Dream Log: Mystical Alternative Energy and Elizabeth Banks

I dreamed that a new energy source had been found. Some people, mostly women, were able to gather electricity, like batteries, while they were meditating, and then to discharge it into the grid. During the process of discharge they glowed until they looked like translucent plastic from head to toe. Each one glowed a different color. They were able to sense places where they could go, where there were large amounts of static electricity which they would be able to gather up. Science was not yet able to explain any of this. The people who gathered and distributed this energy came to be known as "batteries." Some compared the process to becoming impregnated giving birth.

By far the most powerful battery happened to be Hollywood actor, producer, director, writer and all-around genius and Nice Person Elizabeth Banks.

During the discharge process she glowed a vivid lime-green. She was able to put several gigawatt-hours into the grid per week. This made Ms Banks even more famous than she had already been. Many people who put most of their time and energy into trying to ensure that we all die from pollution and global warming -- also known as "Republicans" -- at first tried to discount the entire phenomenon of human batteries as a hoax. Then they tried to demonize Ms Banks as a Hollywood liberal. Banks shrugged and replied that she WAS a Hollywood liberal, and she didn't seem very demonic at all. Then the Republicans complained about coal miners and oilfield workers losing their jobs. You know how they do.

Being a human battery, sensing where the electricity was, traveling there, absorbing it while meditating and then discharging it into the grid, tended to be very much a full-time job. Most of the batteries had support teams handling the logistics for them. Banks' team was headed by Seth Rogan, with whom she had worked several times in show business. I was heading another logistics team, for a woman who wasn't famous at all. She glowed orange when she discharged. She could do several megawatt-hours a week.

The Banks operation gave all of their electricity away for free. Some smaller organizations, like the one I was working for, sold our electricity to utilities or consumer co-ops. Republicans, naturally, tried to play things up and make it seem as if Banks and Rogen and all those Hollywood types were taking money away from poor hardworking Murrkins like me and the lady who glowed orange. You know how they do.

Elizabeth Banks set up a conference for human batteries, where advice, organization and, yes, even money could be offered to those in need. 

I had hardly parked our team's mini-van when Seth Rogen was shoving me and yelling incoherently. Then he walked away as suddenly as he had appeared. Then he was there again, sobbing and apologizing and drunk. I assured him that he had not done any damage, and asked him what was upsetting him. He said that he was out of his head because he had feelings for Ms Banks, and they were unrequited. "You and me and billions of other people," I assured him. If I am correctly informed, Ms Banks has been with one guy for several decades. 

Electrical Power to the People!

There are probably 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots -- approximately, give or take -- raving full-time about how EV's don't have enough range. They're wrong. I could fill whole posts with the details of the ways in which they are wrong, but if we could somehow distract them from this topic, and get them raving full-time about how there need to be more charging options instead, that could really do some good.

I'm not just talking about fast-charge options -- the public places where you pull up in your EV and plug it in and then pay when you're done, like a gas station except with electricity instead of gas. This is cheaper than putting gas into a conventional car, but it's not as cheap as plugging an EV into a regular wall socket overnight. I'm also talking about houses with garages. A lot of people who own EV's seldom or never use those public charging stations, because they plug their cars into regular sockets

 

overnight. This takes longer than the public charging stations, but it's also much cheaper. 

So people who own their own houses save money by plugging their EV's in overnight, while poor people who can't afford the price of a new EV to begin with also tend not to own their own houses, and usually don't have any wall sockets which they can easily plug their used EV's into overnight. Maybe they could get a 100-foot extension cord and run it from their 2012 Nissan Leaf parked on the street up the side of their apartment building, in the window of their 3rd-floor apartment and into the wall socket and charge their electric cars while they sleep the way that rich people do. Maybe. But it would be difficult, and the problems would be much greater still if they lived on the 10th floor. 

Similarly, many employers offer free EV charging to their employees, but we're usually talking about employees who are already well-paid. Similarly, Tesla offers free public charging to many Tesla owners -- but again, Teslas are even more expensive than other EV's. And that's just one of the problems with owning a Tesla. 

And electricity is much more widely available in the US and Europe than in some poorer regions of the world.

You see the pattern here. It's easy for you to get those famous huge energy savings by owning an EV -- but in most cases, you can only get the FULL savings if you're rich enough not to really need those savings. It's the infamous Tom Petty It's Ab-So-Lute-Lute-Ly Backwards Law of Microeconomics again. Poorer people will still save money buying electricity for their cars instead of gasoline, but generally not as much money. Let's get those 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots raving about giving poor people their own houses with garages with wall outlets in them -- they could talk to Jimmy Carter and some of his associates about that one -- or giving them very cheap or free electricity some other way. Then, those 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 idiots would actually be accomplishing something.

Global Electrical Production and Use

In this post I'm citing random figures given on the Internet. Reliability of these figures: completely unknown to me. If someone can tell me where to get reliable figures, that would be wonderful. If someone can tell me why RECENT figures are so hard to find, that would be awesome. Because these figures are changing rapidly.

Global energy consumption in 2016: 21.8 terawatt hrs. That's 21.8 trillion watt hours. 21,800,000,000,000 watt hours.

Global installed electrical capacity (the most which could be generated at one time, theoretically, if everything was working, but it's never all working at the same time) was 4.15 terawatts in 2017.

Of that, 1.01 terawatts was renewable.

Global installation of new solar capacity in 2019 was 105 gigawatts. That's 105 billion watts. 105,000,000,000 watts. The total capacity of solar at the end of 2019 was 509.3 gigawatts.

