Dr. Hok writes "As more and more renewable energy enters the grid, it gets increasingly difficult to match supply and demand 24/7. The answer of German power company Lichtblick and Volkswagen is a swarm of 100,000 flexible base-load generators. These fridge-sized CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generators that will be installed in people's basements in Hamburg starting early next year will feed electricity into the grid and the waste heat into their home's water/heating. The "ZuhauseKraftwerk" (HomePowerPlant) features a vanilla VW Golf natural-gas engine that generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. The units are remotely controlled via a mobile network or DSL; they can ramp up in a minute if needed. A water tank ensures that heat is continuously available, while electricity is produced on demand. The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say. And your old oil heating needed replacement anyway."
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"The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say"
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 10, @01:51AM (#29375573)
Germany and Spain allow nice allowances for those that produce the power at home. For example, the price paid for residences in grid-tie solar systems is $.60 per KWH in Germany ("Solar is only economic for installation on rooftops because of the feed-in tariffs for solar electricity of 60 cents per kWh". http://www.edn.com/article/CA6432171.html )
Note that Germany is doing this even though solar is much less efficient there. Germany is located at ~ 51' N latitude . For reference, Great Falls, MT is at ~ 47' N Latitude.
If the US tariffed-in rates were set at even $.38 per KWH, solar would be a no-brainer investment for majority of homes in the US and coal and natural gas generation would die a natural death with no power infrastructure upgrade needed.
As a side note, the price of natural gas sets the world price for Ammonium nitrate - a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce. Therefore the price of Natural Gas has a great impact on the cost of food for most of the world. ( http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/icm/2003/4-14-2003/natgasn.html ).
That is to say: the electricity we use that is generated by natural gas, increases the price we pay for food-stuffs here and in the rest of the world.
Ammonium nitrate [is] a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce.
Here come the chemistry Nazis: natural gas is a reactant, not a catalyst, and not to produce ammonium nitrate. It is used to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to get ammonia, with which you actually get the ammonium nitrate when you combine it with nitric acid.
Though you're right that the price of NG has a large influence on that of ammonium nitrate.
Is that why we here in AR have wildcatters coming out our wazoos? In less than 2 years we have had more than a half dozen natural gas wildcatters popping up all over town, and we are just a little speck on the map so they must be all over the place. I figured the price of natural gas wasn't high enough to explain all the rigs popping up everywhere, but if it is as you say and the natural gas is required for food production that makes a lot more sense.
Because everyone here has known for decades there was natural gas all over the place, just nobody bothered because the price of gas was so cheap. hell in the days of family wells out local fire dept was getting called out all the time because somebodies pump kicked on and the natural gas blew the well house sky high. I was wondering why all of a sudden we have natural gas companies building like mad here, and can't hardly move for all the semis carrying gas production equipment. A tie in with food production makes a lot more sense as to why we have suddenly become a boom town. Thanks for the info.
He made an error in wording(said catalyst, should have said feedstock); but his intended point stands. Ammonium nitrate is typically made from ammonia and nitric acid; and ammonia is, these days, typically made from natural gas or petroleum gases.
There are some serious problems with this home generation concept.
1) When is extra peaking most in demand? In the middle of the day in July, when everyone's AC comes on. How much home heating is generally needed in the middle of the day in July when everyone's AC comes on? Not bloody much. But you're going to have the full heat output of a car engine pumping into your house; there's no way water heating alone will justify that.
2) Instead of spending the capital costs to build a couple really big peakers, they're going be building millions of tiny individual peakers, each with their own pollution controls? I can't imagine that would be even *remotely* cost-competitive. Or as clean.
Being German, I can tell you that I have yet to meet someone who has AC in his home. Public buildings *sometimes* have it, but AC isn't common here at all.
The point is that nuclear plants can't be shut of in a few minutes (coal plants neither) and waters storing plants are not flexible enough. Because of that many windmills and water dams are shut of even thou they could produce green energy. So what it really means is that this technology will allow real green technology to run when ever it can.
Just a statistics i remember (i can not cite it anymore thou) is that about 40% of green energy is wasted because the electric grid couldn't handle it.
Alternatively, instead of having hundreds of thousands of CO2 producing generators with the ability to rapidly ramp up and down production, you could have a few nice green nuclear power plants and ramp up and down the load instead (e.g. by using the excess power to do useful stuff like cracking water).
I guess I should buy stocks of every major paint company, just in case if someone really wanted to start building 'green nuclear power plants'. Wouldn't know of any other way to turn them 'green'
the term "green" has lost all meaning through over use.
if you mean "less impact on the environment" then nuclear power is almost as good as it get for anything that produces the kind of load needed to run a nation.
it has one by product which is easy to contain. coal emits tons of radiation and toxic gases into the air, geo thermal is limited to certain locations.
solar, wind and wave can't maintain a consistent load 24/7, so i'm curious as to what alternative you propose.
