New at Reason

November 24, 2006

Ronald Bailey ponders how government smart guys will create a future of boundless energy.

Comments

|11.24.06 @ 8:42PM|#

So, powering the Earth's civilization will require "some form" of solar energy. It is assumed, of course, that this means solar energy incident on the surface of the Earth.

But back in the early 1970s, physicist Gerard O'Neill (who founded the Space Studies Institute) asked the question "Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" and answered it with a resounding "No!"

O'Neill and others proposed that one could supply plenty of pollution free electric power to Earth by building solar power stations in geosynchronous orbit and beaming the energy to Earth with microwaves or lasers, using material from the moon or asteroids.

Back then, the cost was too prohibitive, but we know more about space resources now (near Earth asteroids are more abundant than previously thought) and enterprises are beginning to develop more cost effective space transportation systems (e.g. Branson's Virgin Galactic, and the folks over at Eleveator2010).

I think O'Neill was right: There are no effective limits to growth if we expand our conceptual zone of human economic activity off the surface of the Earth into near Earth space.

Public policy should ensure that property rights are well difined and enforced regarding space resources, and remove any regulatory impediments to active use of space resources by private industry.

|11.24.06 @ 8:42PM|#

"...eliminate all energy subsidies, set a price for carbon..."

Setting a price for carbon, or anything for that matter, is hardly in keeping with "free markets".

|11.24.06 @ 9:11PM|#

Maybe ITER will be successful. www.iter.org

Will fusion always be 50 years away?

|11.24.06 @ 9:11PM|#

"A terawatt equals one trillion watt-hours."

power = energy?

|11.24.06 @ 10:26PM|#

Setting a price for putting CO2 into the atmosphere is eliminating a commons by creating a market. Charging for permission to dump onto my territory (in this case, into the air I breathe and the environment I live in) is quite in keeping with free markets.

|11.24.06 @ 10:27PM|#

It's an interesting analysis, but it seems to assume that there will be almost no increase in efficiency. A few breakthroughs in the right areas, and an American or European level lifestyle might only require 1/4 the energy it does today by 2050.

Something like cheap room-tempature superconductors alone will probably solve 90% of the problem.

|11.24.06 @ 11:15PM|#

Nuclear could produce 8 TW which implies building 8000 new reactors over the 45 years at a rate of one new plant every two days.

That's a rather sobering assessment, to someone like myself who had high hopes for a next generation of safer nukes to come along and save us. Speaking of which, where are they? The last I read about them was a couple of years ago, there should be a few built by now somewhere.

thoreau|11.24.06 @ 11:17PM|#

I don't know about room-temp superconductors becoming practical, but LEDs can have efficiencies of 4 or more times an incandescent.

Hell, just replace your incandescents with fluorescents and you can double or more the efficiency. Even if you don't give a damn about CO2 emissions, it lowers the electric bill. I did it several years ago and cut my electric bill substantially without sacrificing anything in terms of quality of life. The bulbs are more expensive but they pay for themselves in less than a year.

|11.24.06 @ 11:21PM|#

The other night on one of the squawking head shows there was some guy who actually said the following (or words to this effect): "If America had listened to Jimmy Carter and taken seriously the idea of alternative fuel development, today we wouldn't be dependent on the Middle East for oil."

Statements like this make me take any kind of talk about a "carbon neutral" future with the proverbial grain of sodium chloride.

James Anderson Merritt|11.24.06 @ 11:53PM|#

If you want, I can give you the substantiating figures, but I recently calculated that, if the US's 200-odd million registered motor vehicles were to magically turn into the equivalent of all-electric Tesla Roadsters (see www.teslamotors.com), everybody's driving could be powered by the contribution to the electric grid of a photovoltaic solar farm occupying only 67x67 miles of otherwise unused southwestern desert land, or four parcels of 34x34 miles each. Put a couple in NV and one each in AZ and NM, and the allegedly significant problem of US foreign oil dependence and automobile CO2 emissions goes away. Furthermore, PV solar is not particularly efficient. Solar concentration farms could produce much more power in the same space, or the same power in much less space.

Also, various companies are already exploiting wave and tidal power, which didn't get a mention in Bailey's piece. Ocean Power Technologies (http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/), for example, is just one of several firms that have practical devices for generating commercial levels of electric power from wave energy. OPT's is called the PowerBuoy. They expect to have units that can generate 500kW each by 2010. Conservatively, around 1000 of these buoys (500 MW) can comfortably occupy 1 square mile of ocean. A square, 2 miles on a side, would give you 2GW of output, or 48GWh every day. Operating 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, such a farm would provide 17.5 TWh per year. Assume each unit is out of commission 25% of the time for maintenance or other reasons, and you are still talking about 13.1 TWh per year.

So that's 2010. Let's talk about what might be possible today. In the past several years, the OPT units most successfully deployed so far have produced only 40kW each. Even if limited to using only such units, we would need only 50 2-mile-square "wave power farms," scattered around the globe, to provide the same 13.1 TWh per year. If the figures in Bailey's article are correct, then those 50 wave power farms could pretty much satisfy existing global electric demand. Augmenting those farms with new farms based on more efficient generation units, or replacing older units with more efficient units on a continuous-maintenance schedule, could allow electric production to keep up with consumption for the foreseeable future, from wave power alone. More importantly, an expansion of wave power could allow greater electric consumption in developing nations, contributing to their GDPs without also contributing to global warming.

In the US, incidentally, a switchover to LED lightbulbs (and, until then, to fluorescent tube lighting wherever practical) could save tremendous amounts of energy. The LED bulbs would each last for decades and save hundreds of dollars in operational costs over their service lifetime, while greatly diminishing household and business demands on the power grid.

