3 ms·

Again: > You appear unaware of the magnitude of the system that now supplies kerosene to aircraft. Since that is an overwhelmingly larger effort than generati

by ncmncm 4y ago

Again: > You appear unaware of the magnitude of the system that now supplies kerosene to aircraft. Since that is an overwhelmingly larger effort than generating electricity by solid-state PV panels, automatically collected and distributed on the grid via transmission lines, and electrolysing and liquifying, and tanking hydrogen via completely automated machinery, your sense of outrage is wholly misplaced. Of course, pumping LH2 into aircraft would involve some manual work with hoses. That is the only place where people need to be directly involved. No drilling technicians, pump operators, ship crews, refinery operators, truck drivers. Obviously, when we do more work via the electric grid, the grid must be beefed up to handle the extra load. It is not honest to insist that the existing grid, unchanged, would need to shoulder increased load. If we need for it to carry more load, we augment it. That is overwhelmingly cheaper than pipelines, ships, and refineries. Synthesizing hydrogen may be done anywhere at any time. There is exactly zero benefit to synthesizing in one place and transporting it to another, vs transmitting the power and synthesizing in place. Of course each airport may synthesize its own hydrogen. There is also no benefit in centralizing synthesis. Where you need it, drop equipment there. Generating power is done where the power-generating equipment is. There is no benefit in doing that at the airport, instead of at a thousand places on the grid and sending it in via transmission line. Anyway, where do you imagine the airport would put its PV panels and wind turbines? Yes, we need more solar and wind farms. That is not a novel or insightful observation. The entire "pumping, transporting, refining, transporting again, distributing" process, with all of it manual labor and industrial machinery, completely vanishes. Your lack of need to be aware of all that manual work done daily does not mean it is cheap or easy. It is done reliably just because it is a mature process, but it is very, very far from cheap or simple.

regularfry 4y ago
Oh dear. Maybe I should be clearer. 1) The scale of the existing kerosene system is a liability to your scheme such as it is, not an asset, because both need to exist in parallel. You cannot reuse it. Costs are additional for any transition period, and can easily be high enough to make transition impossible. 2) The scale of the kerosene system is thermodynamically irrelevant. The relevant scale problem is that you need double-digit gigawatts available to planes on demand and on-site. That's the whole game. Where you put the solar, wind, or nukes to make that happen is your problem, not mine, but I can guarantee you that transporting XXGW into a single site over transmission line starts to look silly. "Do it at a thousand places on the grid" is a non-starter. That's why I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that on-site was naturally beneficial for your scheme. My mistake, it won't happen again. 3) However you do this, you are doing this in addition to the power generation capability of the rest of the grid. I've talked about one airport. Taking the UK as a whole you need to have a proposal which, give or take, doubles electricity generating capacity for the entire country. That needs more than a dismissive "not a novel observation" jibe. The scale of that challenge means that it's on you to propose how to achieve that as part of the scheme. You have not made such a proposal, rather you prefer to accuse me of misplaced outrage and dishonesty when you have failed to clarify a critical part of your idea adequately. You're handwaving about manual work and implying, I have to assume, that one can take the vast flow of money currently spent on manual labour and use it to bulldoze any inconvenient laws of physics which happen to get in the way. I wish you all the best in that particular endeavour. 4) Either you generate H2 on-site with huge amounts of equipment, or you pipe from elsewhere at pressure. In the former case "drop the equipment where you need it" takes vast tracts of land next to the airport, as I pointed out, in addition to the space the airport already takes up and in competition with the housing (or whatever) that's already there. In the latter you manage high-pressure hydrogen over considerable distances. It's just not true to say there's no difference. Elsewhere you've tried to dodge this dilemma, but you do actually need to pick one. You can't say that the storage and transport problem is fine because you can generate on-site without acknowledging the amount of space that takes up, and you can't restrict piped supply to low pressure because of the sheer quantity of H2 you need to transport. We're done here. The scheme's not practical, you've got no adequate response to the problems with it, and I'm past caring any more.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  I get you: anything already being done, of any magnitude whatsoever, is wholly negligible, but anything new, even of radically lesser magnitude, is "not practical", purely because it would need to, you know, be done. But... Do you really believe that gigawatts are not delivered via gigawatt-scale transmission lines to wherever they terminate? Where does the power they carry go, instead? Halving the material operating cost of civil aviation while eliminating its climate impact will require temporarily expensive and temporarily inconvenient changes. Like every substantial change, ever. Railway systems have been built. Highway systems have been built. Electrical power distribution systems have been built. Airports have been built. All cost, and all were inconvenient. That did not make them impractical.

by ncmncm 4y ago

regularfry 4y ago

Oh dear. Maybe I should be clearer. 1) The scale of the existing kerosene system is a liability to your scheme such as it is, not an asset, because both need to exist in parallel. You cannot reuse it. Costs are additional for any transition period, and can easily be high enough to make transition impossible. 2) The scale of the kerosene system is thermodynamically irrelevant. The relevant scale problem is that you need double-digit gigawatts available to planes on demand and on-site. That's the whole game. Where you put the solar, wind, or nukes to make that happen is your problem, not mine, but I can guarantee you that transporting XXGW into a single site over transmission line starts to look silly. "Do it at a thousand places on the grid" is a non-starter. That's why I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that on-site was naturally beneficial for your scheme. My mistake, it won't happen again. 3) However you do this, you are doing this in addition to the power generation capability of the rest of the grid. I've talked about one airport. Taking the UK as a whole you need to have a proposal which, give or take, doubles electricity generating capacity for the entire country. That needs more than a dismissive "not a novel observation" jibe. The scale of that challenge means that it's on you to propose how to achieve that as part of the scheme. You have not made such a proposal, rather you prefer to accuse me of misplaced outrage and dishonesty when you have failed to clarify a critical part of your idea adequately. You're handwaving about manual work and implying, I have to assume, that one can take the vast flow of money currently spent on manual labour and use it to bulldoze any inconvenient laws of physics which happen to get in the way. I wish you all the best in that particular endeavour. 4) Either you generate H2 on-site with huge amounts of equipment, or you pipe from elsewhere at pressure. In the former case "drop the equipment where you need it" takes vast tracts of land next to the airport, as I pointed out, in addition to the space the airport already takes up and in competition with the housing (or whatever) that's already there. In the latter you manage high-pressure hydrogen over considerable distances. It's just not true to say there's no difference. Elsewhere you've tried to dodge this dilemma, but you do actually need to pick one. You can't say that the storage and transport problem is fine because you can generate on-site without acknowledging the amount of space that takes up, and you can't restrict piped supply to low pressure because of the sheer quantity of H2 you need to transport. We're done here. The scheme's not practical, you've got no adequate response to the problems with it, and I'm past caring any more.

ncmncm 4y ago
I get you: anything already being done, of any magnitude whatsoever, is wholly negligible, but anything new, even of radically lesser magnitude, is "not practical", purely because it would need to, you know, be done. But... Do you really believe that gigawatts are not delivered via gigawatt-scale transmission lines to wherever they terminate? Where does the power they carry go, instead? Halving the material operating cost of civil aviation while eliminating its climate impact will require temporarily expensive and temporarily inconvenient changes. Like every substantial change, ever. Railway systems have been built. Highway systems have been built. Electrical power distribution systems have been built. Airports have been built. All cost, and all were inconvenient. That did not make them impractical.