Comments by "Alan hat" (@alanhat5252) on "Engineering with Rosie" channel.

  1.  @srenjensen3817  or different frequencies like EU 50Hz & USA 60Hz.
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  2. No, "demand response" is a symptom of it being incredibly expensive to have entire power stations which only run for 2 separate hours per day, 5 days a week but the boilers are kept at pressure 24/7
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  3.  @aleksandrsnaumovs4277  the distance problem is both technical & economic, lines losses (I understand) reduce with distance so 100% loss takes more than 30-odd thousand kilometers but not enough more. At the end of very long runs the loss is still more than accountants will stand for. There are improvements in line losses being invented frequently but obviously it takes a while for them to get on the market, the line Rosie shows in the video is very different from the 1850s lines that originally crossed the Atlantic, to start with cross-linked polythene is a relatively new invention compared with gutta percha so are semiconductors that she showed as a 2nd layer of insulation. One day a superconducting material that works at high enough temperatures to lay undersea will be invented but that hasn't happened yet.
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  4. So you're ok with paying for whole power stations to be left idle 22 hours a day? Most of us prefer cheaper (& cleaner) alternatives 😮 How much do you think it costs to boil a row of 8 house-sized boilers & get them up to enough pressure to run the turbines?
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  5. also grit abrasion in joints of moving parts, plus there's a news-media 'worry' about whales getting shredded.
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  6. Oh, no explosions :-( I'm disappointed now :'-( Still, seems like a fascinating topic. Are there camera triggers which sense the electrical field build-up a few seconds before the discharge? I'm sure high-speed video viewed from perhaps the far end of the nacelle would help understand the detail of what's happening
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  7. pumped-hydro needs mountains or very high shoreline cliffs in convenient locations & it seems SA has neither.
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  8.  @jimgraham6722  how noisy are your blades? Also, have you compared with plain blades?
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  9.  @koyamamoto5933  plastic reinforced concrete is possible but works in a very different way to steel reinforcement – you can make car springs out of it!
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  10. 1) yes the potential of tidal is obvious for all to see & has been for millennia but nobody has figured out how to harness it till the last few decades so it's still essentially unproven technology & doesn't attract investors. La Rance (spelling?) is the only installation that's been running long enough for investors to use as a guide & it's a totally niche setup that's difficult to compare with other things that are looking for funding. The bean counters will figure it out eventually but until then tidal is stalled. 2) I have no idea what "advanced reconductoring" is but the need for additional transmission lines was noted in the video & every single metre of new or replacement line is to the highest proven standard, it's too expensive to be otherwise. All the transmission companies & manufacturers have research labs & they evaluate every likely idea as well as inventing their own, they will have been evaluating whatever it is you're suggesting pretty much since it was invented, if it's any good they'll be installing it.
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  11.  @EngineeringwithRosie  sorry Rosie, on first viewing the seasonal slump in solar does not come across at all clearly in the video & in the UK it is a major problem. My campervan has a 220W solar panel bolted flat on the roof & through January & often February it doesn't generate enough to cover system losses, I've come back to the 'van in Spring several times only to discover I need to buy a new battery bank.
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  12. It looks like your definitions are somewhat undefined, for instance "manufacturing" & "operation" are very definitely engineering.
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  13.  @EngineeringwithRosie  I'm thinking a cheap modular system could be based around domestic guttering & downpipes as interconnects between plain sheet-metal backings on the solar panels (possibly with foamed polystyrene insulation) & then off to whatever plant extracts the heat. The backing panels would be hole punched across the ends & guttering glued over the holes with maybe silicon rubber or Sikaflex. Bends, 'Y' pieces & jointed pipes are available in a reasonable range of sizes.
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  14. you missed an alternative for dealing with gusts -- furling. Early tower-mounted wind turbines often had a spring-loaded offset tail, something in the same realm could be done with airborne systems.
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  15. In the UK Tesco supermarkets (& I believe others) turn off all their freezers for one hour when they get a signal.
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  16. No, it's safe. The nuclear reaction at the planet's core is producing huge amounts of energy which is being dumped, geothermal is just altering the route a miniscule amount of it is taking to escape.
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  17.  @AK-vx4dy  you've been challenged on everything you've said, please find some sources to check rather than guessing or repeating propaganda.
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  18.  @gregorymalchuk272  "instantaneous wholesale power prices" is what utility generators get paid for producing power, "net metering" is what domestic generators get paid for producing power, the concept seems fair to me, why doesn't it seem fair to you?
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  19.  @gregorymalchuk272  detlefk seems to know more about the German energy market than you, I'll take his/her word over your about coal use trends.
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  20. 5 minutes googling produced – Larderello, Italy, 1904 seems to have been the first producing electricity. France went large-scale immediately after the 1975 Oil Crisis. The Geysers, California, 1950s & then expanding with EGS (fracking) in the 1960s & '70s. Plus Roman, Greek & Arabic thermal-only (particularly cooling) for millennia.
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  21. Are you using domestic-scale equipment? Have you considered caging? There are designs which are easily caged, I'm thinking of roof-ridge squirrel cage designs but I'm sure others could work.
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  22. or millions of households with batteries...
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  23. This may be true for penguins but where did all the dodos go?
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  24.  @WeatherGuardLightningTech  does this suggest conductive &/or magnetic shapes which might direct strikes away or towards specific points? Perhaps some sort of direction of the blade tip vortex?
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  25. ​ @EngineeringwithRosie I googled "deepest man-made hole" & Kola came up in all results which surprised me, I thought the Russians had surpassed it a while ago with microwaves or lasers.
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  26. I suspect the reason is more likely to be to stop engineers getting blown off the ladders.
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  27.  @Meatball2022  perhaps more urgently, this sort of vibration can make concrete crumble around joints.
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  28.  @Stroporez  why does efficiency matter? Solar panels are at best 20% efficient but they're sold as fast as can be made because they're effective!
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  29.  @BatMan-oe2gh  keep an eye on the technology, there's a new rock vapourizing laser that might well drill deep enough for traditional deep-well liquid-vapourizing geothermal but there's definitely shallow-well solar-heated geothermal like they use for heat pumps. Everything's changing so fast at the moment you can't rule anything out for long.
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  30. https://youtube.com/channel/UCjSraaazRdxu83cdnuYwBZQ – Tom Warner's channel.
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  31. Current variations on Neoliberalism seem to involve a lot of backhanders to politicians which may make it difficult to get rid of, in the UK the only party offering something different is the Green Party & the popular Press has taken on the mission of disparaging them so they won't get elected into Government any time soon 😢
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  32. they definitely are fun, reliable information too.
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  33. In several places people are getting just a battery & bi-directional meter & saving huge amounts of money, sometimes this upload of power is done on a timer & sometimes it's triggered by the grid.
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  34.  @davestagner  you had the wrong information sources 50 years ago, Charles (then Prince of Wales now King) was reporting to the world what climate scientists were telling him. He was very worried. He was, at every opportunity, publicly telling world leaders they should be worried. It has been in a few newspapers since about 1912 though not front page headlines. COP21 in Paris in 2015 changed that though far too late, we needed Governments acting when King Charles first started speaking out, governments worldwide had the same information he had but they chose to carry on with their "donations" from fossil-fuel companies. Waste-of-space news sources didn't report any of because, well, they're a waste of space.
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  35. it sounds like an avenue the manufacturers don't want to go down, fortunately there are other solutions.
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  36. A few thoughts: Are these very large machines already a 'hazard to navigation' for aircraft & if not how big can you go? What do you do about different wind speeds & directions at different heights? Can you end up with a machine that's big enough to launch satellites off it's blade tips?
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  37. Cost should be minimal because the required infrastructure is cheap & the exploited resource is free.
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  38.  @thamiordragonheart8682  recycled polyester (2 litre bottles etc) can be spun fine enough that individual strands aren't visible to the naked eye but that introduces problems like silicosis.
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  39. stripes were glossed over but can be applied to all blades, removing the balance problem
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  40. At 12:37 you note slow development of tidal energy but from my bystander's perspective sitting in England what I'm seeing is that the holdup is political not engineering. Tidal-flow seems furthest along & the tech is really mature given that the device is basically a submarine at anchor, the only part that's necessarily less than a century old is the exact profile of the impeller & even that would still be reasonably productive with a century-old design. The last I heard there's a tidal-flow device that's been running off Pembroke in Wales for decades but it was hauled ashore for maintenance several years ago & central government has been withholding funding for years so it's just sitting there rusting away, they also withheld funding for the 2nd of the pair so it was never built. Also in Wales is a utility-scale tidal-range generator in Swansea Bay, it seems that it's fully-designed, permissions & public approval obtained, funding found & ready to be built but at the last minute central government stepped in & shelved the whole project without, as far as I know, any reasons being stated. I really don't understand it, there's TeraWatts of free, predictable & reliable energy sitting there waiting to be tapped & we've had the technology to do it for a century or more.
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  41.  @WeatherGuardLightningTech  does that mean they're getting closer or not?
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  42. USA has plenty of expertise, the problem is inter- & intra-company politics & this will continue to be a problem till the government sorts it out, something they've historically been very reluctant to even look at let alone actually do anything productive.
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  43.  @DSAK55  no, many States have fragile or unreliable infrastructure that doesn't inter-operate well. If the grid was a Federal institution and well managed Texas would appear to have very few problems (obviously gas pipes icing might still be a problem).
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  44. it is, some have models of perching predators on top.
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  45. 1,000hp in the late 1930s was not 'a flop', there were widely-sold engines of a similar scale producing 200hp or less! Don't forget the money for that amount of development work is generally only available in wartime.
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  46. processing kiln exhaust certainly looks possible though the temperature may make the engineering "interesting"
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  47. Ground launched aircraft have a ceiling because they're too heavy to fly higher but build a lighter aircraft & launch it off a 747 or a rocket & it will fly higher. Both were successfully used for the Space Shuttle though that's not a good example, it just demonstrated the technique. Sparse-atmosphere engines are different too, this is what the ramjet was originally designed for.
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  48. 1. not much CO₂ is reabsorbed as concrete sets 2. the process stage identified here is not the only stage which liberates CO₂
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  49. I haven't tried it but it looks like just paneling over the back of the frame & adding forced-air junctions (possibly in the corners) would be a simple retro-fit. I don't know how you avoid the electrical junction box being a hot-spot & degrading the whole panel though.
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  50.  @EngineeringwithRosie  can you bring someone in to explain the likely reaction of the oil industry to that, please?
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