You missed the point of the post. Lovins was talking about unscheduled downtime like the wind not blowing, or a reactor scramming because of a tremor. He was claiming that renewables were similar to baseload power plants in that they both have unscheduled downtime. I was responding to that.

Of course there is also scheduled maintenance, but that's not what Lovins was talking about. That has no relevance to the discussion of whether storage would be required for renewables. If Lovins was talking about scheduled downtime then his point was even weaker.

I don't think that's what he was saying. He appeared to be saying that no storage is required, aside from EV batteries.

I think the biggest mistake of the video, is when Lovins says that renewables are no different from baseload power plants, because baseload plants are down some fraction of the time also. He claims that power companies already compensate for downtime of baseload power plants by just having a few extra power plants. He claims that the same thing could be done with renewables.

That's just all wrong, in my opinion. It's a statistical error. Although baseload power plants are down 10-20% of the time, they are down at random. The downtime of any one plant is not correlated with the downtime of any other. As a result, if you have enough plants, then 10-20% of power generation is offline at any given time, as a result of the law of large numbers. That can be compensated for by building a few extra power plants.

With renewables, their downtime is not random. Their downtime is correlated with that of the other plants. For example, when the sun goes down, all solar panels stop working at the same time in a geographic region. Also, when the wind stops blowing (which can happen over a wide area), all windmills in that region will stop working at the same time. This is a much bigger problem than randomly distributed downtime.

If solar panels had randomly distributed downtime, and were as likely to generate power during winter nights as during summer days, then no storage would be required. We could just build more solar panels. This is because the randomly distributed periods of downtime of the solar panels would "cancel out" each other. However, it does not help to build more solar panels for the night time.

That is why renewables require storage.

Even if it only made 0.0001% nitric oxide and some kind of catalytic converter caught 95% of that, it would still destroy the environment faster than fossil fuels.

I doubt that. Burning a gallon of gasoline in an internal combustion engine produces about 1.5 grams of NOx, which is more than would be emitted by 0.0001% from ammonia combustion.

And that's if none of the ammonia ever escaped from vehicles, let alone the industrial production and transport.

Ammonia is a basic building block of life and is already produced in huge quantities by bacteria in the soil. Furthermore, it's produced in massive quantities by industry, at a rate of 150 million tonnes per year worldwide. That's more than 20kg per person, per year, worldwide, which is more than any other chemical. No attempt is made to confine that ammonia or prevent it from leaking into the environment. Quite the contrary, that massive quantity of ammonia is injected directly into the soil as fertilizer, or evaporates from window cleaner. The amount we are leaking into the environment right now, is vastly greater than the amount which would leak from the occasional defective fuel tank.

If ammonia is causing some dire environmental effect, worse than global warming, then I've yet to hear about it. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you'd have to provide some evidence for your assertion.

Sure. Sorry to have offended you. I thought you were being snitty. I apologize for being aggressive in my response.

It's also probably harder to get the hydrogen out of the ammonia in secondary processes than from hydrocarbons - plus if it's fuel cell usage you do not need to go all the way down to hydrogen gas anyway.

I was originally thinking that ammonia could be used directly in internal combustion engines, as a replacement for oil when that starts to become scarce. Of course there are replacements for oil in most applications (plug-in cars and electrified rail), but there are some applications where a liquid fuel would be very helpful (such as remote construction equipment, ships, and so on).

There are very few combustible liquids which can be made out of the main constituents of air and water, and so wouldn't alter the composition of the atmosphere when burned. That's one reason I was excited about a process which produces ammonia using less energy.

I was referring to how the above poster can find out about the relative danger of propane and ammonia and get some real understanding. Got it now?

I was referring to the paragraph I quoted, in which you were discussing making ammonia. I think you actually understand that.

You didn't know we were discussing making ammonia without fossil fuels, and you made a big fool out of yourself. As follows:

It doesn't come as ammonia. It comes as something like oil or natural gas, then you get hydrogen out of that, and then you make ammonia out of the hydrogen. It's an extra step

Don't guess or ask. LOOK IT UP... No, and for a very good reason. It doesn't come as ammonia. It comes as something like oil or natural gas, then you get hydrogen out of that, and then you make ammonia out of the hydrogen. It's an extra step

Why don't you try LOOKING IT UP by reading the actual article before commenting? The article (and the discussion) is about making ammonia without oil or natural gas, using a process other than Haber Bosch.

