Classic
Artisinal mines with child slave labourers
That argument sticks an image right into your head doesn’t it
What heartless b@$tard could argue with you now Doug
Nonsense
Mining in the DRC is now regulated really well. The phone or laptop battery you’re likely holding has much higher concentration of cobalt.
Let’s not even start with the “make remake” energy chat
Are you on default spokesperson duty for the argument dept this month?
Let’s find some animal motion verbs, before we get distracted by some interesting references from the Wikipedia pages.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985JThBi.117...47R
Bounding and undulating flight
The Magic of Bird Flight with David Lentink
I’ll leave that honor for you Roddy.
Personally I was chagrined as a kid that I was not allowed to get a job until age 14.
I was stuck delivering all the morning newspapers in the neighborhood for a measly $10 a week, but at least I was “running a business” and had some spending money at age 11. I was already accustomed to going to work when it was still dark out, every single day, and demanding money from adults while I was still in elementary school. Therefore I don’t personally see a problem with kids who probably have nothing better to do anyway, earning a little money. But it does not sound like a very well developed mining operation.
I’m just sharing what I have read on that topic, but the fact that producing, then “storing” electricity involves 3 steps: create, un-create, re-create, is my own original contribution to the conversation. You’re suddenly sounding like quite the omni-topic expert, so maybe you can tell the rest of the class any electricity “storage” method (besides pumped hydro) that doesn’t cost twice as much as the original cost of generating the electricity. (?)
Discussed also here:
I’m expert on nothing
But, As nominated officer responsible for responsible arguing
It’s appropriate to point out that this deranged argument thread started with pointing out an energy storage system comparable to pumped hydro, which was has the useful function of providing rapid timescale peak shaving and arbitrage energy value market propositions.
Long sentences are great for closing nonsense arguments
Well I don’t know about that - wind and solar are increasing pretty fast.
But there is increasing concern over wind and solar saturation. It used to be easy to “accomodate” wind and solar, but it’s getting harder as the percentage of clean energy production increases to the point that it’s obvious we have a problem when the sun goes down and winds calm.
What they used to scare us with was to tell us that we had used up all the oil and gas. Even the oil companies were in on it, because they need oil to seem scarce to maintain its perceived value.
But now instead of saying we’re running out, since we’re always producing more, they have global warming to keep a lid on drilling (prevent competition), and oil spills conveniently timed to match recessions when demand falls anyway, resulting in drilling restrictions to favor existing big players, etc.
It’s funny to go back in time and see how whatever “urgent” thing that seemed so important decades ago is now forgotten, like “we’re running out of food and the whole world is about to starve to death!” Whatever happened to that? CO2 helping crops?
All the cardiologists are embarrassed that they told us all to use margarine instead of butter and eat carbs instead of proteins and fats and it all turned out 100% wrong (opposite) to reality. Of course they were causing the heart attacks - job security. Guess who never fell for it? Me. Nope, I was one of those stubborn ignorant people who said it was all lies, and kept eating butter. Who was right? The normal-thinking people with common sense and good taste, just like today. Today the cardiologists not still making money doing bypasses and stents have given up surgery and instead just get people eating right (ignoring all the government guidelines) and the heart problems and most other medical problems disappear. Turned out the government guidelines were a result of lobbying by big agriculture and the mega-food conglomerates to allow them to produce food as cheaply as possible to maximize profits. That meant promoting sugar, carbs, and seed-oils, not fresh vegetables, healthy meats and animal fats. Look at any group picture taken before 1980. No fat people. Look at modern group pictures, or just walk down the street, and you often see most people overweight.
When I was a kid, we’d have one or two fat kids in a whole school.
Today the whole school is almost all fat kids. Unbelievable!
Question authority. That used to be a popular saying.
It’s good to question things that people in power insist you believe.
For the production of electricity, in Germany as in other countries, and with the notable exception of Denmark (until some level) due to both Baltic Sea wind resource and energy agreements with neighboring countries, intermittent energies such as solar and wind are coupled to gas which remains both one of the main energies and a backup for the intermittent. In these countries the production of CO2 is more important because of this coupling, while in France it remains much less thanks to nuclear power. Here is a link to the CO2 emissions linked to the production of electricity in live:
Now,120 g for France, and 428 g Germany (gCO₂eq/kWh).
