Hurricane made me wonder

So we had this giant hurricane Irma have it's way with Florida. Pretty impressive storm although I was hoping my intelligence was correct in thinking that ground level wind wouldn't be nearly as bad as some of the news would make it appear. I'm in Central Florida and it was pretty scary in the early morning hours. It's easy for me to be narrow minded and think that my home or neighborhood was the big picture but, driving through Orlando the other day after the storm, I could see for miles and miles towards the east coast and it hit me how massive these storms really are. I can't begin to imagine what kind of terror the islands that were hit with the full force of this storm must have been experiencing.
I live a couple of miles from our power plant which is coal and natural gas, with a smaller solar field, and have not been without power in the past 12 years since I've lived here. This changed during Irma and we were without power for three days. Half my neighborhood didn't even lose power. Anyway, I was loaned a pretty good sized generator (7000 watts) and was pretty surprised at how limited it was at producing power. A couple lamps, a couple fridges (my neighbor took a 120 feed for their fridge and 2 fans) and a portable ac unit pretty much made it struggle when I added anything significant like a microwave or a bigger fan. Used about 7 or 8 gallons of gas per day.........maybe closer to 10........
So it made me wonder how efficient is fossil fuel for power? I'm totally clueless aside from this experience and am sure there is much more efficiency going on at higher levels but, wow, I couldn't imagine what kind of energy we are using for our daily lives. I'm now turning off lights in rooms when I leave and just thinking about things more in regards to energy conservation and or alternatives. Is solar any good? Weird thing too was that there is a home here with 2 sides of his roof covered in panels that had their windows open during the power outage. I wonder if there has to be some kind of power to run the solar system? I need to ask my neighbor who is completely solar but has been away. I know he actually sells power he doesn't use back to the power company and gets like a $15 check some months so I know he has good supply, even with a pool.
Anyhow, it just had me thinking and was wondering what anyone's thoughts were regarding efficiency of fossil fuels, how important it is to really consider saving electrical use and if there really should be serious thought being put into alternative energy sources before we create some kind of problem. Don't get me started on why a vinyl fence or even a flower pot can withstand this storm but our power grid can't. Really doesn't make sense to me why that infrastructure isn't sorted out in this regard.....

Please go easy on me. I'm not looking to offend anyone....

can you phrase that as a question?

JR

scott2000 said:

Does anyone have any thoughts regarding efficiency of fossil fuels, how important it is to really consider saving electrical use and if there really should be serious thought being put into alternative energy sources before we create some kind of problem?

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One barrel of oil (55 gallons) has the energy content of tons of batteries.

Oil (fossil  fuel) is cost effective.  We have plenty of time to develop alternative energy sources.

Hurricanes are weather not related to fossil fuel use (the eye of Katrina passed right over me and tore things up).

JR

> efficiency of fossil fuels

We use fossil fuels because they are *cheap*. Efficiency is mostly about the cost of transportation.

Fuel in the ground is no energy at all. It's how we use it.

Propane is $1 at the tank in Texas but $2.25 in my Maine tank. I try to be thrifty. I don't go putting 2 feet of fuzz around my house.

For reference: large engines (steam, Diesel) run 25%-50% efficient from the theoretical heat value of the H+C in the fuel to work at the crank flange. Large electric distribution runs 90% to 60% efficient from generator to your house.

You "don't" run a microwave oven on a small generator. Think what you are doing. You could heat those beans in 2 minutes with 1,000 Watts or 20 minutes with 100 Watts. When connected to a megawatt power company, you opt for "quick". When running your own generator, max Watts is a major up-front expense (more than the fuel for a month solid). And you "can" wait. So you want a low-power cooker. (I have a rack to go in front of my gas fireplace.)

MANY things we do on utility power are "dumb" on self-bought generators. My well pump sucks 5,500 Watts for a part-Second at start-up. Taken literally, I can not get water with my 4,500W generator. The running power of the pump is 1,400 Watts. That gives a generous flow. The pump runs only a minute or two a day. Further out from where I live, windmills provide <100W but run most-times day and night, eventually filling the stock-tank. As long as I understand I will get 10 Gallons an hour (instead of 10 Gallons a minute), I could live with that. Stagger dishes, bath, and potty flushes.

scott2000 said:

This sounds like conservation or is it just slowing the inevitable use so pick your poison???

