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from the worlds-first-commercial-electric-beaver dept.
The Guardian is reporting;
The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.
"This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work," said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.
The company designed the plane's motor and worked in partnership with Harbour Air, which ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and coastal communities.
The recycled 62-year-old de Havilland Beaver seaplane is designed for short hops of 160 km or less, which represents the majority of Harbour Air flights. They're looking to save millions on costly maintenance and downtime. Harbour Air hopes to convert most of their airplanes after certification.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @05:27PM (20 children)
Want to know how to kill fossil fuels? Send demand skyrocketing. Paradoxical, but true. Oil is a finite resource. As demand skyrockets, prices will rise. But as prices rise, it makes alternative energy sources (such as solar) that much more economically viable. This will result in an ever larger portion of all new energy facilities being renewable sources. Beyond this, the global demand for energy is also going to rise in the coming decades. China's developing, India's developing, Africa will someday develop. As these countries develop their consumption is going go up up and away. And this is ignoring all the sorts of new energy consuming technologies that we'll inevitably invent over the coming decades. Air conditioning, computers, microwaves, dish washers? These things would have sounded like magic to people not that long ago, and the inventions of the future will likely seem similarly unimaginable to us today.
Fossil fuels aren't going to be killed by some half hearted treaties, doomsday prophecies, and a screechy teenager. They're going to be killed by their own demand. And the faster we get there, the better. Anyhow, trying to stop global warming by reducing emissions is never going to happen in any case for the exact reasons as above. China, for instance, emits less than half of the CO/capita as the US/Canada/Australia/etc do. But they're responsible for the most emissions simply because of their population size. Those emissions are only going to increase alongside India (who currently has something like a tenth of our emissions) and even Africa pulling up the rear - all emitting like beasts as a product of their greater population levels.
So we should try to reach the inflection point where fossil fuels lose their viability as rapidly as possible. Save the planet - encourage everybody to get a 10mpg SUV!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:41PM (1 child)
If the goal is to makes prices rise then we have the perfect tool at our disposal: tax the crap out of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:21AM
This doesn't achieve anything for numerous reasons.
1) Localized to a single nation. The sharp increases in the coming years will be coming from nations that would not voluntarily damage themselves - China and India in particular.
2) Limited support. Many would oppose giving a government trillions of dollars. Earmarks change as soon as the government wants some (see: Alaska Permanent Fund [wikipedia.org]). Even of those that think they support a carbon tax, many would find themselves quickly backpedaling when prices at the pump double or triple and they're constantly reminded that they can solve this problem by simply rolling back the tax. It's like war - people tend to support it when it's glamorized and promises a quick victory. When the reality of it kicks in, support plummets.
3) Open to lobbying. Even if the tax did pass, it's something that can simply be rolled back or undermined by lobbying. Our politicians are for sale, and the price is far less than the resources available to fossil fuel industries. This process is made much easier by #2 and #4.
4) Petrodollar. Going to abbreviate this one to keep this post succinct, but the US economy is heavily 'subsidized' by the global fuel economy. This is a big part of the reason we talk a big game on terms of reducing emissions but do pretty much nothing.
5) Loopholes. The carbon taxes that have come close to passing were 'revenue neutral.' That means the government imposes a carbon tax on the fossil fuel industry while giving them benefits and tax reductions in other fields such that it's effectively revenue neutral. In other words, it has 0 effect. And as it's chipped away it will result in a 'carbon tax' gradually turning into a defacto tax-break for fossil fuel industries. There's a reason Exxon has been one of the more vocal advocates for a carbon tax.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:02PM (10 children)
Just look at the tar sands. At $100 a barrel, hugely profitable. At today's prices, hugely unprofitable, even with government subsidies and a government exemption from carbon taxes.
The major oil companies are planning to expand production over 30% - but the market isn't going to expand by 30%. The best part is their expansion will make prices drop even more, making their operations even more of a bad investment.
Saudi Arabia knows this - why do you think they're selling off Aramco? They know that demand wil be way down long before their wells go dry in 60 years.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:27PM (9 children)
That's the dumbest thing I've heard today. Here's the actual rundown:
Electricity generation costs in $/MWh (2019)
gas/oil: 40.8
Wind: 48 (onshore) 124.6 (offshore)
Solar: 48.8
Fossil fuel is still 20% or more cheaper than "renewable" sources. It also benefits from an enormous existing infrastructure both in power plants and vehicle fuel supplies that our current electric simply grid cannot support.
And at the risk of laboring a point that gets made over and over again - wind and solar are not continuous sources of electricity and also require significantly more land to achieve the same power density as fossil fuels. And hydro is pretty much at it's limit of exploitation, it requires very specific geologic conditions to be viable.
The only source of power that that makes any sense in a CO2 free era is nuclear, but all the tree huggers have an irrational fear of it, even while screaming about how the earth is being destroyed by fossil fuels.
