An Esoteric Technical Diagram of How Humanity Might Be Saved from Itself.
The bourgeois rather clueless antinuke thug Amory Lovins became famous for promoting the absurd idea that energy efficiency would reduce energy consumption and create a suburban so called "renewable energy" nirvana. He originally became famous for this line of shit in an unreferenced paper published in a social science journal in 1976: Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?
Regrettably his "ideas" such as they were and are were taken seriously and a little cult called "RMI" - Rocky Mountain Institute - still exists run from an aerie in the very upscale town of Snowmass, just outside of Aspen Colorado, where people can (for a fee) pay obeisance to the undead dream of suburban nirvana, a solar molten salt energy storage unit in every backyard.
I have a different view of energy efficiency, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing if the goal is not to heat suburban McMansions using only the sun (but sneakily burning some natural gas and wood when the sun isn't shining) but rather to extend energy to those who lack it, that is, to address, cleanly, poverty. In 1976, the concept of Jevon's paradox - energy efficiency increases the use of energy - had been known and stated over a century before, but Lovins, an admirer of his own genius, apparently didn't look very far into the world outside his exalted mind. Wisdom just sprung, like Diana from the brain of Zeus, from his wonderful brain.
The attempted adaption and rote acceptance of Lovins' pixilated ideology has left the atmosphere of the planet in ruins, the forests burning and not in "renewable energy" nirvanas but rather in incinerated wilderness. The reactionary impulse, still underway, to embrace Apolloian and Aeolian Gods, to make our energy supplies dependent on the weather at precisely the time we have destabilized the weather has failed miserably.
To wit:
Week beginning on September 15, 2024: 421.94 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.33 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.24 ppm
Last updated: September 21, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Numbers don't lie; people lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.
Nevertheless, there is something to be said in favor of very high energy efficiency, not in suburban enclaves, but in industry, if we are to save what is left to save and perhaps restore what can be restored, as well as to extend clean energy to those who lack it.
I'm way behind on everything but in trying to catch up I came across this diagram in a paper I came across in this paper in my general reading: An Extended Superstructure-Based Model for Synthesis of Compression-Heat-Integrated Heat Exchanger Networks Coupled with Multiple Utilities Yongjian Huang, Yafeng Xing, Yu Zhuang, and Jian Du Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (21), 9456-9470.
This diagram from the paper, in my unimportant opinion, a diagram of a heat network, is the key to saving the world:
The caption:
EC here stands for "energy consumption." and the "case" is described as follows:
In this case, the integration of work and heat is considered simultaneously, which is manifested in this Article as optimizing the temperature conditions of pressure-change operations. The interaction between temperature and pressure introduces a relationship where changes in compression power impact heat integration. By simultaneously integrating work and heat, the expectation is to achieve better optimization results. There are also two different results obtained from two different objectives: Case 2_a, for minimum TAC, and Case 2_b, for minimum EC, where the total CPU times used are 655 and 80 000 s (the set upper bound on computing time).
TAC is "Total Annualized Cost."
VHPS is very high pressure steam - the words "supercritical water" might be substituted for VHPS - HPS, high pressure steam, MPS medium pressure steam, and, now obviously LPS, low pressure steam. Note that the working fluids can be different as well, we might substitute "very high temperature pressurized air" for VHPS, and chemical reactions driven by heat, as in thermochemical water splitting cycles, the SI cycle, for instance, can appear in the lines. The idea is process intensification using a heat exchange network. The higher the temperature of the fuel, the greater the possibilities.
If the fuel in the diagram is an actinide element, thorium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, or curium, the system would be clean and sustainable, unlike the garbage fantasies of the reactionary little RMI guru Amory Lovins and the members of the RMI cult.
Have a nice day tomorrow.