I was taken aback some years while playing with various ideas for heating my house ago to realize that natural gas was significantly cheaper than wood. Here is a table that illustrates that. Coal – Powder River Basin1 – $0.56 Coal – Northern Appalachia1 – $2.08 Natural gas2 – $5.69 Ethanol tax credit3 – $5.92 [...]
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The drawing at right is the schematic of an air conditioner based on phase change. In this case wax that melts at 22C (72F). The wax is encapsulated in tiny spheres and then mixed with water to create a fluid. That slurry is pumped thru the radiator (labeled: cool-phase condensing rods). At night cool outside [...]
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
From Chapter 2 of the “Transportation Energy Databook” from the US department of Energy (with slight format changes). The Commercial air numbers maybe high do to freeloading cargo. Thousand BTU/Passenger Mile 4.2 Public Transit Buses 3.9 Personal trucks 3.4 Cars 3.3 Commercial Air 3.0 Rail – commuter 2.8 Rail – transit 2.6 Rail – intercity [...]
Maybe somebody can explain what’s actually going on here. MIT has a press release out, it crows about the discovery of a catalyst for splitting water (the pod cast there is good) into it’s constituent hydrogen and oxygen. Now I thought that was pretty simple stuff. What’s the hard part? My model of using hydrogen [...]
Any amateur economist knows that if two goods can substitute for each other they will, overtime, adjust their prices to about the same level. So obviously the choice between oil or gas for heating your home shouldn’t be a matter of price. So, being a gadfly, I found myself taking the contrarian point of view in an argument last [...]
I have sighted a new urban myth: Electric heating is cheaper than oil heat! Here in Boston people heat with both gas and oil, and the cost per unit of heat between the two has diverged rapidly over the last few years. Those who heat with oil are looking for ways out of their plight. [...]
These are cool! They are huge, they float, and they include steam, balloons, and your choice of ocean going or deserts with optional canals. They would be better if they included a giant watch spring to rewind them every day. Real life steam punk! I might have called them solar turn tables. Solar collectors need [...]
There is a delightful state just before sleep, but it requires a certain absence of anxiety. A place where threads in your head can intermingle in amusing ways. Last night I spent some moments there and cloud servers became entangled with the density of energy storage. I’m liking the idea that server farms in isolated [...]
This chart is pulled from a good report (pdf) circa 2001 out of Sandia National Labs which is full of nice charts like this one. Energy storage systems have numerous facets you can sort them out over. For example up-front costs, lifetime, cost per cycle, etc. etc. This shows seven different technologies, including superconducting magnets [...]
This chart is lifted, and slightly edited, from a post discussing how much land area it’s going to take to generate power from wind or solar. No surprise there, fossil fuels are amazingly dense sources of energy. In any case the horizontal axis is showing how large various things are. There isn’t really anything surprising [...]
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