A coal company is taking legal action over Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s rejection of a $5.3 billion coal project in central Queensland wetlands.
Waratah Coal wanted to establish a rail line and coal port at Shoalwater Bay, north of Rockhampton but Mr Garrett rejected the proposal on the grounds it would destroy Shoalwater and Corio Bay wetlands.
Govt rejects coal port, rail line in Qld - Breaking News - National - Breaking News.
26th Aug, 2008
Single-handed sailing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This use of hand to mean a member of a ship’s crew may derive from the days of sailing ships, where the crew had to work high in the rigging without the benefit of modern safety harnesses; it was an essential precaution that each sailor should hold on with one hand at all times, while working with the other. This meant that each crew member represented one hand for the ship’s work, and gave rise to the saying one hand for yourself, one for the ship. This saying remains excellent advice for sailors today, particularly single-handers.
One hand for yourself, one for the ship.
24th Aug, 2008
Silver lining
In one of the previous posts there was a mention about combining rechargeable batteries with capacitors so that the capacitors could be quickly charged so then they could take the appropriate time to charge up the batteries without having the unit connected to the mains for the whole time. An extension of that idea is to investige the possibility of shaping the capacitors for a battery as a layer of the battery casing. Normally capacitors are found as standalone units with the plates rolled up into a compact bundle. The pair of plates could still have a large surface area if they were flattened out and incorporated into the battery casing with maybe more than one layer around the battery. The shape and size of the battery/capacitor unit could be set up so that the capacities of both match the other. The battery/capacitor units could then be stacked into banks depending on the energy needs. These batteries would need some controlling circuitry so they would not be as simple as current batteries. But you would have the advantage of being able to charge these units up very quickly while also using them to store energy.
Perhaps you could design these storage units so that the capacitors or ultra-capacitors around any particular battery cell could be used independently of the battery itself and energy could be shuttled around like information is moved around in a computer’s RAM, only very much slower. Then there is the question about capacity volumes; what are the smallest possible units sizes and what are the most practical largest capacities for individual units. Could you add a few new types of layers on an integrated circuit so that sub-systems on the chip could hold energy like in a capacitor (similar to RAM with regard to holding information) or a battery (like flash memory in computing)?
***
29 Aug
This is off topic, but perhaps one of the reasons why the number forty (40) has such prominence in the Judeo-Christian religions is because forty is the number of weeks for an average term of pregnancy (counting from the woman’s last menstrual period). The first chapter of Genesis marks out the seven day week as a basic measure of time. Stories such the one about Noah’s Ark mark out the duration of the flooding deluge as forty days and forty nights, and in this case the idea of a symbolic period of gestation and then a birth of sorts doesn’t seem far fetched. Perhaps one of the meanings behind the number forty in these texts is as a symbolic gestation period before a new birth of something. That could be for forty days and nights or forty years in the wilderness. That the period of forty weeks is not used in these texts very often is a strange omission, but to establish or legitimise some new idea or pattern the men involved (Noah, Moses and Jesus, for example) spent some time in the wilderness measured in lots of forty before emerging with a new approach. It points to the importance of the feminine, even going as far as to lend legitimacy to the patriarchs only after an, albeit unconscious, acknowledgment of the feminine. Just another idea to ponder.
Its interesting too that when the number forty is used there are usually two alternatives, set up as pairs nearly like mirror images or with one as the shadow of the other. With the Flood there are forty days of rain to start the flood and after the water receded Noah waited forty days before he sent the raven out and then later the dove which returned. This might also be another echo of the two versions of creation.
Or could you view these 3 fold patterns with multiples of 40, or at least for the beginning and end of a cycle with perhaps a longer time in the middle, as being in harmony with the basic feminine pattern in the phases of the moon; symbolically as maiden, mother and then crone.
[This blog would have to annoy just about everyone who reads it. For the religious types there are posts about science, technology and politics, and visa versa for those interested in the more technical ideas, expressed as they are all too crudely.]
22nd Aug, 2008
What bloggers read in the papers | The Australian
The sheer fact it’s mainstream, though, means it must offer two crucial elements missing from the world of the blogs. They are balance and fact.
The last sentence is slightly ambiguous. If it were phrased to mean that mainstream media was balanced and factual then you have something to test and a starting point for debate. Being balanced and factual are ideals. There are many ways to view complex issues. People who share similar assumptions about the world will tend to agree on what constitutes a fact on topics of interest to them. People with different sets of assumptions about the same topic may agree that there are other facts that better describe a given situation.
The last sentence reads more like a defensive assertion of authority: “They are balance and fact.” He seems to be bemoaning the fact that bloggers don’t always accept the grab bag of asssumptions about the world that the mainstream media defines as being balanced and factual. Given that we can all agree that balance and fact are as Good as fairyfloss and candy.
19th Aug, 2008
Nuclear is the answer: Liberals | theage.com.au
The Liberals have reignited the nuclear debate, with a frontbencher saying Australia must have nuclear power if it is to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
But the government has vehemently rejected the push and says people do not want nuclear power plants in their suburbs.
Liberal frontbencher Ian Macfarlane opened the latest round of the radioactive debate when he talked up “yellowcake” in a speech.
“It’s a black and white answer. Or should I say a black, green and yellow answer,” he said in the speech, to be delivered in Brisbane tonight.
“Clean coal, renewables and yellowcake - we must include nuclear in our future baseload clean energy mix.”
Mr Macfarlane, who was resources minister in the Howard government, said it was an “inconvenient truth” that only nuclear power could provide baseload electricity while cutting emissions.
The main problem is that they are asking the wrong questions.
The energy crisis is largely due to maintaining a top-down configuration for energy systems based around centralised baseload power generation for grids and oil company dominated logistical supply chains of fossil fuels for use in transport. Think baseload, think monolithic, think Brontosaurus. I’m sure someone could paint a picture of a wrinkly old dinosaur using only a limited palette consisting of black, green and yellow pigments.
These kinds of arguments that nuclear power is an answer to global warming could be examples of a false compromise, or even worse, an example of the use of an Overton window.
The idea of an Overton window only works if one side uses it unfairly to try to shift public discourse in a particular direction, to the right as it happened in the past few decades. If everyone catches on to what is going on then what might happen is that the width of the window will expand rather than having the window shift significantly. It might be more like a flattening bell curve as when results are increasingly noisey. The average may still shift slightly even as the curve flattens out. If the Overton window strategy is broadly adopted in politial discourse one consequence might be that a wider range of options for any issue would be back on the public agenda and then perhaps the more radical ideas would be seen for what they really are and you might end up with what looks like, um, open and reasonable public debate. Another effect might be that the criterion for adopting a particular position may need to be more clearly elaborated on in any public debate. One of the other propaganda strategies over the last few decades was to narrow the debate and strictly control who had a voice in those public debates and this might have been tied in with a strategy of shifting Overton windows on particular topics. (I have only seen this term on Wikipedia or blogs so it might be a furphy, you never know.)
The strangest thing about this Overton window strategy in politics is the assumption that the repeated use of this strategy will NOT impact on a person’s or group’s credibility with the general public. Carefully choose a topic, use this strategy once or twice depending on the topic and it may be effective. Use the technique all the time on far-flung flights of fancy - intelligent design and even a Christian theme park that has exhibits of dinosaurs in a mockup of the Garden of Eden are a couple of examples - and you wonder how anyone can take the people using these strategies seriously. [That's why the so-called war on terror is so important to the people adopting these deliberately radical strategies, in quite a number of ambiguous ways]. A trick is only a trick the first time it is used. A joke works only the first time its heard. This strategy only has a limited lifetime.