I guess I'm reading so far that the concern of leaving my computer on all day for fear of stressing components at start up isn't really justifiable at this time???  Or is leaving it on when I don't "need" it just dumb in general?

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not leaving your computer or any other electronic appliances on all day when you don't need them is to help you avoid a blown-up electricity bill, therefore saving up your money.

i personally don't think it's a right thing to waste electricity or water, and that i should appreciate it when it still lasts, because in other parts of this world, there are people who need it the most but they don't have it. feel free to call me stupid.

I found a really interesting speech by Terrence McKenna  before ,must have dated from some time in the late 80's ,he came up with a stat that said the average Californian would use 600 times the energy in their lifetime than the average person in Bangladesh.
I doubt the situation has changed all that much over the years ,kinda makes you think though .

We could argue all day about fossil fuel use being the cause of climate shift, at any rate the 'burn it up' mentality has associated hidden costs in terms of global hedge ,war(civil or otherwise) and messing with politics of far away places to get into a position to be able to suck the black gunk out of the ground in the first place .

I see there's a huge disparity in fuel prices depending on which part of the US you happen to live in ,as PRR pointed out. Is this purely down to transport  costs or is it local taxes putting the prices up so people are forced into considering energy consumption ?

Just for perspective a liter of petrol(gas) in Ireland is about $1.60 vs $0.56 in the lone star state .

You can't really talk about the efficiency of a fuel but you can talk about the efficiency of converting the energy stored in the fuel into useable energy. As others have said, the conversion efficiency of fossil fuels can be 50% in large scale operations. Renewables struggle to reach 20%.

There is another factor to consider and that is the cost of ownership. It costs a lot of money to build a coal or gas powered power station but it lasts for many years and produces many megawatts of power. Renewable sources tend to be on a much smaller scale, produce much less power and last about as long as their fossil fuel counterparts. Due to their economies of scale, fossil fuels are again cheaper than renewables.

What we really need is fusion power.

Cheers

Ian

scott2000 said:

Wasn't going there at all....Ugh..... Here we go..... :-\

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Sorry your post was not very clear (to me).  Fossil fuel has been demonized by modern culture (unfairly IMO). To study efficiency or effectiveness of using fossil fuels we need to count all the energy required to make things like solar panels. Electric vehicles require energy from utilities, that until recently were mostly coal powered... Cheap NG has displaced a lot of the coal energy production. Even my local esoteric "clean" coal plant has switched to NG.  : (note NG is a fossil fuel too).

Speaking of hurricanes and energy, tropical storms draw their energy from warm ocean water typically at the equator. I have suggested that we mine that warm surface water to capture energy from the temperature difference between warm surface water and cool water 50-100' down. Effectively cooling the ocean surface at the equator would reduce the energy in future tropical storms while harvesting some free energy. Of course not completely free , we need to move that energy thousands of miles back to land...  Perhaps some large container ships could figure out how to harvest the energy from the warm surface water to move their ships across the ocean (not obvious how do this while moving ).

Of course cooling the ocean surface at the equator might cause other unintended consequences.  " It's not nice to fool mother nature."

JR

scott2000 said:

electricity doesn't grow on trees.....

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Tell them they are wrong. Most of our electricity comes from coal and gas, both of which are made from fossilised trees.

Cheers

Ian

if you wonder too far, you might get lost.  This is especially true if you wonder during a hurricane.  ;D

>> 10 Gallons an hour (instead of 10 Gallons a minute)
> This sounds like conservation or ....

Saves nothing. 1,200 Watts for 1 minute or 20 Watts for an hour is the same Energy and rough fuel cost.

But the generator to power the in-a-hurry load is expensive. And may sit idle (sipping fuel) the other 59 minutes. The 20 Watt generator is conceptually less expensive. (However there are minimum costs to build&market, and minimum sizes worth making.)

As long as my burst power demand is shared with 10,000 other customers, there is little incentive to use a small well pump.Get a big one and suck big power in short bursts. 10,000 customers doing the same averages-out to a fairly steady load on the main city generator.

As soon as I have to buy my OWN generator, I can start wishing I had a much smaller slow-start well pump and more water storage.

> I can only imagine what things were like before we recorded weather events... energy use in general

Remember the Original Settlers of Florida lived with zero electricity.

Even the Europeans did without until the 20th century. There's still folks living out beyond the wires.

