Wind Energy to Benefit from High Tech, Higher Turbines
September 14, 2016
A scaled-down gale blows over a flat plate set inside the tabletop wind tunnel. Despite the low lighting and hazy Plexiglas view portals, we can clearly see the frenzied fluttering of streamer ribbons, called telltales, in the field of little wind vanes that carpets the exposed test surface inside.
At first, each unruly telltale flies every which way, clear evidence of unsteady air flows gusting within. “OK, that’s off,” the researcher says.
“Here’s on…” Almost like a sorcerer’s spell, an otherworldly, blue-violet halo emerges at the front of the plate and hovers corona-like, casting peculiar purple shadows onto the walls. The telltales meanwhile become suddenly and strangely obedient, instantly swinging round in near unison, aligned by an insistent new wind.
“Off,” she says. The ribbons flap arbitrarily as the eerie electric flame fades. “On.” More purple haze and parallel ribbons.
“Off, off…and on.” The odd glow, curious order, and incessant roar of the fan drop away. By the time the lights come on, a whiff of ozone hangs in the air and everyone in the room is grinning uncontrollably.
And for good reason. We just watched moving air being controlled by plasma, the lesser-known, fourth state of matter which also exists in the blistering core of our sun. And while such lab demonstrations are both uncanny and awe-inspiring, these so-called plasma actuators could produce far more impressive benefits in the real world, especially for the aviation and wind power industries, and maybe even the trucking business.
On airplane wings, for example, tiny plasma actuators could help planes fly more safely, more efficiently, and with greater stability and control. They can speed, slow or divert air flows in ways that can cut drag, fuel use, and CO2 emissions by as much as 25%, researchers estimate. Some experts even think that these devices might someday replace conventional flight control surfaces such as flaps and ailerons. Imagine witnessing the ghoulish purple glow of the lab demo from the window seat of a transcontinental flight.
More immediately, aerodynamicists are looking to place the same technology on the huge, vulnerable, and costly blades of wind turbines to improve their efficiency, extend their lifetimes, and even help them more effectively cope with gusting winds.
Technology advancements are expected to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy, according to a survey of the world’s foremost wind power experts led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Experts anticipate cost reductions of 24%-30% by 2030 and 35%-41% by 2050, under a median or ‘best guess’ scenario, driven by bigger and more efficient turbines, lower capital and operating costs, and other advancements
Climate Timeline goes Viral
September 13, 2016
I’ve been bombarded with requests to repost or at least mention a new web-comic from the popular XKCD series depicting earth’s climate timeline over 20,000 years or so.
The original graphic is a bit ponderous to repost in the confines of this WordPress-powered blog, but Aaron Huertas has posted a nice, wonky walk-through.
How Big Sugar Followed the Tobacco/Fossil Fuel Playbook
September 13, 2016
New revelations, if you needed any.
Similar techniques have been used to sell tobacco, fossil fuels, and, it turns out, the ridiculously sugar-heavy standard American diet.
As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.
That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California, San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library.
Her paper recounts how two famous Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.
The trade group solicited Hegsted, a professor of nutrition at Harvard’s public health school, to write a literature review aimed at countering early research linking sucrose to coronary heart disease. The group paid the equivalent of $48,000 in 2016 dollars to Hegsted and colleague Dr. Robert McGandy, though the researchers never publicly disclosed that funding source, Kearns found.
Hegsted and Stare tore apart studies that implicated sugar and concluded that there was only one dietary modification — changing fat and cholesterol intake — that could prevent coronary heart disease. Their reviews were published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which back then did not require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest.
That was an era when researchers were battling over which dietary culprit — sugar or fat — was contributing to the deaths of many Americans, especially men, from coronary heart disease, the buildup of plaque in arteries of the heart. Kearns said the papers, which the trade group later cited in pamphlets provided to policymakers, aided the industry’s plan to increase sugar’s market share by convincing Americans to eat a low-fat diet.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper.
Denial Paranoia: Louisiana Flood due to “Weather Weapon”
September 13, 2016
Mind control is a thing. It’s actually a business model.
It’s not the “They Live” model of invisible rays from the television controlling the populace, at least not yet. The reality is much more low tech, has been known to tyrants for thousands of years, but has been amplified by mass media and internet vectors in the current version.