That said hydroelectricity is still better because it is both clean and controllable, without the risks of nuclear: see for examples Quebec or Norway. But hydro is limited by geography. We cannot build mountains everywhere.
This is contradicted a few lines further on:
Does this mean that today people listen more to the “authorities” and “elites” than before, contrary to what you seemed to assert just before?
I do not believe in the fable of the good people and the bad elites, nor do I believe in the opposite, the good elites and the bad people. In reality, all this is much more intertwined than we imagine.
Concerning global warming, even the IPCC forecasts are on a very wide range. It is better to take this into account without falling into catastrophism.
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@dougselsam that rant was so far off from what I percieve as correct. Provide links.
Famine is threatening huge populations of the earth right now.
You can be sure those affected will question our gluttenous authority over the resources and political calls which have caused this.
Scarcity is real. Human ingenuity is real. Too often we use it to exploit resources beyond sustainable levels or twist truths to suit our narratives.
@PierreB love a bit of live GIS data map wizzardry.
The page you posted has the UK all lumped together as one (but oddly only the Orkney Islands separately… (2nd best globally))
Here’s some more granular data on the state of the UK
Come on England and Wales yous dirty slackers. Pull your socks up. Pull the finger out. And other odd motivation based idioms.
Unlike in sailing where you can only go left or right while jibing, in tethered jibing flight you can also go up and down, which allows the kites to fly in a figure of eight when line twist needs to be limited or in a circle when it doesn’t. When the length of the tethers is not fixed because the pull of the kites is unwinding the tethers from a drum to turn a generator, the flight path of the kites resembles that of a corkscrew or […]. When the tethers do not unwind from a drum to turn a generator, torque must be directly transferred to the ground via the tether tension, or additional energy harvesting devices must be placed on the kite, typically secondary wind turbines that generate electricity that then is transmitted to the ground via conducting tethers.
All three modes of energy generation [unwinding a drum, torque transfer, adding additional energy harvesting devices] add […] and […]. In […]. In […]. In […].
In single tether single kite systems, tether drag and limited tether tension limits […] at the cost of usually more complex kite control more kites can be added. […] branching from central line […] swarming […] echelon flight to […]. […] further developments include moving away from standard airplane fuselage + wing + tail design to […].
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Hi Pierre: The fact that even in undeveloped countries, everyone has been getting to be overweight the last few decades, is well known. The “problem” might just be a comparative abundance of food, but more likely the types of food being provided: Diets based on powdered grass-seed (grains), seed oils and hydrogenated seed oils, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. These are where most of the calories in the world now come from and the result is obesity. Just like oil is controlled by a few huge international conglomerates, so is food.
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Hi Roddy:
Before the recent artificially-provoked war in the breadbasket of Europe, it is common knowledge that the previous problem of starvation in undeveloped countries had been replaced by ubiquitous obesity. It’s all controlled by huge international conglomerates.
Of course if you have a war in Ukraine and Russia, which had become the defacto food suppliers for much of the third world, a short-term food crisis can result, and people are suddenly, for the first time in decades, worried about starvation. But that artificially created supply crisis does not change the fact that the world has been getting fatter and fatter by consuming the wrong foods. I’m somewhat of a healthy eating fanatic. i do a lot of juicing of carrots, kale, berries and fruits, to get good vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and other good nutrition from plants, and also good meats, butter, whole milk, all the stuff the corporate-controlled government advice warned against. The American Heart Association originally got its funding from Procter and Gamble after they had invented Crisco, a partially-hydrogenated seed oil, which could be substituted for lard, which is what everyone used back then. Their money drove the American Heart Association to recommend everyone replace lard with Crisco, and butter with margarine. Why? Lower cost. So the food conglomerates lobbied congress to influence the “food pyramid” and other “official” dietary recommendations, to the point that even scientists and doctors just assumed it must be true information and even heart surgeons didn’t realized their dietary advice was 100% wrong. Some cardiologists are now rebelling. The American Hear Association has been caught redhanded and has begin changing their advice. Animal fats are no longer taboo.
As real information begins to trickle in, the public is beginning to realize we’ve been bamboozled. But the theme is not restricted to food. It extends to energy, and a lot of other fields. The information is controlled by international conglomerates, and you have a choice to believe everything they say, or to be a bit skeptical.
