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phase change materials

Electrified Heating without Breaking the Grid or Bank

By Energy Rant No Comments
Here are my last words, for now, on artificial intelligence: I do not claim to understand the computations or systems behind AI whatsoever. However, I do understand human behavior very well, so when I saw a headline last week, JPMorgan CEO: AI Will Eventually Lead to 3.5-Day Workweek, my response was, never, not going to happen. I mean, people will not be compensated with 40 hours of pay for 28 hours of work. That is fantasy. I remember dispelling such fiction as a grade schooler because the same concept was floated back in the 1970s. Only the mode of automation…
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Flowing Water at 22 Degrees Fahrenheit

Flowing Water at 22 Degrees Fahrenheit

By Energy Rant No Comments
As undergraduate mechanical engineering students, we took materials science courses and studied phase diagrams like the one below from “Metallurgy for Dummies.” Does that appear to be dummy-grade to you? It gave me a chuckle. A phase diagram for water (below) is decidedly simpler. The above diagram shows only liquid and solid phases of carbon steel, while the water diagram shows its three phases, solid (ice), liquid, and vapor (steam). The author writes, “Freezing Point: At a temperature of 0 °C and a pressure of 1.00 atm, this is the point at which water (liquid) freezes into ice (a solid).”…
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Decarb Warriors

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Last week I read a statement from a retail energy provider. It said, “100% green rates, always.” It doesn’t work that way. An aggregation of power sources, including renewable, nuclear, coal, and natural gas, are supplying the grid at any given time. The little electrons aren’t tagged by source and routed to any given customer(s). Second, even if that were impossible, er, I mean, possible, it’s shoving more hydrocarbon electricity onto someone else. In this way, it’s the same as the net zero con. Cheap but Unreliable Generating renewable power is easy and inexpensive, but as described in the net-zero…
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Leveling the Skateboard Curve with a Demand Side Attack

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NERC sounds alarm on solar tripping in sobering summer reliability report, May 19, 2022, UtilityDive.com. This seems like a timely sequel to last week’s Blistering Wind and Solar Energy post, in which I summarized the results of a renewables integration study performed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. The blisters represent pockets of excessive renewable energy generation and the “very different reliability risks than are experienced today,” as described in the MISO report. Electronics provide voltage and frequency control from solar panel generation. When the solar tiger grows from a cub that we had a few years ago into the…
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