How would that be more dangerous than propane? LP gas would do exactly as stated above, if someone poked a hole in a fuel tank with their drill, they would get sprayed by rapidly evaporating fuel.

Ammonia is caustic and would cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes, unlike LP.

IMHO, this might be the way to have a hydrogen economy. If a nitrogen fixing process is easy and economical, making liquid ammonia is a lot easier and requires less pressure than converting water to hydrogen via electrolysis.

It seems much more sensible to use ammonia than hydrogen gas, because ammonia has handling and storage properties similar to propane which solves the major problem of hydrogen gas.

It makes a big difference if you can store something as a liquid and transport it through pipelines. That explains why oil sells for 10x more than coal, per BTU, and several times more than natural gas.

Something not mentioned here is that ammonia is suitable as a fuel in internal combustion engines. Ammonia is liquid under modest pressures (like propane), is easily transported, and will burn inside an engine.

If we made ammonia out of nitrogen and water vapor, then it would become nitrogen and water vapor again when burned. It's a closed cycle that would not alter the composition of the atmosphere at all.

It probably wouldn't be suitable as a fuel for your car, because of safety issues (if you hammered a hole in the fuel tank, the fuel inside would flash boil and could shoot out into your eyes causing a chemical burn). However it would probably be fine for trains, airplanes, ships, and so on, where special handling procedures could be enforced and people could be required to wear goggles before working on the fuel tank.

The amount of capital there has increased a lot over the last few decades. That implies fewer workers relative to capital, and higher wages for workers.

but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers.

When there's a scarcity of workers relative to capital, then workers have bargaining power. They can leave a job which pays too little for a job which pays more. It makes sense (ie is more profitable) for companies to pay more, otherwise they cannot attract enough workers to run their equipment. Competition among workers for jobs pushes wages up, when capital is abundant, just as competition between firms for customers lowers prices and pushes wages back down.

Companies in the US and western countries have always paid the lowest they can to their workers. Google has to pay $100k per engineer. If they paid only $50k, then all those engineers would go elsewhere and google would be no more. Labor is scarce in silicon valley, because there's more money than engineers. The relative scarcity of labor is what pushes the price of labor (wages) up everywhere, and is the only reason labor makes more than bare subsistence ($2/day) in any country. In countries where there is no capital (no factories, no investment money, etc), there is no labor scarcity relative to capital, and people actually make bare subsistence wages ($2/day).

Sure it does. At least to those who aren't sure the earth is round.

No it doesn't. I was asking whether the procedure was logically valid, not whether some people think it's valid. The two aren't the same.

You must be an American if you equate liberal with socialist. In Europe, they tend to be the very opposite of each other.

In the USA, the left appropriated the term liberal and started using it to refer to itself in the early 20th century. It stuck. As a result, the word liberal now has almost the opposite meaning in the USA as everywhere else.

For example some liberals are now promoting nuclear energey now that global climate change has proved to be a much bigger issue.

Some liberals do, but others don't. To me, it appears there's a small group of people who are reasonable and who really consider things. I would say that they are mildly liberal on average. Which does not imply that most people who are liberal are reasonable and really consider things.

this is why people don't believe in AGW. Because every time that a proponent of it comes into contact with something that disagrees with their tidy view of the world, the first thing they do is lash out. And in the minds of a rational person, this simply screams "scam."

You don't believe in AGW because someone on slashdot was impolite in a comment? Which proves the whole thing is a scam to any "rational" person?

Try this. People who think the world is flat are fuckfaces. Does that imply that the round-earth idea is a scam?

Of course, I explicity stated that on resume.

EVERYONE states on their resume that all their prior projects were very successful, and that they're excellent employees.

If your employer was going by your resume and had no direct experience with your prior work, then they had no way of knowing what kind of employee you'd be. No one "minded" six month jumps on your resume because you code in ruby on small projects, and it's common among that group of people to jump around all the time, so nobody cared.