We’re going to end with a strong red/blue state divide on regulatory frameworks. I wonder if the vaccine guideline coalitions point to emerging regulatory consistency among blue states on this as well.
I like this actually - let different states try different things, and see how they work out. As the results become more certain, states will feel pressure to adopt the policies that are working well. And there's still room for different states to retain different policies that are better suited to them individually.
Exactly. Just like the pressure of being the last state in basically every single metric has empowered Mississippi to turn things around. Oh wait what? Mississippi is more fucked up than ever and shows zero signs of ever joining a civilized nation? Maybe they just haven’t hit rock bottom quite hard enough. Surely then conservative politics will turn things around!
Like it or not - Mississippi is doing what their citizens want as they demonstrate at their own ballot box. It's not up to me to decide what's best for them. And in the worst case, if a person there really feels strongly about some particular issue - it's not THAT hard for them to simply move to a more agreeable state.
We should embrace diversity and mutual respect - not simply assume that other people doing things differently are wrong and need to be fixed/corrected.
Why would this not be ethical to study? It's not like the researchers are taking an active role in creating this situation. In fact, I would say it is more unethical not to research this, given that we already know the PFAS will readily migrate out of the red-flag states.
Regarding vaccines, if you live in a red state you probably won't be able to get one unless your a senior citizen, travel to another state, or possibly with a doctor's prescription.
Well pre COVID, Silicon Valley had one of the highest non-vaccination rates amount kids in day-care. So at least then it wasn't a red/blue thing at all.
> The Cookware Sustainability Alliance, an industry group formed by major cookware companies, urged lawmakers to oppose the bill.
“The proposal risks taking safe, affordable, and reliable kitchen essentials off the shelves, leaving customers with fewer options for the products they use every day,” the group said in a statement.
> The alliance says PFAS is a category that includes some chemicals—such as fluoropolymers used to coat nonstick cookware—that have been deemed safe for uses in food preparation by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority.
> “They are non-toxic and inert, they do not bioaccumulate, and importantly, they are not water soluble,” the alliance stated.
Wow, what a lie-by-outrageous-omission. I would believe that the fluoropolymers in nonstick cookware are, in their intact state, inert and rather harmless (if quite persistent). I would even believe that most of the definitely-not-safe stuff that’s used in manufacturing them don’t end up in the pan.
But these things are in cookware, where they are regularly heated to high temperatures, and a lot of fluoropolymers start to degrade at temperatures that are well within the reach of the average stove. Have any of these people ever contemplated the state of an omelette pan at a restaurant? Or basically any Teflon pan that has gotten any sort of regular use without extreme care taken not to overheat it? Heck, overheated PTFE is so non-inert that it rather imfamously kills birds.
I will he delighted to see Teflon pans phased out at California restaurants. You can buy perfectly fine PFAS-free “ceramic”-coated pans these days at reasonable prices. (You can also buy non-PFAS-free “ceramic” pans these days — read labels carefullly, consider looking up the listed patents, and keep in mind that if it doesn’t see its PFAS-free then it probably isn’t. PFOS/PFOA-free does not mean free if other PFAS.)
Do restaurants even use Teflon? I get the sense that most restaurants use stainless steel, carbon steel, or cast iron for practically everything, because nonstick pans will last all of a week under heavy use.
(And if you’re a good cook, you definitely don’t need nonstick for an omlette.)
I am suddenly quite bullish on California real estate. The “good people” will flock from all around the world so that they can be in one place with the other “good people”. It’s about shared values. California will be the last refuge for people around the world who have these shared values.
I assure you there are places in the world with good people and shared values outside of one state in one particular country. Pretty wild comment frankly...
Heat pump != Geothermal energy generation, or any energy generation at that
Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal
A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy
They certainly don't produce electricity, but they do produce energy. You put in 1 kW of electricity, though, and you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
Now, that energy is coming from somewhere else (in this case, the heat of the ground beneath the house or the air outside), but that's true of electrical generators as well.
They certainly don't produce electricity. However, if you put in 1 kW of electricity, you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
They didn’t say home geothermal, they said home heatpumps. In that setup, the earth is not an energy source, just a very massive source of thermal inertia. They are not the same thing.
‘home geothermal’ isn’t really a thing unless you’re already living on a hotspring, which is quite unusual. (delta-v is not sufficient)
At the point someone is drilling km+ boreholes and installing MW+ turbines, it’s safe to call it commercial.
More than 900 shallow wells have been drilled at Rotorua for space and water heating for private homes, hospitals, schools, motels, hotels, and other commercial and industrial uses. At peak use, around 430 wells were operating. Currently fewer than 300 production and injection wells are operating, for approximately 140 consents takes. About 90 of the wells are less than 200m deep and typically recover geothermal fluid at temperatures of 120 to 200°C.