17th Aug, 2008
Eternal return (Eliade) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sacred and profane
According to Eliade,
“all the definitions given up till now of the religious phenomenon have one thing in common: each has its own way of showing that the sacred and the religious life are the opposite of the profane and secular life.”[2]
This concept had already been extensively formulated by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1912,[3]. Scholars like Jack Goody gave evidence that it is not universal.[4][5]
This sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane is Eliade’s trademark theory. According to Eliade, traditional man distinguishes two levels of existence: (1) the Sacred, and (2) the profane world. (Here “the Sacred” can be God, gods, mythical ancestors, or any other beings who established the world’s structure.) To traditional man, things “acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality”.[6] Something in our world is only “real” to the extent that it conforms to the Sacred or the patterns established by the Sacred.
Hence, there is profane space, and there is sacred space. Sacred space is space where the Sacred manifests itself; unlike profane space, sacred space has a sense of direction:
“In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany [appearance of the Sacred] reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.”[7]
Where the Sacred intersects our world, it appears in the form of ideal models (e.g., the actions and commandments of gods or mythical heroes). All things become truly “real” by imitating these models. Eliade claims: “For archaic man, reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype.”[8]
…
Origin as power
According to Eliade, in the archaic worldview, the power of a thing resides in its origin, so that “knowing the origin of an object, an animal, a plant, and so on is equivalent to acquiring a magical power over them”.[13] The way a thing was created establishes that thing’s nature, the pattern to which it should conform. By gaining control over the origin of a thing, one also gains control over the thing itself.
Eliade concluded that, if origin and power are to be the same, “it is the first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid”.[14] The Sacred first manifested itself in the events of the mythical age; hence, traditional man sees the mythical age as the foundation of value…
The New Year ritual reenacts the mythical beginning of the cosmos. Therefore, by the logic of the eternal return, each New Year is the beginning of the cosmos. Thus, time flows in a closed circle, always returning to the sacred time celebrated during the New Year: the cosmos’s entire duration is limited to one year, which repeats itself indefinitely.
Eternal return (Eliade) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 17 Aug 2008
There are different kinds of cyclic processes. Philosophical eternal return could be associated with a clockwork conception of a closed and finite universe with infinite time (assumptions that don’t hold). There are also cyclic patterns containing feedback mechanisms and you could argue that an expression of an insight from the Buddha soon after the starting point of Buddhism - The Four Noble Truths - has the structure of a cyclic feedback pattern with the aim of reducing suffering. Systems engineering looks specifically for feedback loops and causal cycles in both hard (physical sciences) and soft (human and cultural) contexts of complex organisations. You could also claim that markets and liberal democratic systems can only function when feedback cycles are working throughout them, and perhaps you couldn’t even define markets with price signals if they didn’t consist of feedback loops. That is what a market is after all; cyclic feedback loops that optimise supply channels to meet demand. Even global warming is due to an imbalance in the earth’s carbon cycle caused by burning fossil fuels. These are only a few examples of cyclic processes. There are many types of cyclic processes without having to resort exclusively to a literal reading of religion for meaning.
Stories such as this one are a worry, as was this. The main conflict within Israel today, most people would agree, is within Israel itself and along the secular/religious divide. Modern states are secular. States run by religious elites in recent history have not generally been considered to have been successful nor suitable models to aspire to. Modern states are secular.
14th Aug, 2008
Authoritarian divisions | The Australian
…History, in case you missed the point, has not ended…
Authoritarian divisions | The Australian. by Paul Kelly
And yep, those intellectual Wonderland fancy dress costumes sure do look silly.
11th Aug, 2008
Waratah Coal | Projects | Galilee Basin Project
Waratah Coal is proposing to develop a coal mine, railway and port facility in Central Queensland to export high volatile, low sulphur, steaming coal to international markets. The project’s estimated total development cost is AU$5.3 billion.
Processed coal will be transported by a new 495 km rail system from the Galilee Basin to a planned export port facility on the Central Queensland coast…
Waratah Coal is responsible for the planning, construction and operation of the Galilee Coal Project. Waratah Coal is a public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in Canada.Waratah Coal is managed by an Australian team with the company’s headquarters located in Brisbane. Approximately 50% of the company is owned by Australian investors.
