GraphFoley

To weave a web of deception...

EEstor

I happened across an interesting post on the promise of ultracapacitor startup EEstor at Ezra Klein's site. Guest poster John raises a few interesting questions and a commenter gets the last word in. The latter reminds us that 1/2 the energy stored in a capacitor eventually gets wasted. I rolled this assertion around in my head for a bit and essentially come to the same conclusion. If you consider that any power source has an internal resistance (R1=r) that must eventually get balanced by an external resistive sink (R2=R), the most efficient power transfer occurs when r=R.

P=I*V=I*(I*R)=I²R

P=(V/(r+R))²R

dP/dR = 0 when r=R

Reduce r and you have to reduce R to get the current up. Increase r and you have to increase R to generate a significant voltage drop. And since equal amounts of power get consumed internally and externally when r=R, only 1/2 becomes usable for an application.

The same principle follows from audio amplifiers having an internal impedance designed to match that of your typical speaker (8 ohms). Half the power gets lost as heat emanating from your amplifier.

Another reminder that energy storage devices by themselves do not save us from dealing with the real issue at hand:

But these are all forms of energy storage, not sources of energy on their own. The primary form of energy for the United States would still, even if every car had one of these EEStor capacitors in it, still be coal and oil. (We could use a lot less, but still.) The objective still has to be reducing the amount of oil we use to avoid Peak Oil (whenever it happens, better to prepare early.) Quite aside from Peak Oil, climate change requires that we stop using fossil carbon altogether. Storage technologies, exciting as they are, are not by themselves the answer.

Update: The anonymous commenter has a good point, but consider that big-money military rail gun development and other directed energy weapons has predominantly funded the development of ultracapacitors. Here, and in other applications (like the Tesla Roadster racing) where you need huge amounts of instantaneous power, power extraction efficiency remains important. All those fast discharge losses add up. But I'm happy to see designs get above 80% efficiency (charge+discharge). I have to admit that I must have retained little from the switching power supply class I took in grad school circa 1986.

link

A Modest Proposal

So the Neocons started with a plan, a plan theoretical on paper and untested in practice. The Neocons now actually have lots of plans, all likely doomed to failure.

Then we read this:

Iraq terrorist calls scientists to jihad

Al-Qaida-in-Iraq's leader, in a chilling audiotape released Thursday, called for nuclear scientists to join his group's holy war and urged insurgents to kidnap Westerners so they could be traded for a blind Egyptian sheik who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

The fugitive terror chief said experts in the fields of "chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences — especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts" should join his group's jihad, or holy war, against the West.

So's I've got my own plan, played around in my mind and show-room-floor modeled in this blog post. Rather concisely, my plan involves targetting all the scientists and engineers in fundamentalist, rapture-ready societies for special attention. I see the danger as too great and the consequences too dire for us to sit back and allow the leaders of these countries to try to advance their nuclear weapons capability. So the special attention I recommend involves a combination of (1) scaring the bat-sh*t out of every engineer that dares to get involved in the work and/or (2) actually rooting those people out with whatever means at our disposal.

I base my plan on the premise that engineers and scientists everywhere have enough technical acumen and awareness to understand current events. I presume some fraction of these educated folks would quickly comprehend that the civilized world has placed a huge bounty on their heads and would act accordingly. As an engineer myself, and associating with other engineers for years, I know that cowards and self-centered bastards fill our ranks -- independent of country of origin. The minute they get wind of Western society's plans to eliminate their line of work, entire development teams would start to disintegrate. They would quickly disperse like sheets to the wind. I find it hard to believe that the remaining engineers, no matter how intense their jihadist beliefs, could continue building nuclear weapons in their basement.

It really would not take much effort to throw a huge wrench in the works of any fundie-ruled country if we put such a plan in place. Why bomb a weapons plant when you could easily accomplish the same thing with psy-ops and special forces?

I could put the shoe on the other foot, and think how this would effect me if we turn the tables, and I and my fellow American engineers and scientists became targetted for the same treatment. Echoing Bush, I would say "bring it on". Deep down I believe that technologists that don't pursue rapture-relief objectives have a bit more cajones to stay the course. The other side would sooner piss their pants than support a cause that all their education contraindicates.

