The benefits of a car were immediately obvious as soon as supply lines were considered. Feed for horses was something like 30% of all deliveries in a horse-based supply chain.
Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered in those early days, including electricity).
---------
Such benefits are not immediately obvious with solar/wind. In particular, USA doubles its electricity usage each day, and then it shrinks down to 50% by nightfall (which does NOT time with the sun, its slightly offset: the 5pm sun loses most of its solar-power but homes are still hot and using a ton of electricity for A/C)
As a baseload plant, solar/wind, even with storage, is a bit unreliable. That's fine, they're a cheap source of energy but you need to consider things like hurricanes: winds too fast so you need to shut off the wind plants (otherwise they'd spin too fast and damage themselves), and the cloud cover so thick you lose most of your solar power.
Since there's no storage mechanism that lasts for days (ex: hypothetical hurricane), you end up needing to build a 200MW gas turbine ("just in case"), +200MW of clean energy.
Note: this is fine. This is probably the best path forward for now. But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an area, the nuclear power plants will keep working.
EDIT: The issues come up if someone builds 200MW of solar panels / wind but fails to build any "just in case" energy sources. Which is happening. Their grids will fail when solar/wind inevitably cuts off.
"But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an area, the nuclear power plants will keep working."
Actually, they don't.
"As a precaution measure, the reactor shall be shut down at least two hours before the hurricane’s strong winds arrive at the location. Generally this happens when the speed reaches between 70 and 75 mph (between 113 and 121 km/h)." (https://www.foronuclear.org/en/nuclear-power/questions-and-a...)
Also, they need electrical power to keep the reactor cool---typically the power grid and co-located diesel generators, not necessarily the best redundant backup system.
> ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered
Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on vegetable oils without modifications (not long term though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to each other.
No, horse breeders argued the supply lines favored horses as horses could be fed by unlimited biofuels instead of limited fossil fuels. Of course, there was a difference in scale, but it’s just false to claim there weren’t major naysayers about automobiles from the horse industry.
First time I've ever heard this claim about horse naysayers. Do you have citations?
Interesting off-topic: according to Vaclav Smil, the number of horses in the USA peaked in the 1930s. In Europe, later still. David Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old talks about horses as well, among other "outdated" technologies.
People thought fossil fuels were a finite resource back then?
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if someone thought that, but given the frequency with which oil was being discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have assumed it to be effectively unlimited.
Even in the late 1800s when cars were just starting to be used, the ultimate scarcity of fossil fuels (including coal) was explored by Jules Verne who suggested hydrogen as a successor fuel in The Mysterious Island. And local scarcity of fossil fuels was acknowledged since everyone knew that oil wells started reducing output after a few years.
Nikola Tesla spoke glowingly about how we don’t need coal, oil, or gas if we just harness the energy around us (what he meant here was quackery, unfortunately, but wind and solar accomplish very much the same thing). People understood from the beginning that coal, oil, and gas are finite.
IIRC, people did think we were going to run out of coal back then. A minority, but yes, I do recall some quotes from the 1800s about the exponential growth of coal usage and that people were using too much coal.
But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all, the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the animal-based predecessor to trains)
Think of it like water flowing down a hill. The heat is in your room because it flowed down to a cooler space with less energy, just like the water flowed down to a space with less potential energy. Moving that heat back to a higher energy area, back outside, is the same as pumping the water back up a hill. It always takes more than one unit of energy to move one unit of energy back “up”. You can only capture energy if it’s moving “down”.
You might enjoy a physics course, especially if you enjoy calculus, although an entry level course won’t require it.
Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE, geothermal, or whatever
When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down, either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air contracts, pulling the stuff down).
The sterling engine is the best general purpose demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for $20 to $100 or so.
ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from nuclear, coal, or other sources)
----------
Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate".
Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air outside the house). This cools down the air inside your A/C unit.
Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have modern A/C units.
