Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green
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Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green
Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green
The caterers for the volunteer workforce behind the summer’s MCH hacker camp in the Netherlands served all-vegan food. This wasn’t the bean sprouts and lentils that maybe some of the more meat-eating readers might imagine when confronted with vegan food, nor was it a half-as-good array of substitutes with leathery soy hamburgers and rubbery fake cheese smelling suspiciously of feet.
Instead it was a well-crafted, interesting, and tasty menu that was something to look forward to after several hours driving a vanload of handwashing sinks. It was in one of their meals that I found food for thought when driving a week later past the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine on my way through Germany to Luxembourg’s Haxogreen as part of my European hacker camp summer tour.
The meal was deep-fried soy protein strips and the mine is probably one of Western Europe’s dirtiest and most problematic CO2 sources in a country that likes to imagine itself as environmentally friendly, so where in this unlikely connection did I find a pairing?
Finding The Point Of It All With The Aid Of A Vegan Breakfast
Looking into the gigantic pit at Garzweiler, while the earth grapples with environmental difficulties all around, it’s easy to pack up and go home. After all where’s the point in saving a few tons of CO2 when the German power industry is belching the stuff away like it’s 1972? But we’re hardware hackers, and we spend out time idly thinking of solutions rather than glumly accepting the futility of trying.
Which brings me back to that meal. Deep-fried soy protein strips don’t sound very appetising, but if I told you they’d given it just the right combination of fattiness, salt, and crispiness to make the perfect bacon replacement then maybe you’d at least understand why it made an impression.
Have you ever tried vegan fake bacon? It’s underwhelming, to say the least. Pink rubber strips with a suspiciously uniform consistency and a vaguely baconish flavour, they’re an expensive way to remind you of what you’re missing. Meanwhile the MCH caterers had nailed what makes bacon so bacony, by not trying to make bacon at all and devlivering something that very explicitly wasn’t being represented as bacon. On my MCH breakfast plate I had the perfect metaphor for how to approach green projects as a hacker, even if it took me a week to understand it.
Whether it’s fair or not, it’s safe to say there’s a long-held perception among consumers that the eco-version of a product is never going to be as good as the real thing. LED light bulbs and cyclonic vacuum cleaners may be triumphs of 21st century technology, but as anyone who has used some of the cheaper organic-solvent-free paints will tell you, sometimes eco-freindly substitutes are a mediocre substitute.
The lesson that came to me as the autobahn wound its way for miles round that huge hole in the ground was this: that just as with so many commercial attempts at plant-based food we are doomed to make a poor substitute if our solutions only seek to replicate what went before. Instead as hardware hackers, when faced with an environmental challenge we should seek to subvert what went before rather than simply make a bad job of copying it.
Ask Why, Don’t Simply Go Along With It
It’s easy to say that as a call to action, but how about an example? Oddly, while the LED light was cited as a triumph of an eco-friendly product, it serves to highlight a perfect case of clinging to an older technology. While an LED is a low voltage device, the LED lights most of us use are high voltage devices designed to replicate a filament lamp invented powered by a high-voltage AC mains supply, both of which were 19th-century inventions.
As a result our LED lights have a bunch of electronics to bring the mains voltage down to LED voltage, all of which serves only to waste power and to shorten the lifetime of the device. Why do we still use 19th century power distribution within our houses to run low voltage equipment? Finding an alternative that wastes less energy is what I’d call subverting what went before, rather than simply adapting the new to be compatible.
Driving past Garzweiler made a deep impression on me, one that persists more than a month later. I come from a place where lignite wasn’t mined and which has mostly shut its coal-fired power stations, so to be brought face to face with something which should by rights have ended decades ago was a shock. My voice is not enough to see it closed, but as an engineer I can turn my mind to ways to make its energy unnecessary. I hope you can too.
Garzweiler panorama: Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0.
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111 thoughts on “Engineers: Be Subversive To Be Green”
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Michael Black says:
In 1981, I had a vegetarian hotdog that came in a can. It seemed a little too real. But I stopped eating meat 2 years before.
It took about ten years before I tried such things, not because I.missed them, but a burger or dog in a bun has its own appeal.
But back then, it wasn’t mostly about meat substitutes. I couldn’t stand meat,gave it up as soon as I felt I had the power.
We ate our beans and rice, tried tofu, tempeh and seitan. Ate nuts, which pu on pounds but are a good source of protein
It’s more recently, as people feel an obligation to give up meat, that there’s a lot more meat substitutes. So they can move without giving up”meat”
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harry0987654321123456789 says:
We need to focus mroe on the big emissions sources, not on tinkering round the edges with minimal quantities of CO2 caused by lifestyle choices. Lignite should NOT still be burnt in Germany (they should have been sensible and not panicked after Fukushima, afterall you don’t get tsunamis in central Europe), and as they show n sign of fixing that we’ll open declare we have no desire for vegan virture-signal foods when the environmental impact of chicken and pork are negligible compared to the harms that all manner of countries are perpetrating by using fossil fuels for their powergrids. A capitalist knows to focus on the big gains, so replacing fossil fuel powerplants with nuclear and renewables, getting hydrogen infrastructure to replace petrol pumps and getting steel and concrete manufactured in ways which don’t pump out vast quantities of CO2 byproducts from their reactionsmust be the priority. Lifestyle change based “CO2 savings” are diminishing returns of insignficant value but massive cost to quality of life.
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Comedicles says:
All you have to do is make it attractive in the market place – without government subsidies and penalties which signal to everyone that your project is fraudulent or unworthy.
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luqtas says:
veganism is about animal welfare;
we can produce meat being sustainable..!-
Hello There says:
Not for the entire population, we can’t.
So who goes without..?-
Foldi-One says:
Not really true, in many nations you can’t actually come close to providing the nutritional requirements for a vegan diet, as humans are just not able to eat or good at processing all the plants, and the plants that do grow there don’t have x/y/z. Where a diet containing sufficient meat is substantially easier – your livestock can forage and eat in all the places crops can’t be grown and harvested quite happily.
What clearly can’t be supported is the USA style 90tons of cow and cheese in every meal type meat diet for the whole population. (No its not only a US problem, I expect I too eat too much of it)
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Maxzillian says:
So this brings up an interesting thought exercise. I have a product I’m writing code for that controls the pressure of a hydraulic cylinder. Nominally it’s just controlling a proportional relief valve that sets the pressure the cylinder operates at. Thanks to some other valves in the system it is possible to operate the cylinder in more of a bang-bang operation where the proportional relief is used to raise or lower the pressure in the cylinder and then another valve deactivates to trap that pressure for the majority of time.
The downside to a method like this is cylinder pressure may not be able to adjust near as often or maintain a desired setpoint as well, but it would save a little waste in the form of hydraulic oil heating as there is a constant displacement pump in the system that will always be moving oil no matter what the cylinder pressure. So if it spends 90% of the time at an idle pressure of 100-200 psi and 10% of the time around 800-1200 psi there is some energy loss that can be mitigated.
On an individual machine basis this is saving, at best, a couple horsepower on a machine that is usually operating in the low 100s. For an individual customer it’s completely inconsequential in terms of savings.
Over several thousand machines retailed this does add up to some fair fuel savings on a global scale. Is it worth the code complexity and potential loss in core performance? From a business case sense the answer is a resounding no, but in an ethical sense it’s subject to opinion.
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HaHa says:
Frequency drive powered motors driving hydraulic pumps are _old_ technology now.
Pressure on demand is economic (power saved covers the extra cost).
Maybe marginal at piddling power levels.
Only a couple of HP shouldn’t even require hydraulics though, in that case servos (broadly defined) are economic.
They’ve had all electric small injection molding machines for at least a decade now. Good ones, all brands.-
MensaDropout says:
Variable Frequency Drives may not be as efficient as one might think. The energy consumed to drive the SCR’s can be an additional 10% of the energy consumed by the motor.
Looking at the system’s duty cycle is important.
Conversely, there are the wear and tear issues of running a system at 100% even with a bypass.
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Maxzillian says:
This is on mobile equipment so such luxuries are not offered. The most efficient option would be to use a pressure compensated pump, but the monetary cost is too high. On the same vein, a servo or linear actuator is too expensive and insufficient force for anything off the shelf (~5000 lbf). Not to mention we’re talking about 250 watts of available electrical power at the most.
Long story short, hands are tied as to the parts being used.
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TG says:
A lot of people wouldn’t know a subversive idea if it slapped them in the face.
The industrial world is running low enough on a few bottleneck resources that it’s starting to affect future projections. The people in charge of knowing this know this, and they’re trying to manage a controlled glide into pre-modern living conditions for most people who have become accustomed to much more than their ancestors have had. Trying to finesse a way to let hundreds of millions of people down without it coming back to them and literally losing their heads. People in charge must do this, or they will not survive.
What we’re seeing is austerity marketing. Trying to make the austerity empowering, heroic. No, believe it or not, the mega-industrialists did not suddenly change their mind and decide that they wanted to save the world instead of bending it over and having their way with it. Keep in mind that for every action, there is a good reason and then there is the real reason.
Oh, and giant mega-farms of hyper-genegineered soy and rapeseed and such combined with factories processing it into peasant sludge are NOT more eco-friendly than small-scale diverse hybrid farming and animal husbandry. It simply makes them more money, and it gets rid of kulak competitors at the same time. That’s why they want it. They do not want to protect your environment. They do not like you. Quite the opposite.
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cmholm says:
As a recent NYT article points out, the challenge is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. Yeah, the article’s thumbnail photo isn’t ideal. Uruguayans don’t get around by horse, except on a ranch.
Carbon footprint per person:
25 tons, US. It’s a figure that eclipses the global median by a factor of five
20 tons, Canada & Australia
15 tons, D, NO, NL (Fossil fuel electricity)
9 tons, DK, F, UK (nukes)
~4.5 tons, global median
2 tons, India, the Philippines (poor ass)
~0 tons, AF, CAF (destitute)
2 tons per median person is the goal to hold temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.
US carbon output
25% electric generation, decarbonize
27% transportation sector, electrify
24% industrial production, regulate
24% household, smaller cuts, replacing gas heat with electric heat pumps, building efficiencies and banning hydrofluorocarbons.
By 2050, these steps might reduce our emissions to 12.5 tons, so we’ve got to figure out how to do better.
What’s a current model we can look towards?
4.5 tons, UY, sits at about the global median per person, while maintaining a global middle class lifestyle for more than half the population. A major part of that was a move from petroleum-based to renewable power, a critical move for them even without climate change, given the problems that commodity-based economies have dealing with the prices for their stuff vs. the cost of running on fossil fueled power plants.-
cmholm says:
Crap, didn’t copy the NYT url: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/magazine/uruguay-renewable-energy.html
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Comedicles says:
2050 is a ludicrous goal. It is an 80 year project. And to really work it needs to be market driven, not regulated. If anything ever showed why the market is better it is the current behavior of States with leadership that don’t give a damn about any of it.
The ultimate unpredictability of climate science is the human factor. There are no equations or models for that.
At this time I conclude that “subversive” engineering is more likely to cause loss of trust. Engineers need to be looking for things that are better in cost/productivity/usefulness that carbon releasing tech. And it truly needs to be better without subsidies and regulations else it fails when and where the rule of law fails.
Maybe some portion of the community should work on low carbon ways to build Moroccan style housing in Scandinavian, Siberia, and Northern Canada? Because controlling the climate isn’t going to work.
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cmholm says:
Based on the climate effects we’ve seen thus far, 80 years ain’t gonna cut it. The heat engine is going to do what it’s going to do based on inputs. If we can make meaningful reductions in our share of the inputs, the climate effects are going to suck, but we’ll live with in. If we can’t, it’s really going to suck, and major changes are going to get forced on humanity no matter what the politics or market effects. As an Aussie Mother Nature might say: FIOFO.
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Twisty Plastic says:
What market force drives a company to produce less CO2? Executives live and die by short term profits. Why should there be no subsidies on green energy when there are already billions of dollars in subsidies going to oil? And how do you think pollution can ever be kept under control without regulation? Here in the US, before regulation we had rivers so polluted they caught fire and Lake Erie, the 13th largest lake on Earth by surface area was considered to be dead. Have you heard the saying about what happens when one doesn’t learn from history?
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Winston says:
“a recent NYT article points out, the challenge is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living”
Yeah, that will be a problem…
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/global-energy-substitution.png
and while the West puts itself at a competitive disadvantage by “going green” with more expensive energy while becoming more dependent on “green” products from China:
https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/07/IMG_4607.jpeg
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cmholm says:
China isn’t going to be in a position to “stay competitive” if they don’t get with the program, so this argument is moot.
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evad says:
Firstly, LEDs are not a high or low voltage powered device. They are a current controlled device with a forward voltage required for significant current to flow through them.
Secondly, there is no big push for new nuclear plants in the US. There is a push to ban non-electric powered heat sources, hot water sources and vehicles.
