The Hydrogen Economy – More Green Mythology

Energy Matters

The Scottish Government has launched a consultation on their new draft energy strategy and targets (links are top right on the page linked to). The new energy strategy in general terms has four main strands: 

1. A four-fold increase in renewable energy production by 2030.
2. Embracing a hydrogen economy, especially in the areas of heat and transport.
3. Employing carbon capture and storage to decarbonise CCGT power stations required to balance the grid and H2 production from methane.
4. The phasing out of nuclear power by 2030.

This post will focus on the thermodynamics, efficiency and costs of making H2 via electrolysis of water and steam methane reforming. I calculate costs of £142 / MWh for electrolysis and £100 / MWh for steam methane reforming (SMR). These compare with industrial methane prices of £15 / MWh at odds with multiple claims made by the Scottish Government that hydrogen is a low cost option.

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What is Homesteading?

ClubOrlov:



Prosperous Homesteading has been out for a little over a week now and has been selling extremely well. But based on the feedback so far, the concept of “homesteading,” as defined in this very practical book, needs to be better explained. Yes, you can register your house as a “homestead” to shield it from foreclosure or to lower your taxes; would you then be homesteading? No.

Homesteading is not a hobby, a business or an individual pursuit; it is the main activity of a family. It is an essential “lifehack”—a way to get around the strictures imposed on us by a crumbling society that is set in its ways and incapable of even considering absolutely essential changes. It is about insulating yourself and your family from the vagaries of a system that is running amok, and about regaining a viable future and peace of mind.



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Nothing to See Here, Folks

Scott Adams' Blog

I recently tweeted a link to my blog post that is unflattering to the proponents of climate science. I have 138,000 Twitter followers. My traffic from Twitter to my blog in a recent minute was only 14 people, while overall traffic from other sources was its usual robust self. For non-controversial topics, my Twitter-driven traffic for a tweet to my blog would be 200-300 per minute in the half-hour after a tweet. On this topic, it hovered between 10-14.

As many others have documented, Twitter throttles back the tweets of people who hold political views they don’t like.

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Artist's Impression Of The Oscars

Source: Townhall.com

Google Records Everything You Say and Everything You Have Searched For — Here's How To See, Hear, and Delete Your Tracking

The Daily Sheeple

The Independent has previously reported that Google’s voice search function doesn’t just turn on when specifically asked to. It records anything and everything. This has been going on for years, but the public at large became generally aware of it back in the summer of 2015.

Google also carefully keeps track of every single thing you search for on the web… all of it in one nice long history strand that makes a Facebook wall look like peanuts by comparison. Depending on whether or not you have location data on, it can also show you a timeline of where you have physically been, broken out by year on a world map.

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It Won't Be Like The Jetsons

EPautos - Libertarian Car Talk



What does it mean when people talk about self-driving cars? We really ought to be talking about programmed cars.



And about who does the programming.



The “self-driving” car doesn’t decide for itself how fast it goes or what route it takes – at least, it won’t until it becomes an autonomous thinking machine, an artificial intelligence. We are not quite there yet.



So, in the meanwhile, who decides?



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Plot Holes

Robert Gore | STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

The Michael Flynn Affair is one of those movies where you figure out a jumble of things that don’t make sense as you walk out of the theater.

There has been a deluge of articles about the Michael Flynn affair from an array of political and ideological vantage points, and SLL has reposted some of them. What’s lacking are coherent and cohesive explanations for what would be, if this were a novel or movie, gaping plot holes. The upshot of many commentators is that Trump has underestimated the Deep State, he’s floundering, and so on. This article takes the opposite tack, out of innate contrariness and because President Trump has been so consistently underestimated by both friends and foes.

Why was Michael Flynn cashiered? The administration’s story is that he talked with a Russian diplomat and mentioned lifting sanctions, then lied about his conversations to Vice President Pence. What’s become the conventional subtext is that the intelligence agencies have launched a “soft coup” against Trump, he has been significantly weakened, and the Deep State has scored a major victory.

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