How to go green without failures and disasters? 17

[RedSnake]

I think it is sad that we have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and at least one hundred years of exponential technical development and we stil can’t utilize what we know.

I know it has much to do with politics, markets and peoples unwillingness to draw back on consumption and whether or not to believe in the scientists assessment of the climate change.
But I hope that we can keep that part of the discussion to a minimum and try to discuss the engineering and technical sides of things.

But since I am OP, I will start by not following my own advise. ;-)
By saying that, you do not need to be a scientist only a half dissent engineer, to know that if you put to many meta tablets in a toy steam engine and the pressure relief valve don’t work it will a eventually explode.

Best Regards A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[cranky108]

I see the best working systems tend to be regional.
Like here, we have run of the pipe hydro electric. The high altitude lakes originally had no fish, until the fish and game people used the lakes for fish breading. so the pipes that run from those lakes would develop such high pressures of up to 1200 PSI, and the pressure had to be broken anyway. The use of a pelton wheel worked well for that, and generated electric.
But it is not enough to power the whole area.

That can't be replicated in other places. I am also told that there is not enough wind here, but at times we can see wind speeds of 100 MPH (likely I could find pictures of trucks being blown off the roads).

Solar works for almost 300 days a year, but only until about 5PM.

Using water for cooling the air in summer would work, if we had enough water.

Underground homes would work to reduce heating and cooling needs, if the lots were greater than a third of an acre (the new standard for city lots). And if people would accept them.

But people want to see a little green grass between the houses, and want air cooling and heating on demand, and a two to three car driveway. We get this from some other region, which is not very functional here.

 

[thebard3]

It's hard to address this issue when you consider the general unsustainability of the human population.
ThisLink includes future trends to indicate a slowing of population growth that is in conflict of the general trend of increasing growth. Based on historical rates I tend to believe these projections are probably wrong. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime (60 years). There are lots of others to indicate the same so you can use your own judgement whether you want to believe it or not.
We humans are consumers as we should all notice by the amounts of things we purchase and dispose of. Whether that's fuel for your car or home heating, electricity, water, cardboard, food, shoes, toilet paper or whatever. Imagine if you could see the pile of waste that you have personally generated during your lifetime.
Being 'green' is many faceted. As some others have noted, I do not consider hydroelectric power to be particularly green. Nuclear power can be considered green in some aspects and exactly as the opposite in others depending on your particular view. Most others are nascent technologies with all of the pitfalls and shortcomings usually associated with new things. Biofuels, wood, and refuse power sources are all generators of CO2 so they do not address the issue of climate change, which is one of the major social issues of the day.
If I buy something online, it usually comes in a box-in-a-box with other packaging material stuffed in. Some of this is recycled and some is not. Even recycling has a net power input.
I don't see anything that comes close to a panacea to address our energy needs that will not have adverse effect on the world in some big way.

Brad Waybright

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

 

[alexcorporation]

I would outline this with several points:

Geothermal heating
A heat pump is a unit designed to heat residential and industrial premises. The energy-efficient system is an environmentally friendly alternative to a wood or gas boiler that generates heat.

https://www.flocon.co.nz/5-ways-mor...nd wood heaters,heat from very little energy.

Solar collector
It is the most environmentally friendly type of heating that uses solar energy most efficiently. With the help of the collector, you can both heat the building and heat the water.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10973-019-08153-4

Natural cooling
It is better to use natural cooling methods such as swamp coolers to protect our ecology from old and harmful air conditioners.

https://evapolar.com/blog/cool-small-room-without-ac/

 

[cranky108]

That's sort of my take, as nothing is perfect. I use wood for heat, because if I did not I would be using propane, and dead trees are a problem that causes fires. So by fixing the problem of fires, I am heating my home with a renewable source.
Two problems solve themselves.
Yes, burning wood makes CO2, but that would happen anyway. Either as a forest fire, or decomposing in the forest. I'm sort of becoming part of the cycle.

If there was a way to solve my other energy and waste problems as neatly, I would like to know.

 

[byrdj]

one way to curb the population growth would be going green with agruculture.

Ie the invent of fertilizer being the blame.

reducing the power for equipment would then go with the drastic reduction in harvest

 

[RedSnake]

indicate at slowing of population growth

I was waiting for that one ;-)
There where actually on the news today that the population increase in Sweden have not been so low in 30 years, and that includes immigration.
All industrial countrys sees this a bad thing, why?
For earth as whole it's a good thing, if we want to avoid catastrophe.
We only have a limited amount off resources.

