8 ms·

Good thing HN wasn't around durning the development of most of humanity's great inventions. "So your telling me I'm going to have to hold my food over this fire

Good thing HN wasn't around durning the development of most of humanity's great inventions. "So your telling me I'm going to have to hold my food over this fire for 15 minutes before I eat it? No thank you, I'd stick with my raw meat."

msandford 12y ago
The majority of humanity's great inventions didn't have basic physics saying "this isn't brilliant" long before a prototype got built. Most of humanity's great inventions were things that were difficult because human beings thought they were difficult, or complicated or intricate or whatever. On their webpage they say " The biggest single cost is the hole, but it is expected that firstly this will have a very long life and secondly, as the technology rolls out, the costs of drilling will reduce significantly. So the economics will improve in time." Drilling will not get cheaper without a serious reform of the law, and that's unlikely to happen. There are two primary kinds of drillers; water and energy. Folks involved in water have VERY protective rules in all states. The reasons are 1. good lobbying and 2. if you screw up you destroy the water supply. Energy drilling is no cheaper. Drilling rigs are huge machines that aren't moved easily and cost at least $50k a day on land and $500k a day for seagoing. That's before you pay another $20k per day in staff and god knows how much for fuel for everything; a rig will produce at least 5MW of power. Could they custom build a rig just for drilling for their idea and would that work? Sure. But they'd probably spend several million and then you've got to have it running 24/7 for it to pay off. The regulatory hurdle is going to be non-trivial as well. They're going to case it which helps. But the casing would probably need to be cemented in place which is a non-trivial cost as well. And convincing lawmakers that this doesn't quack like some other kind of well is going to be no easy feat.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  The hole for this has different requirements than holes for water and petroleum: you'd not want to drill one of these holes into an aquifer, because then it would fill up with water. Oil and gas wells have to be drilled in specific places where the oil and gas are, naturally. In this case, you'd want nothing but a dry, empty hole. A dry, empty hole would be the kind of hole least likely to interact with anything underground. I'm not sure this has much to do at all with water and energy drilling. They're talking about using abandoned mine-shafts. Those are much wider and shallower than the kind of holes used to reach petroleum.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Please tell me where I can drill 1500-4500 feet deep without running into an aquifer. http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/current/?type=gw http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/current/?type=gw
- waps 12y ago
  Sadly what you say is true. Despite the fact that humanity has been drilling holes into various types of soil for over 8000 years, we don't really have a good way to do it. The situation is not quite as bad as you're describing though. It is not $50k per day, more like $5k. That is for machines that can only do soil, not rock, and aren't as much drilling as they're making a hole. But in places where you can do agriculture, you'd have at least 5m of soil above rock, and more usually 50+ meters. I wonder how much power this system would have with a 10 meter deep hole (like is regularly installed for heating water in homes these days). These guys may be on to something. Scaling down seems to me to be the key. Full gridless operation with solar panels (at least in earthquake-free zones).
  - msandford 12y ago
    If you want to go deep enough for the system scale to be reasonable, you have to get a big drilling rig. You'll hit rock within a couple hundred feet or perhaps a thousand, but I'm not sure of anywhere in the world with 5,000-10,000 feet of dirt. The problem with going shallower is that the system capacity is directly proportional to depth and weight. Too shallow and you have to have huge weight and that means a large diameter hole and really big cables and such. But going deeper requires drilling through rock, and aquifers which are located within the rock. That means big regulatory hurdles because nobody wants to poison the aquifer on accident. Plus the large costs of drilling through rock. I really like the idea from a theoretical standpoint. It's very elegant. But it doesn't seem practical from an economic or regulatory standpoint. If there are places where you can get the diameter and depth for free, it's clearly genius. But I don't think purpose-drilled holes for this will become a thing -- at least barring some kind of immense breakthrough that I can't even imagine.
  - kwhitefoot 12y ago
    It is quite easy to calculate how much energy can be stored and how much power can be generated for how long. The potential energy of a mass in joule is simply m * g * h where m is in kilogram, g is 9.8 m/s^2, h is the height in metre. So, for example, 100 ton lifted 100 metre gives 98MJ. That's 1MW for 98 seconds. To make this very concrete my house uses, in the summer, about 40kW-hr per day for water heating, cooking, and the rather large amount of computer equipment we have. That is 40000 * 3600 = 144MJ. So assuming that your solar power system can supply that over a 12 hour period we need to store half of it, 72MJ, to keep us going after dark. Your ten metre deep hole would need a 734 ton weight: 735000 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 10 m = 72MJ
- chipsy 12y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me at all if the cost structure does work out but the complete picture can't be disclosed for competitive reasons. There are a lot of "obvious ideas" that have only come to fruition recently where the technology was already basically proven, but only entered productive use after several generations of systemic improvements made it a competitive choice. For example: LED lighting was around for several decades but only had niche application until gradual cost/quality improvements pushed it ahead of older lighting tech - and now every major city is rushing to replace all their old street lights. With the Gravitricity tech there are factors like the cost of drilling, the strength, cost and density of the materials used, and lifetime maintenance costs relative to other solutions. There's lots of room for expertise to know for sure what the issues and bottlenecks are. I'm looking through all the dismissive comments to see if any of them are pinpointing it as a scam - because this is, after all, the kind of idea that is simple enough to captivate laypeople and lift dollars out of their pockets. But judging from this kind of response, it seems like it's also the kind of idea that is simple enough to be dismissed as a "they would have done it already if it worked," rationalized via fuzzy back-of-the-envelope math. Ultimately, since I have no stake in this one, I'll just wish them luck.
- deerpig 12y ago
  There are a many places in the world where this approach would work and where regulation is not so onerous. Not everyone lives in the United States. And, as your comment seems to indicate, that is a good thing :)
wklauss 12y ago
A lot of bad ideas happen in between humanity's greatest inventions. When you look at the past, you are only looking to the successful stories. Maybe a lot of people with unrealistic or bad ideas would have benefited from HN.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
sskates 12y ago
Here's an interesting reference, Drew Houston showing Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Definitely more negative comments on HN these days (although it's always been a skeptical audience).
- yen223 12y ago
  To be fair, there are many, many more Show HNs which wound up going nowhere.
  - sskates 12y ago
    That's the hard part though, isn't it? Telling the difference between bad ideas and good ones. Even professionals at it (AKA venture capitalists) get it wrong all the time. So the questions is- knowing that you don't know whether you're looking at a bad idea or a good one, how should you behave?
    - lukifer 12y ago
      Even if it's a bad idea, I still prefer a community that encourages people to try anyway and make things for its own sake. HN culture felt much more positive and constructive when I joined a few years ago. While that ethos is still present, there's an unfortunate tendency for the snark to rise to the top.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      The responses in that Dropbox thread were pretty solid though. To all the naysayers, I mean. It's sort of a ritual format to test any new idea with the back and forth. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Real problems: Dismissive people who don't/can't/wont listen to good responses. Good founders/ideas but just really bad at communicating. Those are basically the type i and type ii errors of this format.[1] _____ [1] A grey area exists in some other areas too (some people just get 'lucky'; others for good reason can't disclose everything the key answers/insights for competitive reasons)
      - 12y ago