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades, and huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported. By contrast, distributed generation of electricity as proposed by the article is much more efficient, because it happens very close to the consumer.
There are already passively safe reactor designs available to be built, most of the waste that will ever be produced has already been produced as modern reactors produce far less, and where did you get the idea that there are only a couple of decades of fuel left? More like a hundred years with current technologies and billions of years if breeder reactors are used: [slashdot.org]http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html [www.nea.fr]
i think until you learn even a little about how a power grid works, you'll continue to hear, and be frustrated by, the base load arguement against solar,wind and wave.
"Had we invested a fraction of the research funding that we have given to nuclear power industries into renewable energy research, we would probably already have most of our energy from renewalbe sources. "
the fact is we HAVEN'T invested in nuclear at all for about 20 years,beyond keeping existing reactors going. and how do you come to the conslusion we could make solar/wind/wave able to provide a constant load?!?! is any amount of research going to make the sun shine and the wind blow on queue?!
"Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades" - bull-fucking-shit! the nuclear industry has a saftey record 2nd to none for a start. then consider modern reactors have passive saftey masures making a meltdown impossible.
and i've also heard this argument that uranium fuel will run out in 50 years. yes, present STOCKS will run out if we don't dig up anymore, or look for/develope new deposits. i know for a fact (i work in resources) australia has MASSIVE reserves of uranium, which could provide fuel to the world for easily 500 years at present rates. then there are breeder reactors, which can extend the life of fuel rods 50x, at which point you end up with either a low rad material which isn't dangerous or a highly active material which has a 1/2 life of 200 years - easily containable.
but i know you won't listen to reason, you've been spoon fed this nonsense for years. i'll just wait for your lights to go out.
Nuclear power IS safe, at least by any reasonable use of the term. Thing is, if you scale up Nuclear power to the same electricity production as coal, even if you include a Chernobyl every year, it'd still kill fewer people than Coal does. The statistics DON'T point to a Chernobyl level event every year - at this point you're looking more at a greater than 50 year interval between them, and every year of safe operation without another disaster extends that.
Even though I am thousands of kilometers away, it is still recommended to not eat mushrooms more than a couple of times a year, and I want a better future for my own children.
Are you sure that recommendation is based on good science? Or is it like the Vaccine scare here in the USA about Thermisol? That has parents not vaccinating their kids even with thermisol free vaccines.
showing that US research spendings on solar energy are still only half of those on nuclear energy despite the fact that you claim that there is essentially no research on nuclear energy! ; figures are from National Council for Science and the Environment.
Given that Nuclear power provides ~20% of our power, sure, there's R&D with it, but most of that's gone to increasing power production capabilities at existing nuke plants, not for building new ones. I'd also note that wind isn't listed - which might put wind/solar over nuclear in research investments(might be why they don't list it), but still under the R&D investments for COAL.
While on this topic, I'll point out that I'm for a rough power production plan of 35% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% hydro, 5% other.
Given that I've considered installed a combined cycle generator in my basement*, I'm not hostile to Lichtblick's plan. I'd power it with propane though, as that's what I have access to. It can be very efficient as well - an electrical power only plant is lucky to reach 50%, most are closer to 30%. The rest is waste heat. If you're using the combined cycle to also utilize the heat that would otherwise be waste, bonus.
*Normally you don't want the generator in the house, but it is perfectly safe if you take the right steps and properly duct the exhaust to OUTSIDE the building, and in my case I'd be ducting the air in as well.
You're looking at it from a purely ideological standpoint, and you're missing the pragmatic side of the issue.
The fact is, nuclear power plants, today, in practice, in the real world, *can* and *do* deliver the kind of energy required to run the power grid. They can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels if necessary, and the fuel they run on is in fact VERY plentiful, particularly modern reactors that can run on U-238. This is partly because it goes so far. A pound of uranium generates a WHOLE lot more power than a pound of coal or oil. But uranium is fairly abundant anyway. There's more uranium in the earth's crust than there is tin, for instance. Enough to meet the world's power needs for *centuries* (and by then hopefully we'll have more cost-effective solar -- but I'm getting ahead of myself).
It is likely that no amount of research or investment will ever make wind and wave deliver enough power to meet the world's needs at the current power consumption rate. Falling-water power plants are very cost-effective where you have a generous amount of water at significant potential, e.g., at a dam or large waterfall, but there are relatively few such sites. We do use them where they are available, but there's a limit to how many of them we can build. We can't replace all the coal and oil plants with hoover-dam-style plants, because quite simply there just plain aren't that many large rivers.
