New Flow Battery Created at Stanford out of inexpensive materials

One of the currently technically feasible battery storage systems for large scale (but intermittent) sources of power from renewables such as wind, solar and wave is flow batteries.

These batteries can be scaled up to pretty large storage sizes such as tens of megawatt hours and so are definitely a technical solution to storage of intermittent power. There are currently a few places in the world where there are ongoing trials, such as a wind farm in Ireland, a couple of places in Japan and some south Pacific islands.

The issue with these batteries is, however, that they are often complicated and made of rare materials such as Vanadium. Also required is a membrane to separate the two liquids between which electrons flow. This membrane has to be replaced every so often, adding to the expense.

A team at Stanford, however, has solved a couple of these problems at least in the lab by the creation of a flow battery without a membrane and also using the relatively inexpensive and abundant materials lithium and sulfur.

A utility scale system would be capable of being scaled up to handle many megawatt hours.

Diesel from Bacteria

So I'm not holding my breath waiting for biofuels from algae or whatever but nevertheless this is interesting as it shows just how far we're coming along in the development of biotech with plug-in parts to the genome that do exactly what we want them to do:

Professor John Love from Biosciences at the University of Exeter and his team have modified the ubiquitos E.Coli bacteria to produce a bio-equivalent version of diesel.

This is revolutionary because it's not just some kind of fatty acid or ester which needs a convoluted and possibly energy intensive method to process the chemicals into diesel or gasoline, instead it's a drop-in replacement.

Prof Love and his team worked with Shell on this and though it's not ready for commercialization and still faces a number of hurdles to bring it there, it's nevertheless very interesting.

Death by Mathusian Collapse: The horseman of famine

Just a short post today.

So the premise of the one particular doom scenario (reminiscent of Thomas Malthus and loosely tying into the Limits to Growth crowd) is that the population will increase to say for example 10 billion people and we will all starve.

The doomers like to tie this together with the fact that the green revolution from the 1960s where we (they would say narrowly) avoided famine by increasing crop yields to keep up with population and that the green revolution recently appears to have stalled.

Well my doomer friends, here is yet another nail in the dieoff-from-famine doom scenario:

By sheer and utter accident it turns out that a scientist trying to replicate some extinction events hypothetically caused hundreds of millions of years ago by the toxic gas Hydrogen Sulphide seeping out of the oceans, has instead discovered that the plants growth faster, germinate quicker and produce significantly more biomass.

Frederick Dooley, a University of Washington doctoral student in biology who led the research has this to say:
"With wheat, all the seeds germinated in one to two days instead of four or five, and with peas and beans the typical 40 percent rate of germination rose to 60 to 70 percent." he said
"They germinate faster and they produce roots and leaves faster. Basically what we've done is accelerate the entire plant process," he said."
"The most significant near-term promise, he believes, is in growing algae and other stock for biofuels."

Oh well. Maybe doom from famine is postponed a bit longer.

Doomers are like Zombies

Doomers are basically zombies because there is an endless supply of them and their brains are already partially eaten because they keep coming up with the tired same old shit over and over again.

There is one post on some scientific site today allegedly debunking the possibility of running our current (and a few years down the line) civilization off of renewable resources.

I won't even bother posting the link because it's a tired reheat of droning doomer arguments but it riles me that such gibberish is given airtime.

The argument basically boils down to this: It’s expensive so don’t do it. What if population grows? The horror: if population grows to infinity then obviously you can’t have infinite growth so nyah.

Recommendations are the same old tired hippy/druid/English teacher bullshit: cut back on growth. Live with what you have today. Keep those who are in grinding poverty still in grinding poverty because if we grow then maybe some small furry creatures might be displaced from their environment.

Here’s my debunk of their debunk: I’m not going to waste my breath taking you seriously. It’s like the unending supply of doomer trolls in the dieoff/peakoil forums repeating the same tired old mantra. It gets tiresome repeating how things actually work. Instead I’m imagining an episode of the Walking Dead where I’m eating a bag of popcorn on the roof with a few cases of ammo shooting the zombie doomers down in the streets who caught the Rage Virus from their cans of MREs from Savinar.

What’s funny to me is that they think that “you can’t grow forever” counts as any kind of valid argument for “don’t try to grow today, tomorrow, the next day and for the next century or more”. It’s also amusing how little grasp they have that the economy *doesn’t* grow in a straight line to-the-stars trajectory: just like China’s blistering growth of the 90s slowed down in the 2000’s and has slowed down further. Also like the way Microsoft grew like blue blazes in the 90s etc etc.

I recommend these doomer idiots read Joseph Schumpeter and get a handle on creative destruction and Kondratieff business cycles. I also recommend they actually do the math to figure out exactly how far away we are from any putative “limits” to growth here on Earth never mind if we used some of the energy we could harness to pull in resources from off-Earth.
No doubt they’d dismiss that as sci-fi, all the while doing so using a globe spanning computer network that has all the current knowledge of mankind accessible from star-trek like communicators (i.e. “cell phones”) from anywhere on Earth. To quote a friend of mine: Sheesh!

Ooops might I have been right about *smoke*

In one of my previous posts I debunked the idea that the warming which we've seen could be caused solely by Carbon Dioxide and is most likely caused by smoke and aerosols (i.e. black soot).

http://dieoffdebunked.blogspot.ca/2011/11/death-by-carbon-dioxide.html

Surprise surprise turns out I was right. http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2013/2013-01.shtml Da-da-da-dum!

Well guys that's quite the easier problem to tackle than Carbon Dioxide isn't it? And we can handle it quite comfortably by putting particle scrubbers on smoke stacks while NOT shutting down the economy.

So what are we waiting for?

Global Warming Leads to the death of the Amazon? Not.

So after a genetic survey of Amazon tree species it has been determined that many of the species have survived for a surprisingly long time in the region (over 8 million years in some cases). Previously it had been believed that most tree species originated in the cold Quaternary Period (in which we are now), beginning some 2.6 million years ago.

In fact, of the 12 species surveyed, seven have been around for at least 5.6 million years and three for more than 8 million years.

This means that many of the common amazon tree species were around during previous periods of high temperatures induced by previous instances of rapid CO2 induced climate change such as the early Pliocene (3.6 million years ago to 5 million years ago) which was equivalent to the IPCC's moderate carbon emission scenario. During the highest emission IPCC scenario, temperatures will be equivalent to what they were during the Miocene (5.3 to 11.5 million years ago).

The implications are clear: Amazon tree species can survive extreme temperatures up to and including those predicted for the most extreme emissions scenario.
So no tree dieoff then.

Even I'm Surprised

So I have to say that even though I'm a big fan of electric vehicles I hadn't realized exactly how far along we are.
Allow me to explain:

It seems that a private company in the US (note *not* a subsidized government entity but a private company) has installed more than 10,000 chargepoints all across the USA and Canada. Apparently you can get some kind of payment card and use it to pay for electric charge exactly the same way you would for gas at a gas station.

From the looks of it most of the major metropolitan areas in the Eastern Half of the country are covered. i.e. you can drive from one major city to another no problem as well as drive from the northeast round the lower states and all the way along the bottom to California and up the coast to Vancouver in Canada.

It's pretty light in the mountain time zone region tho so basically I still need a Chevy Volt or a Plug in Prius to get from where I am to the more connected regions and will still need to rely on gasoline for at least 1,000 miles. The rest of the country, however, looks pretty impressive.

The following is the map: