located in southeast California.
  • 2,200 square miles – the amount of Appalachian forests that have been cleared for mountaintop removal coal mining by 2012.
  • 3,590 square miles – a best guess at how much land is used for parking lots.


This doesn't make it sound so bad, but what we have to take into account is that this is today's figures.
What happens tomorrow when all of the cars and all of the homes and all of the trains, and farm implements are electric. Forget that many of our products such as tires and furniture, and dishes, plastics et al are made from oil

Our use of electricity will more than double it will probably go up 4 times. and does that mean that all of these figure will go up the same amount?
 

SamSpade

Well-Known Member
PREMO Member
I think stuff like "the Pickens Plan" collapsed because people began to realize, the only way you power the United States with wind is to cover an area the size of Kansas - for NOW. Eventually you'll have to cover every mountain and national park.

Ditto solar. The simplest way I can think of is to find a way to make it cheaper and useful for everyone to use their own roof and their own land.
And to find a way to collect more of the energy that arrives - most of the solar energy that could be captured is lost.
 

glhs837

Power with Control
I think pretty rapidly the understanding that nukes is the only way to go is going to make a big comeback. You want a moon shot project? Dump it into fusion. But while we wait for fusion start building modern small plants. By the time those things are old enough to have a fuel problem, you'll be able to send the damn fuel into the Sun using a starship
 

SamSpade

Well-Known Member
PREMO Member
This guy thinks fusion is possible by 2024. More power to him. Literally.


This is brilliant. I'm STILL highly skeptical of ever seeing commercially viable fusion generated electricity in my lifetime - as was intimated in the articles and responses, fusion has ALWAYS been 20 years away - meaning - never. I worked as a very minor tech in a lab where they worked on magnetic containment but this has always been interesting to me.

Aside from all of the cold fusion pseudo science, Pons-Fleischmann, LENR and so on, my money's been on the second of the three he mentioned - basically, at Lawrence Livermore, the approach has been to smack 192 lasers into a tiny spot - until I read an article recently from one of their own scientists saying, basically - it's never going to be a commercially usable technology.

This however is brilliant inasmuch as the technique for achieving it and THEN producing electricity - I've never seen it, and it's genius.

Still gonna wait and see. Won't be 2024.
 

phreddyp

Well-Known Member
Here's a twist on that: one of the things newer electric cars can do is something called V2G, V2H, and V2L. Vehicle to Grid, Home and Load. A fully charged electric car can provide power to the house and devices for quite a while, if used smartly. Except in rare cases like Fort Meyers where everything was flattened, the power is back on before the car is depleted.

The electric car I have on order is supposed to support V2H. If it does, solar panels on the roof will charge the car, and in the event of a power outage, provide power to the house. I might eventually retire the gas generators.
There is one born everyday!
 

jrt_ms1995

Well-Known Member
I think pretty rapidly the understanding that nukes is the only way to go is going to make a big comeback. You want a moon shot project? Dump it into fusion. But while we wait for fusion start building modern small plants. By the time those things are old enough to have a fuel problem, you'll be able to send the damn fuel into the Sun using a linear accelerator.
I've always thought this should work; shoot it into the sun on big-assed rail guns.



I haven't done any of the math, though; maf's hard!
 
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LightRoasted

If I may ...
For your consideration ...

This is brilliant. I'm STILL highly skeptical of ever seeing commercially viable fusion generated electricity in my lifetime - as was intimated in the articles and responses, fusion has ALWAYS been 20 years away - meaning - never. I worked as a very minor tech in a lab where they worked on magnetic containment but this has always been interesting to me.

Aside from all of the cold fusion pseudo science, Pons-Fleischmann, LENR and so on, my money's been on the second of the three he mentioned - basically, at Lawrence Livermore, the approach has been to smack 192 lasers into a tiny spot - until I read an article recently from one of their own scientists saying, basically - it's never going to be a commercially usable technology.

This however is brilliant inasmuch as the technique for achieving it and THEN producing electricity - I've never seen it, and it's genius.

