Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Elsewhere on the intertubes an engineer named Henk Tennekes chimes in with his opinion about wind as an energy source. That opinion is pretty well summarized by his first sentence, “[w]ind energy is an engineer’s nightmare.” His basic point is that designing and maintaining windmills is a challenge; a difficult one at that, and that therefore they’re a bad idea.

It’s completely laughable and appreciably sad that an engineer would dismiss an entire technology because there is difficulty involved. Certainly nuclear power plants, for which he advocates, represent only the simplest and easiest of engineering tasks. Nuke vs Windmill? Oh yeah, the windmills are the difficult ones. I’m also certain that all those engineers who currently design and build wind mills agree that they’re living a nightmare.

There is a bit more worth quoting.

Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. Therefore, these run at far less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical – only at full power they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered.

This is another contradiction to Courtney who argued that conventional thermal plants can’t really operate at all below their peak, especially not at “far less than half power.” Tennekes here also tries to pull an engineering sleight of hand. Rather than mention total emissions, he talks about emissions rates only at the thermal plant.

Why don’t politicians listen to engineers?

Well, Henk, I can think of a few reasons…

The Dude: Walter, what is the point? Look, we all know who is at fault here, what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: Huh? No, what the fuck are you… I’m not… We’re talking about unchecked aggression here, dude.
Donny: What the fuck is he talking about?
The Dude: My rug.
Walter Sobchak: Forget it, Donny, you’re out of your element!
The Dude: Walter, the chinaman who peed on my rug, I can’t go give him a bill, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT… Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
The Dude: Walter, this isn’t a guy who built the fucking railroads here. This is a guy…
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about?
The Dude: Walter, he peed on my rug!
Donny: He peed on the Dude’s rug.
Walter Sobchak: Donny you’re out of your element! Dude, the Chinaman is not the issue here!

I know that I should never read things on the Daily Kos? Why? Not because I can’t deal with opinions that conflict with mine. No. Because the writers demonstrate that they have intelligence and that they absolutely refuse to use it. And I’m Nobrainer?

Case in point, this post: Doing what Detroit says is impossible.

The short run down is that some high school drop out mechanic is doubling gas mileage with off-the-shelf parts. This gets Kos all worked up.

Remember — Detroit tells us it’s impossible to increase gas mileage without taking a hit on horsepower. Yet here’s Goodwin — with an eight-grade education — able to design motors that blow the doors off the conventional (and obviously bullshit) wisdom.

The problem with Detroit isn’t the laws of physics, it’s the fact that a guy who never even went to high school can do things — with stock parts — that Detroit’s auto executives and their armies of engineers claim is impossible. Good ol’ American know-how and ingenuity is alive and well, just not where we need it.

These two quotes tell us a lot.

For one, it isn’t just Detroit who says some of these things are impossible. The Germans aren’t designing these things. Neither are the Japanese. I’m really fucking sick of Americans who blame all of the problems of the auto-industry solely on Detroit. I no longer have a particular love for the Big 3, but let’s realize that many of the trends in the industry are global and not attributable to Detroit.

And looky here, Kos says that Goodwin is designing motors, but then says that Detroit is selling the damn motors, which of course means that Detroit, in this case GM, is actually designing, building, and assembling the motors (actually engines). Goodwin isn’t designing motors or engines. He’s just assembling his own drive trains. That’s a huge fucking difference.

For another thing, Kos doesn’t even get into any of the technical details. I can think of only 2 reasons. Either he/she/it has no concept of the details and is wholly out of his/her/its element (which one can believe based on the point I made in the preceding paragraph), or he/she/it is intentionally omitting information to mislead. In other words, Kos is not someone you should be reading, at least with respect to energy and energy policy, and probably not ever.

So what are the technical details? First, the guy is basically swapping out the gasoline engines in Hummers with diesel engines. And those would be Detroit’s diesel engines (not to be confused with Detroit Diesel engine, Detroit Diesel being a specific company). That’s the major step. He’s just putting in diesel engines. That’s it. Although he goes on and makes some other modifications. He does add electric motors and makes hybrids. That’s great. But guess what? GM has been marketing and selling (very poorly) hybrids for years. Other modifications include adding hydrogen and/or natural gas to the fuel mixture. This last point is important, and is often one used by no-good liars and/or no-good idiots. They substitute some other fuel that isn’t diesel or gasoline and then go on and on about their “miles per gallon” without hardly mentioning all the other energy required to get to that final MPG calculation. These people are usually also the ones who think that everyone should use only ethanol or biodiesel without taking it account where all that biofuel would have to come from.

And keep in mind, too, that this guy is basically making a few workshop-quality vehicles. There is a huge difference between something that works for several thousand miles for a mechanic who can fix the vehicle at any time and something that will be reliable for at least a hundred-thousand miles. Maybe Goodwin’s designs are robust. Or maybe they’re not.

You know what they say: if it sounds to good to be true, idiots will demand it and politicians will promise to deliver it.

… or given, neatly condensed into one little video.

Orac calls it the best scientific talk, ever, while the Unapologetic Mathematician considers it the best lecture ever. Sunclipse has it as well.

The first rule of engineering, “keep it simple, Stupid!”

I can’t believe I never thought of this:

“The best cooler - it’s easy to drain and clean.” (from CollegeHumor)

It’s time to start planning the mother of all road trips. Russia is planning to build a 64 mile tunnel to link to Alaska. Great googely moogely.

The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete… [T]he tunnel… at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan…
The Bering Strait tunnel will cost $10 billion to $12 billion.

By 10-15 years and $10 to $12 billion, I assume they actually meant 20-25 years and $20 to $25 billion.

So who’s got some vacation retirement time in 2032?

We’ve seen cars that bounce, cars with little wheels, cars with wheels, and even cars with clear wheels. The next fad I imagine is cars with non-round wheels; I’m thinking elliptical. They could give your car interesting bounce characteristics and an uncommon, perhaps flashy, feature.

And before you tell me that it’s a stupid idea that would never catch on, look at the stupid ideas that have caught on.