The company is preparing to list on the Australian Securities Exchange creating a dual stock listing. This will establish Waratah Coal as both an Australian and Canadian company.
Waratah Coal on the Toronto VENTURE Exchange - TSX Venture Exchange: WCI
10th Aug, 2008
Proposed Coal Port in QLD Threatens Unique Wetlands, Local Drinking Water - Friends of the Earth Australia
Friends of the Earth Brisbane (FoEB) and the Shoalwater Bay Wilderness Awareness Group (SWAG) reject the proposed coal port near Yeppoon. The port proposal currently [to] be fast-tracked by Premier Bligh is a serious threat to the unique RAMSAR listed wetland area and the cleanliness of local residents drinking water…
This proposed coal port will be right next to Byfield National Park and Conservation Park, near Great Keppel Island and near the Capricorn section of the Great Barrier Reef.
10th Aug, 2008
Proposed new Queensland coal port - Supply Chain Review
First new coal port in 25 years planned for Qld mines
July 15, 2008
The Queensland Government is considering plans for a new $5.3 billion coal port between Rockhampton and Mackay to service coal boom-basins Bowen, the Galilee and Surat.The proposal from Waratah Coal would be the first new coal mine built in Australia in a quarter of a century.
It’s one of three plans being considered by the Government to deliver a 40 percent coal export increase for the State.
Premier Anna Bligh says the plans are a “quantum leap” for Queensland’s coal industry.
“These projects could see this State fully harness the opportunities the resources boom can offer by delivering a 40 percent increase in our coal exporting capacity,” she says.
The Waratah Coal proposal will see a new mine built near Alpha, with the potential to produce 25 million tonnes of terminal coal for export per annum.
The new port, to be built at Shoalwater Bay between Rockhampton and Mackay, will have a capacity of up to 100 million tonnes of coal per annum.
A new 500km rail line – reaching from the Galilee basin to the new port – would open the region to coal exports for the first time.
Defence Force land is being targeted for the project so that adjacent Byfield National Park will not be affected. [Yeah, right - Rob]
The State Opposition has already questioned the plan, which Opposition Leader Laurence Springborg calls a “shock announcement”…
These people do not seem to understand climate change.
10th Aug, 2008
Still luffing along
There seems to be a general feeling that we are not going anywhere, being neither here nor there, even after the last federal election when Kevin Rudd was elected. You could claim there was a continuation from Keating through to Howard by the way both Prime Ministers adopted neo-liberalism or economic rationalism. There seems to also be a continuation from Howard to Rudd through style, but Rudd wouldn’t be able to get away with it like Howard did. Howard was arrogant but he worked very hard to disguise it. He would be on television putting on an innocent face and ACTING as if his judgement was careful and considered, no matter what he did or failed to do responsibly. Howard worked very hard to present an average everyman image to the public gaze. Rudd wouldn’t be able to do that. Rudd was elected by sailing close to the wind but now seems to be “in irons”. We will have to wait and see whether the continuity from Howard to Rudd will be in terms of national security, but Rudd has started to distance Australia from the most obnoxious aspects of the Howard era such as mandatory detention. The election of the next US President will most likely also change things.
10th Aug, 2008
Coming clean on climate change | theage.com.au
HALF of Australia’s biggest companies are risking cost blow-outs, an increased regulatory burden and reputational damage from climate change, according to an international report.
The report from the London-based Ethical Research Investment Services and the Centre for Australian Ethical Research in Canberra found that 48% of Australia’s largest 200 companies are classified as having a high or very high potential impact from climate change. Collectively, these companies account for more than $545 billion in market value.
It also found that Australian companies were doing less about climate change than their global counterparts…
Alarmingly, the report found that more than half (53%) of companies in the S&P/ASX200 were considered to have unmitigated risk. In other words, they had not taken sufficient measures to fix the problem and reduce their riskiness for investors…
It also found a significant gap between what steps companies claimed they were taking to tackle climate change, and what they were actually doing. Just under two-fifths (39%) of the high and very high-risk companies had a corporate-wide commitment to deal with global warming, but only 18% were basing their efforts on international targets, regulations or scientific research.