My conclusion from that is in the future, the peasants wont be buying the now expensive conveniences we have. Those conveniences will be for the rich and well connected. The peasants will get to dial up an uber when travel is needed or use public transportation. The peasants will not be in control of their thermostats, washing machines, ovens, etc. You will own nothing — and be happy — or else.
The energy demand is being driven towards a supply (electricity) that is not being increased accordingly. The outcome is predictable.
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tinkermore says:
“More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.”
https://ourworldindata.org/soyTransitioning from eating animals to healthy plant based eating can massively reduce the land and energy used for soy and similar crops, make food production more small scale, rewild huge areas of land and forest and still provice an abundance of nutritious food for everyone. Win-win-win-win.
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Anonymous says:
The image is from the Kenari mining planet
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HaHa says:
Were the volunteers warned ahead of time?
If so, fine, you do you.
If not, they should walk (drive off in blown American big block V8 powered land yachts, roosting gravel on the hippies).Herbivores are as bad a Mormons about preaching.
Also. Author should at least understand the first thing about electric power before talking about low voltage power distribution and efficiency. Clearly no clue. Expected from the greenies, but not from HackaDay.
The author is an Engineer? What kind? Shenanigans! Job title or education?
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TG says:
Yeah I was about to say… Have fun building a 5VDC power grid. But I assume they meant having a central, efficient converter on premises stepping down the grid and distributing it instead of a separate converter inside every bulb, which would make a bit more sense but would require so many resources to retrofit everything that it might never pay off.
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pwm says:
Just that small and efficient DC/DC are now very affordable. So that centralised and efficient converter would still be less efficient because we don’t want to step up the cable thickness (consuming valuable copper) to avoid cable losses.
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JohnU says:
The addition of a 2nd set of wiring in homes, and the losses even over those relatively short distances, would likely make that worse than just using existing good quality mains-powered LED bulbs.
Perhaps pick something like existing GU10 / MR16 bulb fittings that run from 12v and where a decent and long-lived power supply can be part of the fitting or installation… but even then, is that any better than a reasonable quality LED bulb + its small pack of electronics?
Big Clive has the right idea, opening bulbs & snipping current-setting resistors to drop the wattage but massively extend lifespan.
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Pineapple says:
Exactly.
There is a reason for high voltage transmission: V=IR
Until we can run superconductor wires.
Or microwave.-
That kid says:
Giant recharge coil under the entire home,Send power wireless?
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HaHa says:
Maxwell’s equations. They’re the law.
Sounds like you own power company stock.
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Qigley says:
Nikola Tesla. Pointed out how inefficient Edison’s low voltage DC was.
Wanted to develop wireless electricity transmission. Small problem with billing though now we have computers?
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HaHa says:
Tesla’s wireless power transmission _didn’t_work_ because Maxwell’s equations. Ionosphere conductor just didn’t work at all, RF was inverse squared law borked.
Hate to pop your bubble.
Did you even pass e-fields/antenna design? You should have gotten enough to understand issue in physics, freshman year.
Sometimes you’re Dunning, sometimes you’re Kruger. You shouldn’t comment about this subject, you are ‘flat earther’.
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LordNothing says:
hack-a-day is becoming too “woke” for my tastes. were supposed to be coming up with our own solutions to problems. to think for ourselves rather than parrot the solutions that conform to the party line. that’s supposed to be the core philosophy of the hacker/maker community.
it also amuses me how everyone flocks to these international conferences, burning all kinds of resources on travel, then pat themselves on the back for eating a vegan meal that nobody on a budget could afford. if you really cared about the environment, you would have used video conferencing.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
“hack-a-day is becoming too “woke” for my tastes.”
counterpoint: Under Elliot’s helm it has allowed some comments that would have been
deleted previously.-
HaHa says:
They might have just increased the frequency of the scheduled reindexs.
MySQL being a steaming pile…Schrodinger’s comments.
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Jenny List says:
I cycled into MCH on my electric bicycle, having taken an electric train, a ferry, and another electric train.
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Jenny List says:
How to say you’ve never been to a European hacker camp without saying you’ve never been to a European hacker camp.
I’ve written about low voltage DC power here in the past. Yes it’s no good for long distance distribution. In your house though, it could have a place.
Jenny List, b.Eng, 1993
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Jan Praegert says:
Some Germans ideas are beyond crazy.
We (not me) build the prototype pebble-bed reactor “AVR reactor” (Pebble-bed reactors seem to have a strange cult like follower fan base.) [1] It failed. Big. REALLY BIG. Currently estimates are that alone tearing it down will cost more than 1.000.000.000 €. And we build another one. Guess what, failed even bigger.
So, now for the crazy: the energy delivered by the AVR should be used for coal gasification [2]. Because, well, North Rhine-Westphalia was the King of bituminous coal industry in Germany. In 1969 (AVR went hot that year) the decline of the coal industry was expected, exploitation going heavily down and totally folded in 2018. But gasification! Bright future for NRW!
So we (not me) had an earth killing industry (coal) and tried to invented a not working new earth killing industry (PBR) to make the other industry survive. Crazy.
Anyone knows how much it would cost to build and run a solar panel plant? Just a single factory constantly producing panels from sand and aluminium (etc etc) day in, day out? Just for fun, anyone has numbers?
(AVR history is a good read. As usual with nuclear stuff in Germany it is full with lying scumbag industry leaders, mishandling nuclear waste and losing all control over costs.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification-
Rumble_in_the_Jungle says:
This is exact scenario I would play, if I would be a mole form e.g. russland. And I’m sure you got them a lot.
BTW, where is Gerhard Schröder now?
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Foldi-One says:
I agree with the thought, though when considering DC home electronics it is not so easy to move away from standards built into existing structures (especially the older ones that were never designed with services and upgrades in mind), and I’m not sure we should in general anyway.
Your computer might be a DC device, but it draws maybe 4KW if its high end and/or loaded with storage, you can’t sanely transmit enough power to deal with that sort of draw in the normal DC voltage ranges as a “ring main” replacement – you start getting into need separate dedicated cable runs and breakers for any high draw device or cables that are so stupidly thick you can’t afford them… Lighting as a separate circuit could be done sanely I think, the existing standards for AC lighting wiring is probably sufficiently overspec for a direct conversion into a DC LED light circuit, with how low watter LED bulbs are, so transitions couldn’t be simpler, just buy the right bulbs and fit that one giant transformer engineered to last ‘forever’ per circuit near the existing breaker.
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TG says:
If you think copper is getting scarce and expensive now, just wait until every structure on earth has to be wired to handle the amperage of everything running on low voltage DC while keeping up with the wattage of the larger appliances. Or else two separate circuits, one high AC and the other low DC.