If we can hold it together for just a few more years, technologies already exist (and are being improved every day), which will significantly alleviate our energy vs. emissions situation. I think that all of this improvement is now within our reach, as long as we don't set ourselves back with warfare or political obstacles. I'm crossing my fingers.

|11.24.06 @ 11:59PM|#

Really, all that's neccesary to start work on energy provision mechanism x that costs y, is for the cost of oil/coal to rise to y+1 and look like it'll stay there. Carbon markets are one way to make this closer to happening--increased energy use in developing countries is another.

|11.25.06 @ 1:30AM|#

Jimmy Carter was a f*ker, and we can drive big ass SUV's until the world runs out of fuel! Screw the naysayers, we'll all be dead by then! Responsibility? Screw that, we're libertarians! Sarcasm galore.

|11.25.06 @ 2:03AM|#

"If America had listened to Jimmy Carter and taken seriously the idea of alternative fuel development, today we wouldn't be dependent on the Middle East for oil."
Just put the word "as" in between be and dependent and we're there. Oh, wait a minute...I forgot that it's not kosher here to admit that Jimmy Carter had a good idea pr two in his time. Hey...Rush is on!!!

|11.25.06 @ 2:28AM|#

dead elvis,

France is building them. The third generation PWR plants that is. They're cheaper, more powerful, safer, etc. Some other countries are also building them - mostly in Asia though. France expects PMBR reactors to be online in ~15 years.

|11.25.06 @ 2:32AM|#

"Biomass could supply 7-10 TW of energy, but that is the equivalent of harvesting all current crops solely for energy."

Aren't they already harvested for energy? Or in the case of textiles etc. they utilize solar energy to form fiber or tother produccts.

"Nuclear could produce 8 TW which implies building 8000 new reactors over the 45 years at a rate of one new plant every two days."

Which Generation?

"Wind would generate 2.1 TW if every site on the globe with class 3 winds or greater were occupied with windmills. Winds at a class 3 site blow at 11.5 miles per hour at 33 feet above the ground. "

Again, which generation of turbine? Does that include verticle turbines? Off Shore? High Altitude? Other unconventional designs whcih surely will be available in 2050?

Regarding solar, we already use solar to simply keep us warm and to light our daytime spaces. Did that assessment take these valuations into account? It is a key part of Off-Grid and Net-Zero-Energy homes, (which are not hovels by any modern standard).

I understand that this mental excercise assumed maximum possible conservation efforts. But sometimes energy isn't the only factor; Hurricane Katrina showed us, in addition to futility of building next a low lying hurricane alley coastal area, that we need independence technoloogies which should the power grid (and water and sewage etc) fail we can survive. Think Hand-Cranked devices, portable soloar power and wind etc. Such things add to the cost of our energies services, but are worth it in the long run.

Lastly, in addition to the Wave/Tide power someone mentioned, Technology review reports:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17236/
Oil drilling techniques are making a novel kind of geothermal energy available; which would supply rather large quantities of Grid poweer near wherever it was needed. No waste, except heat.
follow-up here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17524/

|11.25.06 @ 2:40AM|#

Why the fuck isn't James A Merrit a gazillionaire?

|11.25.06 @ 2:54AM|#

Maybe you should check his figures.

|11.25.06 @ 2:59AM|#

...using material from the moon or asteroids.

Wow, and I thought Green Peace already had enough to do. Wait until they start yelling "Save the fucking asteroids!"

We can't have PEOPLE ruining the perfectly natural barren-ness of the moon, either. I want to know there are NO human foot prints in that dust the next time I look up that way in the night sky.

Now, iguana foot prints would be fine. Just not people.

|11.25.06 @ 3:06AM|#

And no yaks, either.

|11.25.06 @ 3:09AM|#

The next time you see one of those asteroids coming, go build yourself a great big ass ferris wheel, hook it up to a generator, and stick in the way. I bet it'll spin for a long long time. Then you can use any light bulb you please.

I'm a firm advocate of light bulb choices.

|11.25.06 @ 3:13AM|#

I also insist that the moon remain forever free of yak shit.

And now, I think I'll go have another drink.

|11.25.06 @ 3:29AM|#

O'Neill and others proposed that one could supply plenty of pollution free electric power to Earth by building solar power stations in geosynchronous orbit and beaming the energy to Earth with microwaves or lasers, using material from the moon or asteroids.

Holy Cow, don't we have enough trouble with health claims about power transmission lines, cell phones and now wi-fi. Can you imagine what they'd do with fricking laser beams from space.

It'd be trial lawyers dream.

Ron Hardin|11.25.06 @ 3:46AM|#

I think the confusion started when bandwidth was given in bytes, leading to energy being given in watts and power given in watt-hours. Nobody can make sense of any of it, but that doesn't affect the tone, which after all in a popularization is what makes people know what they're talking about.

Only science types are confused by it.

And even they can't deal with mass being given in pounds, leading to the loss of an occasional space vehicle.

|11.25.06 @ 4:10AM|#

"And even they can't deal with mass being given in pounds, leading to the loss of an occasional space vehicle."

being fair, that incident had to do with an international team operating on a limited budget with poor oversight. They got better...

|11.25.06 @ 5:21AM|#

Sam-Hec,

To be fair, they couldn't get worse. ;)

Warren|11.25.06 @ 8:18AM|#

Oh for the love of zog. Where are all these green wackos crawling out of? If they're this thick around here, I see no hope there will ever be a sane discussion at the policy level.