msandford 12y ago

The majority of humanity's great inventions didn't have basic physics saying "this isn't brilliant" long before a prototype got built. Most of humanity's great inventions were things that were difficult because human beings thought they were difficult, or complicated or intricate or whatever. On their webpage they say " The biggest single cost is the hole, but it is expected that firstly this will have a very long life and secondly, as the technology rolls out, the costs of drilling will reduce significantly. So the economics will improve in time." Drilling will not get cheaper without a serious reform of the law, and that's unlikely to happen. There are two primary kinds of drillers; water and energy. Folks involved in water have VERY protective rules in all states. The reasons are 1. good lobbying and 2. if you screw up you destroy the water supply. Energy drilling is no cheaper. Drilling rigs are huge machines that aren't moved easily and cost at least $50k a day on land and $500k a day for seagoing. That's before you pay another $20k per day in staff and god knows how much for fuel for everything; a rig will produce at least 5MW of power. Could they custom build a rig just for drilling for their idea and would that work? Sure. But they'd probably spend several million and then you've got to have it running 24/7 for it to pay off. The regulatory hurdle is going to be non-trivial as well. They're going to case it which helps. But the casing would probably need to be cemented in place which is a non-trivial cost as well. And convincing lawmakers that this doesn't quack like some other kind of well is going to be no easy feat.