The Achilles heel of the green movement is a chronic and habitual failure to think things through to conclusion. Solar panels don’t last and contain a bunch of ultra-rare materials. Wind power also doesn’t last and causes all kinds of unintended consequences. The upkeep costs must be figured in. There’s not enough resources to EVER build the batteries required for most of the all-electric ecosystem. They don’t care. They’re making heaps of money off of status signaling and NGO political patronage, and the concern for the environment is only a veneer. A PR stunt. The cynicism is disgusting. At least a lot more people are starting to figure out the con game behind faux-“environmentalism” and maybe soon we’ll be able to pursue nature conservationalism for real.
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Foldi-One says:
I mostly agree,
However solar I would argue with you over, as it really doesn’t (have to) contain anything meaningfully rare at all and the endurance of a panel is huge, even panels from the earliest days when degradation was bad still work badly today if they avoided mechanical damage several decades later, and modern panels are likely to functionally outlast the humans that fit them degrading so slowly that you are not going to really notice the degredation in decades, as its so low the degradation is entirely lost in the noise caused by how clean the panel surface is and the general variability of sun intensity at the ground in the real world. It will only really show up in the lab in the shorter term.Wind is much more dubious, but right now it does seem way more than worthwhile, as something has to be done about greenhouse gas emissions, and while other avenues also have to be pursued wind is available and cheap.
Who ever said anything about an all-electric needing batteries, and even if you insist a more electric future does need vast electrical energy storage there are so very many battery techs that need wildly different resources that it is not implausible.
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Leithoa says:
‘Rare earth elements’ aren’t actually that rare. There’s some thing like 123 MT of REEs. That’s a lot of PV arrays & cell phones.
You talk about things not lasting but pretend that the same can’t be said about any power plant. Renewables also don’t pollute while generating power. Yes they have end of life problems but so does coal ash and diesel exhaust.
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Julian Skidmore says:
“The Achilles heel of the green movement is a chronic and habitual failure to think things through to conclusion”
We’re at least thinking it through better than fossil fuel industry proponents whose still overwhelming dominance of the energy industry is driving the world into collapse. We have a choice, either we decarbonise as fast as we can, and it’s a major challenge, or we don’t and we have no future worth speaking of.
That’s the real conclusion,
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Foldi-One says:
The extreme ‘greens’ are entirely nutter –
Greens: ‘oh we need to decarbonise’
Gov/Industry: ‘Sure, lets build more nuclear, it’s reliable, green, and affordable while we work on making things more efficient’
Greens: ‘NOOO we can’t have that, nuclear is evil… rabid chants, shut them down etc’
Gov: ‘OK fine, we will shut the existing nukes down decades early… Well I guess we shall have to re-open more dirty coal plant and ramp up the strip mining of filthy brown coal then, as you won’t go back to 10th century living and can’t afford other powersource.’
Or the gluing yourself to trains, by far the most green method of moving people and goods around, forcing everyone traveling to suddenly have to go by the least green methods possible, likely ‘driving’ (read sitting in a massive impromptu traffic jam for hours) a 2 ton box around with just them in it…
The actually viable choices for progress towards a more ecologically sound future are almost never what the rabid and vocal greenies of the ‘green movement’ want… They somehow want to be able to wear and eat cheap imported good so they never have to see the industrial buildings, drive to their protests, have lots of reliable heat and electric in their homes without power stations – in short consume rather a large amount of resources on demand all while demanding changes that means somehow getting everyone to live in a lower tech way than they themselves will choose!
Which is one of things that made Greta such a great person to happen to gain the media spotlight… When invited to events across the world, and at pretty short notice so the expectation has to be they would fly, they instead found a sailing boat – actually living at least in part the lifestyle changes they preach rather than being nothing but loud mouthed hypocrites, who by their own actions frequently make the world directly LESS green. The ‘Green movement’ needs more figureheads like that, and a rational agenda that will actually make progress. But too many times when ‘greens’ have got what they demand, because its a stupid demand that will never actually work big picture things get directly worse for it…
There are not all that many fossil fuel proponents let really – but when the opposition is so often disappointingly demonstrably disconnected from reality it doesn’t take many, and folks that would like to be greener have nobody speaking any sense to vote for/ seek guidance from…
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HaHa says:
The crewmember who’s bunk she took flew to meet the boat where she got off.
All just a show. She’s never missed a meal.
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Foldi-One says:
As I understand it there were no crew members expected on that tiny little boat – it was certainly small enough to sail single handedly, as folks do…
And even if it was just some theater, its still a far better demonstration than most ‘greens’ that get media attention, rather proving you don’t have to fly and burn fossil fuels to get across the ocean, even at short notice. Inspirational activity showing something is possible, over purely hypocritical making of noise and poorly thought out demands and protests.
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Electrician says:
I mean, 6W AC LED vs 80W Filament… I think we are still doing it right without new electrical circuits
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NiHaoMike says:
“Your computer might be a DC device, but it draws maybe 4KW if its high end and/or loaded with storage”
How to say you have a mining rig with a dozen GPUs without directly saying you have a mining rig with a dozen GPUs…-
Foldi-One says:
I did say maybe and go high end – as your house infrastructure has to be built to handle a reasonable worst case, not the 500w average draw. And no none of my PC are that high, my now dead workstation was the worst offender I’ve ever owned and it tapped out just over 1KW. Also these days that would be a tiny rig with perhaps 6 GPU, as they are such power hogs…
But seriously just have a pretty normal mid-high end gaming rig the CPU and GPU alone are likely getting up towards 650W in hard use, if you go in for the most modern Intel and Nvidia at the high end certainly even more as the GPU alone can get up to 600 something Watt! Add in monitor, sound system, the massive active cooling requirements etc – all the stuff needed to make it a usable machine and you can easily get to 1KW just for a fairly common basically normal gaming computer.
Now if its also or actually your home server/streaming rig/workstation/render farm…
Then its going to be loaded with storage space, probably got DAS stacked up with drives, so likely an extra disk controller or two, perhaps some extra sound and network cards, perhaps some extra GPU, and certainly lots of extra memory (over what gamer actually need anyway) as well. Every HDD adds quite a bit, especially if its a high performance one, and while SSD can be lower draw the high performance ones of those are not lightweight either, and have so much lower capacity you will end up needing more of them!All that can easily ramp you up massively while still being a pretty normal end ‘pro’ computer…
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markogts says:
This is the kind of reasoning that leads people to buy oversized SUVs and then use it for school runs. We have a great standard for DC delivery, it’s called USB C. Everything from smartphones to laptops to LED lights and even TV sets can be powered with it. You want to game with 1 kW of graphic cards? Fine, switch to the AC plug. But for the average Joe, a USB home harness in parallel to the 120-240V AC isn’t rocket science. Also, last time I checked, a 120W appliance at 12V required the same copper as a 1.2 kW at 120V…
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Foldi-One says:
Not really – your house infrastructure lasts after you move, and is usually forced upon you by the regulatory agencies, who have to define a standard that actually is safe and functional for MOST people, including some headroom for potential future requirements. Your personal vehicle needs be nothing more than your actually needs, as no external legal reasoning forces you to have a big V8 and 10 ton metal box on stilts, that is entirely your choice, made from within the vast scope of stuff legal on the roads.