If people REALLY cared about the environment we would be seeing fast tracking of nuclear power around the world.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:49PM (8 children)
Why aren't you quoting the cost of generating electricity by hydro? Oh, I see why -it's by far the cheapest.
Stop excluding one of Canada's largest energy resources, that still has a long way to go in terms of dam building. After all, this article is set in BC, not California.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:14PM (7 children)
Because my figures are the LCOE values (Levelized Cost of Energy) which includes all expenses related to the particular energy source including the cost of building and operating the power generation facility.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:19PM (6 children)
And yet when I look on wikipedia, hydro still comes out cheaper all in, because the plants tend to last for generations and the costs can be amortized over 50 years or more. Unlike coal, natural gas, etc., which need fuel and maintenance involved with the burning of said fuel.
Once it's built, hydro has NO fuel costs.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @11:43PM (4 children)
Wind and solar have no "fuel" costs either, but they have high install and maintenance costs and require huge swaths of land. I'm not arguing that hydro isn't great, just that it isn't anywhere near plentiful enough to supply enough of the energy needs to displace fossil fuel. It's just not a solution to an electric economy.
Only nuclear provides an emission free and essentially unlimited electrical supply 24/7.
It's important to remember that coal, oil, and gas account for 85% of worldwide power generation. Hydro accounts for 7% and there's no where to build new dams. So while it's a noble goal to switch everything to electricity, you still have to find a source of power to replace that 85%. Hydro, wind, and solar, even if you push hard, they're not gonna do it.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 13 2019, @03:27AM (3 children)
There's not enough nuclear fuel to supply the planet for even 100 years. So forget that.
Dams just keep running and running.
Winds just keep blowing and blowing.
Tides will keep on until the moon approaches the Roche limit - humans will be long gone by then.
Solar will keep on as long as the sun shines.
Geothermal will keep on as long as uranium keeps fissioning in the earth's crust and core.
Biomass will keep growing even without human intervention.
You keep using US stats for energy sources. The US is less than 5% of the world's population. And becoming irrelevant on the world's stage as it seeks to be even more isolationist and less dependable as a partner.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday December 13 2019, @04:44AM (2 children)
The combined uranium and thorium deposits of the United States would be enough to power the world for at current energy demands for some 100.000 years. And we have stockpiles of already mined ore right now that could power the world for roughly 1,000 years. Gen 3, and particularly Gen 4 reactors are extremely efficient. In fact, Gen 4 reactors, some of which are already coming online in China and India, are even capable of "burning" existing nuclear waste. The only thing standing in the way of taping this resource is irrational fear and bureaucracy.
Not all the time they don't, not enough to spin those giant turbines. And the sun, especially in Canada, is far from constant. Hydro and geothermal have already been exploited to their maximum capacity and still only provide a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Nope, none of those will fill the 85% hole that fossil fuels currently does.
The US GDP is the largest in the world. With just 5% of the population we account for more raw economic power than all the European nations combined, nearly double that of China (which btw is the #1 consumer of fossil fuels). So where is Canada in that list? It's less than 1/10th the US. So don't be so quick to dismiss the US as being "irrelevant", no country believes that. Canada was quick to jump on board the USMCA now wasn't it. We love Canada down here in the US, but only as the harmless, quaint, and often funny little buddy to the north.
You might also want to brush up on the difference between protectionist policies vs isolationist. The US has strong trade agreements around the world including with Canada - that's not isolationism. And the idea that the US shouldn't negotiate such agreements for her own benefit, as all nations should, is ludicrous on its face.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:48AM (1 child)
You're leaving out one critical components in your nuclear advocacy there: price.
Nuclear is plausible (I say plausible because once you factor in the build/decommissioning/'contingency' and other costs it's aggregate cost is not pretty even if its MW/h cost while operating is nice) right now because uranium is, relative to demand, widely and readily available. Should nuclear gain in popularity this would radically change. There is a lot of nuclear fuel in the world. For instance there's even uranium in seawater, but it's incredibly expensive to extract. Breeders also introduce other issues. They are both extremely expensive and extremely volatile. The greater level of enrichment offered by breeder reactors is the source of both of these issues. It results in greater deterioration and maintenance, and also means that an accident (which will happen at scale) could be catastrophic. The greater level of enrichment also means reactors could be used, or easily modified, to produce weapons grade nuclear material.
No idea what you're talking about in terms of US reserves either. We definitely do not have stockpiles of uranium. Uranium is primarily relegated to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Australia. 'Mideast 2.0'.
Anyhow the long and short there is that the overall price is going to skyrocket if nuclear becomes the norm for energy production. So it's somewhat self defeating unless you ignore this, which companies who advocate for nuclear are very much willing to do because they'd effectively be too big to fail and could rely on the government ensuring they don't fail. Higher costs tend to result in higher justifiable profit margins so it's win-win for them. The only loser would be the consumer who sees their electric bill or price at the electro-pump go up, up, and away.