Our only chance is that the government will do the right thing (i.e. nothing) because they can't agree on which callously stupid bureaucratic nightmare they want to . When the demand goes up, and the supply runs out, the price will sore and market forces will fix everything.

Yup, I believe every word.

|11.25.06 @ 9:29AM|#

The U.S. transitioned from primitive animal (horses, oxen etc.) wind (mills and sailing ships) and biomass (wood stoves/fireplaces) to a primarilly coal fueled economy without a department of energy. Next came oil, natural gas and hydroelectric (a one step removed solar energy source). This also was accomplished without a department of energy, albeit significant gov't involvement with hydroelectric.. This was followed by nuclear energy with increased governmental involvement. As we haven't fired up a new nuclear plant in 30 years, I doubt the efficacy of gov't oversight/assistance. We are now moving forward with third? fourth? generation wind power (unless it spoils Ted Kennedy's view), photovoltaic, tidal, energy from ocean waves (really a form of wind power, which is really a form of solar power). Research continues on fusion which sane people hope for. If I neglected your pet form of alternative energy, sorry.

The point to this rambling statement is that civilization has been evolving/developing new energy sources for a long, long time. I see no reason for development and innovation to stop today or tomorrow. According to previous expert predictions, we are already out of oil and natural gas. I, for one, am not overly concerned about mankinds energy future. But then again, I wasn't worried that Y2K, AIDS, west nile virus or avian bird flu would bring down civilization either. It will likely take a HUGE nuclear war to accomplish that task.

|11.25.06 @ 9:35AM|#

Setting a price for carbon, or anything for that matter, is hardly in keeping with "free markets".

MarkV: "Setting a price for putting CO2 into the atmosphere is eliminating a commons by creating a market. Charging for permission to dump onto my territory (in this case, into the air I breathe and the environment I live in) is quite in keeping with free markets."

Great, then in keeping with your idea of free markets, can I charge a price lower than the government's price and under-cut them?

Fact is, the government isn't setting a price... they're imposing a tax. That's what it's usually called when you are forced to pay for something you didn't want to buy in the first place (i.e. carbon credits).

|11.25.06 @ 9:40AM|#

And even they can't deal with mass being given in pounds, leading to the loss of an occasional space vehicle.

The neglect/rejection of the metric system by the U.S.is just plain damn stupid. Since the government is tasked with standardizing weights and measures, you'd think this would already have been (relatively) painlessly accomplished. The failure to do this illustrates that tradition is vested with significant social inertia. God knows we can't make Jethro and Ellie Mae learn a measurement system different (and simpler) than Jed and Grannie's.

|11.25.06 @ 9:42AM|#

The previous is actually a pet peeve of mine. I realize conversion is not that difficult. It's just that it shouldn't even be necessary.
/rant

|11.25.06 @ 10:54AM|#

And even they can't deal with mass being given in pounds, leading to the loss of an occasional space vehicle.

A mistake was made. USC units were not the root cause.

Trust me, I used to teach senior thermal-fluids labs, back when the push was on to "convert" everyone in school (which is now a done deal in engineering and science, btw).

With USC units the students were missing by factors of 32.2 With SI units, now they miss by factors of 10.

Either mistake will crash your space vehicle, I promise.

|11.25.06 @ 11:10AM|#

Russ R,

Amen to what you said. Because even Ron said

Instead, eliminate all energy subsidies, set a price for carbon, and then let tens of thousands of energy researchers and entrepreneurs develop and test various new technologies in the market.

He used to argue that it's not clear there's even that big a problem looming. Nobody has yet proven to me there is. And yet now Ron is ready to "price carbon"?

Who, besides a buearacrat, is going to "price carbon"? I'm really starting to doubt Ron's libertarian creditials. Maybe he's attended one too many UN conference.



Nocera concludes....the global appetite for energy is simply too great.

I seem to recall somebody concluding that there would simply be too many people for the world to feed, too. You'd think that by now people would figure out that crystal balls are bullshit.

Clearly, few of them have figured it out. Even our rigorous "scientist" thoreau lends them a measure of credence with his opinions. The world is full of idiots who've conceded another Malthusian horror story.


More energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour than humanity uses in a year.

Sure, but what nobody ever talks about is the fact that solar power is a very diffuse form of energy. Do a second law analysis on the incident solar power flux, and you'll understand why a factory needs acres of solar collectors to get enough power to run. Even if you push up conversion efficiency the required acrage is going to be vast.

Solar will help as things like photovoltaics improve in efficiency. But we're going to be needing some other form of energy over the long haul.

I for one am ready to bet that if we can keep the "carbon pricers" the hell out of the way, it's going to work itself out just fine.

I'm not ready to bet that we'll be able keep the carbon pricers out of the way long enough. They've got their crystal balls you know, and they say "Jesus died and rose from the dead." Oh sorry, I mean they say "oh yeah, and the sky is falling too."

It's the 21st century and the West is still running on faith...

|11.25.06 @ 11:15AM|#

Well, OTOH, democracies have been on the verge of doing something really stupid since the day they were born. Yet somehow sanity (usually) manages to prevail in the long haul.

Maybe we'll survive.

As much as I dislike Bush, I submit that in the long ru, allowing Gore railroad us into Kyoto type deals could have done at least as much damage to us overall.

Which just goes to prove that the incumbent parties need a serious competitor.

|11.25.06 @ 11:35AM|#

"...the greenhouse gas emissions that are thought to be increasing the earth's average temperature."

