Hybrid renewable systems

Kind of new to me, but obvious enough:  wind blows some of the time when the sun doesn't shine, so put wind generation and solar on the same location and reduce some infrastructure cost while getting less-intermittent power. Obviously it won't work everywhere, but it helps. I read somewhere (and sadly can't find the link now) that night winds are very reliable in India during monsoon season, and India's the big challenge now that China is all-in on renewables, so this could be huge.

Alternatives include renewables with large hydro and with power storage. And my personal favorite, floating solar panels.

Tangential thought: we would live in the energy world that denialists think we live in if it weren't for solar and wind (and soon, battery storage). I mean that denialists argue we can't maintain a modern lifestyle without fossil fuels. How that translates within their minds into climate change not happening is unclear, but regardless, that view of the energy picture has been wrong for a decade. And now even the denialists have to add a throwaway statement that "I support solar and wind too" before defending massive pollution of our environment.

Is it just luck that wind and solar and hopefully storage are taking off in terms of cost savings just in time to save us from ourselves? Certainly it's also a function of years of government-funded research, but other fields like wave power, instream hydro, and biofuels have had the same research with limited results. Maybe I'm just looking at the gift horse in the mouth, but if the technology for solar and wind were 20 years behind where they are today, then we'd be in a hell of a mess on climate. I'm curious why it's worked out relatively well.

Some thanks to Jimmy Carter perhaps, starting something that Reagan couldn't quite totally bollox?

Government Regulations and the Law of Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ms. Rabett when still employed worked in a nest of libertarian types who complained about how complicated government regulations were, and how it was stifling business and most importantly how they could make more money without them.  The same folk would wail about how bad government was when something bad happened and there was no law or regulation to stop it. There ought to be a law they screamed.

Now Ms. Rabett is more than somewhat of Eli's disposition or as she would say visa versa and she realized that governments do not always write crazy regulations to pass the time of day, but more often because some outstanding libertarian tries something crazy and goes nah nah there ain't no law agin it.  There are so many regulations because there are so many libertarians out there trying to game the system.

Many years ago, Angry Bear explained the Law of Chocolate Chip Cookies

So the process continues… Eventually, the Army has a spec that indicates even situations that a rational person would say – “This makes no sense. Everyone knows that.” But the rational person wouldn’t realize that when the Army specifies that no sawdust is to be used in making flour, or that no more than X parts of per million of rat droppings will be in the cookie, that the Army has a damn good reason for having that in there, namely that some upstanding leader of the community who waves a flag and is a member of the local Kiwanis actually tried to pass such things off on American military personnel. And of course, that upstanding leader of the community who waves a flag and is a member of the local Kiwanis is happy to lecture one and all about how much more efficient the private sector is than the public sector – exhibit A being the Army’s specs on making a chocolate chip cookie.

CO2 Atmospheric Absorption Is NOT Saturated

It is certainly an evergreen claim by the climate change disbelievings crew that the absorption of CO2 in the atmosphere is saturated.  What does saturated mean to them is a useful question to ask. A useful answer would be that the atmosphere is optically thick at the greenhouse effect relevant frequencies/wavelengths where CO2  absorbs, between about 620 and 840 cm^-1.

It would also be useful to describe what is meant by optically thick and optically thin.  To do that we first need to define optical depth.  Optical depth is the fraction of light blocked in passing through a medium.  The transmission is the percentage of light that gets through.  Something is optically thick at a particular wavelength if no light can get through it, It is optically thin if most or all of the light can get through.  If an absorption is not optically thick, it can't be saturated

If the disbelievers are right at current concentrations CO2 is optically thick over the entire region.

We can check on that using Spectral Calc, a program that allows us to calculate the spectrum based on precision and verified measurements.  Let us imagine that the atmosphere is a tube with 400 ppm CO2 at 296K.  How much of the light is absorbed in a 1 m tube

At this point those interested in only the bottom line can skip down to the bottom of the post and pick up the figure the bunnies need for their tweet.

