Climate Change in Australia (Part 1)

I reckon we can do better than that.

Mandate the use of smart tvs, which automatically turn off during any reality show, cooking show (except for Supersizers or Iron Chef), home renovation show, or during rain breaks in the cricket when channel 9 dredges up a replay from 10 years ago.

All cars should have an ignition interlock that prevents starting when the driver is detected wearing Collingwood, Hawthorn, or fark Carlton colours. We don’t want to make it easier for that sort of person to escape into society, after all.

All computers/phones/whatever should automatically switch themselves off if the user is ever detected typing any of the following words/phrases: ‘crossfit’, ‘global warming religion’, ‘liveblog’, ‘libertarian’, ‘spuffy’, ‘sous vide’, ‘my all australian squad’, or anything that has ever been posted on a meme site.

Vegan recipe
My local Hillsong

Anything to do with Kanye West a Kardashian or the other family name they’re associated with.

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Anyone who watches Fox or Sky News would be a nice start, … along with it’s owner, … and anyone that appears on air, … and …

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General idea is OK , but I would start with Jonathan Green and Paul Bongiorno. Snarks supreme.

Just invested in rooftop solar. $735 per kw, 2.6 year payback based on my current use and power prices. Hopefully storage technology will drop in price like panels and I will have a battery and small genset in 5 years and off-grid.

And there are people saying renewables don’t stack up financially…

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2.6 years? I put mine in march and the calculations weren’t that good.

I demand you show your workings!

(i’m very curious as my calcs were generously 5 / 8 years which was cool by me).

Mostly people who read blogs financed by the Heartland Institute. Bit like the one about how the cost to run a Tesla car is higher than using petrol (so just imagine how expensive Powerwall is!)

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5.7kW system for $4,000.
I reckon I can shift 12kWh per day to sunlight hours
5.7kW in Brisbane should give me ~24kWh per day
My new power rate is 24c/kWh so assuming 12kWh from solar - $2.88 per day - $1,052.3 per year
Factoring in a feed-in tarrif of 10c for the additional 12kWh - $0.72 per day - $436.48 per year
$1,488.78 per year = 2.68 year payback

Obviously dependent on shifting majority power consumption to sunlight hours which I reckon is achievable. Noting I have ~9.5kWh in daytime at present.

Also acknowledging it won’t be this good because cloudy days but it will still be a sound investment.

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We’ve only had our system since March and i’m in Vic so the production will be slightly different but here are my months figures on a 5.12kw system with 16 panels (LG Neon 2 on Enphase microinverters). 10 facing north, 6 facing west (split system slightly to give more output later in the day when more is used in our household as we are not morning people).

March (28 days worth as it kicked in on the 3rd) - 673kwh or 24kwh per day.
April - 499kwh or 16.63kwh per day
May - 404kwh or 13.03kwh per day
June (25 days) - 279kwh or 11.16kwh per day.

With the winter equinox out of the way the only way is up again :slight_smile:

Dud technology turns out to be a dud. No one is surprised.

**Clean Coal’s Flagship Project Has Failed**
A plan to slash emissions from coal burning by 65 percent has proved too problematic at the beleaguered Kemper power plant.

_ by Jamie Condliffe June 29, 2017 _

The Mississippi power plant widely regarded to be the biggest proof of concept yet for clean coal has failed to deliver on its promise. Its carbon capture technique has been declared too costly and problematic, and the facility will instead burn natural gas to create electricity.

The coal-fired power station in Kemper County had many hopes pinned to it since construction began in 2010. The theory was simple: if a plant could be built to cleanly burn nearby lignite coal reserves—the most heavily carbon-emitting of all coal types, per unit of heat extracted—then the fuel’s future in American energy production would be assured.

Sadly, things haven’t played out that way. The project has been mired in problems from the get-go and has run up a $7.5 billion tab—$4 billion over its planned budget—with the carbon capture scheme three years behind schedule. Now, the New York Times reports, the plant’s owner, Southern Company, has ditched its attempts to get it working as designed, following pressure from the Mississippi Public Service Commission to switch to natural gas and stop hemorrhaging money.

The plant was supposed to gasify the soft brown lignite coal to create a fuel that emits similar amounts of carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned. According to a description of the technology by Power magazine, that would in theory have reduced the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning that coal by 65 percent.

But the gasification systems have not worked as planned, and the Kemper plant has instead been burning natural gas. Now, it will continue to do so. Southern says that it is “immediately suspending start-up and operations activities” for coal gasification at the plant.

It’s a huge blow for clean coal. Despite some successes in cutting carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants, by and large the process is still considered too costly to implement at scale. That’s especially true given that prices for renewable energy are continuing to decline swiftly. Indeed, a newly published analysis from the Global Warming Policy Foundation suggests that carbon capture schemes will always remain too expensive to be viable as the cost of clean energy drops.

As part of his push to reinvigorate the fossil-fuel industry, earlier this year President Donald Trump said that his administration was “putting an end to the war on coal,” providing America with “clean coal, really clean coal.” Now more than ever, that looks like an empty promise.