Nice passive voice, Bailey. Backsliding already? Shocking...

|11.25.06 @ 12:36PM|#

Genghis Kahn,

You sound like the Malthusians you so despise. Predictions that mild adjustments to the structure of energy markets will lead to economic ruin are as stupid as any uninformed prediction regarding energy shortages or doomsday global warming prediction. Most of the things that need to be done to address human contributions to climate change are good for the economy. Grow a pair.

|11.25.06 @ 1:12PM|#

1 Meter = one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian running near Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain.

How logical!

1 gram = 1 cm3 water

Why water? Why not hydrogen or beerium? How earthling carbon based life form centric.

0c and 100c corresponding to freezing and boiling point of water at sea level.

mmmkay, same problem.

1 second = 1/60th of one hour, itself being 1/24th the time it takes the earth to make one turn on its axis.

Fuck yeah, makes all kind of sense... Staying earth-centric and all intelligent n stuff, the base time unit should be the year or the day, with fractional units derived from movement of the decimal point. Duh.

The only good part is units of the same measure scale up and down based on our arbitrary base 10 numbering system. And that's only good because we are all used to the arbitrariness of the base 10 system. My computer prefers base 2 or base 16 numbering. We'll have to transition after machines take over the earth. Better start learning it now.

Metric is the "prefered system" in the US right now. I know because the govt said so in the Metric Conversion Act of 1975:

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/metric-conv.html

|11.25.06 @ 1:32PM|#

What bigbigslacker said.

The only reason to use metric is to be consistent with practise in the rest of the world. For that reason science has been using SI for a very long time and while engineering articles use dual units the conversion has been going on for thirty years. Construction has been resistant mostly because of the capital costs of converting equipment.

Decimalization is no panacea either. It is easier to visually divide a distance into halves, quarters, sixteenths etc than it is to divide it into tenths, hundredths etc.

Decimals are great for easy calculations but for real precision fractions are required.

Also note that wine and spirits are sold in metric units, so obviously we started with the most important things.

James Anderson Merritt|11.25.06 @ 2:01PM|#

MainstreamMan | November 25, 2006, 2:40am | #
Why the fuck isn't James A Merrit a gazillionaire?

Genghis Kahn | November 25, 2006, 2:54am | #
Maybe you should check his figures.

By all means. What's wrong with them? I'm happy to be corrected if you can do it.

I'm only going on what's been published, so clearly my "back-o-th-napkin" results must be seen as approximate; nevertheless, even the approximate results are encouraging. Check out the Tesla Motors blog for deeper examination of the solar potential. Check out the OPT website for their claims (in particular, for buoy capacity and development timeframes, as well as clues to optimum spacing between the buoys). OPT has tested and demonstrated its 40 kW powerbuoy (including for the military), and there is reason for optimism that the technology will scale to 500 kW per unit, more or less on time.

As far as why I'm not a gazillionaire, I think most of the blame goes to the IRS. It would have been nice to have kept those several thousand shares of Apple stock I got in the 1980s until the present day, but Uncle Sam had other plans, and executed them with extreme prejudice in my case. If anyone ever wonders why I routinely doubt the government's capacity to do the right thing, it is because I have seen plenty of counterexamples, and have myself been on the receiving end of several. I'd love to see some of the smug scoffers here try to maintain their flip attitudes after the kind of treatment I went through. I'm lucky, though. I'm still alive and kicking, and enjoying life with my family, living near the ocean I love. Unlike, for example, Peter McWilliams.

Incidentally, for those of you who might want to try becoming gazillionaires where I failed, Tesla Motors is privately held -- but give it a few years: I see IPO or merger with a major company in their future. OPT is now traded on the London Stock Exchange, but this month filed for an IPO in the US.

James Anderson Merritt|11.25.06 @ 2:19PM|#

Isaac Bartram | November 25, 2006, 1:32pm | #

Decimalization is no panacea either. It is easier to visually divide a distance into halves, quarters, sixteenths etc than it is to divide it into tenths, hundredths etc.
==========================

Indeed. The difference really comes down to human-scale and inhuman-scale. The old measuring systems and units were convenient for day-to-day human life, involving tractable fractions and multipliers. (The divisions of the hour into 60 minutes, and the circle into 360 degrees, have a lot to do with the large number of integral factors those numbers enjoy, making division much easier and cleaner when you have to do it in your head, or with only pencil and paper.) The new units were somewhat shoehorned onto the comfortable, traditional quantities, so that they could supplant them. Working with them required a facility with decimal arithmetic -- or calculators/computers. The arbitrary precision of decimal arithmetic in scientific and engineering calculations, without needing to switch units or deal with cumbersome numbers, was helpful to science, as it dealt with phenomena that were too small or too grand for ordinary, individual human experience, and for industry, as it took much the same path. But for everyday interactions with one's friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it's easier to think and work in terms of quarters, halves, and thirds, than in terms of 2.5 tenths, 5 tenths, and 3.333 tenths.

Quite literally, man was the measure for most of the key units in the old systems, either in terms of bodily dimensions of or quantities easily consumed by people. The metric system affected a "universality," but over the years, I have come to see this as an "inhumanity," too. I'm not metric-phobic, by any means, but I never did jump on the bandwagon, either.

|11.25.06 @ 2:31PM|#

In your head, quick, how many inches in a mile? 100,000 cm in a KM. In my head, less than a second. Its easier in metric. that's all there is to it. Hell, I'd like to see the clock go decimal. Just because the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah. This just in. We trade with the rest of the world!

|11.25.06 @ 2:45PM|#

bigbigslacker | November 25, 2006, 1:12pm | #

1 Meter = one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian running near Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain.

How logical!