ORIENTATION

Most of the spectrum is due to transitions from the CO2 ground vibrational level to the first excited vibrational level  The sharp peak in the center is called the Q branch composed of lines that are very close together and corresponds to transitions where the rotation(al quantum number) of the molecule does not change.  The band to the left is the P-branch for transitions where the rotational quantum number decreases by 1.  The band to the right is the R-branch where the rotational quantum number increases by 1.

The two little sharp peaks to the right and left of the main bands are Q-branch transitions between excited vibrational levels.  Even at room temperature a small percentage of the molecules are vibrationally excited by collision.  Of course, they can also lose energy by collisions but there is an equilibrium between excitation and de-excitation by collisions with nitrogen and oxygen molecules (mostly) and a thermally driven equilibrium population in each vibrational level.  If a bunny squints really hard she can see the corresponding P and R-branches. These are called hot bands. Why the excited vibrational levels are split and even what excited levels they connect is complicated.  Google books provides an explanation.

If the distance is increased to 10 meters the lines of the 0-1 band are optically thick but there is still space between them, however, the lines do have wings and the wings overlap so even over a 10 m path, there is a noticeable underlying continuum mostly caused by collisional broadening.  The hot bands on either side of the Q branch are now easy to see.  The Q branch 0-1 band is optically thick

At 100 m or 0.1 km the 0-1 transition is almost optically thick and the 1-2 bands are very clear.  Using the squintosope, Q branches for higher lying hot bands can be seen at the edges

For a 1 km path length, most of the 0-1 transition is optically thick (saturated in the disbelieving sense) but light from the surface would still be seen in the wings, where the hot bands are.  

BOTTOM LINE

Finally at 10 km, while the center of the CO2 absorption is optically thick, there are still regions of the spectrum where light from the surface will get through the atmosphere.

Of course, increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will decrease the transmission in the wings of the bands.  At 560 ppm

and returning to 280 ppm

There are a few things that Eli has not considered in this post but they all would DECREASE the calculated optical thickness. Temperature and pressure decrease with altitude.  This post assumes both are constant. Their effects will be considered in detail in follow on posts,  Simply put the optical depth is directly proportional to density and path length, thus decreasing density with altitude, decreases the average optical depth and increases transmission across the spectrum.  Second at lower temperature there is less population in the excited vibrational levels and the hot bands at the edges of the spectrum are weaker, decreasing the optical depth in the wings, and increasing it in the center 0-1 band.  Since the 0-1 band IS optically thick at very small path lengths anyhow, this increases transmission.  Third, each of the lines is substantially broadened at atmospheric pressure.  A narrower comb of lines is optically thinner.  This would substantially decrease the continuum absorption between the lines.

Bottom line, the 667 cm^-1 CO2 vibrational absorption is not optically thick across the entire region of absorption. It is not saturated.

What Rich Lowry said about Erdogan thugs attacking protestors in America

He got this one right, at least. Go read.

You don't often get a chance to read a National Review piece and agree with every word.

Probably Not The Place For This

Eli has been watching the reports on today's Senate hearing which features the Ted Cruz - Sally Yates death match.  The general feeling is that Yates did to Cruz what Macron did to Le Pen.  However, rather than getting too deeply into the legal parts of their interchange, the Rabett would like to point out that Yates READ most of her initial answer to Cruz (starting at 1:49 in the video below).

She was clearly prepared for the question.




You might ask what little birdy whispered in her ear, well, let's go to the video from three months ago




Somebunny was paying attention.

The New York Times approach to climate change

Behold the CrapWaffler, the writer that the New York Times thinks is a contribution to the climate change debate. It's what happens when you hire a climate denialist with the implied condition of employment that they can't completely lie about climate change, but merely smear uncertainty and misdirection about undertaking reasonable action (and Stephens still managed to get important things wrong).