People who do not have food on the table, they want food on the table.
When they have food they want a roof over there head and clothes.
When they have that they want things that makes life easier.
When they have that they want things they don't really need just for fun,
When they have that they wont it bigger.
When they have them bigger they wont it more often.
But a day only have 24 hours, so somewhere it has to bee a limit.
Is it when we buy a new mobil every day or ones a hour, or what?

I do not mean that people have to go back and live in caves, but if we want to have everything and more.
We need to do it smarter or with less people on earth to find a balance.

We have a saying here in Sweden -You can't see the forest for all the trees.

The problem gets so big, it gets overwhelming, we do not seems to know where to begin.
Or more accurately we try to solv the whole problem at ones and when we cant, so we "give up" before we even have begun.
But as with everything else one needs to brake it down to be able start somewhere.
A do not think it will be done in a blink or that it will be easy, but I know that everything that is needed, is there if we just get the right tools to do it.

You talk about what we call wellpapp, I would assume recycling is +-0.
You need to have a machine cut the tree down, you drive it with a truck to the sawmill, you saw the timber.
The rest you drive to the papermill and you get wellpapp, from here the chain is the same.
You recycle the wellpapp the consumer drives it to the recycling, then it is driven to the papermill and then it starts over.
If you replant the trees the trees bind the CO[sub]2[/sub] as well as the wellpapp and the timber from the tree if you build something with it, that will last for a hundred years.
This is a small thing in the big picture I know but it's a start.

There is three mayor consumers of energi.
Households, office buildings and producers(factory's).
I do not think changing the energi production will do the job if the consumption of energi does not decreases as well, to meet somewhere in the middle.

I can say which is a small thing too, I know.
That I do not have one light fixture at home where I can not put a LED light, no need for changing any fixtures.
So why would I not do that?
I do not to need to change the light bulbs several times a year and I get to pay less on my electrical bill.
It reduces the electrical consumption for light with 90%, if you do mot install more of them.

Best Regards A








“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[CWB1]

As mentioned, engineering without failures/disasters isn't realistic because reality happens and there's tradeoffs to everything. More often than not, fixing one issue causes others and we must be cognizant of the impact our changes have upon the world around us. As engineers I believe the bulk of what we can do is simply to remain ethical, open-minded, and follow the requisite process to evaluate everything we do. Far too many folks today get polarized into believing that there is only one true solution and that others' opinions are misguided, uninformed, or self-serving, and that leads us down these politically motivated rabbitholes into bad decisions.

JMO but I have a strong affinity for hydropower. While I agree that we need to strongly consider the various downsides to altering waterways, I dont believe we have begun to harness readily available locations for small-scale hydro installations. As I mentioned in the other thread, in the NE US (where the highest demand is) we have removed many smaller (hundreds of kW to several MW) hydro plants that provided clean, cheap energy for decades. We did so in the name of nature, yet haven't really impacted nature. In many cases the lakes and mill ponds were never drained, we simply removed the turbines which became lawn ornaments or museum displays nearby. Most everything I have seen done stateside in the name of environmental protection has been similarly bass-ackwards in implementation resulting in little/no impact, yet heaven forbid anyone should admit that. Folks see bluer skies and cleaner water and ass-u-me that its bc of govt interdiction, not technology and others' environmental ethics which is more commonly the root of improvement.

 

[IRstuff]

I think it is sad that we have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and at least one hundred years of exponential technical development and we stil can’t utilize what we know.

I think that this is not true for anything that's new, just as nearly the same thousands of years of accumulated knowledge was of no help in the nascent nuclear age. We had numerous catastrophes with reactors; which were, only in hindsight, preventable. Likewise, even when we know where the pitfalls are, such as in the case of facial recognition, we've failed several times to recognize how insidious systemic racism is and how woefully inadequate our safeguards are.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[RedSnake]

About geothermal heat pumps which are quite common here in Sweden, there has been some research done on improving the thermal conductivity of the plastic pipes.

https://www.hb.se/en/about-ub/curre...-performance-in-geothermal-heat-pump-systems/

Seems to remember someone who used the swimming pole as an accumulator in a systems like this.