You could too.

scott2000 said:

Does anyone have any thoughts regarding efficiency of fossil fuels, how important it is to really consider saving electrical use and if there really should be serious thought being put into alternative energy sources before we create some kind of problem?

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Efficiency means conversion efficiency from chemical energy to some other kind, in this case electricity.
The conversion energy from chemical energy to heat is 100%. But then conversion energy to mechanical work peaks at about 55% for modern reciprocating engine (which is not far from the ideal Carnot efficiency, which is the thermodynamic limit). Conversion from the engine's mechanical work to electricity then reduces it a bit with generator losses. i.e. the engine burns the fuel to heat, which does work on the piston, which is translated to shaft power with the crank train, which drives a generator.

So for fossil fuels, the conversion is about 50-60%. Half becomes electricity. Where does the other half go? Waste heat out the exhaust stack. This is why electric heat is less efficient & expensive than gas. A gas furnace has a conversion efficiency of ~95% because converting chemical energy to heat is easy.  Currently, it is easier to run electricity to rural areas than gas pipes, so it is fairly widespread. 

The energy density is a different thing (how much chemical energy does a fuel have on a per mass or volume basis). Fossil fuels are energy dense. They don't compare with nuclear energy, however, which is many orders of magnitude higher. Gas has 47 MJ/kg, the tesla powerpack2 has about 0.2 MJ/kg. Firewood is in between. Uranium is 1000s times higher. But a good storage medium for energy should also be easily converted to work or heat and should be safe. In this respect electricity and batteries are way better. Electricity is the most useful kind of energy. 

The example that boggles my mind about how much energy we are accustomed to using is cutting firewood. I can cut firewood with a hand saw for a day. Then with a chainsaw do the same amount in about 10 minutes. And that is  just using about a pint of gas.

That said, I don't think using less electricity or rationing is the end goal - the goal should be improvements in technology so we have more access to cheap, clean, and sustainable energy.  I think that will end up being solar conversion to electricity, although nuclear would be a great solution if it could be done safely as well. The issue with nuclear plants is they need tremendous reservoirs to dump waste heat (ocean, great lake) which puts them in vulnerable positions for hurricanes, tsunamis, etc..

All energy comes from the sun and there is plenty of energy incident on the earth everyday. It is a technology challenge to convert it in clean, efficient way. 
A typical US household uses 5000 kwh of electricity a year. The incident solar energy on the typical house lot can be calculated and it is MUCH larger. So it is not energy quantity, it is a conversion challenge. Even if you account for all the energy a typical American uses for heat, electric, and transportation, it is still fairly small compared to the solar energy incident on the earth. The USA gets about 5 kWh/m^2/day, so there is more incident energy in a couple hundred square feet than the typical household uses.

There are off-grid solar systems that need a rack of batteries for storage. Most solar systems are grid tie so they don't work without the power grid there to balance things out.  Your neighbor probably had a grid tie system.

And there is a lot of effort being done to develop the technology for clean, sustainable energy conversion and storage. Of course, there is also a lot of  effort being put into opposing that progress also. I don't understand the mindset of people who nit pick the technology improvements as if the status quo is really that good. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the white house 40 yrs ago. Ronald Reagan took them off.

dmp said:

And there is a lot of effort being done to develop the technology for clean, sustainable energy conversion and storage. Of course, there is also a lot of  effort being put into opposing that progress also. I don't understand the mindset of people who nit pick the technology improvements as if the status quo is really that good. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the white house 40 yrs ago. Ronald Reagan took them off.

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One thing that makes me chuckle is when people claim burning trees is carbon neutral because the tree has already absorbed the CO2 that is released when it is burnt.  They forget that exactly the same is true of all fossil fuels.

Cheers

ian

scott2000 said:

I just wanted to learn people's views on energy use in general so I can quit thinking "too" much about what I use.