mtdewcmu 12y ago
The hole for this has different requirements than holes for water and petroleum: you'd not want to drill one of these holes into an aquifer, because then it would fill up with water. Oil and gas wells have to be drilled in specific places where the oil and gas are, naturally. In this case, you'd want nothing but a dry, empty hole. A dry, empty hole would be the kind of hole least likely to interact with anything underground. I'm not sure this has much to do at all with water and energy drilling. They're talking about using abandoned mine-shafts. Those are much wider and shallower than the kind of holes used to reach petroleum.
- msandford 12y ago
  Please tell me where I can drill 1500-4500 feet deep without running into an aquifer. http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/current/?type=gw http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/current/?type=gw
waps 12y ago
Sadly what you say is true. Despite the fact that humanity has been drilling holes into various types of soil for over 8000 years, we don't really have a good way to do it. The situation is not quite as bad as you're describing though. It is not $50k per day, more like $5k. That is for machines that can only do soil, not rock, and aren't as much drilling as they're making a hole. But in places where you can do agriculture, you'd have at least 5m of soil above rock, and more usually 50+ meters. I wonder how much power this system would have with a 10 meter deep hole (like is regularly installed for heating water in homes these days). These guys may be on to something. Scaling down seems to me to be the key. Full gridless operation with solar panels (at least in earthquake-free zones).
- msandford 12y ago
  If you want to go deep enough for the system scale to be reasonable, you have to get a big drilling rig. You'll hit rock within a couple hundred feet or perhaps a thousand, but I'm not sure of anywhere in the world with 5,000-10,000 feet of dirt. The problem with going shallower is that the system capacity is directly proportional to depth and weight. Too shallow and you have to have huge weight and that means a large diameter hole and really big cables and such. But going deeper requires drilling through rock, and aquifers which are located within the rock. That means big regulatory hurdles because nobody wants to poison the aquifer on accident. Plus the large costs of drilling through rock. I really like the idea from a theoretical standpoint. It's very elegant. But it doesn't seem practical from an economic or regulatory standpoint. If there are places where you can get the diameter and depth for free, it's clearly genius. But I don't think purpose-drilled holes for this will become a thing -- at least barring some kind of immense breakthrough that I can't even imagine.
- kwhitefoot 12y ago
  It is quite easy to calculate how much energy can be stored and how much power can be generated for how long. The potential energy of a mass in joule is simply m * g * h where m is in kilogram, g is 9.8 m/s^2, h is the height in metre. So, for example, 100 ton lifted 100 metre gives 98MJ. That's 1MW for 98 seconds. To make this very concrete my house uses, in the summer, about 40kW-hr per day for water heating, cooking, and the rather large amount of computer equipment we have. That is 40000 * 3600 = 144MJ. So assuming that your solar power system can supply that over a 12 hour period we need to store half of it, 72MJ, to keep us going after dark. Your ten metre deep hole would need a 734 ton weight: 735000 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 10 m = 72MJ
chipsy 12y ago
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the cost structure does work out but the complete picture can't be disclosed for competitive reasons. There are a lot of "obvious ideas" that have only come to fruition recently where the technology was already basically proven, but only entered productive use after several generations of systemic improvements made it a competitive choice. For example: LED lighting was around for several decades but only had niche application until gradual cost/quality improvements pushed it ahead of older lighting tech - and now every major city is rushing to replace all their old street lights. With the Gravitricity tech there are factors like the cost of drilling, the strength, cost and density of the materials used, and lifetime maintenance costs relative to other solutions. There's lots of room for expertise to know for sure what the issues and bottlenecks are. I'm looking through all the dismissive comments to see if any of them are pinpointing it as a scam - because this is, after all, the kind of idea that is simple enough to captivate laypeople and lift dollars out of their pockets. But judging from this kind of response, it seems like it's also the kind of idea that is simple enough to be dismissed as a "they would have done it already if it worked," rationalized via fuzzy back-of-the-envelope math. Ultimately, since I have no stake in this one, I'll just wish them luck.
deerpig 12y ago
There are a many places in the world where this approach would work and where regulation is not so onerous. Not everyone lives in the United States. And, as your comment seems to indicate, that is a good thing :)

wklauss 12y ago

A lot of bad ideas happen in between humanity's greatest inventions. When you look at the past, you are only looking to the successful stories. Maybe a lot of people with unrealistic or bad ideas would have benefited from HN.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

sskates 12y ago

Here's an interesting reference, Drew Houston showing Dropbox to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Definitely more negative comments on HN these days (although it's always been a skeptical audience).

yen223 12y ago
To be fair, there are many, many more Show HNs which wound up going nowhere.
- sskates 12y ago
  That's the hard part though, isn't it? Telling the difference between bad ideas and good ones. Even professionals at it (AKA venture capitalists) get it wrong all the time. So the questions is- knowing that you don't know whether you're looking at a bad idea or a good one, how should you behave?
  - lukifer 12y ago
    Even if it's a bad idea, I still prefer a community that encourages people to try anyway and make things for its own sake. HN culture felt much more positive and constructive when I joined a few years ago. While that ethos is still present, there's an unfortunate tendency for the snark to rise to the top.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    The responses in that Dropbox thread were pretty solid though. To all the naysayers, I mean. It's sort of a ritual format to test any new idea with the back and forth. That in and of itself isn't a problem. Real problems: Dismissive people who don't/can't/wont listen to good responses. Good founders/ideas but just really bad at communicating. Those are basically the type i and type ii errors of this format.[1] _____ [1] A grey area exists in some other areas too (some people just get 'lucky'; others for good reason can't disclose everything the key answers/insights for competitive reasons)
    - 12y ago