Now you have been contending that most everything I say lately is BS. You said I was wrong about a previous discussion about energy storage. Well, due to the high frequency of conversations being moved to a different “topic” I could not go back and see which “Professor Crackpot” energy storage method started the conversation, but you might notice a similarity between, say, kite-reeling and that dumb idea of cranes stacking then un-stacking concrete weights to store energy. That company has already switched horses in midstream in response to so many level-headed debunkers (like me) saying how completely idiotic their scheme was. But notice the similarities to current AWE efforts: The “future of energy” being all about wrapping cables around drums, pulling and reeling our way into a future energy utopia. The problem is a lack of clear thinking, and what amounts to “a cover-up” of the lack of workability of these themes. Yes, a coverup. On this forum, for example, the “really smart people” are quick to announce some supposed sale and delivery of an AWE system, announce new “factories” to produce kite-reeling systems, yet never follow up on the story. How are the “AWE systems” that were delivered working? Or is it just one AWE system that was delieved? Well, how is it working? Nobody knows. It is a coverup. How many AWE systems is the factory now producing and delivering, years later? How are they working? silence… crickets… It is a coverup. Based on moeny. How can these companies keep raising more money if they admit they are just telling stories that lead nowhere?
Just as the poster-child AWE companies promise how many hundred homes they are just about to begin powering with their unworkable contraptions, the energy storage promoters are lost in “rendering-land” and in reality couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag.
As you pointed out, time of use arbitrage would be the first place to implement energy storage. That has been true for what, maybe a century or more? Almost forgotten until recently? You’re saying I’m full-of-it with regard to the three (3) steps to stored energy - produce, unproduce, reproduce. And so I challenged you to show us a means of energy storage that doesn’t cost twice as much as the original energy cost. You have not provided any example. So who is really “full-of-it”? 
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Thanks for the challenge @dougselsam
And you’re an OK dude in my book, dinna stress.
Regarding food, you’re right that globally individual diets have been getting richer and slightly more diverse but globally as a collective diets have become far less diverse and fed by cheap, just in time supply chains. And that’s not a safe nor healthy result.
Back to energy
And yes there’s always a wider picture to consider.
Especially as the electrical grid can be considered as the biggest machine humans have ever made.
This interconnection means we can consider a huge range of market demands and forces.
Straight to YouTube for the latest link on batteries and solar… I’m served a calculation on why it makes sense for UK domestic circumstances.
Batteries make sense where the market for them makes sense whether or not the energy they supply costs more than your initial source. It always will.
Even in the off grid case human energy demands peak and trough and don’t smoothly match production.
So some manner of smoothing the supply will be valuable.
Unproduce energy
Hmmmmm
Now, that, I do take great exception to.
I might even resort to using a condescending tone and your Sunday name Douglas
Energy is converted not destroyed Doug
Energy Conversion - was the only class in uni I had to resit
Roddy you are confirming that you cannot meet my challenge to find a form of “energy storage” (electricity storage in our case) that does not cost twice what the original electricity cost to generate. (Meaning your end result will multiply the cost of electricity by a total of 3x). Heck if you want to add in the markup for the provider to make a profit, the price to the end user could be multiplied by 5x!
Trying to talk your way out of it now by nitpicking word definitions is only digging yourself in deeper. The problem is real. Just wishing it will go away isn’t going to work.
But as you know, AWES, especially kite-reeling, can produce for almost nothing, using only 1/10 or 1/100 material of regular wind turbines, in the future of course. With storage, three times almost nothing, it doesn’t cost much. 
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There is no cost to the owner after buying the battery.
They get the convenience.
They make money from having these devices available for grid smoothing in scale cases.
I’m on a ferry right now. Low bandwidth and it was rough. Pulling into Kirkwall, Orkney.
I’ll get you some details soon enough
Roddy, maybe take a course in economics 101, or a business course, or maybe accounting 101. The idea that you can just talk about any investment and say it’s free once its paid for is not reflective of real life, or real economics. In most cases storage would require credit which would have to be repaid over time. And if someone could fully pay ahead of time, there is what is called “lost opportunity cost”. In other words there is a cost for using money. If this is the level of the conversaion here, it is childish. Just goes to show once again, why waste my time here?
