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Merged Bitcoin - Part 3

The Don said:
But was it more efficient than using electricity generated by a coal-fired power station ?

Power stations use pulverised coal dust to superheat water and use that water to drive turbines.

The "Coaldsmobile" burns the pulverised coal dust directly in a turbine. I know that this sounds like an argument from incredulity, but if this was more efficient than using coal to heat water then wouldn't power stations be doing this ?

There would seem to be a *lot* of wasted heat in the coal-dust turbine.
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Natural gas powered generating stations can have thermal efficiencies as high as 60%. Coal plants are ~35% efficient. Internal combustion engines are 20% to 35% efficient when powering a car.

Internal combustion engines can go as high as 45% - 50% in other scenarios. Eg a diesel - electric locomotive where the motor runs at it's optimal efficiency turns a generator that powers electric motors which turn the drive wheels. The difference here is that with mechanical drive the motor is hardly ever running at it's most efficient speed.
 
lomiller said:
Natural gas powered generating stations can have thermal efficiencies as high as 60%. Coal plants are ~35% efficient. Internal combustion engines are 20% to 35% efficient when powering a car.

Internal combustion engines can go as high as 45% - 50% in other scenarios. Eg a diesel - electric locomotive where the motor runs at it's optimal efficiency turns a generator that powers electric motors which turn the drive wheels. The difference here is that with mechanical drive the motor is hardly ever running at it's most efficient speed.
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I say we use small black holes in car engines. They're up to 35% efficient... at converting matter into energy direct.

Of course your car would probably now weigh abot half a million tonnes or more.
 
Here's the thing--if your auto fleet is electrical, even if your power grid could use some greening, efficiencies created on the grid later automatically propagate to your car fleet.

If you stay on fossil fuel cars, once you improve your power grid you still have to tackle the vehicles.
 
ChrisBFRPKY said:
Personally, I'm all in for solar electric powering Bitcoin mining. Sunshine into money.
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Not especially helpful as that segment's increased demand for solar resources affects the cost of other solar projects. There's no way to isolate the problem that bitcoin monetizes wasting electricity. Wasting efficient electricity is still waste.
 
gnome said:
Not especially helpful as that segment's increased demand for solar resources affects the cost of other solar projects. There's no way to isolate the problem that bitcoin monetizes wasting electricity. Wasting efficient electricity is still waste.
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Pretty incredible, right? We're at the point of consumerism where we're encouraged to buy stuff just to throw it away. It's almost a a parody of capitalism.
 
lomiller said:
This is false. Electric motors efficiency is in the high 90's plus you can use things like regenerative breaking to increase efficiency even further. There are some transmission and charging losses but these are a lot smaller than the additional losses you incur running a car sized internal combustion engine instead of a large power plant.

You can't compare coal because there are no vehicles that run on it. Even with natural gas, it's more efficient to produce electricity in a large natural gas power plant, and use that to charge a car battery than it is to power the car directly from natural gas. A coal powered vehicle would be even worse.
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Science proves what I'm saying is true. You can't argue with Thermodynamics and energy conversion or transformation, there will always be losses. Belz is likely the only one here that can charge his Tesla without worrying about contributing to global warming.
 
ChrisBFRPKY said:
Science proves what I'm saying is true. You can't argue with Thermodynamics and energy conversion or transformation, there will always be losses. Belz is likely the only one here that can charge his Tesla without worrying about contributing to global warming.
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Science proves many things. Not that what you're saying is true though.
Problem is car sized coal power plant would be way less effective than huge coal power plant. The difference in efficiency would be greater than transformation losses, which in case of BEV are surprisingly low.
Show coal powered car, which has better efficiency than coal power plant + BEV, or keep dreaming.
 
ChrisBFRPKY said:
Science proves what I'm saying is true. You can't argue with Thermodynamics and energy conversion or transformation, there will always be losses. Belz is likely the only one here that can charge his Tesla without worrying about contributing to global warming.
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Well that's not true. There's a lot of combustion engine vehicles involved in maintaining those hydroelectric dams, repairing and maintaining electric equipment, building the cars, etc.
 
Dr.Sid said:
Science proves many things. Not that what you're saying is true though.
Problem is car sized coal power plant would be way less effective than huge coal power plant. The difference in efficiency would be greater than transformation losses, which in case of BEV are surprisingly low.
Show coal powered car, which has better efficiency than coal power plant + BEV, or keep dreaming.
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I think it would be on you to disprove losses in efficiency regarding energy conversion, rather than for me to design a new car... My work is done.