1 gram = 1 cm3 water

Why water? Why not hydrogen or beerium? How earthling carbon based life form centric.

0c and 100c corresponding to freezing and boiling point of water at sea level.

mmmkay, same problem.

1 second = 1/60th of one hour, itself being 1/24th the time it takes the earth to make one turn on its axis.

Fuck yeah, makes all kind of sense... Staying earth-centric and all intelligent n stuff, the base time unit should be the year or the day, with fractional units derived from movement of the decimal point. Duh.

The only good part is units of the same measure scale up and down based on our arbitrary base 10 numbering system. And that's only good because we are all used to the arbitrariness of the base 10 system. My computer prefers base 2 or base 16 numbering. We'll have to transition after machines take over the earth. Better start learning it now.

Metric is the "prefered system" in the US right now. I know because the govt said so in the Metric Conversion Act of 1975:

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/laws/metric-conv.html

problems with defining and accurately measuring the units you describe were recognized and changed. as a result, the definition you give is no longer the definition of one meter. instead:

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

Note that this definition had the effect of fixing the speed of light in a vacuum at precisely 299,792,458 metres per second. Although the metre is now defined in terms of time-of-flight, actual laboratory realisations of the metre are still delineated by counting the required number of wavelengths of light along the distance. An intended byproduct of the 17th CGPM's definition was that it enabled scientists to measure their lasers' wavelengths with one-fifth the uncertainty. To further facilitate reproducibility from lab to lab, the 17th CGPM also made the iodine-stabilised Helium-Neon laser "a recommended radiation" for realising the metre. Today's best determination of the wavelength of this laser is λHeNe = 632.991 398 22 nm with an estimated relative standard uncertainty (U) of ± 2.5 × 10-11. This uncertainty is currently the limiting factor in laboratory realisations of the metre as it is several orders of magnitude poorer than that of the second (U = 1 × 10-14). Consequently, a practical realisation of the metre is usually delineated (not defined) today in labs as 1,579,800.298 728 ± 0.000 039 wavelengths of Helium-Neon laser light in a vacuum.

(from Wikipedia)

that definition for gram is no longer used either, instead a standard kilogram mass is used for comparison, however, it appears to be slowly losing mass, and another standard for the kilogram unit is being debated and developed.

the base unit for temperature is the kelvin (NOT degrees kelvin, not degrees Celsius).

the base unit for time is the second, and is defined as:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K

(from Wikipedia)

James Anderson Merritt|11.25.06 @ 3:12PM|#

J sub D | November 25, 2006, 2:31pm | #
In your head, quick, how many inches in a mile? 100,000 cm in a KM. In my head, less than a second.
======
Who cares? You illustrate my point, exactly. Metric makes "easy" things that are pretty much irrelevant to common everyday experience. Great for bar bets, but not so important in daily life. However, if you are wanting to work in very large or small scale (as do science and industry, for example), metric tends to be easier to handle because scale conversion is so much more straightforward, based on shifting the decimal point.

I don't criticize the Metric system where it is strong. I have always been skeptical, however, of the claims made by Metric partisans that their system is better in every context, including meeting the needs of everyday life on a human scale.

|11.25.06 @ 3:16PM|#

Biologist,
Ooh, all those metric terms. They're sooooo confusing. Couldn't you use terms like nautical mile or furlong for distance. For mass, whats wrong with the troy ounce. not to be confused with the standard ounce or the liquid ounce (volume). And Kelvin for temperature? Just because it uses 0 degrrees for the coldest temperature possible, does that really make sense?

All snarkiness aside, if you have a working knowledge of exponential notation, the metric system KICKS ASS.

|11.25.06 @ 5:34PM|#

James Anderson Merritt, that's just not true.

metric handles both the extremes of measurements and the everday very well, and allows for each conversion between the two.

non-scientist types need to measure in grams and kilograms. non-scientist types need to measure in centimeters, meters, and kilometers.

if maps were constructed on metric scales and used order of magnitude ratios, converting map scales to real world scales would be much easier (instead of the very common 1:24000 ratio, or 1 inch=2.5 miles)

|11.25.06 @ 5:35PM|#

edit:

each (sic) conversion = easy conversion

|11.25.06 @ 7:46PM|#

Biologist, I now agree with you completely. At first I thought the metric system was somewhat arbitrary, but better than some of the alternatives. But now I know it sucks balls. Thanks.

Am I to understand that one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian running near Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain approximately equals the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. I'm blown away by how perfectly the two match up. I've always thought the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second should be the standard unit of measure.

:)

ignorantly yours,

slacker

biologist|11.25.06 @ 8:03PM|#

Am I to understand that one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian running near Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain approximately equals the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

apparently so, or I doubt the metric people would have chosen that number, they probably would have chosen a nice, round number like the distance traveled by light in 3 times 10 to the -8 power of a second.

I'm blown away by how perfectly the two match up. I've always thought the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second should be the standard unit of measure.

every measurement system is arbitrary, it just depends on how logically you want the arbitrariness to be arranged.

thoreau|11.25.06 @ 10:50PM|#

Now, if you want to get really geeky, we can debate the best units for electromagnetism.

I like Heaviside-Lorentz.

|11.25.06 @ 11:08PM|#

J sub D | November 25, 2006, 2:31pm | #

100,000 cm in a KM. In my head, less than a second. Its easier in metric. that's all there is to it. Hell, I'd like to see the clock go decimal.

What you are describing is decimilization not the metric system. Guess what, American surveyors and engineers decimalized the foot in the 1800s.