Coming clean on climate change | theage.com.au. [my emphasis]
7th Aug, 2008
Coopers cans beer ad after monarchists’ complaint - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
The brewer has cancelled an advertising campaign after the monarchists complained about the slogan: ‘Forget the monarchy, support the publicans’.
Plastered on billboards, the ad showed the words next to a huge glass of beer.
The Coopers Ad - from the abc.net.au story
But a marketing commentator says the monarchists should get a sense of humour, while Coopers should stand up for itself.
Coopers no doubt hoped that the play on words would raise an eyebrow, spark a chuckle and lift sales of the company’s beer…
Coopers cans beer ad after monarchists’ complaint - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
This is good publicity for the push for the republic, even if it is with a slightly slurred enunciation.
So let’s drop the utopian notions of an Australia where everyone can have a train station or a light rail nearby and the services are frequent and trouble-free. If it ever happened, and maybe it did 50 years ago, it cannot happen now. We treasure that little private capsule, insulated from the outside world, where we can abuse talkback callers or listen to our favourite music. We love our cars and we want to keep them. The challenge is to find ways to make cars safer and cleaner. And not to feel so bad when we enjoy one of humanity’s greatest inventions.
It’s too late to put car genie back in bottle | theage.com.au.
I don’t have a car and have to catch public transport everywhere. It is a slow way to travel and while there are always new trams being commissioned some of the old ones seem run down and poorly maintained.
4th Aug, 2008
Emergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Non-living, physical systems
In physics, emergence is used to describe a property, law, or phenomenon which occurs at macroscopic scales (in space or time) but not at microscopic scales, despite the fact that a macroscopic system can be viewed as a very large ensemble of microscopic systems.
An emergent property need not be more complicated than the underlying non-emergent properties which generate it. For instance, the laws of thermodynamics are remarkably simple, even if the laws which govern the interactions between component particles are complex. The term emergence in physics is thus used not to signify complexity, but rather to distinguish which laws and concepts apply to macroscopic scales, and which ones apply to microscopic scales.
That’s the proper word: emergence. What I have been describing as a twist between micro and macro is properly called emergence. There are many examples of emergence and they are an aspect of systems. I suspect that a major factor in emergence is the effect of scale as sub-system components and their interactions shape the behaviour of the system as a whole. Emergence also - most importantly - marks out natural limits.
***
You could probably characterise archaic conservatism, political and otherwise, as an understanding that simply can not comprehend emergence or even that there could be such a way of ordering.
For example, there are nations and people within their nations support their nations. When you step up a scale you see a world with a variety of different nations with some that cooperate in blocks, some that are neutral or indifferent and there is also some competition. Inter-governmental organisations such as the UN and the EU are another emergent layer above nation states.
Religion also has emergent properties as for social groups. Again there is the local level where people know and trust each other. Then there is an emergent layer with a variety of groups of religions and beliefs where some cooperate in blocks, some are neutral or indifferent and a small minority are hostile. There are further inter-faith emergent layers above this as well.
The major ambiguity in the understanding of God could be characterised as being based around a disagreement on emergence as an organising principle itself. Someone who understands emergence would see the world in a certain way, while a person who has no comprehension of emergence as an organising principle typically takes on a more black/white or us/them perspective.
Modern states and liberal democracy are based on emergence. There is the private and then there is the public. They are both needed for individuals within a modern state to prosper and for the modern state to work humanely.
There are qualitative differences between the micro and macro that can not be explained away as being merely due to statistics. Emergence is a natural way through which limits are set - its the edges that fold over to nestle what is inside.
***
Scale is a fundamental idea in the sciences. It is so basic an idea that it’s considered common sense and is often overlooked. Open up a physics text book and one of the first things mentioned is scale - what happens at subatomic levels is quite different to the way everyday objects interact and this again is quite different to what happens at astronomical scales. Scale, and hence emergence, is absolutely basic to understanding the world. The difference between an individual and society is one of scale. It is that basic.