Alternative? Again, solar. The intermittentcy of the power is not an issue. You have 'kumbaya' solutions like world-wide high energy direct voltage current lines meaning there is never a nighttime, but you also have local solutions like artificial hydro-electric. I fully agree (with the unstated but implied comment) that batteries are not a viable solution at scale, but that's hardly an issue.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday December 13 2019, @09:45PM
The vast majority of the cost of nuclear plants comes from red tape associated with the plants layouts. Westinghouse figured out a way past that buy designing a modular plant called the AP1000. Four of them have been built and connected to the grid in China already where they were fast tracked. In the US, two such reactors ended up getting canceled because, unlike China, it's become a national sport for tree huggers to tie these plants up in court. Even so, per megawatt, it's actually cheaper to build nuclear than it is to build offshore wind turbines. Weird right?
As for fuel stockpiles you have to remember that only 5% of the uranium in a fuel rod is actually "burned" before being pulled and sent for processing. So just in the fuel reprocessing sector alone you have about 20 times as much fuel as our reactors are currently using. But more importantly, newer reactor designs like you would see if we fast tracked nuclear, are much more efficient. When you get to the Gen4 reactors like the LFTR you're talking about a 95% burn rate and that's using Thorium 232 as the fuel. In fact, India plans to have 50 such thorium reactors online by 2025. And thorium does not require enrichment nor is it particularly radioactive and we have massive amounts of it all around the country. Ironically, many of the mine sites we would normally develop for the rare earths used in all our electronics are not exploited because they contain large amounts of thorium which the NRC regulates. So allowing such mining to take place has a dual benefit. And of course there is also the enormous number of nuclear weapons that get decomissioned as they age. Weapons grade uranium has to actually be diluted in order to work in a reactor. Bottom line - just in the US there is more than enough nuclear fuel to power as many reactors as you care to build for as long as you need.
I know people love to embrace solar as the utopian green power source but people ignore the downsides. It requires huge amounts of land to viable, so you're basically going out and strip mining vast tracks of land and planting these panels there. The damage to the ecosystem would be astronomical. I saw a study that said if England wanted to meet it's power needs with solar it would have to convert 1/4 of their entire land mass to it. And roof top solar is no answer. It helps, but when you throw an electric car in the mix you're talking about a roof top install taking three days to recharge your car. And then there's the failure rate - chinese panels last only about 5 years. Can you imagine the scope of the problem of disposing/recycling that many panels every 5 years? Never mind the toxicity of the chemicals they contain, or the chemicals required for their manufacture. Hell, if you think Uranium is scarce - trying to build enough panels to fill the gap left by fossil fuels, it just can't be done. We dont have the materials or the manufacturing capacity to handle it.
Clearly I'm pretty enthusiastic about nuclear but I think the points are compelling. Pushing renewables is admirable, but nuclear is the only emissions free energy source that reasonably be expected to replace fossil fuels over the next 50 years. I see no reason why we shouldn't be fast tracking both.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 13 2019, @02:47AM
Unless you have econazis who want to blow up perfectly functional dams, and who have the political clout to do it.
My cynical little voice opines that this is more about depriving others of the benefits of stored water than about making nice with downstream fish.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:12PM (6 children)
Not as finite as you might think. New oil/gas fields are being discovered that could supply demand for the next century. This is why the US has now become a net exporter of fossil fuels. If you sent demand skyrocketing it would just make even more oil fields economical to develop.
Just this past month Iran announced discovery of a new oil field thought to contain 53 billion barrels. And Japan recently discovered an offshore oil field containing another 50 billion barrels.
I'm afraid there is plenty of oil to go around for the foreseeable future, regardless of demand.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:51PM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday December 12 2019, @10:38PM (3 children)
Burn those hydrocarbons and condense the water. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 13 2019, @02:09AM (2 children)
Yielding water and CO2. Think we could make it into soda water? Really fizzy stuff? To put into the cans involved in another discussion on this site?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 13 2019, @02:35AM (1 child)
Depending on the initial composition, you may end with a strongly carbonated soft drink (if you burn methane), or a liquefied carbon dioxide with traces of water (e.g. if you burn Hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene [wikipedia.org]).
Just don't try to burn graphene or buckyballs, you'll die of dehydration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday December 14 2019, @10:46PM
As I said, really fizzy stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @08:33AM
One thing to keep in mind about these numbers is that they sound enormous from our perspective. They are not. Currently the worldwide consumption of oil is about 100 million barrels per day. [wikipedia.org] That's trending upwards and as India/China/Africa economically develop it's going to skyrocket upwards. So 50 billion barrels of oil is enough to supply the Earth for less than 1.4 years. And that is, again, at current levels - which are only going to increase. Another reason that increasing demand is paradoxically the best way to kill fossil fuels.