If I have my figures straight, that would mean that about half of the renewable generating capacity, and about 1/8 of all capacity, worldwide, is solar. I have no idea whether my figures are even halfway straight. I also don't know the ratio of capacity to actual electricity generated. I'm sure it varies greatly from one type of generation to another. As opponents of alternative energy love to point out to us, is if we hadn't figured it out on our own, the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow everywhere.

However, some things are completely clear: Solar power is growing at a very fast pace. It's cheaper than coal, oil or gas, and it keeps getting cheaper, while generating electricity with fossil fuels gets more expensive. Utilities, at least ones which are privately owned and operated, would rather generate that cheap solar energy themselves and sell it to the public than have Mr and Mrs Joe Blow Homeowner own solar panels on their roofs and compete with the utilities for the profits from selling solar electricity, if Mr and Mrs have any left over. The regulations about who can generate and sell how much of what type of energy very wildly from place to place across the US. Quite a few oil companies are among the companies who are building huge solar generating plants. Two very key factors which will determine whether or not humanity kills itself off with pollution and climate change, are information and politics.

True Stories From My Life. Part 4: The Mystery of Electricity

My town is in the midst of an "arctic vortex" of unusually-cold winter weather. This afternoon, I drove my 2003 Saturn Ion 1 about half a mile from my home to the Salvation Army, to see a social worker about a pair of glasses. The Major was behind the desk, and he told me that the social worker wasn't in today. I said I was surprised they were open at all today, because of the weather. He said they were open today, with a skeleton crew, precisely because of the weather: in case someone needed to get indoors somewhere and warm up.

From the Salvation Army I drove to Kroger's, about 2 miles. After I had Kroger'd, my car wouldn't start. I went back inside Kroger's, searched my wallet, and found an AARP card. (My Mom had gotten me an AARP membership, and told me that roadside assistance was the most important part of the membership.) To my surprise, the card said that my membership was still active, until May 2019. After about half an hour on the phone, I found out that my membership had been cancelled.

I went back out to the Kroger's parking lot, and this time my Saturn started. I was not as surprised as I had been when a similar thing had happened in earlier years: drove my car to a parking lot, shopped, car wouldn't start, waited about a half hour, then it started.

Since this wasn't the first time, I wasn't completely surprised. But I still don't understand what happened. Perhaps my not understanding it just shows that I know laughably little about electricity. Maybe engineers who are reading this are shouting at the screen: "It's the condensation, you idiot!" Or something else if it's something other than condensation.

I've been trying to learn about electricity, because the world is converting from petrochemicals to electricity. I can't claim to have made much progress. I open books such as this one:

-- and am immediately baffled. it maik munkee brane hert. And there are other textbooks in physics and math whose equations make my brain hurt much more than the ones in this book. I stopped studying math in the mid-1970's at age 15, as soon as I was allowed to stop, and now I'm hopelessly behind. (Also: I still don't actually like math. That's why I stopped studying it: because I hated it.) I have heard that Einstein used tensor analysis to come up with the theory of relativity. I've heard that. I don't know whether it's true, or partly true, or a misleading statement, or what.

I do know that my 2003 Saturn Ion 1, if it doesn't start on a cold day, may start a while later the same day. I know this is so, but I do not know why this is so. There's an entire world of STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- which is mysterious to me. And yet I know that I know much more about such things than do many poets and artists. And I know that many scientists, engineers and mathematicians are just as woefully ignorant of history and philosophy and the arts.

And so for today, grateful to be back home and grateful that the heat is on, I shall be as one crying in the wilderness for geniuses of various kinds to become less ignorant about one another.

I hope you're not too cold out there, reading this.

Are More People Studying Electricity?

I was wondering about that even before this power outage started 4 days ago, on the 8th of March, 2017. DTE, the electric and gas utility I use, says that over 650,000 accounts were affected by the outage, which coincided with a severe cold spell, that most of them have had their power restored and that I will be one of the 90% to get the juice turned back on before midnight tonight. I wonder whether that estimate is accurate in my individual case. I wonder what it's going to be like for the last 10% to get their power back.

I was thinking about electricity before Wednesday morning when my electricity went out, and studying books such as Rojansky's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, because I hope and believe that, Trump, Putin and the Koch brothers be damned, we are on the verge of a huge transformation away from fossil fuels and toward electricity generated by solar, wind and other green energy. I've mentioned before in this blog how I'm taking another one of my stabs at advanced math. Studying electricity, and physics, is part of that stab.

Since Wednesday morning I've been wondering things like, How much suffering would have been alleviated if more people here in the Detroit area had solar panels on their roofs, and, What actually is up with these smart grids one hears about in the news, and just exactly how smart or stupid are our grids around here? And, Will more people study electricity as a direct result of this outage? Surely some will. How many have already begun?

What, if anything, could I have done better since Wednesday if I had been an expert on the subject of electricity?

A few years ago DTE switched me over to a smart meter. Among other things, this means I, or anyone else with a smart meter, don't have to phone in a power outage because as soon as my power goes out, DTE already knows it.

Or so they say. I have no reason to suspect mendacity on DTE's part, but the truth is that I still know very little about electricity, and so I have little means of judging public or private statements about it.

I'm 55 years old. If you're shaking your head and muttering something like, "Starting to learn about electricity when he's 55?" -- meh. I'm not claiming yet to have actually learned anything. But Izzy Stone, one of my heroes,

started studying ancient Greek in his 60's and Hungarian after age 80. When I grow weary I just think of Izzy and my strength returns. I also haven't stopped doing push-ups and crunches every day, but Izzy has less to do with that directly. I don't happen to know what his exercise regime was like, or if he had one at all.

I'm also wondering: has President Chump said anything publicly at all about this power outage? I mean, I haven't noticed the National Guard in town handing out blankets and hot soup.