Science is NOT values free. There are some implicit values about rational human beings within science and any discipline in fact.
NSW police now have special emergency powers to bug or track people for up to four days without a warrant.
Under the biggest shake-up to the state’s surveillance laws, police will have up to four days to monitor people before needing to apply retrospectively for an emergency warrant from a Supreme Court judge…
Under the Surveillance Devices Act 2008, which came into effect on Friday, NSW Police can now also cross state borders, and the operational time for surveillance warrants has risen from 21 days to 90 days.
NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Cameron Murphy said the new powers were a massive reduction in police accountability to the community.
“We have seen a number of high-profile police in NSW and Victoria in trouble,” he said. “It raises the question: ‘Can we trust them with these powers where there is an accountability-free zone?’ ”
Concern as police bugging power widens - National - smh.com.au.
Are these the kinds of means an unpopular government will exploit in order to get it’s way? It’s just a rhetorical question - nothing more…
…Along came the fuel squeeze, which made such trips a dream. Now every journey must be evaluated, social contact constricted, distant friends unseen and a party invitation on the other side of Melbourne might as well be on Mars.
“I could go where I wanted,” he said. “It was not just transport, it was fun. Now I calculate it costs me $6 for a round trip to Werribee Plaza.”
If fuel is the lifeblood of Melbourne’s sprawling outer suburban dream, the dream is looking decidedly anaemic as low-income earners battle prices that in recent weeks have hit $1.70 a litre…
So near and yet so far, with distance measured in litres | theage.com.au.
2nd Aug, 2008
Convergence
With information technology there was talk about media convergence, namely that nearly anything that had to do with transmitting or sharing information could be done digitally. The old TV broadcast networks and copper-wire telcos are working with analogue signals and many of these networks have been progressively digitised. Instead of real time signals being sent directly to the end user’s TV or phone, the information has been bundled as discrete IP packets and the signal is decoded and turned into the analogue sound, image or whatever at the end point of the communication. With decent baud rates the message is transmitted over the internet in less time than it takes to watch or listen to.
The next area for digital convergence might be in the energy field. You could think of information being like a vector. The bits in a byte of information may all be signals that can be either zero or one, but the value of a bit depends on where in the byte that particular bit is placed. Coordinate vectors might also consist of a few separate numbers to uniquely specify a particular location in a coordinate system. Shuffling the raw numbers in a coordinate vector is likely to result with a number of different locations (usually three) and shuffling the bits in a string of information will result with a string that has lost the ability to convey information - it would become random. The point is that the convergence so far has been with information and with regard to vector values.
Energy is not a vector, it is a scalar. As energy systems become digitised they are likely to converge with the other major scalar that dominates our lives, namely money and finance. Building renewable energy systems and networks with storage capacity will be akin to building banks and robust financial systems. That would probably not be apparent now and this idea may be laughed off. Once energy systems have become digitised and there is a suitable storage capacity throughout the system people will measure what they can do by the energy that would require. There may be a stable exchange rate between buying energy and currency and eventually stores of energy or a reliable supply of energy will seem like capital, the amounts of energy would be recorded like money is in a bank and then the energy units could be traded directly in the same way that currency is now. There would, however, be realistic limits to the energy capital that can be stored or produced. Rather than relying on perceived social value through markets, an energy currency would be physically verifiable and you wouldn’t have financial systems bubbles like we have had in the later 20C and early 21C with the associated boom and bust cycles that these unverifiable ’sentimental’ financial and market systems go through. Energy is already a valuable commodity and access to energy is important for all of a nation’s economy. Energy and a verifiable supply of renewable energy may well in time have more social value than a lump of gold ever could.