One of the key components is that you split people away from objective reality with some kind of a Big Lie, doesn’t really matter what, but, “my God is the best God”, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya”, or “Climate Change is a Chinese Plot” will all do just fine. Then you build your alternative reality edifice on that, creating a parallel world that looks very much like the objective one, with a few critical differences inserted.
Once you’ve got that, then you’re off and running – and if you’ve entrained a number of followers, you can fleece them, direct them, and if necessary, send them to war.
Reality check below.
Has Trump Hired a Climate Hawk?
September 13, 2016
More weirdness. In a rational world, this would lead Cable interviewers to ask about climate change, but I expect they’ll keep focused on emails and Pneumonia. Once again, it may be up to the “climate people” to raise the obvious.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has signed on as a senior adviser to Donald Trump—even though the two men’s views are oceans apart on an issue very close to Woolsey’s heart: climate change.
For years, the former CIA director has been an advocate for cleaner energy and has called for addressing global warming from a national security perspective. He argues that our current energy sources put us at “the whims of OPEC’s despots” and make us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. He wants the United States to shift from its reliance on coal and oil to renewables and natural gas. “There’s enough consensus that human-generated global warming gas emissions are beginning to have an effect,” he said in an interview in 2010. “Next year might be cooler than this year but that doesn’t mean the trend isn’t there.” (Indeed, the world keeps getting warmer.)
In 2013, Woolsey was one of dozens of national security experts who signed a statement declaring that climate change represents a “serious threat to American national security interests.” The “potential consequences are undeniable, and the cost of inaction, paid for in lives and valuable US resources, will be staggering,” read the statement. “Washington must lead on this issue now.”
Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in global warming, having called it a Chinese hoax. He’s even pointed to cold winter weather in an attempt to debunk this “GLOBAL WARMING bullshit.” Trump wants to scrap President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan and back out of the Paris climate accord. Rather than move toward renewable energy, he wants to make the United States energy independent by resuscitating the coal industry.
Reuters:
“Mr. Trump’s commitment to reversing the harmful defense budget cuts signed into law by the current administration, while acknowledging the need for debt reduction, is an essential step toward reinstating the United States’ primacy in the conventional and digital battlespace,” Woolsey said.
Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Reached?
September 12, 2016
Observers asking if the sea ice has reached its annual minimum – which would be slightly earlier than usual. More info needed. Stay tuned.
In any case, I’ll be working on a video explaining why this year was so interesting.
Renewable Energy a Jobs Creation Powerhouse
September 12, 2016
The solar industry alone has created one out of every 80 jobs in the United States since the Great Recession. When including wind, LED lighting, and other clean energy categories, that number could be close to one in 33.
For the solar industry, a majority of these new employment opportunities are blue-collar construction and manufacturing jobs that pay an average of $21 per hour — far higher than the $16 per hour non-union manufacturing jobs that South Carolina was touting later in that episode.
–In fact, the solar industry has hired more veterans than anyone else, retrained coal workers, and even provided a soft landing for oil and gas workers who have lost their jobs. The vast majority of solar and wind workers are trained in less than six months because their previous work experience and training is completely transferrable.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “wind technician” is the fastest-growing job category — expanding twice as much as the next-fastest growing job, occupational therapy assistant.
In 2015, the manufacturing arms of the solar and wind industries employed tens of thousands of people making pieces and parts in the United States. This is up by 20,000 people over 2014. In fact, this number is expected to continue to grow at that pace for the next five years.
Between 2002 and 2015, a major expansion of the renewable energy industry created 25,500 blue-collar job-years — some 53 million hours of construction work, according to the study by the Don Vial Center on the Green Economy at UC Berkeley.
The greatest job gains were “in counties such as Kern, San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial, where unemployment rates are far above the state average and income is far below average,” the study concluded.
The effort is producing many middle-class jobs because almost all the large-scale renewable projects are built under project labor agreements, which provide union pay rates, health insurance and pension programs, said Betony Jones, associate chair of the center.
For years, Elohim Cofield hopped from job to job without landing a stable career that supported him and his family.
His luck changed two years ago when he joined an apprentice program that promises steady work at more than $40 an hour installing solar panels and other energy infrastructure.