Also a USB home harness would be a nightmare – you can’t have a single very efficient, over engineered to last transformer as the outputs are varied, there are what 3? 4? different power delivery negotiation standards already, and likely more will turn up in the end, so every output needs smarts that will continually have some power draw, and have to be updatable smarts so it can continue to be useful in the future – its just way to complex and will be wasteful to integrate such a thing into a building.
Where having some regular 19, 12, 24, maybe 48V * as a mandatory DC house standard as a barrel plug socket is perhaps plausible. Letting your electronics have nothing but perhaps the cheap and relatively efficient and simple buck/boost to get what they actually need. The transmission losses around a house are going to be somewhat meaningful, but the saving from having but one super long lasting and efficient transformer for the house rather than lots of tiny and likely not that efficient ones built into the devices may make it worthwhile on overall power efficiency, with the added bonus of less resource use.
*pick ONE – and I’d suggest 19 or 48V as one is so ubiquitous already as a powersupply output for electronics and the other is about as high as I’d consider sane to run, which allows for smaller diameter cables in the wall.
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Reluctant Cannibal says:
I’ve been a subversive all my life and would not have it any other way. In my last job I stood up for fellow workers and uncovered a massive multi-million pound fraud the company were doing on worker’s wages. It went to the Houses of Parliament and the company was forced to spend 20 Million £ on weights and measures machinery. Right now I’ve joined a new group of subversives acting against a bunch of pretend subversives – a prominent UK trade union. I love vegan food, but have always wondered if it is ethical to eat vegans?
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Loxmyth says:
The problem is, most vegetarian diets get much of their protein from legumes or nuts. There are people allergic to either, and I know one individual who is allergic to a substance that can be found in many of both. (The dieticians are nodding their heads at this point, saying “ah yes, that one “) There are vegetarian diets that would work for her — soybeans are safe, and almonds appear to be, and she can tolerate “cooked with” traces of things, and _proper_ refried beans have been processed enough to denature whatever it is — but it certainly isn’t as simple as “gimme a veggie burger”.
Or “gimme a burger”; fewer people are allergic to meats. Though I know one person who had to give up her plan to be a large animal vet because she turned out to be allergic to cows.
This doesn’t mean a green diet is impossible; it just means it’s a bit harder to do group cookery unless you know what sensitivities are in this crowd and/or plan enough alternatives.
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HaHa says:
Proper refried beans contain lard. Delicious nutritious lard.
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TG says:
Covering large swathes of the Earth in monocrops drenched in glyphosate and eradicating all plant biodiversity for millions of hectacres is “””green””” but it’s not good for the environment. You’d think we would have learned this lesson during the dust bowl. We took vast plains made fertile by roaming buffalo, got rid of the buffalo, then drained every bit of that richness from the soil in a couple generations. And no, the combined farts of a continent-wide herd of buffalo did not cause mass extinctions.
The people advertising this to you are liars. They just want to monopolize the core market of feeding people and muscle out independent techniques which have survived in harmony with nature for hundreds of thousands of years. And yes they will employ and bribe shameless scientists to re-write history and convince people of things which are so obviously wrong that you have to give up all curiosity to accept their framing.
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Comedicles says:
The Dust Bowl was a catastrophic drought combined with “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and the farming methods of the time with repeated plowing and discing between crops and many who did not know about contour plowing (as opposed to the “no-till” techniques today). The government encouragement to go West and be a farmer did not help.
I wonder if there will be a “Environmentalist’s Folly” some day? See “Plowman’s Folly” https://www.amazon.com/Plowmans-Folly-Edward-H-Faulkner/dp/0806111690
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HaHa says:
Also trees/pot on fence lines wasn’t yet practiced (windbreaks).
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tinkermore says:
That’s a manageable and shrinking problem. In addition to legumes there’s now plant based proteins using wheat (seitan), quinoa, oats, lupin, rapeseed, hemp, mushrooms/mycelium – the list goes on. If everyone not allergic to all of those made the switch the positive effects would be huge and those with allergies could continue eating what they ate before until new plat based foods are invented or cultured meat hits the shelves.
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Jenny List says:
I’m no veggie, I just happened to enjoy the Mecklenburger’s veggie breakfast.
I grew up on a small farm. I like meat, but I also recognise that it’s a poor way yo make food out of land.
We have to eat less of the stuff if we’re to make the best of our food production, simple as that. Personally I expect to find insect protein products at Tesco within the next decade.
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Al says:
You make an excellent point; I fear some commentors have got stuck in the detail, but I think even they would concede that the best subversion is one where the potential opposition never realises they were potential opposition, nor realises that you see a different paradigm, nor really thinks they have been diverted in their course at all.
May I suggest leaving the existing light circuits in your house (as backup, perhaps with little switches hidden on the panel) and using PoE to the light socket +- the lightswitch as you find neccessary? Maybe in 50 years we’ll all be doing it!
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Joshua says:
Yes, Light bulbs weren’t really efficient, maybe.
But they weren’t harmful to the environment, either.
The materials they did consist of, glass and metal, were not poisonous waste.They didn’t cause RFI/TVI, either. Their electromagnetic compatibility was good. They caused no harm to the radio spectrum. And they did could survive an EMP.
Incandescent lamps were also useful for other things than producing light or heat.
They could be used as fuses (the Yaesu FT-101 has one in the receiver line), could act as a controller in charging rechargeable batteries, could be used as a field strength meter in the radio field (tuning an oscillator; antenna matching).All in all, the incandescent lamp was truly ingenious, most likely because of its humble design and versatility.
Unlike energy-savings lamps and LED bulbs.
Incandescent lamps also did not require any power supply. And they did work with both AC and DC.And their light spectrum was clean, natural. Like fire or sun light. They didn’t harm animals, insects.
That’s something the energy-savings bulbs did and the LED bulbs still do.:
The former was smelly and creating a total unnatural type of light, with ugly spikes in the spectrum. It caused depressions, too.
My family called these bulbs “grave light”, because of their moody light.The latter, the LED bulb, has a strong blue emission that’s filtered, more or less.
Blue light can damage eye-sight on the long run, according to current discussions.
And it again is attracting or confusing insects of the night.In principle, there are (still) other alternatives, like Halogen based incandescent lamps.
But they’re being phased out, too. Because of the LED lamps.What we, as a society, do is avoiding or delaying the finding for a solution to our energy problem.
Instead of fixing the power sources and continue to use and improve environmental friendly incandescent lamps,
we’re trying to reduce/limit power consumption and use poisonous lamps instead. Is that really a good tradeoff?-
echodelta says:
LED lighting is available in a wide range of colors from daylight on planet earth as seen on its surface to dungeon torch yellow. Bring back unmantled gas light? Shield all outdoor lighting from the sky. Planet’s side is away from the sun, it’s natural for night. From 5% to 50% efficiency in lighting in such a short time, an order of magnitude! WOW! I doubt wolfram mining is clean, smelting worse. Oh and those bulbs burn out rather fast don’t they. How many…does it take to…
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Joshua says:
“LED lighting is available in a wide range of colors [..]”
I don’t think so. Modern LEDs use a rensonator crystal to create a desired frequency. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use IR or UV light by now.
However, the blueish wavelength must be filtered out, still. The ordinary E27 socket LED bulbs we can buy in shops don’t create purely white light. It’s white-blue, the frosted glass is used as an extra filter to further tone down the blue.. But it still reaches our eyes, even if it’s at the edge to our perception.
“I doubt wolfram mining is clean, smelting worse.”
So mercury in energy-saving lamps is fine and plastic in LED bulbs ? Hypocrite. IMHO.
“Oh and those bulbs burn out rather fast don’t they. How many…does it take to…”
No, they don’t. At least not by design. In my parents home, an OSRAM bulb lasted for over 20 years, for example.
Energy-saving lamps and LED light bulbs must be changed multiple times a year sometimes.The LED bulbs suffer from bad PSUs. They do not contain needed capacitors, to save costs.
There’s just a single diode inside that does rectifying.A slight fluctuation or power surge from a microwave oven, a heater or a vacuum is enough to cause a voltage spike that kills the LED bulb. That’s soo unnecessary. Because the still working LEDs themselves end up at the dumpster. And lastly, you can’t even use a dimmer device anymore. That’s not eco friendly, all in all.
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Reluctant Cannibal says:
A friend of mine has incandescent lamp bulb still going strong after 40 years. Seems like the more modern ones were not very well made?
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Sauce Man says:
This is an excellent point – there are numerous examples of overspec’ed devices in modern times. It used to be common to purchase incandescent bulbs rated for 130 V to ensure a long life, and such bulbs could easily last over ten years. Now, both incandescent and LED bulbs are often overdriven to increase brightness at the cost of bulb life (obvious planned obsolescence). The lifespan of many cheaper LED bulbs can be drastically improved simply by snipping or swapping out a current setting resistor in the internal PSU circuit.
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Joshua says:
If we are honest and if we are objective, then it’s clear that the incandescent lamp is superior in all disciplines to (current) modern day alternatives.
Except for the efficiency / heat dissipation issue.
But even this could be solved, if researchers would be allowed, not to say encouraged, to continue the development of modern incandescent lamps.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen soon due to the ban of traditional light bulbs.
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Well that happened says:
Caution: tin foil hat area!!!
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Dude says:
>Why do we still use 19th century power distribution within our houses to run low voltage equipment?
Because low voltage power distribution, even in-house for relatively short distances, is inefficient and requires more copper for the wires, and it’s actually more efficient and cheaper to regulate the current through a string of LEDs in series than in parallel.
>The meal was deep-fried soy protein strips
The processing of soybeans into soy protein requires so much energy and water that it’s more or less equivalent to eating chicken. Many other meat substitutes are worse, because they start with raw materials that are pitifully low in protein, such as wheat, and then waste 90% of the calories to extract the proteins – and it’s not even complete proteins that people could live on, so you need to
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Dude says:
so you need to take supplements.
The vegan diet is also dependent on diversifying your food intake to include many foodstuffs that are simply not grown locally in many places of the world, requiring costly transportation. Go to Sweden and try to survive on whatever is growing in the ground without eating any meat or fish – don’t complain about getting rickets and anemia in the middle of the winter because all you have to eat is bread and potatoes. Not even butter or cheese to have a bit of stored vitamin D and calcium. You would basically die.
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HaHa says:
Scurvy used to be common among northern Europeans every winter.
Most high protein grain meal is byproduct of fermentation. Hardly wasted calories. Best use IMHO. Russia is going to need extra Vodka over the next few years to sooth the butthurt.
Many ‘high protein’ vegetables are simply measured after drying vs low protein vegetables where the water counts. Accounting tricks.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
A few years ago (around here) there was a “100 miles” movement.
Basically, eat only plants/animals indigenous to the area (within 100 miles) before colonization.
I thought it was a nice concept, but that would definitely rule out a lot of plants here in southern Minnesota (I’m looking at you bananas!)Although rose hips could be used as a source of Vitamin C.
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Michael Black says:
There was a series about that, a small town talked into the 100 mile diet. So one couple stops being vegetarian becauee it didn’t fit the new diet.
People who jump from one diet to the next seems a bigger problem.
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Foldi-One says:
There I don’t agree, jumping from diet to diet shouldn’t be any more a problem than eating in the fashion most of us will – whatever is in the supermarket or as prepared by the take-away.
The 100 mile diet as an idea sounds so good, once you take out the silly only native to the region part – if it grows well in the area and is a better source of nutrition denying it makes no sense long term. As an experimental archaeology demonstration its interesting to see what the folks in the area would have had, but its not sane to ignore good now locally available stuff as a general rule.
Plus in the UK I’m not sure you could manage that 100 mile diet, at least if you define native as only the stuff we know for sure wasn’t brought here by people over the last 2000 odd years, I doubt there is enough true native plants to fill all the dietary requirements, and the seafood that might make up the difference is largely becoming by that definition non-native as the water conditions change, sealife being rather mobile.
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psymansays says:
If they’re going to feed people vegan bilge, I predict difficulty in retaining volunteers. Oh, so subversive, complying with the dietary specifications promoted by every government, the UN, the media, and celebrities as the future of food. Stunning and brave.
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Jenny List says:
Yet again, how to say you’ve never been to en EU hacker camp without saying you’ve never been to an EU hacker camp.
I’m no veggie, I grew up on a farm and like meat. But the Mecklenbergers did a great job of cooking awesome food that just happened to be vegan. I really enjoyed it, and you probably would have too.
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Bill says:
Can your HVAC run on 5 v? How about a microwave or cook top?
Will you be able to charge your EV?-
The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
Years ago I read an article (Radio-Electronics magazine?) that proposed a multi-tap outlet for houses.
It would supply low DC voltages to things that could use it, but also IIRC, had high voltage/amp supply also for those appliances (such as you mentioned) on demand.but yeah, rewire every house/outlet?
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Myself says:
Another thing that annoys me is the fallacious belief that all energy should be the same price all the time. Most homeowners in the US are accustomed to this because domestic rate plans have avoided demand pricing, hiding the realities of the grid behind oversimplified tariffs, and it’s led to some mindbogglingly unhealthy consumption habits.
Real energy has _curves_. And dynamic pricing can make us use it accordingly.
Once we get people accustomed to the energy price fluctuating throughout the day, we’ll need probably another decade for price-responsive appliances to surface a reasonable amount of innovation, and a decade beyond that for them to proliferate (white-goods appliances tend to last a long time!) enough to start to make a dent in the way we use energy.
That’s much too slow. We need to start hacking old appliances with new controls.
My 40-year-old Kenmore dryer with the mechanical knob may last yet another 40 years, but I need a box that I can plug it into which will automatically run it when energy is nice and cheap. Ditto for the clothes washer and dishwasher (thought these have electronic controls). Ditto with EV charging, though many EVs are already there, the other major energy consumers haven’t followed suit.
(Side note, as solar proliferates, it’ll make sense to charge EVs during the day, which means PV-divert charge scheduling on EVSEs installed at workplaces, which is another social change, but I think it’ll snowball once a few high-profile examples emerge.)
I’m from the dialup era, I don’t expect files to be available immediately. I start a download, I go do something else, I check back later and it’s probably done. The speed of my connection is all but irrelevant; I don’t need to pay for gigabit anything. Likewise with appliances, if I could just start the dishes or laundry and assume they’ll be done by morning, relegating the task to the background, then it’s immaterial when the appliance decides to run itself.
When the process can be treated as background, impatience disappears. The thing is just magically done when I check later. And if that allows it to use energy when it’s plentiful, so much the better. But I don’t want to throw out my perfectly-functional appliances and create more waste to get those benefits. We must upgrade what exists.
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Saabman says:
Ive been making energy “diverters” to turn on appliances (hot water heaters mainly) when I have sufficient surplus power to run them. That along wth some active monitoring and manual control of energy devices means for our family of 5 we have an average consumption of less than an average single person household in our area.
I find old appliances are easier to control than newer ones as they usually have basic resistive elements and mechanical timers/controls which work well with retrofitting external controls – I can happily modulate my resistive hot water heater but a heat pump unit would fail rather promptly.
Long ago I came to the realisation that the most efficient path is not necessarily the best path.
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HaHa says:
If you don’t have a smart meter, the best trick is an electro-magnet on the wall behind the meter. Add wraps on the metal core one at a time or you will stop the meter permanently. Let the meter run during meter reader hours.
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Jonk says:
Well said.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
“Another thing that annoys me is the fallacious belief that all energy should be the same price all the time.”
Yeah, since California basically rules out off shore oil rigs, they should pay more for oil shipped in from other places.
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Daniel Scott Matthews says:
I personally would rather hack or engineer my own diet and lifestyle. Forget all that hypocritical “environmental” nonsense and the anti CO2 fascism, the reason you should think about your diet is because your current one is probably killing you and the biggest culprit is processed foods, including vegan options. Slow down, learn to cook, focus on fresh locally grown and seasonal produce, learn what a balanced diet really requires and if you eat meat put it last on the list and only consume it if you still have available calories left on your required energy allowance. Do that any you will find you rarely have good cause, or need, to consume meat other than a bit of fish perhaps. Stop trying to change the world, get your own act together first and stop kidding yourself that you have a right to impose your beliefs about the state of the world and what needs to be done about it on others, just provide them with access to knowledge and have enough respect for other humans to let them come to their own conclusions.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
Growing up in North Dakota, I thought lignite coal was strictly regional.
Finding that it is near my ancestral home was a surprise. -
jonk says:
The reason consumers think eco friendly versions of products are worse, is because they are. Not because they need to be mind you, just because marketing people are the worst. Look at LED bulbs for instance. If you buy a “45W” led bulb, and look at the lumen rating, it’s maybe 10% less than an actual 45W incandescent. So someone like my mom buys it, and says “these LED bulbs are dim”. Whereas when I buy one, I know to ignore that stupid wattage equivalent, so I can put “100W” led bulbs in my 25W fixtures and light up the room to searing brightness while using like 1/10 of the power. They’re also flickery, because they’re too cheap to include any filtering or smoothing circuitry, not because LED inherently flicker. If I could buy LED bulbs that were 5 times as much that didn’t flicker, I would, but it seems basically impossible to tell by looking at the boxes.
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echodelta says:
You have a valid point. So much xxxx from China. Municipal lighting is in the same boat. There needs to be life of service standards for parts that make these worth putting in our civic fixtures. At the beginning of LED screw in lights they were going to nix the “equivalent” watt rating but caved into marketing.
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Jonk says:
I think the answer to preserving the environment is not mass produced ultra-processed food substitutes. A better solution would be a cultural change and reduction in consumerism. Repair things when they break. Work less, buy only what you really need. Maintain a garden, and buy/trade food with your neighbors. Cook your own food and chat with friends in the evenings instead of going to wasteful bars, restaurants and other entertainment venues. Live a simpler life basically, and become less dependent on global supply chains and industrial production.
So why does most media promote more industrialization as the answer, instead of less? The answer is obvious. The elites of the world profit massively off the industrial production/consumption cycle. They want us hustling at our factory jobs, earning just enough to survive on their mass produced junk food. Meanwhile they’re taking 90% of the value created for themselves.
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HaHa says:
Good news, the environmental paradise, Venezuela, is accepting immigrants.
At least 20% of the population would starve if they had to survive on their own ‘value created’. They live on ‘bread and circus’. Gonna be rough if things get ugly. Be armed.
