Energize

15 responses to “Energize”

1. 

   AndrewNZ

   Oct 16, 2005 at 7:38 pm

   That last paragraph is scary. The rest is just amazing. Shame they’re not getting into renewables though…

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2. 

   Automatt

   Oct 16, 2005 at 9:28 pm

   the giant has awakened

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3. 

   Todd Huffman

   Oct 16, 2005 at 10:20 pm

   That is a lot of water… at 8ish pounds per gallon… 8 x 10^13 pounds…

   Think that is the largest human induced accumulation of mass? I cant think of anything else off the top of my head.

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4. 

   AndrewNZ

   Oct 17, 2005 at 12:47 am

   Possibly the Great Wall itself?

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5. 

   jurvetson

   Oct 17, 2005 at 1:18 am

   Oddwick: yeah… and that was after they demolished and moved 11 cities (carrying bricks by hand) to make room for the dammed water…

   Ed Burtynsky took some great photos of the project:

   "Currently the world’s largest engineering and construction site, the Three Gorges Dam project along the Yangtze River in Hubei province China, has displaced over 1.2 million people and destroyed 11 cities (in less than 6 months). The resulting 400 mile long reservoir will supply enough water to generate 84 billion kilowatts-per-hour of electricity."

   

   Ed also has a new book on Chinese Industrialization.

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6. 

   sweet thing

   Oct 17, 2005 at 5:15 am

   Until renewables produces the return on investment necessary, China is leading the way on these Pebble Bed Reactors. They offer a safer alternative not requiring fossil fuel consumption

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7. 

   The Rocketeer

   Oct 17, 2005 at 11:09 am

   AndrewNZ: What are you talking about? Hydroelectric power is renewable…

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8. 

   AndrewNZ

   Oct 17, 2005 at 12:05 pm

   @Rocketeer – Sure, hydroelectric is a renewable source, but my comment (unclear, I accept) was directed to the paragraph about China’s large consumption of coal and oil, since I presume they aren’t all being used for creating plastics etc. Personally I’d also prefer it if they didn’t go for hydro projects which involve such massive displacement of people.

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9. 

   The Rocketeer

   Oct 17, 2005 at 5:01 pm

   I gotcha now, Andrew. I agree with you about the coal and oil use. It’s best to use as little as possible.

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10. 

    sprklg

    Oct 18, 2005 at 7:12 am

    So will the 3G dam make money? Or lose it?
    Has it been shown to be a financially sound project?

    Many of the hydro projects
    in SE Asia are essentially "bad loans", in the sense that it is not clear that they will be able to sell electricity at a sufficiently high price to cover costs.

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11. 

    Victor1

    Oct 19, 2005 at 2:49 am

    I think I remember that day they filled the damn… it seemed longer than the day before… and I felt woozy…

    When does the earth spin out of control because of the re-shifting of all that water? That would be a funny footnote in galactic history… ‘planet earth leaves orbit due to industrial energy project by one of its species’.

    On a more positive note, China can now redirect its oil consumption to make its bold move into America’s Tupperware market.

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12. 

    boring fact

    Oct 19, 2005 at 8:14 am

    this fact has stunned me for days…

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13. 

    jurvetson

    Jun 4, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    Just read a mildly optimistic update in The Atlantic. George David, the CEO of United Technologies, summarizes the "Silver Lining" theme of the article:

    "precisely because so much of the Chinese system is profligate and sloppy, the opportunity to improve efficiency, and cut back on pollution and energy use, is greater here than nearly anywhere else—and the savings can be achieved more cheaply."

    and China is ground zero in the war on carbon:
    "a recent study by Maximilian Auffhammer and Richard Carson, of the University of California, concluded that without some startling change in technology, China cannot avoid increasing its greenhouse-gas emissions faster than other countries can possibly cut theirs back."

    an example from a Chinese entrepreneur:

    "With so much of the country under construction so fast, and with China’s equivalent of America’s interstate highway system being built in the space of a few years, modern China can appear to be made out of concrete. Nearly half of the world’s cement is produced and used in China, and cement factories are a major source of both the country’s surging demand for energy and the environmental damage that is the most shocking side effect of China’s economic miracle."

    "The heart of his idea—easy to describe, tricky to implement—is capturing the enormous amount of heat normally wasted in cement making and using it to run turbines that generate electric power. This power can then be fed back into the factory, doing work that would otherwise require burning even more coal. The reduction of dust is a visible indicator of the more fundamental reduction of waste. Over the course of a long day, I heard about the many, many refinements Tang had made to this “co-generation” system since he first started working on it, in the mid-1980s. The punch line is that it now works well enough to cut the energy (mainly from coal) required to make clinker by 60 percent, and the overall power demands of the cement production line by 30 percent."

    But…

    "the problems that are less obvious at a glance are even more threatening. Toxic emissions into lakes, groundwater, and farmland; the drying-up of rivers and silting-up of dams; the rapid exhaustion of water in the northern half of the country that, in the view of many experts, is likely to be China’s next great environmental emergency; the millions of new cars that hit the road each year, spewing carbon dioxide; the billions of tons of coal that go up in smoke (yes, billions—China burns more than 2 billion tons of coal each year, about one-third of the world’s total); the engines on Chinese airliners that must be overhauled or replaced more frequently than elsewhere, an airline engineer told me, because operating in Chinese air corrodes the turbine blades … living here, I don’t have the heart to keep ticking items off."

    And, as I learned in a recent conversation with the World Bank, the rising consumption of beef in China, a predictable byproduct of growing wealth, is pushing the water crisis to Africa and neighboring nations that are being recruited for cattle farming.

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14. 

    jurvetson

    Aug 12, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    Update:

    China is installing a one-megawatt wind turbine every hour,” points out Dermot O’Gorman, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Beijing. “That is more encouraging than the one coal fired power station a week” that normally dominates foreign headlines.

    Indeed, China is pushing ahead on renewable technologies with the fervor of a new space race.

    from CSM, Aug. 12, 2009

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15. 

    jurvetson

    Oct 15, 2009 at 5:06 pm

    still…. NYT photo essay by Lu Guang

    Reply