Still gonna wait and see. Won't be 2024.
Cold fusion ...... Getting more energy out than what was put in. Another way to say perpetual motion.

Crazy that they think they can duplicate what the sun does, on a planet with an atmosphere and a much weaker magnetosphere and weaker gravity. What keeps and allows the sun to do what it does is due to its massive size and mass and extremely high gravity forces that contain, along with its exponentially humongous magnetosphere, its chemical reactions that provide what is necessary for life on earth. The sun is also constantly fed with ingredients, elements, gasses, space dust, etc., that assist in that process by pulling in things due to its massive gravitational pull. In addition to being over 109 times the size of the earth, and, holds 99.8% of the solar system's mass.

So, sure, maybe, scientists may be able to simulate cold fusion for nano seconds, but will never achieve their stated goal. Because, after all, ask any scientist why perpetual motion machines/devises don't work and they'll answer it's because nothing can be made to produce more energy than what is put into it. Just like cold fusion, which is, a very complicated, and very expensive, perpetual motion machine, but sold as the latest and greatest for those funding dollars. Even this 'new way' to make electricity won't work. Because it is six of one and half a dozen of another. A zero sum game.
 

DaSDGuy

Well-Known Member
For your consideration ...


Cold fusion ...... Getting more energy out than what was put in. Another way to say perpetual motion.

Crazy that they think they can duplicate what the sun does, on a planet with an atmosphere and a much weaker magnetosphere and weaker gravity. What keeps and allows the sun to do what it does is due to its massive size and mass and extremely high gravity forces that contain, along with its exponentially humongous magnetosphere, its chemical reactions that provide what is necessary for life on earth. The sun is also constantly fed with ingredients, elements, gasses, space dust, etc., that assist in that process by pulling in things due to its massive gravitational pull. In addition to being over 109 times the size of the earth, and, holds 99.8% of the solar system's mass.

So, sure, maybe, scientists may be able to simulate cold fusion for nano seconds, but will never achieve their stated goal. Because, after all, ask any scientist why perpetual motion machines/devises don't work and they'll answer it's because nothing can be made to produce more energy than what is put into it. Just like cold fusion, which is, a very complicated, and very expensive, perpetual motion machine, but sold as the latest and greatest for those funding dollars. Even this 'new way' to make electricity won't work. Because it is six of one and half a dozen of another. A zero sum game.
Just another thing that the sun can do that people are not capable of doing. Cold Fusion is beyond the capabilities of mankind.
So is changing a climate on a planetary scale, aka Climate Change or Global Warming. The sun can do it, people can not.
 

spr1975wshs

Mostly settled in...
Ad Free Experience
Patron
Just another thing that the sun can do that people are not capable of doing. Cold Fusion is beyond the capabilities of mankind.
So is changing a climate on a planetary scale, aka Climate Change or Global Warming. The sun can do it, people can not.
The climate has changed as long as the planet has had an atmosphere.
 

DaSDGuy

Well-Known Member
The climate has changed as long as the planet has had an atmosphere.
Agree. I'm not denying the climate is changing because it most certainly is. I am denying mankind is the cause and I'm denying anything we try to do to stop it will be successful. Maybe we should just move the planet a little further away from the sun so it doesn't get so hot. Keep that one quiet. We don't want to give Al Gory or Brandon any ideas.
 
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spr1975wshs

Mostly settled in...
Ad Free Experience
Patron
I'm not denying the climate is changing because it most certainly is.
Both of my grandfathers remembered colder winters when they were young and mentioned how things seemed to be getting warmer as they got older.

1816 was a year without summer in much of the northern hemisphere, New England had snowfall in July and August. There was a massive volcanic eruption in Bali, which basically gave the world a "nuclear winter." Lots of natural phenomena, which mankind's efforts at fouling the nest look tiny by comparison.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

Electric vehicles are exploding from water damage after Hurricane Ian, top Florida official warns



A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state's top financial officer and fire marshal.

"There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start," Patronis tweeted Thursday. "That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale."
 
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