> It seems like you’re removing energy from the air.
You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy, its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work generates heat)
We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy. Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the same temperature.
We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really, really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam engines / heat engines.
The 1000 miles road starts with a first step, and it's not like we can't pursue several approaches at once. People like grandparent poster suggest us drop everything and concentrate on the idea he likes best. That is a very bad and harmful idea.
No one is saying we shouldn't invest in exploring fusion. But we shouldn't sit on our hands on the interim. We need to invest heavily in the best alternative resource available right now till such time as fusion is a viable alternative to solar.
Keep in mind horses and cars co-existed as mainstream transportation choices right up till the end of world war 2.
> No one is saying we shouldn't invest in exploring fusion.
Actually, jhallenworld's comment was saying exactly this: "We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait".
That's what prompted my response about horses in the first place. Analogy is apt, because first engines were wildly inefficient compared to horses, yet, if people back then would never pursue them, we would never have eventual progress. So no, while we should invest in storage, fusion CAN NOT wait.
Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial progress with the latest development from NIF as well as SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior superconducting technology
With NIF’s latest result, we’re no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks together, now we got a flame.
That’s a substantial, qualitative change in the state of the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens of times per second and make steam from it, while using efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium jacket.
NIF's target cost millions of dollars to make. It produced 1.3MJ of energy, which is (generously) worth about a penny.
SPARC/ARC would enable a tokamak at a smaller scale (and self-sustaining from bootstrap current, most likely) but ITER is so far out of the running that something can be much better than it and still not be practical. ITER's gross fusion power density is 400x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel; ARC would only be 40x worse.
Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are completed. That's when we'll have an idea of the real world viability, including how to scale and deal with production concerns.
No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten years until after it has been demonstrated to actually work in a production environment.
The first commercial production system will be an alpha build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after those are completed that there's enough information to make commercial plans.
As of now, this system the GP is talking about hasn't even been built yet and won't be operational until at least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are numerous more steps after this design phase before we get to commercial application.
Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.
I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved before these are ready for prime time. And these problems will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit around and talk about how this will be ready to go in 10 years, then who is going to want to fund it into year 11?
Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. And there are many, many political opponents to science in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any good.
The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net positive energy for short periods of time, and that there is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. The viability of commercial application has yet to be demonstrated and may never happen.
Its power density will only be 40 times worse than a fission reactor, and made with steel operating at much closer to its strength limit (safety factor of 1.5 for the ARC design, I think, vs. at least 3.5 for steel pressure vessels in the ASME code). There is no way this will be cheaper than fission power plants, and they are already not competitive.
Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..
I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming horses.
I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.
Well, it kind of depends on what you define as teh first steam engines. Are you including like novelty stuff used for entertainment like magic shows and fountains? Or are we starting with the first steam engine used to do real mechanical work? The Newcomen engine came out in around 1712, but it's initial purpose as a water pump for mines wasn't really in direct competition to horse powered pumps. While they could be used to generate power for factories, that was an uncommon use case because they gradually lost power output over time.
The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100 years.
But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an ICE.
Long term projects often have the problem they are solving disappear out from under them. They become obsolete before they're done. Freeman Dyson famously pointed this out and suggested anyone planning ahead more than five years was fooling themselves (and he meant that in science, too.)
Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.
Well, if we'd have gone down that road, plus strong environmental awareness, maybe the Earth wouldn't be warming up so badly right now, and the oceans wouldn't have islands of plastic (= oil) waste. Now, sure, we wouldn't have enjoyed some of the benefits of car technology, but - public transport (esp. trains) makes up for a lot of that. OTOH, public transport pollutes too.
Had we gone down this road, we'd have a thick layer of manure covering everything. Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form agriculture. Had we used faster horses, that volume of emissions would be effectively doubled or tripled.
>Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form agriculture.
CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the plant when it grows.
And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come from using oil, a major component of that being from tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a horse-only world).