Belz... said:
Well that's not true. There's a lot of combustion engine vehicles involved in maintaining those hydroelectric dams, repairing and maintaining electric equipment, building the cars, etc.
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**Your use of electricity produced by hydro.** to be exact. Perhaps someday we can train beavers to build hydroelectric facilities.
 
ChrisBFRPKY said:
I think it would be on you to disprove losses in efficiency regarding energy conversion, rather than for me to design a new car... My work is done.
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No it isn't, it's not even close to being done unless your "work" is to display your lack of understanding.

As pointed out upthread, traditional coal-fired power plants are up to 35% efficient under ideal conditions. For 2 years, back in the early 90's, I used to install and commission power station efficiency management systems and have a pretty good idea about the factors which influence efficiency on a day-to-day basis.

Apart from the quality of the coal, the biggest factor was the efficiency of the condensers, which in turn was heavily influenced by ambient temperature.

The "Coaldsmobile" didn't have a system analogous to a coal-fired power station. There superheated steam is used to drive a turbine, in the car the coal dust was the fuel for the turbine itself. Single stage gas turbines are 20%-35% efficient. It's less efficient to burn coal and a small unit would be towards the lower end of that range because the thermal losses are proportionally larger.
 
The Don said:
No it isn't, it's not even close to being done unless your "work" is to display your lack of understanding.

As pointed out upthread, traditional coal-fired power plants are up to 35% efficient under ideal conditions. For 2 years, back in the early 90's, I used to install and commission power station efficiency management systems and have a pretty good idea about the factors which influence efficiency on a day-to-day basis.

Apart from the quality of the coal, the biggest factor was the efficiency of the condensers, which in turn was heavily influenced by ambient temperature.

The "Coaldsmobile" didn't have a system analogous to a coal-fired power station. There superheated steam is used to drive a turbine, in the car the coal dust was the fuel for the turbine itself. Single stage gas turbines are 20%-35% efficient. It's less efficient to burn coal and a small unit would be towards the lower end of that range because the thermal losses are proportionally larger.
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Hmm, sounds like all we need is a steam turbine in the car and skip the electricity production altogether...:thumbsup:
 
novaphile said:
Has been tried don't worry.

They were very efficient, but no one wanted a car that took half an hour to get up a head of steam.
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The early steam engines were very inefficient compared to internal combustion engines. It needs super heated steam to get the efficiency up.
 
Efficiency is the key issue. Removing energy conversions whenever possible.

A few years ago I worked on/experimented with an S3 Antminer to convert to 100% solar mining with it. The S3 miner was/is powered by 4 pciE 12 volt inputs. First thing I did was to fashion some pciE cables that would connect to a 12 volt battery. I skipped the power supply portion completely and connected the S3 miner directly to the 12 volt battery. Then , I used a solar panel to charge the battery with a solar charge controller connected in the middle.

It was fun and educational. I learned that one battery didn't last very long after the Sun went down. A 1KW battery ran the miner for about an hour and a half without the solar input. I also learned that float charge is about 14.5 volts on a lead acid 12 volt battery after I added a couple more solar panels. This overvolted my miner, and though I expected it to fail rather quickly, it didn't. It actually increased quite a few GH/s while mining. If I remember correctly it went from around 430 GH/s to around 460-475 GH/s.

I added more batteries and more panels, now the miner would run all night as well. It was a success!

No. It was a pain in the rear. Batteries require maintenance, you have to monitor the electrolyte levels and add distilled water as needed. My miner would get smoking hot during the day at peak Sun when the batteries were fully charged and floating at 14.5 volts. At night when the voltage dropped my miner made less hashrate. I now had a significant investment in solar and batteries just to run this one miner.

I ended up going with a grid tied system, no more batteries to fill! I used a regular power supply, no more overvolt! I still use solar but now in a different way. Add as many miners as you like and at the end of the month if the electric bill is too high, add more panels.
 
ChrisBFRPKY said:
As a store of value, which it shares with BTC, Gold is a terrible way of doing this. Imagine moving 100 million in Gold overseas as a payment for goods and services. Yikes! The same task performed with Bitcoin takes a few clicks of the mouse and there's no waiting months for your payment to arrive.
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Why are you trying to smuggle $100million out of the country?
 
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