SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A group of scientists have called for a "moonshot" renewable energy research program called the "Global Apollo":
They say they have generated interest from major nations in their plan for an investment of 0.02% of their GDP [about $150 billion over 10 years, and about the cost of the Apollo program in 2015 dollars] into research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of clean electricity. Their report, launched at London's Royal Society, says on current projections the world will exceed the 2C danger threshold of climate change by 2035.
The academics are led by the UK's former chief scientist Professor Sir David King. He told BBC News: "We have already discovered enough fossil fuels to wreck the climate many times over. There's only one thing that's going to stop us burning it – and that's if renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels. "Under our plan, we are aiming to make that happen globally within a decade." Another of the authors, former Cabinet Secretary Lord O'Donnell, told BBC News: "People never believed we could put a man on the Moon - but we did. People don't believe we can solve climate change - but we have no choice."
It complains that renewable energy has been starved of investment to a shocking degree, with publicly funded RD&D on renewable energy only $6bn a year – under 2% of the total of publicly funded research and development. The authors say this compares poorly with the $101bn spent worldwide on production subsidies for renewables and the $550bn "counter-productive" subsidies for fossil fuel energy.
Solar is the most favoured renewable source as the group says it has greatest potential for technology breakthroughs, and most new energy demand will be in sunny countries. The cost of solar has been plummeting and is already approaching competitive prices in places as different as Germany, California and Chile. But the authors believe next-generation plastic photovoltaics can to keep prices tumbling. They believe battery technology is improving fast – but think batteries and other forms of storage need to be massively developed to store intermittent renewable energy. The authors say much smarter software is needed to enable electricity grids to cope with the new sources of power. Some experts believe that energy technology has developed so fast that it simply needs further price support to keep volumes rising and costs falling. Others will complain that the Apollo group has done little to tackle the immense problem of replacing fossil fuels in heating.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @03:13PM
Yeah well I donno about your sous vide temps listed for food safety reasons, but the general idea is good.
One interesting demand-ish based technological improvement is something vaguely sous vide ish for most cooking, just keep the oven above 160 or so and it'll cook just fine and more or less food safe, but you need some broiling elements or a residential grade salamander (LOL as if) to get the maillard reaction to brown the food.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction [wikipedia.org]
Most pastry baking is done as a compromise cook it quick at 350 and hope the batter in the center of the cake sets before the exterior blackens. Yet with a microscopically more intelligent oven controller you could cook the thing for hours at 200 or until it gets too dry and then zap it with the broiler elements for 5 minutes to brown... Thats interesting. If you use chemical leavening you could manipulate the oven temp curve for fun and profit.
There are some other "pizza crust" like effects of cooking something in an insanely hot oven which are sometimes (in the case of pizza) even good.
Anyway it never fails to amaze me in a world of microcontrollers how so much cooking has not yet gone beyond the mechanical egg timer.
Still my idea of building a super insulated oven that sits at 350 for six months at a time using practically no energy is still valid. Its not crazy, we make "boxes of cold" that stay cold 24x365 for not too much energy cost and if we cared we could make them much more efficient than we currently do. Why does my house have like 16 inches of insulation in my attic but the fridge only has about 1 inch? Clearly its technologically possible to make a fridge that leaks 16 times less energy by making the walls 16 times fatter, well, roughly. I would imagine at some very expensive liquid N2 dewar level of manufacturing quality, you'd only have to plug in a fridge every couple weeks and it would stay icy cold.
In my infinite spare time I'll ask a guy I know at a nearby schools cryo lab if he can give me an old N2 dewar for me to mess around making it into the worlds most delicate, yet efficient, camping cooler. Imagine filling that with icy cold beer and it still being icy months later. There are of course contamination issues with a "used" dewar that I'll have to worry about.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @05:11PM
Most of the heat (cold?) loss from your fridge is opening the door, letting all the cold air out, and then standing there looking for that missing jar of mayo.