However your question "In your head, quick, how many inches in a mile?" Suggests to me that you are not a carpenter nor a machinist for those tradesmen find it much easier to use fractions rather than decimals.

Actually it indicates that you are probably not a mathemetician either. Mathemeticians know that fractions are much more precise than decimals.

Of course in most of life's pursuits precision takes second place to convenience. Hence decimalization rules.

Just because the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah. This just in. We trade with the rest of the world!

And guess what. In matters of international trade we use Le Systeme International. Since the late 1970s all the bolts on automobiles manufactured in the USA and Canada have been Metric.

And as I noted in science the metric system has been standard all my life.

|11.26.06 @ 12:17AM|#

The answer is found in all the crap that uses energy for no good reason. Unplug them. Replace bulbs with efficient ones, and then use them sparingly. Design homes to use less energy. Paint the roof white. Look at those guys with the hybrid cars and think about how those sanctimonious goofballs are making sure that more efficient technology will be cheaper sooner (see: Dudes who paid $1200 for a dvd player and $5/minute for cellular service, to cite just two examples.) Get an electic water heater that doesn't waste energy by storing water at a certain temperature and then maintaining that temperature when it isn't being used. Insulate your home. Design it better. Blah blah et cetera.

But just like the 60mpg car that uses carbon fiber construction, the market doesn't demand it yet. But it will, whether the government acts or not.

|11.26.06 @ 5:04AM|#

You haven't experienced the sheer hell of multiple units of measure until you've experienced the Navy.

Altitudes are measured in feet, or in meters, but occasionally for aircraft in "ANGELS" (hundreds of feet).

Depths can be in feet and fathoms (on US charts), or in meters (on Admiralty charts), but if you're measuring the depth of your anchor by how much cable you've let out, it's counted in shackles (90 feet).

Horizontal distances are typically measured in nautical miles (originally 1 minute of latitude, but now 1852 meters) but there's also the Admiralty nautical mile which is 6080 feet (~1853.1 meters). However, if you're measuring distance on the tactical display, it uses a unique unit called the "data mile" which is different from either the statute mile or the nautical mile, and is defined as 6000 feet.

Shorter distances can be measured in cables, which are defined as 1/10 of either variety of nautical mile, or as 120 fathoms (720 feet) depending on who you ask. When you get down to smaller scales, things resort back to the traditional dichotomy of either yards and feet or meters, until you start loading small arms ammunition, which is either 5.56mm, 9mm, .50 cal or 12-gauge.

Speeds are traditionally quoted for knots (nautical miles per hour) for slower things, or in mach for faster things, but mach is defined as a fixed 661.7 knots, rather than the more scientific definition of "the ratio of an object's airspeed divided by the speed of sound in the medium". This kind of makes sense because the speed of sound is itself a function of pressure and temperature, and dealing with that would only create additional havoc when trying to shoot down an incoming missile and working out how many seconds you have left before it smashes through your hull.

Arc is measured in either degrees, minutes and seconds for navigation and astronomics, or in mils (1/6400 of a circle) for targeting and gunnery.

Volumes go by any of gallons, liters, or cubic meters, though plenty of pints are still seen on Friday afternoons in the wardroom.

Weights are seen in pounds, kilograms, or tons (long, short, or metric), but don't be confused by talk of tonnage, which is actually a measure of volume, with one GRT (gross registered ton) being equal to 100 cubic feet.

Pressures come in atmospheres, inches of mercury (inHg), torr (mmHg), bars, millibars, kiloPascals or psi, depending on the context (meteorological, altimeter setting, oceanographic, mechanical, pneumatic or hydraulic).

Lastly, time can be the most confusing. While most people are used to the standard system of hours, minutes and seconds, it doesn't take much effort to adapt to the 4-digit, 24-hour military clock (where 0030 is 12:30 am and 2300 is 11:00pm), however, one must always be mindful of the time zone, whether its UTC (Zulu) or local, and on a ship where you sail across multiple time zones in any given week, keeping track of when you're supposed to be on watch can be tricky, especially if you're a submariner and never see daylight.

To help with all this, the Navy devised a routine of measuring time in bells (e.g. "7 bells in the forenoon"). Each bell measures 1/2 hour of time since the start of the watch, and watches are 8 bells long, except for the first dog watch (1600-1800) which is only four bells long, and the last dog watch (1800-2000), which is also exactly two hours long, but somehow ends with eight bells. Why are these shorter watches call "dog watches"? Something about being a watch "cur-tailed". [groan]

And after all that, I think I could really use a pint...

|11.26.06 @ 5:11AM|#

Sorry, "ANGELS" should have been thousands of feet, not hundreds... my bad.

|11.26.06 @ 3:31PM|#

Much earlier, Warren said:
"Oh for the love of zog. Where are all these green wackos crawling out of? If they're this thick around here, I see no hope there will ever be a sane discussion at the policy level. "

On the first, greenies are realizing that Government is wasteful , and thus bad for the environment; and they realize that markets are more powerful and less variable than any sitting administration, especially when those markets are resonably free. Thus the move towards libertarianism...or at least enviromarketism.