A cap on carbon emissions is essential if we are to have sustainable energy systems that we can live with. If indeed energy and currency converge then the world would have to be firm to insist that the energy be produced sustainably and without damaging the environment. Any economy that will want to be part of this converged energy/currency economy would have to be part of a verifiable carbon trading scheme with caps on CO2 emissions. Without this the atmosphere’s CO2 levels will spiral out of control. I think that technology will move towards storing energy and with renewable sources of energy and that the convergence of energy and currency will only be a matter of time. Obviously I think that a medium to long term way to stabilise the financial systems is to shift the emphasis of value towards renewable energy and energy storage systems. This is a way out of the financial turmoil.
This convergence would also add a whole new meaning to the term ‘dirty money’ and change the way that coal is perceived.
1st Aug, 2008
Balanced energy credits/debits over the grid
Another idea to do with electricity networks has to do with considering how wide spread storage over the electricity grid would change the network. At first storage units and electric cars might be able to schedule their coordinated energy downloads at off peak times to smooth out the load over a network. Renewable energy sources could feed straight into the grid or directly into storage units. You might consider something similar to a neural firing pattern for renewable sources where they slowly build up a unit of charge or energy and then discharge it into the network once the accumulated amount of energy passes some specified threshold. The energy impulses further down the network might work on a similar pattern of slow build up and then a rapid discharge but with larger quanta as appropriate.
A technical question is to what extent could you balance a discharge of a quanta of energy into the network and extract a comparable quanta of energy from the network at a different location in such a way that keeps the load over the network steady. There would be a time delay as the signal propagates over a distance so what would be the furthest apart that you could have a balanced credit and debit energy transaction over an electricity grid without making the network unstable. If large energy transactions were out of phase or unbalanced you could have wild fluctuations over a network. An advantage of this approach might be that you might be able to shift large amounts of energy very quickly and in volumes that far exceed the analogue network capacity.
[It's not an information signal but an energy signal (Bosons?) if you could express it that way. Force may be a better expression for a signal through a change in energy. I don't know - I haven't studied this (fields) in any depth. When will I learn that it is best not to publish paragraphs like this? ]
Could balanced credit and debit transactions over an electricity grid, using specified quanta of energy over bounded windows of time, change the nature of electricity networks? After a while if almost all transactions over a grid are balanced it may be possible to lower the average load level (baseload) to zero, thus turning the electricity grid into a medium for moving energy around rather than a distribution network as it is now. Its a question about comparing analogue with digital. In analogue grids that predominate now the load is matched with the electricity generated, so there is an energy balance over the network as a whole. My question is about the effect that small scale balanced and bounded demand/supply transactions locally within the grid would have, as well as the global matching of load with generated energy. Perhaps the two approaches are complimentary. A slight baseload could be maintained over a network to match the energy dissipated through keeping the energy storage and transaction systems going. There is a difference in the two approaches. There may be huge advantages in going digital over an electricity grid.
***
Written during the eclipse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar eclipse of August 1, 2008
***
2 August
Another relevant point is that the current analogue grid infrastructure can gradually be transformed into a digital energy system. This will most likely be the greatest change in energy systems that will make them sustainable. A large number of renewable energy sources will fit naturally into this transformed system and eventually the large polluting power stations can be decommissioned. The approach that posits nuclear power as an answer to global warming is wrong in nearly every aspect.
Finally, we have this crisis now because what we were doing in the past was not appropriate. Historians look to the past to see what happened. Poetics looks to the future and what can be. There is still a tie in from past to future in the case of energy systems and that bridge has to do with the sciences. We can not solve these problems of global warming by doing only the same as we have done and thinking about the systems involved in all the same ways. Luckily, we are within reach of the science and technology that we need to design and build sustainable energy systems, and eventually to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. That ability was not even there 30 years ago. It would still take some R&D to build those systems though. The potential rewards far outweigh the risks.
Andrew Denton: Mmm. There’s a saying that if you owe the bank a thousand, it’s your problem. If you owe the bank a million, it’s the bank’s problem. If you owe $10 billion, whose problem is that?
ENOUGH ROPE with Andrew Denton - episode 31: Alan Bond (03/11/2003).