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Clean Coal is an oxymoronic joke, touted by oxish morons.

Always has been.

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Yep. Leave it in the ground. Interestingly, solar, which has price parity with coal in most of the west is predicted to do the same in China and India in 4 years time. That’s going to fairly suck balls if you’re a coal magnate or investor expecting an extra few squillion over the next 10 years.

As I said earlier, my recent trip to China was very interesting. The Chinese I spoke with, also said that “clean coal” was a nonsense “American” concept, and that the only chance to continue to use coal was to develop technology that combusted 100% of the carbon present, and was able to convert any residue (as in ash etc) or emissions into a usable product. I was told that they have achieved this in the lab, but up-scaling is currently an issue because of the enormous amounts of energy needed, which makes it unusable and uneconomic. However they have 3000 engineers working on it at the institution I visited, and are confident in a Chinese sort of way.

As I expect to sell our testing equipment to this place for this project, I will be visiting again and If I hear more, I will keep you posted.

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Not sure if I’m missing something, but what does ‘combust 100% of the carbon preent’ mean?

My understanding (from high-school chemistry, I’m a lot better in the physics stuff) is that the burning of coal is a reaction that combines coal © with oxygen (O2) which results in energy release and co2 as byproducts. Carbon is an element, you can’t ‘combust’ it into something otherthan carbon without a nuclear reaction, and any burning of carbon fuel with oxygen as the oxidiser will inevitably result in co2. If ou want to cut oxygen out if the equation you can by using something weird and exotic as the oxidiser, but such substances tend to be expensive, dangerous, hard to handle, and will need entirely new furnace designs. The economics of coal tech are marginal enough these days with people having to pay for coal and getting their oxygen for free. If power generators suddenly need to acquire some exotic oxidiser in huge quantities, that’ll blow the roof of operation costs. And of course the point of the exercise is to reduce emissions, so if synthesising this oxidiser requires large amounts of energy, you may well be back to square one.

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This isn’t the final nail in clean coal’s coffin. It’s the guy with the hammer holding up a bent nail and saying ‘sorry guys, I can’t hammer this final nail into the coffin because the coffin IS ALREADY MADE UP ENTIRELY OF PREVIOUSLY HAMMERED FINAL NAILS’

The search for clean coal tech is starting to resemble the search for N-rays, early last century.

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I’ve said for a decade now, the person that comes up with a method to seperate CO2, and turn it back into inert Carbon, and Oxygen, would own the World.

I did Chem,… lot’s of it, and there’s a part of me that thinks it probably could be done, but we just haven’t thought of it yet.

We don’t need to. Australians (shock, horror) have done better!

Researchers have developed a paint which can absorb sunlight and produce hydrogen
Anmar Frangoul
Wednesday, 28 Jun 2017 | 7:54 AM ET
CNBC.com

Peter T. Clarke | RMIT
As technology and innovation open up new ways of generating energy, some advances seem to come straight out of the science fiction playbook.

Now, researchers in Melbourne, Australia have developed a “solar paint” which is capable of absorbing water vapor and then splitting it to produce hydrogen, a clean source of energy.

In a news release earlier this month, RMIT University said the paint contained a newly developed compound which behaved like silica gel. The university added that unlike silica gel, the new material acted as a semi-conductor and was able to catalyze “the splitting of water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen.”

Torben Daeneke was the lead researcher on the project. In a statement on the RMIT website, he explained how the compound, when mixed with titanium oxide particles, lead to a “sunlight absorbing paint” able to generate hydrogen fuel from solar energy and moist air.

“The developed paint offers two properties at the same time,” Daeneke explained to CNBC via email. “It is strongly water absorbing, so it can take water vapor out of air… (and) it absorbs solar energy and uses that energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Hydrogen is a clean and green fuel.”

According to the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, hydrogen can be used in fuel cells to produce power, with water and heat the only by-products.

Daeneke went on to explain that the real world applications of the work being done by himself and his colleagues were diverse.

“We are currently optimizing the system to maximize the hydrogen production rate and to facilitate the collection of the produced fuel,” he said. “Ultimately we envisage using the solar paint as a cheap alternative to traditional photovoltaics.” Photovoltaics, also known as solar PV, refers to a way of directly converting sunlight into electricity.

“The solar paint might be particularly suitable to cover wall surfaces that do not receive enough light to make solar cells economically viable, while receiving enough light to produce hydrogen with this low cost alternative,” Daeneke said.

Daeneke’s colleague, Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, told CNBC that the environmental benefits of the paint were another positive. “The paint will help to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” Kalantar-zadeh, a distinguished professor at RMIT’s School of Engineering, said.

“Today about 95% of all hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions,” he added. “Hydrogen as an energy carrier will also reduce the reliance on lithium ion batteries. The mining of lithium salts creates significant damage to the environment.”

Turn it into briquettes?

Not being serious, but that’s probably how Abbott would see it.

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So long as they can keep digging the stuff up and selling it while the search for a mythical fix is on then who really gives a ■■■■, right?