BR A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[JohnRBaker]

Back in the early 80's when I worked for McDonnell Douglas, the real estate division was building a new office building for our software group and since we were going to have a large data center (remember this still back in the days of large central computers with disk farms) and so cooling was going to be critical. Now we weren't going to occupy the entire building the real estate division had designed the building on spec so that they could rent out the extra space to make a little on the side (our division still had to pay, but for tax purposes they had to provide our space at something less than cost. They couldn't make a profit off of a sister division). Anyway, to make it commercially viable, it was determined that they needed to built a five story building, which just came under the zoning restrictions because we were under the approach to a Naval Reserve Air Station and there was a height limit. In fact, when the plans went for approval the said they couldn't put conventional cooling heat exchangers on the roof as that made the building too tall and the real estate company needed the full five floors so they had to come-up with a different plan. So for the air exchange system for building ventilation, but not for heating a cooling, they just gave-up some floor space on the fifth floors and created a duct area on the side of the building, but for the actual heating and cooling system, before they put in the parking lot, they dug a large underground vault which they filled with some combination of rock and water that was used as the 'heat sink' for a heat pump system.

At the GM Tech Center in Warren, MI, they did basically that same thing only there is was a large pond running almost half the full length of the campus, that people thought was there because it looked nice and picturesque. The only problem was that ducks and geese used use this 'pond' a way point when they were migrating and while it looked cool seeing all those ducks and Canadian geese, they made a mess, particularly those geese. During the migration season they had to hire special clean-up crews to keep the sidewalks around the pond safe to walk on. And keep the smell under control.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[1503-44]

Are you saying that they didn't think that a nice warm bath in the outside air would not attract geese???

Don't feed them bread.

 

[RedSnake]

The solution is taking away the grass ;-)

We have Canadian geese here too.
Some one hade them in parks, for show and now they are everywhere.
They are migrating north and south together with the other geese every year.
Here they sleep on the river during the night and in the morning they fly over the factory to the fields to eat and inte evening they fly back to river.
They probably would not stay if there wasn't something to eat.
But on the fields they don't make much damage, they come before the planting in the spring and when they come back in the autumn the fields are already harvested.

Best Regards A


“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[1503-44]

And you can eat them and the fish too. Its really an additional benefit... creating wetlands and all. Plant some trees. The Chiswick Office Park in London wasn't bad at all.

 

[cranky108]

I think in many places, rock gardens are underrated.
Or maybe some nice other than grass plants.

 

[RedSnake]

Well the Japanese are are good at rock and moss gardens

BR A



“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[RedSnake]

I think it is sad that we have thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and at least one hundred years of exponential technical development and we stil can’t utilize what we know.

I know, I was a bit "provocative" writing that.
What I meant, and that someone also wrote, was that some skills have got lost over time, not necessary because they where bad.
But just forgotten or there was easier ways of achieving the same thing in a time when people thought there was no limits.

I would like to ask some question so I can clarify what I was aiming for.
There is 3 kinds of underfloor heating systems water, air, and electric.

How many of you have some kind of underfloor heating ?
How many of you know someone that has some kind of underfloor heating ?
And if you do not know anyone that has underfloor heating, why is that ?

Best Regards Anna


“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[SuperSalad]

I have an atmospheric heat pump with electric coil backup. I wish I had gone for geothermal heat pump, but we just did not have the money to excavate at the time. That being said, I love the heat pump. Even with the coils kicking on regularly during the coldest months, it is far more efficient than the previous system and much cheaper to operate and maintain.

Andrew H.

http://www.MotoTribology.com

 

[271828]

...Despite all the talk of renewables taking over, fossil fuels still supply 80%+ of the worlds total power, same as it was 50 years ago. In absolute terms we’re using more fossil fuels than we ever have. This can’t last more than another few centuries, right?

Not sure. Circa 1991, I was a CE student in a geology class of 200 students and the professor told us with a straight face that there would be zero (literally zero) oil available by 2010.

Considering how these discussion usually turn political, with one side trying to figure out how to limit the freedom of others, a person might be a little skeptical.

 

[1503-44]

Oil will probably never go away. It will just get so expensive that nobody will be able to afford to burn it.

 

[Tomfh]

Not sure. Circa 1991, I was a CE student in a geology class of 200 students and the professor told us with a straight face that there would be zero (literally zero) oil available by 2010.

And now, in 2020, we’re heading to net zero by 2030..

The more things change the more they stay the same. I dont think people have the slightest idea how deeply wedded our civilisation is to fossil fuels. This idea we can just swap them out in a decade or two - it’s really weird that people believe it.