How does that make it an energy source? It makes it a pump. That still consumes energy to run. And none of the home heat pump setups I’ve seen are tapping into enough thermal inertia (or high grade heat) to do more than keep a house warm. They also, of course, PUT HEAT BACK there in the summer to help cool the house. They’re just moving heat around, and not with any particularly high quality either. If they used the atmosphere for thermal inertia (also common), would you say they were using the atmosphere as an energy source?
Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
It’s like the difference between having a pool in your backyard, and damming a huge river and installing turbines.
The point of a heat pump is to bring more Watts of heat into the home than the electricity consumed. Otherwise you could just use a resistive heater and heat the home with electricity directly. So ask yourself, if more energy came into your home than you put in from the electric socket, where exactly did the extra energy come from?
I did. The question is for you. I've answered it in several different ways in this thread. There is a sibling comment I replied to which breaks it down even more clearly.
You used the energy from the wall socket to pump the heat from outside into the inside, less efficiently than you could use that heat to generate more electricity or do other work later.
Aka you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit. You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
Actually operating one, you'll see that the energy cost of a heat pump becomes proportionally higher as the temperature difference gets bigger, so you spend more energy moving the heat when the source is low temperature and the output is high temperature.
Many people have gotten quite frustrated when they end up chilling the ground in their ground source heat pump too much, and they end up with very inefficient systems.
You could do the exact same thing (with better or similar efficiency) by using some other source of thermal mass. Air sourced heat pumps do it with the atmosphere. It's possible to use lakes and other bodies of water.
No net usable power is being extracted from the earth in this scenario. The earth is being cooled in order to heat your house. And heated, in order to cool your house.
Geothermal power systems do produce actual usable power, and they do so by running a heat engine (the opposite of a heat pump) off an extremely large temperature difference from a very large source of underground heat. You can't run a heat engine on the output of a heat pump and produce net power, anymore than you can hook a generator to an electric motor and produce net power.
>That is not what ‘power source’ means. You probably want to read up on some thermodynamics and definitions. I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
There is no answer in that whole comment to my question. However, you did answer it in the comment I am replying to:
> you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit.
Yes! That's exactly right. But furthermore:
> You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
This is exactly right, and it is also known as the first law of thermodynamics. [1]. There is no way to produce energy. Even with electrical generation from geothermal, we are moving energy and concentrating it a bit, as you say, just in different forms.
Haha, no. In geothermal, you aren’t concentrating shit. Rather the opposite. You’re just moving it down the entropic slope/dissipating it.
And converting (lossily) the form (usually, unless you’re doing geothermal heat - even then you need a heat exchanger).
And it all boils down to ‘within an enclosed system’. With heat pumps the scope is typically within a hundred meters of itself.
With deep geothermal it’s 1+ mile underground and the surface.
There is useful power between 1+ mile down and the surface. There isn’t 100 meters away and the surface - unless you’re sitting on top of a hot spring anyway.
> Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
Geothermal systems don’t strictly need to produce energy with steam, I just completed a project to convert some boilers and chillers with heat recovery chillers and a geothermal loop for heating and cooling at a research lab for an S&P 500 constituent. I’m doing another project to replace some existing geothermal heat pumps for another customer this fall, no power generation, just heating and cooling.
That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
The different between these two ideas, is that a heat pump is not producing heat (as it's primary goal). It's concentrating and moving heat from point A to point B. The amount of heat moved may exceed the amount of raw energy used to perform this process (and should, in most situations), HOWEVER, it can not exceed the amount of energy you would get back by trying to reverse the process to extract energy. It is still a net energy consuming process.
This is important, because if it wasn't - you could power the heat pumps off their own output, and you'd literally have infinite energy/perpetual motion machine. Which would be awesome. It is also impossible, near as we can tell.
What actually happens is everything grinds to a halt, because the useful (Actual) energy output from the heat pump is lower than the energy required to run it.
Chances are, that system isn't even really geothermal (as in using latent heat of the planet) - any large enough mass would do the same thing. People just like to say the word because it sounds 'green'. If the ground was hot enough (for instance) to provide actual heat itself, a heatpump would be a waste for heating the building - and extremely inefficient for cooling it. It would be better to just pipe water straight out of the ground to heat, and use air based HVAC to cool.
Geothermal power generation does produce power - by tapping into a source of heat so hot that the difference between normal atmospheric temperatures and that heat source allows us to generate useful power. A heat pump gets in the way and causes losses in these situations.
Unless you're sitting (quite literally) on a hotspring, this requires going VERY deep into the ground. Which is what this article is about.
> That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
I get the vibe that your definition of "producing power" is electrical power generation. However the original argument is that there is energy being extracted that is not in the form of electricity.
yes. And don’t forget the ‘deep underground and the surface, where there is a useful high temperature gradient’, vs ‘a hundred meters away and with no high temperature gradient’.
Given the link rot and that this page still have thousand of visitors per day (according to Wikipedia) it's amazing that he never added a resell service. Maybe the original pixels owners are hard to track though.