on the subject of sane policy discussion on the subject, I will now repost my woefully incomplete thoughts in the hopes that someone else will make it better:
"Regulations and subsisdies get in the way of addressing the coming climate change, as the climate change future will require flexibility with which to adapt to the coming changes. The best start is to stop providing corporate welfare to the fossil fuel companies. In the U.S. this is peanuts at $15 billion a year in various monies and protections, but even doing away with that is an important signal to industry. Elsewhere, this would be harder, as fuels are often directly subsidized. Next end subsidies and many regulations in the agricultural industries; not all, but these things prevent the freemarket development of biofuels. And the subsidies do hurt the development of other developing nations; and if they don't develop, we may likely get pulled into nasty expensive wars that would otherwise be avoided; this would be due to panic response to climate change s they did not/could not prepare for. On that note, helping to end corruption in foreign lands would help them be willing to prepare. Third, don't require consumers/producers to be more efficient/use renewables etc.; but do require that our governments to be effectively carbon-neutral. We need is real leadership with a critical mass of demand and supply. The purchasing power of our governments can provide this. Lastly, it is more or less the right of governments to control their borders. So simply require that all persons, products, and possibly services crossing borders be effectively carbon neutral via a carbon-tariff. This will boost local economies, at the expense of the global. But it will not destroy civilization. All the above does not seem anti-capitalist at all to me; and it hopefully provides a balanced solution to our near term climate issues. (it could use some improving though)"

James Anderson Merritt|11.26.06 @ 5:41PM|#

biologist | November 25, 2006, 5:34pm | #
James Anderson Merritt, that's just not true.

metric handles both the extremes of measurements and the everday very well, and allows for each conversion between the two.

non-scientist types need to measure in grams and kilograms. non-scientist types need to measure in centimeters, meters, and kilometers.
=======

Right, we need small, medium-size, and large units. I don't argue against that. My point is that the pre-metric units that developed were convenient for use in their day-to-day, traditional contexts, and that one primarily worried about converting between them (e.g., between yards and miles), only when one was trying to do something on a larger- or smaller-than-usual scale.

Take the pint, for example. To drink a pint tends to satisfy the adult and fills the bladder to the point of needing relief, but not personal incapacity. Drinking a half-pint is often only enough to "wet the whistle," while drinking a full quart in a sitting is usually too much. A (US) pint of water also weighs almost exactly a pound (about 1.25 lbs. in Britain, I am told).

A pound of food makes a decent meal for all but very large adults; a kilo of food is well more than many people want to eat at a sitting.

Now, the thing that these units allow is an easy conversion to "people." If you want to serve 10 people, you'll have 10 pints of liquid on hand, and 10 lbs. of food. In metric-lands, you'd have to remember a "conversion" factor to order 5 liters of liquid or 4-5 kilos of food. When you start having to worry about gallons, hogsheads, hundredweights, or tons, you're serving people in very large scale. But if you have to split up some mass-quantity of something ordered in gallons, for instance, it is easy to do so by dividing into halves, quarters, or eighths (back to pints again). Not so easy to split things by tenths.

Another contributor here mentioned the decimalization of imperial units. Decimalization makes good sense for scale-switching. But the units themselves make good sense for the purposes they were created to serve.

|11.26.06 @ 5:43PM|#

I've pointed this out before, but here I go again. The radical/ignorant parts of the environmental movement are directly responsible for 40% of the CO2 emissions in the U.S. today by stifling nuclear power for the last 30 years or so.

biologist|11.26.06 @ 5:54PM|#

JAM, I see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a matter of familiarity. I only know how much a liter is because sodas are sold in 1 and 2 liter bottles. People would acclimate to ordering half-liters or half-kilograms.

|11.26.06 @ 6:42PM|#

"If America had listened to Jimmy Carter and taken seriously the idea of alternative fuel development, today we wouldn't be dependent on the Middle East for oil."
Just put the word "as" in between be and dependent and we're there.

That occurred to me at the time. There was no "as"; the guy actually said we wouldn't be dependent...

|11.27.06 @ 3:01PM|#

Interesting article - but I'm not quite of the opinion that either the Manhattan project, or the Apollo project were failures. Both were successful at their major aims. The first was a war effort that, arguably, ended WWII in our favor (I mean to imply that the causation, not the conclusion, is arguable). The second was a propaganda effort that achieved its aims - we did walk on the moon.

Goverment spending also brought the computer, and to a much lesser extent, the internet. Neither became commercial successes as a result of goverment involvement, but the initial research that got them off the ground was done on government tab.

Perhaps all of these projects were misguided in their aims, but one should be careful not to confuse that with failure to achieve them.

James Anderson Merritt|11.27.06 @ 3:24PM|#

biologist | November 26, 2006, 5:54pm | #
JAM, I see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a matter of familiarity. I only know how much a liter is because sodas are sold in 1 and 2 liter bottles. People would acclimate to ordering half-liters or half-kilograms.
======
Biologist, You (perhaps inadvertently) hit at the heart of my point: "people will acclimate." Surely they will, as one will acclimate to off-the-rack clothes when tailoring is not an option. You see people in ill-fitting clothes all the time. They make do. But who is served by this? The consumers, or the larger-than-human-scale industries, to whom any individual consumer is just one of several standard sizes?

The traditional units developed as they did because, on average, they were convenient for their purposes -- which were defined by human societies. The metric units were determined more or less arbitrarily, to emphasize interrelationship of units, easy scaling, and -- in one of the few concessions to human expectations and limitations -- the decimal system. Traditionally convenient quantities were expressed in terms of the new ones, either as awkward multiples or fractions of the latter when precision was important, or rounded up or down (as quarts were "rounded" to liters) to the most convenient multipe or fraction whenever "close" was "good enough." Traditionally determined standards were shoehorned into someone's grand scheme, which was then enforced, partly by practice born of necessity (as in science) or by government edict.

Obviously, even the traditional units weren't "optimum" for every person. There are some people, for whom various metric units are more natural and convenient. But over the course of generations, the traditional units had been whittled down to a "good fit" for most people. With the metric units, the purity and consistency of the units came first, and accommodations to mundane human concerns came later, with people having to do a large amount of the "accommodating."