The New York Times thinks it has added to the breadth of discussion on climate by getting as close to wrong as possible while not saying much of anything.

Issue w/ Stephens’ article is absence of specifics that wd allow to verify the validity of its point #NotEvenWronghttps://t.co/KJcdbUHXwq

— Climate Feedback (@ClimateFdbk) May 1, 2017

Stephens is shocked, shocked, that people would accuse him of "closet climate denialism". The term denier fit Stephens perfectly in 2015 when he wrote that temperatures would be about the same in 100 years, unless he was lying at the time about what he believed. It would be helpful if he now said his beliefs had changed, but all we get instead is crapwaffles.

I often read Razib Khan, an old-school Burkean conservative who also writes a lot about science. Several years back the NY Times hired him and then quickly dismissed him - he had unwisely associated with some simply vile racists, and guilt by association was enough to deem him unacceptable. I disagree, but to think Stephens, whose range is from wrong to crapwaffle, is better just tells you something about the Times. I recently subscribed to the Washington Post instead.

So skip Stephens, and read Razib to see what a thoughtful conservative would say.

P.S. And fellow bloggers, a reminder to add "no follow" whenever you link to Stephens. I'm pretty good about that when linking to denialists

Renewable Energy and Creative Construction

One of the weirdest flips in an exceedingly weird year has been the usual suspects going into complete meltdown about there now being extended periods where there is so much renewable energy from wind and solar and hydro that they are not just giving it away, they are paying you to take some of it.

@NoTricksZone This is bad? Surely some clever capitalist is licking her fingers figuring out how to use the excess power. Creative construction baby!!

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) May 4, 2017

Electricity has become like zucchini at the end of the summer, when gardeners leave a few hundred pounds on your doorstep, ring the bell and run.  Remember when the fusion and fission folk were talking about too cheap to meter, it's now a "problem" for renewables.

In any case, when there is money blowing in the wind somebunny will make money while the sun shines, and indeed this is a classic capitalist system opportunity, that somehow all the Randians and Trumplets let alone your average garden variety Bret Stephens don't appear happy with.  If there is a price differential arbitraging the electricity price is a great way to get rich and the technologies already exist.

There has always been a price differential between wee hours of the morning and the peak demand daylight hours, a differential that many industries have taken advantage of.  The guys with the green plastic eyeshades are no bunny's fools

Kentucky Electric Steel spends a lot of time and money trying to control our electric bill, over $2 million spread over the past eight years. This has reduced energy intensity from 743 kWh per billet ton in 2002 to 480 kWh per billet ton today. That represents an annual savings of over $600k with just our night-time operations; the savings would be even more if we ran during on peak hours, except that the higher power cost would eat them up! 

Aluminum smelters in Germany are already lapping up some of the freibier by using the molten metal as an energy storage medium from whose cooling they can draw power

By varying the rate at which the metal is produced, the plant will be able to adjust the power consumption of the 290-megawatt smelter up and down by about 25 percent. Trimet can soak power from the grid when energy is cheap. It can then resell the power when demand is at its peak. The company can temporarily reduce its power consumption by slowing the electrolysis, cutting the energy drain.

Using stored thermal energy is really old technology.  Ice houses that lasted through the desert summer have existed like forever in Iran and storage of heat from the summer to use in the winter is also a Canadian reality (tip o the ears to Andy Skuce )

The first of its kind in North America, DLSC is heated by a district system designed to store abundant solar energy underground during the summer months and distribute the energy to each home for space heating needs during winter months.

For decades large building have built tons of ice at night when electricity is inexpensive and used the ice to cool the building during the day.  Going by the name of ice storage air conditioning, the technique is now moving into residential units.  Eli first became aware of it in the context of labs using large ice systems for to supply coolants for lasers.  Storage heaters are also coming back driven by the low cost of renewable thermal.

So the next time your electric provider tries to leave some zucchini on your doorstep, smile and use it to charge your batteries, heat or cool your house or some other creative construction.