Guarantee that if we put such a plan in place, our fear of weapons of mass destruction (at least of the nuclear kind) would soon dissipate. Put the producers of the TV show 24 in charge, give them some funding, and we needn't worry. High tech weapons such as these do not exist without a stable cadre of well-educated technologists running the show. We could then start worrying about nuclear-equipped places like Pakistan that have ambiguous motivations for keeping their arsenal.

And before anyone criticizes my plan, just consider how much the Neocons have accomplished with their own brilliant plans. Not.

Wind Projection

I missed this news item when it came out earlier in the summer, but Air America's EcoTalk resurrected the issue of the military opposing new wind turbine projects because of potential radar interference. Even though some projects recently obtained a go-ahead, it still boggles my mind how the military can't resist taking a stupid pill and instead simply wiseup and drop the proposal.

Looking at the issue from the perspective of an engineer, I can say that no way will windmills cause interference that would overcome the abilities of a experienced radar technician to filter out. The turbines operate at a fixed (or at least very slowly varying) frequency which means that a straightforward notch filter should remove unwanted signals. After such filtering, radar should not experience a problem from phantom motion interference at all.

And I don't buy this rationale either:

A bureaucratic delay was created by a provision in a congressional bill that wind energy companies say was drafted to create more hurdles for a high-profile and controversial offshore wind project near Nantucket, Mass.

The law required the Department of Defense to issue a report assessing the impact that development of wind turbines would have on military radar.

No way. This has got BushCo fingerprints all over it and they have followed the first law of projection by blaming the opposition for their own actions.

Canadians determined to strike

Somebody¹ decided that the area known as the Northwest Angle in northern Minnesota has turned into a potential security hole for terrorists arriving from Canada.

The northern-most arrow indicates traffic funneling through Minnesota's last one-room schoolhouse.


Watch the web cam at Flag Island for suspicious behavior. If you see anyone leaving by boat without a fishing pole please contact authorities immediately.

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¹Overheard on an Air America Radio news report, but have found no verification from online news sources. (Update: Link)

Ultra Theory

Big Gav has raised an interesting question on suppression of emergent energy technologies. I can side with the rise of interesting storage ideas such as the ultracapacitor in part because of how much the micro-version of the lowly capacitor has steered high-tech the last few years.

In reality, what we now take for granted, capabilities such as persistent data storage, always-on clocks, and power-down state saving, have lead to a revolution in portable electronics. Things such as solid-state mp3 players have now become the rule, whereas a few years ago, users would have thrown their arms up in disgust trying to keep the things running with any reliability and without extreme care and feeding. You see, the advent of low-power consumption static RAM necessary to run these devices would have proved impossible without the reliable dielectrics that went into the solid state designs for memory. And the little bit of non-leaky capacitors that allowed clock circuitry to keep running has saved "dinking-around" time for lots of users. Lots of people would agree that dynamic RAM has done the trick for all of our desktop computing needs, but fewer acknowledge how static RAM (aka flash and non-volatile) has revolutionized the gizmo arena.

And if we can scale capacitance form the micro to the ultra in the same time-frame as the iPod has existed, we might still get some final juice out of the old reliable capacitor.

DOE Report

A new report put out by the U.S. DOE has inspired a fresh perspective or two:

Bloomburg News reported that the Energy Department study found that conventional oil production reached "soft and sudden" peaks in Texas in 1972, North America in 1985, Great Britain in 1999 and Norway in 2001. These dates were predicted by formulas used by proponents of the peak oil theory to predict the crest of global oil production.

I predict the wingnuts will start anti-formula campaigns in the not-too-distant future to help the cornucopians out.

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Hmmm, just a seasonal adjustment, a loss-prevention measure, or a genuine decline?

Preliminary data from tanker tracker Petrologistics showed Opec pumped 400 000 barrels per day less crude so far in September, compared with the whole of last month, on lower production from the group’s top two producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran.