The Macro (approch) versus the Micro (approch)

General Discussion
#21

I found one part of what I thought I was talking about and can not make sense of it .

Gainesville Regional Utilities officials said Thursday they expect to close the long-debated purchase of the biomass plant on Nov. 7.

The Gainesville Renewable Energy Center, commonly known as the biomass plant, will be renamed Deerhaven Renewable once the city takes ownership, GRU Chief Financial Officer Justin Locke said.

GRU officials last week hit the market to seek $416 million in fixed-rate bonds from investors to help fund the $750 million GREC purchase. The remaining amount was bid out separately.

For the $416 million, Locke said roughly $1 billion worth of offers poured in within the first five minutes of opening the bidding and that the utility saw $3 billion from 46 investors within an hour.

“It was ridiculously successful,” he said.

By GRU’/GREC’s s own estimate, the off-line time required to correct the defective parts could save GRU ratepayers $160,000 per day or a total of $2.2 million dollars.
Dear John:

As you know, in May 2014 we had problems with the boiler tertiary superheater resulting in a tube failure and a number of weld cracks. During the October 2014 outage inspection additional cracks on a number of tubes were discovered. All these issues were repaired per proper procedures and the boiler is in operation.

GREC and Valmet have reviewed the failures, conducted metallurgical examinations and have completed a root cause analysis (RCA). Investigations included base material for the P91 header and T23 tubes, manufacturing, and a failure cracking mechanism using finite stress analysis. The conclusion of the RCA is that the failure mechanism is a combination of creep and fatigue.

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#22

This makes more sense

(CHARLOTTE, N.C. – September 27, 2017) – Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises, Inc. (B&W) (NYSE:BW) reported that it has identified a structural steel issue at a renewable energy project in the United Kingdom. Management believes that the issue is the result of an engineering error by a subcontractor, and work has been stopped at the project pending further investigation. Additionally, while the issue has not manifested itself in other projects, the company has proactively stopped work at two renewable projects in the United Kingdom that have similar engineering designs.

“We are working diligently to assess the situation. Keeping in mind that the safety of our employees and subcontractors is our top priority, we chose to stop work temporarily at all three projects,” said Jimmy Morgan, senior vice president of B&W’s Renewable segment. “We presently expect the total cost impact to the first project will be in the range of $10 to 15 million. We also presently expect the total cost impact to the other two projects to be below that amount. These estimates do not take into account possible recoveries from third parties, which we intend to actively pursue.”

About B&W
Revenues in the Renewable segment were $48.1 million for the second quarter of 2017, versus $85.5 million in the corresponding period in 2016, a decrease of $37.4 million. The Renewable segment gross loss was $110.9 million in second quarter 2017, compared to a gross loss of $17.5 million reported in second quarter 2016, due to the recognition of a $115.2 million, or $2.36 per share, charge for increased estimated costs to complete six projects in backlog, as the result of lower-than-forecasted productivity and schedule delays.

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#23

China
This is a $2 million 30 kiloton per year biochar plant. It takes 100,000 tons of crop wastes and stops them from rotting or being burned, avoiding two major sources of greenhouse gas, and makes biochar fertilizer that reduces the use of chemicals and earns the average farmer 150-250 yuan ($20-40) more per day from produce. Each sack of biochar fertilizer is a dollar cheaper than chemical fertilizer. China built 20 of these this year, one every 3 weeks. It is just starting. 45 more are under construction, 200 planned. Simple, scalable, shovel ready. Megatons of carbon removed from the sky, made into charcoal and buried. Albert Bates with IBI Board members Dr. Genxing Pan and Kathleen Draper. September 2018

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#24

3.Phytochemicals are plant-derived compounds with antibacterial and growth-promoting properties. Research into their interactions with an animal’s microbiome offers insight into the conditions necessary for maximizing their efficacy. Although some commercial poultry operations already use these compounds, new research should shed light on how to best deploy them to make them more consistently effective.

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#25

“At the small scale, most people believe the benefits can be much, much higher than the drawbacks,” said Helena Chum, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the lead author of the bioenergy chapter in the IPCC’s special report on renewable energy and climate change.
Though most of the individual steps in bioenergy processing – like growing, harvesting and converting biomass into useful fuels and energy – are mature in terms of technology, the economics are still a challenge, but increasingly less so.
“Every part of this chain has to make a profit,” Chum explained. “I think in five to 10 years, we’ll have several production facilities going.”
In pyrolysis, operators cook organic material to temperatures around 300 degrees Celsius, which releases hydrogen, methane, methanol and carbon monoxide, leaving behind char as a byproduct. Crank the temperature up to 700 C and take out the oxygen, and you have gasification, which also produces fuel and char.
Because some of it stays behind in the char, not all of the carbon from biomass oxidizes into carbon dioxide. This leads to a net reduction in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere without costly carbon dioxide absorbers. Farmers commonly use char to enrich soil, so blending it with earth or burying it effectively sequesters this carbon and helps more biomass grow, further driving emissions into negative territory.

“That material you generate is more persistent in the soil in the environment than the original biomass it’s produced from,” said Johannes Lehmann, a professor of soil science at Cornell University. He noted that char itself is a fuel and, if burned, makes pyrolysis or gasification carbon-neutral instead of carbon-negative, which is still a benefit to the extent it displaces fossil fuels.

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#26

Novo BioPower, LLC, also known as the Novo BioPower Plant, is a 27 megawatt biomass power plant located in Snowflake, Arizona, approximately 180 miles Northeast of Phoenix. The Novo Plant has two long-term power purchase agreements in place with Arizona Public Services (APS) and Salt River Project (SRP), Arizona’s two largest electric utilities.
The Plant has access to traditional woody biomass because the surrounding region has plentiful resources that routinely need thinning to meet forest and woodland management initiatives. Within a 100-mile radius of the Plant, there are millions of acres of forestland. This land is populated primarily with ponderosa pine and pinyon-juniper species, and is owned, and managed by the United States Forest Service (USFS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Arizona State Lands, Fort Apache Indian Tribe, and private landowners. Programs and activities in the area provide the Plant with access to this biomass material.
In 2002, a portion of the region was devastated by the Rodeo-Chediski fire, which burned nearly 468,000 acres and forced the evacuation of many local communities. In 2011, the Wallow fire consumed over 500,000 acres, making it the largest in the state’s history. In 2013 Arizona lost 19 firefighters due to a Yardell Wildland fire outside of Prescott. Even with the massive devastation that has taken place, there are still millions of acres of untouched forest that need to be addressed. These fires have alerted regional and national authorities to the need for proper management and thinning of the forests. Regional authorities have now implemented programs to properly manage the forestlands, which produce hundreds of thousands of bone-dry tons of biomass annually through various thinning and stewardship activities.
In addition, Novo BioPower accesses biomass from timberland sale contracts, sawmills, green collection yards, and orchard operations in the region. Third-party studies indicate that as much as four times of Novo’s annual biomass fuel requirement can be sustainability procured from the immediate vicinity of the Plant.

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#27

I have been following this topic with interest, and I have thought a lot about biomass as a renewable power source. It seems pretty clear that first and foremost, we are not going to get anywhere without really reducing the amount of power we are consuming. More than that, though, we also need to find a way to put a lid on growth. Renewable or not, biomass is very much a finite resource. Eventually if the demand was great enough, you would need to cut down every tree, shrub, and cactus for feed stocks. If we do not get a handle on population growth, In the long run it wont really matter how frugal we are, we will eventually need more power than we can extract.

That being said, I do think that biomass on a macro scale could be a good stopgap to buy us time to work towards a static economy. @SteveUnruh, I think your gripe about big interests promoting the “sustainability” of using crop residues from already questionable farming practices is probably spot on - that sort of thing will probably do as much harm as good. I just dont think that the individual approach can really do much better. How much charcoal do you suppose you would need to make in order to smelt the ore and produce the steel for one barrel? Dont forget to include all the steel in all the equipment you will need, and you will probably need some trained machinists, so lets take into account providing them with a school, and lights, and books, and, and and… And then, how many barrels do you suppose the users on this forum burn through every year making charcoal? The numbers wont add up.

You tease the urban-mass artsie-fartsie pizza eaters (and i would maybe say rightly) but where does your food come from? If we were all growing our own food, we would have no time to sit and sip a cup of coffee and and waste the day in front of a computer screen. The truth is, we are all addicted to the comforts and conveniences that industrialization has bought, its just that some of us see the devils bargain we have made, and others would prefer to ignore it.

I think we should be looking at ways to adapt the system that is already in place. If we dont fix it in time, I suspect we will get another shot at it in the next stone age :slight_smile:

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#28

I would rather be doing anything else then debating this

Thomas Robert Malthus
An Essay on the Principle of Population
he argued that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically; therefore, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance.

Albert Allen Bartlett
“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?”
National Security Study Memorandum 200: World Population Growth And U.S. Security
http://www.population-security.org/mumf-93-01.htm

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#29

Around 1900 there were 1 billion humans on the planet, a massive growth from historical levels. Late 60’s / early 70’s we crossed 3 billion. Today we are around 7.5, and shooting for 9.5 or more by 2050.

Meanwhile, our individual resource demands have probably increased 50 fold over the last 2 centuries.

Economists, talking in a vacuum, referring to a theoretical system predicated on infinite, geometrical economic growth and resource exploitation, DO believe that every extra body means more prosperity. To the degree that Canada is bringing in 350,000 extra people each year, each one riding on at least 1.5 tons of jet fuel, and all dreaming about owning a 4 door pickup truck, and a big house. And going back “home” regularly, to the other side of the planet… Those same economists regularly laugh about Malthus’s observations, failing to recognize how tapping into vast coal seams and fossil guano deposits moved the precipice edge temporarily.

Depending on whose estimates, it’s figured the planet may be able to carry 500 million, or 1 billion without irretrievable damage.

The outcome seems inevitable, while our systems are driven by fantasy, greed, and short term goals.

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#30

Ha! Ha! O.k. Carl I will respond a bit linked back to your comment because I actually like it so much.

I generally have a banana every morning because they help me not to have work muscle cramps later sleeping. I can’t grow these here, or be grown anywhere within 1500-2200 miles. Energy expensive food. Only made worldwide distributed first by lots of sweats-mined out coal transportation energy. Now availble worldwide by a world glut of liquid petroleum transportation energy.
This Fall our three in the yards 60 y.o., old pear trees have born greatly. I am picking up dropped pears by the 5 gallon bucket fulls for the last 20 days and taking to feed neighbor cows to reduce the bees, buzzing about. From just 2 Stanley, and 2 Italian prune trees I planted five years ago I harvested four big 30 pound boxed of ripe prunes. We gave these away to Romania-American new citizens who love these. Last year it was boxes and boxes of Candise(seedless flame) and old heritage purple seeded juicing grapes to gift out. Late may 30th frost hammer our grape-set this year.
Wifie NOT putting bananas into the house, and I would then anti-cramp with something local.
So from just these 7 yard trees the wife and I can/could have two substantial “fruit-portions” daily for a whole year with still surplus enough for at least 4-8 others for a year.
And I even get some thinning harvest wood out of these trees annually.

So what does this mean? Even though we do buy bananas, coffee and other “exotics” no excuse not to do SOMETHING as your climate allows.
And in our case it is the now a seasonally hatched out high point of 35-40 running around the one acre fenced yard chickens. A 10,000 vegetable garden. And too many damn worm infested apple trees. Cow and chicken seasonal foods. Fresh pies slicing out the worm tracks. Frozen pie for year later.

When I hard slam the Urban-pizza-eaters that is the majority of my four different branches of large local/regional blood family.
Twice now in the last 15 years I have had first a 5 acre, then a 4 acre cleared field plots of lands adjacent to the west of us, come up available for sale cheap. These both have/had older mobile homes on them. Livable for initial moving in. Exisitng water wells. Existing code septic systems. One/two barns/outbuildings on each.
I contacted any of the family 20-somethings, working, earning, wanting to step up from urban/suburban renting into home ownership.
No-o-o-o. Too far out. Too much snow up there. Blaa-ba-blaaa-bla. Truth. Too far from the variety take-out pizza selections! No fiber-optic high-speed Internet. “Your cell phone service up there is crappy.”
At any large family get-togather for weddings, elder anniversaries, youngsters graduations; I am lucky out of 50-70 blood relatives, in-laws, out-law’s to be able to talk with 3-4 who still burn wood for heat. Who will make up, and store garden produce.
10 years and never a one, at all of these pizza-eaters get-together who does not look at “Steve’s woodgasing” as a keep-a-hubby happy, hobby. Not a hobby. I’m serious.
Yet too,easy to get folks drooling over a latest acquired new/old hot-rod car or pickup truck; the latest HarleyD; the latest blue/red political solve-all bullcrap.
Hey. Cheer up. The most recent I went to was a 40th for an adult niece-in-law. Married-in now for 5 years. I took the bull-by the-horns and told her about the wife’s and I’s, 8 years and near $20K experiences into Assisted Reproductive Technologies, 1995-03. (No-go joe. So we foster.)
I did not know, she said. Decision already made here. “We’ve” decided not to have any children.
Foot-in-mouth, me. O.K. then. So . . . me and three blood sisters will only have reproduced a total of five nieces and nephews. And now they; only three children. Ain’t gonna be any others. Same-same ratio’s, if even a bit lower rates for the rest of the blood family.

So any you, too-many-people-making-too-many-problems Believers. . . we are already there!!
And forced consumption control IS “1984”, “Animal Farm”, “The Lathe of Heaven” tring to be commanded to life.

A TRUE, can-be-made-reality, is a brought forward, current techs/materials “Five Acres and Independence” lifestyle.

And I truly would; if any of you Top-Down solutuion’ers could get your ultimate wishes would do a Stalin/Mao and take over of your system and force every single Pope, priest, President, university staff, Teachers, professors, scientists, designer, sales-professional, Entertainer. Artist . . . . e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e, of all ages and capabilities to dirt-dig and at least grow a percentage of their foods. Sweat-out at least a percentage of their personal-use energies.

The greatest revelation expressed by many of the men-who-walked-on-the-moon was looking back and realizing our life-giving green/blue world would be the only true Mother for us.
Any, other, off-Mother human habitats would have to be very energy intensive, fragile, complex constructs.
And we still ain’t that smart and capable enough to keep in these types of artificial constructs in-balance for any length of time…

Balance begins with the appreciation of just how valuable a garden tomato, or your own hen egg really is.
Balance learning continues when you from use discover that on most of the habitat-able world, with just a few acres of trees you can supply yourself with all of the solar-stored energy for heating, cooking, reasonable personal transportation that you actually need.
I really, really respect those who are out doing, developing for themselves and their immediate’s with a sense of purpose and balance.

Again no disrespect intended CarlOR . . . .but study and you will fine many Mediterranean current cities were built with previous civilizations first cut stones; re-cut, re-purposed. Some times the same building stone, re-carved, re-purposed, 3-4 times from original quarried-out to current use…
Why not? Versus even more slaved-out new quarry stone, eh? Ha! Newer societies ran out of population groups to conquer and enslave.
Using old steel barrels and buckets; old steel air and water tanks is just the same. Use what is already there. Cast-off, cheap then. Screw magic, solve-all, Doc Brown, unobtainables.
Practical before Purity. Function before Form.

Anytime that worships Purity, Form, and such Absolutes always slips downhill into nasties like ethnic cleansing, Cartels, exclusive-restrictive Guilds.
tree-farmer Steve unruh

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#31

I thought David R. Montgomery’s books Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations and Growing a Revolution were very interesting. According to David civilization/agriculture, the way we’ve done it for the last 20,000 years, just isn’t sustainable, because it causes soil to be washed down into the sea at too high a rate. He shows us ways to solve the problem but none of these ways are quick fixes.
Rindert

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#32

27-09-18

Animal grazing seems to be sustainable, even beneficial for ecosystem diversity and building soil. Zero till and some ag practices are much easier on soil.

The major downfall of agricultural systems has always been removal of soil nutrients with each successive harvest, thoroughly mining tracts of land over time. Until relatively recently nobody understood the process. It ended many civilizations.

But we have known for 150 years, and done worse than ever before. Temporarily we’ve made up for this ruinous practice with mined potash and phosphate, and nitrogen made from natural gas in order to get yields far beyond natural, while we flush the nutrients down toilets to the sea.

Commercial phosphate supplies will run out, and natural gas is finite. Nutrients have to be kept on the land for any system to sustain, which makes cities the greatest mistake of humanity. Along with our old favourites, eye watering population overshoot, and unbridled resource abuse.

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#33

Its a little more serious than that. My ancestors, Friesans, in what is now Netherlands built dijks and farmed dried out sea bottom. This ‘reclaimed land’ had zero nutrients at first. It was mostly sand, and some areas clay. But it was at least granular material. The bare rock scenario that David Montgomery talks about is going to be much more difficult to work with. There were always a few ‘enlightened’ individulas who knew the true value of dirt, but most of us are not enlightened. As civilization has spread the presence of bare rock has steadily increased.
Rindert

#34

Many or most farming areas have deep soil, but they are being reduced to subsoil. Many / most areas are naturally short of phosphate, the little bit there was coming from gradual migration from the ocean, primarily whales retrieving it from the deep, then other creatures spreading it inland.

So we’ve broken natural retrieval, and are pumping all accesible nutrients into deep ocean basins. Not a great strategy.

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#35

God Loves You .
The Planet does not care .
Mesa Verde region, located in Colorado, more than doubled in population between roughly A.D. 700 and 850. But, just as the population peaked, something happened and the people left in droves. The researchers in the American Antiquity article noted that the area of land they were studying, in Colorado, saw its population rapidly shrink between A.D. 850 and 930 to a level not much above zero. Recent research suggests that a change in climate played a role in this emigration. In a 2008 article in the journal American Scientist, researchers noted that pollen remains indicate that the weather in at least part of the Mesa Verde region became colder.
“Presumably, the most productive portions of this area became cold enough in the 900s to make maize [farming] risky. Dry winters compounded this problem.”
Most modern Pueblo peoples (whether Keresans, Hopi, or Tanoans) assert the Ancestral Puebloans did not “vanish”, as is commonly portrayed in media presentations or popular books. They say that the people migrated to areas in the southwest with more favorable rainfall and dependable streams. They merged into the various Pueblo peoples whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico. This perspective was also presented by early 20th-century anthropologists
[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores … provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 … the most severe in the last 7,000 years … precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse.[27]

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#36

I read about that in “Physics Today”. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3997
Rindert

#37

I do not know why I am posting this .
Notwithstanding the inherent methodological limitations of reconstructing past climates, the differences in the multicentury mean PDSI values between the modern period and the MCA are extremely unlikely to have arisen from stationary statistics.
our planet’s history includes at least several hundred global magnetic reversals, where north and south magnetic poles swap places
The Earth’s mantle is not static, he said, but moves by the process of convection: Hotter material from closer to the core rises and cooler material sinks in a cycle of vertical motion. By including convection in the model of Earth’s wobble, the researchers had accounted for the last third of the changes in the spin over the 20th century.
In the Atlantic Ocean, the current known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) ferries warm surface waters northward — where the heat is released into the atmosphere — and carries cold water south in the deeper ocean layers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its circulation transports heat around the globe like a conveyor belt, and if its movement were to stop, that heat would not get distributed, and weather havoc could ensue.
While the complete disintegration of the AMOC is extremely unlikely, the ocean circulation system will probably continue to weaken , studies suggesting a weak AMOC that is likely to weaken further .
The Little Ice Age in Europe consisted of violent scapegoating.[33][34][35][36][37] The prolonged cold, dry periods brought drought upon many European communities, resulting in poor crop growth, poor livestock survival, and increased activity of pathogens and disease vectors.[38] Disease tends to intensify under the same conditions that unemployment and economic difficulties arise: prolonged, cold, dry seasons. Both of these outcomes – disease and unemployment – enhance each other, generating a lethal positive feedback loop.[38] Although these communities had some contingency plans, such as better crop mixes, emergency grain stocks, and international food trade, these did not always prove to be effective.[33] Communities often lashed out via violent crimes, including robbery and murder; sexual offense accusations increased as well, such as adultery, bestiality, and rape.[34] Europeans sought explanations for the famine, disease, and social unrest that they were experiencing, leading to the act of placing blame upon the innocent. Evidence from several studies indicate that increases in violent actions against marginalized groups that were held responsible for the Little Ice Age overlap with years of particularly cold, dry weather.[35][36][33]
Climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of the period,

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#38

In all, the surveys revealed about 140 square miles (362 square km) of terraces and other modified agricultural land, as well as another 368 square miles (952 square km) of farmland.
the researchers determined that up to 11 million people lived in the Maya lowlands during the late Classic period, from A.D. 650 to 800.

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#39

30-09-18

The interesting thing is that today the same region struggles to sustain a small fraction of that population.

Ancient people were just as able as we are today, or like the Maya, possibly more in some reapects.
Though we made the breakthrough of science. However, we are becoming professionals at denying science too… :slight_smile:

The takeaway I get from the Mayan story is the same as Jared Diamond described in Collapse - a population comes up with an innovative way to exploit a resource. They prosper and multiply, taxing said resource to the degree that even relatively small stresses collapse the whole house of cards, and continue to do so when it’s obvious to stop or conserve, because of family and social pressures, and continuing specialization leaves them with no way back to simpler times anyways.

Our civilization has outstripped all others due to our progressively innovative resource exploitation. But the planet is only so big, with finite resources, and we are deep in overdraft on practically every one.

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#40

I would definitely accept that it could happen that way. But doesn’t it seem more likely in this case that a combination of smallpox and other european diseases wiped them out?
Rindert

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