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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Hydrokinetics

When I came across the meme at left, I was instantly reminded of a guy who called me from Baltimore, MD about 15 years ago, anxious for me to hunt up investors in an invention he had created.  I was having a hard time understanding the concept he was describing, and so he told me, “Think of it as a river in a box.”

“Ah! Now I get it. You have a box full of standing water. You add energy to it to get it moving, and then extract energy from the moving water.  And you think that you can extract more energy than you put into it.”

“Yes!” he said excitedly.

I calmly told him that this violates the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but he wasn’t “having it.” I wished him a pleasant good night and asked him to let me know when he had built a working prototype.

I’m still hoping to hear from him again.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Can I relate to the meme here?

No, because the U.S. derives a great deal of benefit from foreign aid.

Not that we care about democracy anymore, but before Trump, it was thought to be a good idea to support freedom around the world, to prevent authoritarian states from taking over the planet.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

Hardly.

Gravity-based energy storage for electricity has been in use since the 1890s.

Storing mechanical energy with heavy objects goes back to ancient times.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy
Energy from wind, generated right where you need it – that’s our SkyWind NG. The first independently tested micro wind turbine is efficient, quiet and Made in Germany.
In response, a reader notes, “They chop up birds amazingly well.”
That’s not the issue.  Birds are 2400 times more likely to die from cars, cats, and plate glass windows.

The problem is the incredible high cost per KWh of small wind.

If you think it looks cool, that’s fine.  Just don’t think it’s going to pay for itself in less than 100 years or so.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

What former Republican U.S. representative Joe Walsh says here is 100% true, according to reports.

What exactly this will mean to the U.S. economy, especially in the long term, is impossible to predict accurately, but it can’t be good.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Here’s a thought: when these guys were little boys, what was their life’s aspiration? Were they like this in elementary school, or did something go off the rails?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

We’ve all had the experience of being presented with something so improbable on social media, and Googling it, in the belief that it can’t possibly be true.

The story at left is true.  But what does it mean about our State Department?

We live in a world at war, on a planet that’s baking, where high school students can barely read and write, and this guy is so opposed to one type font that he’s banning it?

The United States so richly deserves the disaster that is befalling it.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s a mystery to most of us how it’s possible that the comments of our country’s top military minds, who worked for Trump and knew him intimately, can be ignored.

Trump supporters think of themselves as patriots, but they seem not to care that our generals and admirals believe that our president is some combination of a spoiled child and a criminal sociopath.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

After being ordered to commit war crimes, retiring is an option, and I don’t think anyone could say that what this commander did was absolutely wrong.  Of course, another option would have been to call bullshit, and to stand up for rule of law and the United States Constitution.

FWIW, I don’t expect the entirety of our top-ranking generals and admirals to simply disappear from active duty and retire in Tahiti when Trump decides to attack Venezuela, or Canada, or Greenland, or to reorganize the EU.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

As we see from the polls, there are Trump supporters falling off the bandwagon every day.  How and why does this happen?  It’s hard to know.

Some may have undergone an epiphany and realized to their horror that our president is a criminal sociopath and simply can’t believe how gullible they were to have bought into his crap in the first place.

The meme at left suggests that there is another group that has been brought to their knees by Trump, who apparently is a man with unlimited power who knows essentially zero about finance and economics, and simply took our farmers, like our factory workers and the rest of the working class, to the cleaners.

 

 

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