With the old system, individuals could easily double, quadruple, etc., or divide into halves, quarters, or eighths, to "scale" for everyday needs. With the new system, it is not so hard to accumulate by 10s, but it is certainly difficult to partition into 10ths. To the person who can tell me the number of centimeters in a kilometer, I answer: here's a liter of water. Pour me a deciliter. You'll probably need additional technology, probably supplied by an external source, to perform the task. For me, that is one of the most disagreeable things about the metric system: working with it in the real world requires "external technology," which takes power away from the guy on the street. Before, you might need a ruler or a yardstick, a reference pint or gallon, or pound weight, but you could do your own dividing into fairly accurate halves, quarters, and eighths, if need be. With metric, you'll generally have to rely on someone else to do the dividing into tenths for you, through precisely marked rulers or measuring tapes, sets of measuring cups or marked vials, or reference weights.

Maybe we don't need tailored clothes, or the ability to scale down our own units without external help. And certainly, we'll adapt to our environment: if that environment is metric, we'll learn and get a feel for metric. But I hope we'll never stop asking, "for whose convenience?" And I hope our impulse to assert our own convenience will never fully be stifled.

James Anderson Merritt|11.27.06 @ 6:10PM|#

A quick update: My back-o-th-napkin calculation comparing solar and wave-power capacity against global needs relied on the figure quoted in Bailey's article, 13.1 TWh estimated global annual electric consumption. The results on paper seemed encouraging -- perhaps even TOO encouraging, given the thousands of high-powered generating facilities worldwide. My math was right; the capacities of solar and wave-power that I used were consistent with current industrial capability; time to check assumptions.

At the US government's energy outlook site, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html, we learn that net electric consumption in 2003 was 14,781 billion kilowatt hours. From where I sit, that seems to be around 1000 times more than Bailey stated for 2002. In other words, I think, Bailey needed to speak of 13.1 Tera KILOwatt hours, not 13.1 TeraWatt hours. Units'll getcha every time!

With that revision, it appears that 50 2x2 mile wave power stations, using the 500 kW buoys expected in 2010, will be able to handle 1% of today's estimated total electric consumption. That sounds more like it. One percent of the total global consumption is a long way from achieving totally "green energy," but it is still a huge amount of electricity, and those 50 farms would represent a remarkable engineering achievement.

I stand by my previous estimation of PV acreage needed to power 200 million Tesla Roadsters, however. But, in the interests of becoming a gazillionaire, I would probably invest my money in solar concentration electric generation, not PV. Oh yes, and real estate in the desert southwest. :)

Rob McMillin|11.28.06 @ 2:00AM|#

Robert Bussard claims he's got a workable idea for an inertial confinement fusion device that could be energy positive in six years, not the fifty years ITER would take to get going. He's begging for money from Google lately...

James Anderson Merritt|11.28.06 @ 3:38AM|#

James Anderson Merritt | November 27, 2006, 6:10pm | #

With that revision, it appears that 50 2x2 mile wave power stations, using the 500 kW buoys expected in 2010, will be able to handle 1% of today's estimated total electric consumption.
=======================

Actually, the news is slightly better than that. The output would be closer to 5% of 2003's capacity. Here are my figures, in case anyone wants to check the math:

1 square mile would accommodate 1000 500 kW buoys.
A 2x2 mile (4 sq. mi.) wave farm would thus accommodate 4000 buoys (spaced approximately 168 feet from each other, or four times the width of a single unit).
This would mean an instantaneous output of around 500000w/unit(4000 units/per farm) = 2000000000 watts/farm. In a day (24 hours), that would be 48000000000 watthours/farm-day. In a year of 365 days/year, the total output would be 17520000000000 watthours/farm-year.
Fifty farms would supply (17520000000000 watthours/farm-year)50 farms = 876000000000000 watthours/year (e.g., 876 TWh). Multiply by 0.75 to allow for maintenance, etc., and you get 657000000000000 watthours/year (e.g., 657 TWh). Divide that by the total estimated 2003 electrical consumption, and you get (657000000000000 watthours/year) / (13500000000000000 watthours/year, e.g. 13.5 Tera Kilo watthours) = 0.0487, or roughly 5%. So every 10 2x2 mile wave farms (40 square miles of ocean in total) can handle around 1% of 2003 consumption. You would need 1000 of those farms (4000 square miles of ocean), to take care of 2003 estimated global electrical consumption by wave power alone. This would be an amazing enginering achievement, but does seem feasible, as long as the manufacturer hits the per-unit output target they anticipate for 2010. We'll see.

Incidentally, the total California electricity consumption for 2010 was forecast at 309,868 GWh by the California Energy Commission. This represents only 24 such wave farms, or 96 square miles of ocean along a coastline that is around 840 miles long.

|11.28.06 @ 6:44PM|#

As an example of what Imeant on improving technology, here:http://www.loopwing.co.jp/en/products.html
is yet another thing out of the scope of Ron's study.

Additionally, are improved ideas on using energy efficiently, not just efficiently producing energy. Fo instance, water shortages are going to be an issue. Large Scale Windturbine power works well out to sea, where the water is. Simply combine a desalination plant with an offshore Windturbine; have the unit signal for a tug when the freshwater bladder is full. Since it is out offshore there is no significant threat of salinity pollution on shore. Deliver water where it is needed. Hopefully some beaurocrat didn't make it an International Law that fresh water had to be free as some kinda Human Right or other; if so, this idea is dead. [/sarcasm]