Let’s bypass hypotheticals for a moment, and look at off-grid living today: I have friends who live off-grid in Tehachapi, California, ground-zero for wind energy, with plenty of sunshine as well.
It’s well-understood by these off-gridders that their largest electricity expense, by far, is buying, then maintaining, batteries. They usually have a special room or storage shed for the batteries. The initial purchase price is huge, then they slowly go bad, losing capacity with their limited number of charging cycles. In ten years they need all new batteries. It is never free. It is always a huge expense. And the word is, if you have grid power, it is always cheaper than your own self-produced renewable electricity, especially if you are talking about battery storage versus real-time use.
What you are suggesting is one more example of “All ya gotta do is” thinking:
“All ya gotta do is pay for it then it’s free!” Wheee! Maybe you can find a way to steal the money from someone else! At gunpoint! Everything can be “free”! Yeah, that’s it!
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Wow Doug, don’t you just ask mum to pay for everything so it doesn’t count? Of course you have to pay up front and divi the lifetime energy cost. Just as any other renewables device. And opportunity cost yep that’s a real thing too. You’re argument isn’t based on anything real though.
Renewables in the UK come waaay cheaper than grid energy. I believe you get a free pint of gasoline delivered with each kWh (probably some arcane unit of measure) in the US.
As for your double accounting on the cost of energy from a battery - it’s nonsense
You have to think about the system in the whole.
The battery is complementary to the system.
The only reason to charge batteries is when you have overcapacity of energy supply or cheaper grid energy available than when you will use it. This oversupply energy is going to waste otherwise. Essentially its money you can store which you don’t have to pay a grid supply company for.
Here, the economics make sense and the systems pay for themselves in around 5 years.
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AWEIA International holds that an independent technical body such as
Fraunhofer Society engineers Alumni
a European world-leading applied research organization should moderate an AWE competitive fly-off. I consider this option better than having an industry association like AWEurope with competing industry members sit as judges in a yet emerging industry wherein the privileged most funded teams have failed to deliver on their own promises while less privileged teams that opposed the failed concepts much earlier languish and are excluded from the industry association leveraged opportunities.
Association forums should accommodate all comers and let individual members judge for themselves the merit or otherwise of proffered information. This also implies that members must be respectful of others’ opinions no matter how ‘foolish’, ‘non-feasible’, or even ‘irrelevant’.
There’s nothing new here.except obviously DaveS posts appearing under John O’s name.
John mentions religion and issues the occasional “lift”-based slogan. From DaveS we have the usual references to “Einstein”, “Wright Brothers”, UHMPE, graphene, things that “wiggle”, and idle threats of imminent TeraWatts, against a backdrop of excuses why his projects should not have to ever show any actual power on a meter, but instead serve as theoretical guidance whereby others should prove the great genius of the ideas revealed. Contrast the threats of greater power generation than anyone has ever contemplated, let alone accomplished, with zero actual power generated in 14 years of big talk. Basically. there is nothing new here, just the same empty. leading nowhere talk, 14 years ago in Oroville.
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W&I have been working on designing Giant Kite structures and the most massive component of those kite structures which will ever be used has now been completed, The component has been developed in stealth mode. Most remarkably you have probably already seen a part of it used in a test without even noticing.
Here at W&I we have been working on the most massive kite structure that will ever be made, on Earth.
Enough cheesy marketing - The giant component - That’s the Earth itself.
The vital 6,371 km radius part holding the bottom of kite lines against aerodynamic forces. Without that component - nothing. No kitey.
But we are missing some tricks here.
The earth isn’t just one massively oversized 5.972 × 10²⁴ kg anchor point to one kite. It’s all the anchor mass to all kites.
If we need to anchor a giant network of kites, with multiple anchors across a field, or across a whole farm or even across a district… That anchor mass is already there. Waiting to be used, doing not much but sustaining an eco system as best it can.
This giant anchor mass holds individual anchors fixed rigidly in place relative to the other anchor points.
Not only that, but it is massive and rigid enough to hold all of these anchors against any movement in any direction away from the point where they are fixed.
2 anchors pulling toward each other - they are stuck fixed.
2 anchors pulling away from each other -stuck fixed.
200 random anchors - stuck fixed.
Do not negate the significance of the massive component available to your kite designs.
It gives AWES designers a lot of freedom to design using the Earth as a component.