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That is a very practical thought. I'm sure most people think about it, I do.  The answer I came up with was more philosophical than practical though. Or maybe its both. We must have a comparison in our minds when we think we are using to much.  As mentioned above, there are averages for different countries/states/cities/neighborhoods. So I guess you could just look those averages up and know where you stand. And your probably fine comparably. The fact you even think about it most likely puts you in an average bracket.
But if you want to think bigger, we as Americans use way more energy than other people in the world do, as Tubetec pointed out. So you and me are obviously using more than the global average. But I can't go around thinking like that, I mean I have and its pretty depressing because I'm not willing to do anything about it. To really do anything real would mean I would have to go live off the grid and not use any power at all.  I mean when does it end? Everything I touch everyday has its roots in fossil fuels. You would really have to be naked living in the jungle to not be a hypocrite when talking about personal energy consumption.
Sure every little bit counts but there's no way I'm gonna come close to cutting my energy consumption down 600 times to match my homies in Bangladesh. My wife would leave me...my kids would die without the play station 4. So whats the point of belly aching about it? You got snapped out of your reality for a brief moment and realized how  dependent we are on energy...perhaps felt a little of your mortality, that always gets people thinking.
Truth be told, we will always adapt to the situation at hand. You will make the right decision for what ever situation you find yourself in...That's my mantra.

ruffrecords said:

One thing that makes me chuckle is when people claim burning trees is carbon neutral because the tree has already absorbed the CO2 that is released when it is burnt.  They forget that exactly the same is true of all fossil fuels.
Cheers
ian

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If the amount of wood that is burned in a year is equal or less than the growth per year, it is 'carbon neutral'.
Fossil fuels take 100s of millions of years to be produced, so it is not the same at all. The current rate of fossil fuel consumption is rapidly converting a stored deposit of carbon into atmospheric CO2.
Ive talked to very few global warming skeptics that have any clue about thermodynamics. The first law with a control balance gives you an  energy balance of the earth. That's a good place to start.

> As long as I didn't have to give up my internet.....

Your internet toys are the least of your energy pigs.

In FLA your A/C is typically the worst. The brutal answer is that most people could not be happy in Florida (or Nevada, Arizona, much of California) without their A/C. Move North!

Just an aside: In Japan, in 2011, after the initial shutdow of all nuclear power plants, electricity got more expensive cos they had to go back to burning fossil fuels. As a response, private households started efforts to save energy and managed to reduce consumption by 10% on average, simply by turning off lamps and TVs etc etc when not in use, as well as not cranking up A/Cs to ridiculous levels for cooling in summer and heating in winter. So they have seen a reduction of 'only' 10%, but it's remarkable nonetheless -- motivated by more expensive electricity bills.

The downside to this reduction is that between 2000 and 2010 the consumption of electricity by private households had gone up 20%. Maybe it's due to the ubiquitous use of computers, smart phones, music players etc., cos A/Cs and fridge freezers for instance actually have become much better in terms of efficiency over the last couple of years. Anyway, my point is how we make use of and, all too often, waste energy.

dmp said:

If the amount of wood that is burned in a year is equal or less than the growth per year, it is 'carbon neutral'.

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Which would of course be true only if we were not consuming trees for other purposes and not replacing them. Funny how poeple forget about that.

Fossil fuels take 100s of millions of years to be produced, so it is not the same at all. The current rate of fossil fuel consumption is rapidly converting a stored deposit of carbon into atmospheric CO2.

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How it is different? Those trees were alive millions of years ago and removed atmospheric CO2 which must therefore have been higher than it is now.

Ive talked to very few global warming skeptics that have any clue about thermodynamics. The first law with a control balance gives you an  energy balance of the earth. That's a good place to start.

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I really dislike the term global warming sceptics as much as I dislike the term global warming alarmists. It does not really add to the debate. I have noticed how anthropogenic global warming (AGW) protagonists now use the term global warming perhaps because the arguments for the human element have weakened somewhat and some just refer to the even more dilute term climate change. No one denies global warming is and has occurred. It is well known it was warmer than now in the middle ages, it is well known we are recovering from the last ice age, it is well known the sea has been rising for thousands of years, all long before there was any significant CO2 input from man's activities. I am not a global warming sceptic. It probably is getting warming but it is not by any means proven that it is largely  due to man's activities, it is much more likely due to factors completely beyond our control.

Cheers

Ian

ruffrecords said:

One thing that makes me chuckle is when people claim burning trees is carbon neutral because the tree has already absorbed the CO2 that is released when it is burnt.  They forget that exactly the same is true of all fossil fuels.

Cheers

ian

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I researched this because I burn a lot of tree limbs in my yard every weekend (will later today), and didn't want to singlehandedly melt the ice caps (kidding). The official answer I found for burning wood being carbon neutral is because the wood would release the carbon similarly if left around to rot and decay, so burning just speeds up the release, that will happen anyhow.

I guess building houses (or speaker cabinets) with wood, takes that carbon out of the loop for some finite period.

JR