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LordNothing says:
there is money in green tech. money leads to lobbying. which means subsidies and tax breaks to the green tech industry. which they spend on more lobbying. next thing you know you are eating crickets all so someone else can make a buck (which they then spend on filet mignon). whether or not the green tech is actually an improvement for the environment or consumer is irrelevant. much of it is opening yet another can of worms (like electric cars).
you are better off putting a methane capture system on cattle barns such that you can remove the excess gas from the environment. you can then use that to power farm machinery or sell it. either is good for farmers. there are also biotech options, like a low methane output cow. but then the anti-gmo people will whine. i say let them eat crickets. gmo food stands to solve world hunger issues. you can adapt a crop to local climates rather than spend fuel shipping food from bread basket regions.
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Anonymous says:
Here’s a subversive idea: reduce the human population and we can use locally-manufactured incandescent bulbs, forever. No rare earth mining, no supply chains, no fake bacon. Just glass, copper, iron, and carbon, and a lot less people using them.
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HaHa says:
You first.
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Anonymous says:
I will not reproduce, so I already have “gone first”. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
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Joshua says:
No surprise you won’t, the way you talk or think it must be hard to find a partner for the process, anyway, I suppose.
PS: See the demographic change. The problem are not the children, maybe.
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HaHa says:
Like that was by choice.
Half way there. We know you can do it.
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Reluctant Cannibal says:
Join the ‘Legalise Cannibalism’ campaign!
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fhunter says:
One word – Prions. ;)
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Reluctant Cannibal says:
Apparently, the problem is similar to mad cow disease – so dont do as Hannibal Lecter did and eat the brain or nervous system. And always make sure the flesh is well cooked.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
Oops!
I misread that as legalize cannabis.
B^)
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tomás zerolo says:
Thanks for the Garzweiler reference.
Actually, there are folks around here trying to do something about it. A hard job!
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Julian Skidmore says:
I’m a bit confused about this post Jenny. Germany appears to be decarbonising rapidly and Russia’s war with Ukraine has only served to accelerate renewable goals (even if some coal plants have to reopen due to gas pipelines being closed).
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-pushes-solar-tax-breaks-and-pv-crisis-tender
Brown coal is at only 15% (compared with 25% in 2000); other coal is 8% (vs 24% in 2000); zero carbon energy is 45% to 55% (vs 24% in 2000) despite the loss of nuclear.
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HaHa says:
Germany consciously decided to overpay for electricity, because Pooting and the rest of the Rusky jolly time crew. It’s not about being green, it’s about not being ‘red’.
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tinkermore says:
The changes in eating habits are also relatively quick in Germany. Glad to see it but it was a bit surprising.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian -
Jenny List says:
My impression of German politics is that they love to say how green they are, but don’t walk the walk. Sorry German friends.
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Robert says:
Real subversion now isn’t being an establishment type green, its being a pro-nuclear freemarket capitalist libertarian. That doesn’t mean we think lignite should still be burnt in Germany (they should have been sensible and not panicked after Fukushima, afterall you don’t get tsunamis in central Europe), but we have no desire for vegan virture-signal foods when the environmental impact of chicken and pork are negligible compared to the harms that all manner of countries are perpetrating by using fossil fuels for their powergrids. A capitalist knows to focus on the big gains, so replacing fossil fuel powerplants with nuclear and renewables, getting hydrogen infrastructure to replace petrol pumps and getting steel and concrete manufactured in ways which don’t pump out vast quantities of CO2 byproducts from their reactionsmust be the priority. Lifestyle change based “CO2 savings” are diminishing returns of insignficant value but massive cost to quality of life.
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tinkermore says:
There is strong empirical evidence that what we eat has very large impact
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/change-what-we-eat-to-solve-the-climate-crisis/We’re not in an either or situation – we need both energy transition and food transition. And in both areas individual changes and system level changes are needed and they reinforce each other. Individuals can switch meals to plant based alternatives (start with one meal today and ramp it up going forward) and help push for regional/national/international policy change (scale back subsidies to animal ag, legislate against practices that cause harm and suffering to animals, increase mandatory veterinary controls of animal ag, cameras in slaughterhouses, climate impact food labelling, …).
BTW check out the libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer’s “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism”.
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RW ver 0.0.1 says:
I had a thought about counterintuitive energy savings…
If you have an unheated external shed/shop and find it too cold. It might be more efficient to heat it by running your (already owned for other purposes) air compressor, to a bleed outside like maybe a hose with an inflator needle. Yes it’s not as great a heat pump as something designed to BE a space heating heat pump, but it is one. That is vs using an electric heater. Noise may be a concern of course. I am spitballing about 20 or 30% better than a heater. IDK if you get a bonus by doing everything air powered you can and the air exhausting in the shop, as it sucks heat back out with expansion, but there would be the inefficiency difference.
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Matthias says:
Make ice cubes in the fridge and bring them outside to melt, you gain the crystallization energy of the water on top of the electric energy consumed by the fridge.
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Twisty Plastic says:
“our LED lights have a bunch of electronics to bring the mains voltage down to LED voltage, all of which serves only to waste power and to shorten the lifetime of the device.”
What?
Jenny, what am I missing?
If I saw this in some random social media post I would assume ignorance but not here. Is somebody marketing LED bulbs with linear regulators built in? Are they not actually using PWM which is pretty near 100% efficiency to handle the voltage issue? And if the line voltage was lower would that not actually be less efficient due to Ohm’s law?
I do agree that marketing decisions shorten the lifetime of the bulbs which honestly being LEDs should last for decades. But that’s because companies under-rate and over-drive the LEDs because they want you to continue buying replacements. It’s not because running LED lights off of line voltage is a bad idea.
Have you heard about the lights in Dubai? https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4
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dave says:
Why is it that vegans are always trying to force you to see their way of doing things, refuse to accept other peoples right but yet complain when people dont respect theirs.
Why is it vegans expect a menu to have vegan food on it, but no vegan restaurant ever served meat for those choosing an “alternative lifestyle” to vegans. I look forward to the day where a vegan is prosecuted for this discrimination…
Why does most vegan food have to pretend to be something else?
There is no such thing as vegan chicken, vegan sausage, vegan black pudding!!! but it’s all on sale with the words being abused and twisted beyond their actual meaning. Which is frankly dangerous when it comes to food safety.Because hey, some people are allergic to some of the crap that goes into vegan food, but many vegans think it’s ok not to say or know what they are really eating as long as it sounds like it is area, odd and expensive to transport via air freight.
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Navarre Bartz says:
This reminds me of that Einstein quote, “We Cannot Solve Our Problems with the Same Thinking We Used When We Created Them.”
Buckminster Fuller and the New Alchemy Institute were looking at how to “Think Different” back in the day, and today we have Hundred Rabbits, One Army (Precious Plastics), and Tamera for some examples. I think the hacker/maker community is really going to be where we see some of the most important solutions to climate change come from, but I might be biased!
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