Solar power can, in the long term, deliver the power we need, but at present it still needs decades of development to get to a point where it will be economically viable. I'm very much in favor of continuing that research, but it's not going to happen overnight. Today, the most cost-effective method we have for harnessing solar power involves using acres and acres of green plants to turn it into carbohydrates, which we can then burn as fuel. If we want to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear power generation with solar, we're going to have to do better than that. Further research and development is required.
"Free" energy? Tell me, oh wise one, what is the payback time on unsubsidised renewable generation?
Hydro, geothermal and wave, fine. Wind and solar? You still have to keep fossil and nuclear plants running 24/7, or eat the brownouts. Power generation figures for wind and solar are bullshit - show me the figures for reductions in fossil and nuclear generation in areas where wind and solar are "contributing" to the load.
Hydro, geothermal and wave, fine. Wind and solar? You still have to keep fossil and nuclear plants running 24/7, or eat the brownouts. Power generation figures for wind and solar are bullshit - show me the figures for reductions in fossil and nuclear generation in areas where wind and solar are "contributing" to the load.
Actually, I have a friend who's got a cabin up in the hills that's completely off the grid. Septic system, well water, solar power, electric everything (including stove and bbq). The in-house lines have a natural 16V system which powers major appliances and lights, and there's an up-converted 120V power supply for things like TV or computer.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow. more practically, as the GP said, we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this [power-technology.com]. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
So, you're saying that if we all live in log cabins and drink from the same hole in the ground that we're crapping in, then there's no problem with relying on solar?
Heck, why not just live in caves and burn our own dung, like the Goddamn Belgians.
There is no such thing as radioactive waste. If it is sufficiently radioactive to be dangerous, it is sufficiently radioactive to be used in betavoltaic, radiothermal, or pebble bed reactors. Complaining about radioactive waste is like using charcoal mounds as a fuel source and then complaining that you have to store all of that waste charcoal.
Store it, reprocess it, burn it in a breeder, use alternative methods to get it so it degrades faster, like other posters have mentioned.
Besides, radioactive waste isn't having a real effect on the environment because it's contained, unlike the chemical and radiological pollution coal plants release.
Going after salt flats is missing our point, because I haven't ever heard of a pro-nuclear power slashdotter propose using them for long term storage. The proposals are almost universally reprocess/breeder/netron flux with diversions into burying it in subduction zones.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
We have functioning fission plants now, the biggest fusion test reactor being built/proposed is going to cost a couple times that of a good sized fission plant and still has absolutely no provisions for actually producing electricity.
The quote is a little misleading. They are not planning to shut down 2 power plants when the swarm comes online. They are simply stating that it will generate power equivalent to two average nuclear power plants.
Different story: Technically it might actually replace those plants, because the government decided in 2000 that all nuclear power plants will be shut down until ~2019. But we have elections coming up and it's possible that this decision gets revoked.
" They are simply stating that it will generate power equivalent to two average nuclear power plants."
That's good, so if I'm helping them pay for two nuclear power plants, I'm getting paid for the use of my basement, or at least getting it for free, right?
FTFA: "Households would pay around $7,250 to have the generators set up along with an appropriate heating system."
In case you didn't get the memo, Russians stopped being "Commies" almost twenty years ago and are now a good capitalist dictatorship. Plus, there's a second pipeline project on the way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco_pipeline) that'll provide access to more suppliers.
Also, in contrast to a nuclear plant, this swarm can react almost instantly to changes in supply or demand, thus complementing the fluctuating levels of power generated by wind and solar (try achieveing that with a centralized mega-plant)
Also, in contrast to a nuclear plant, this swarm can react almost instantly to changes in supply or demand, thus complementing the fluctuating levels of power generated by wind and solar (try achieveing that with a centralized mega-plant).
France delivers a lot of cheap electricity to its neighbours because, having a mainly nuclear-based power system, they can only provide the base load. This means they have to produce more than what they need and sell the excess, even if the prices are not advantageous and would not justify the sale economically.
Nuclear plants are difficult to control. The reaction's dynamics are nonlinear and unstable, and you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10
Also, in contrast to a nuclear plant, this swarm can react almost instantly to changes in supply or demand, thus complementing the fluctuating levels of power generated by wind and solar (try achieveing that with a centralized mega-plant).
but he's wrong. EDF does actually run some it's nuke plants in load following mode - it's not as efficient, but when you have a lot of plants why the hell not.
Nuclear plants are difficult to control. The reaction's dynamics are nonlinear and unstable, and you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10-second lag (and are controllable).
Oddly enough, nuclear power plants used by the US Navy work just fine when the power demand spikes (or is reduced suddenly) without becoming uncontrollable.
You failed to consider that the target applicants are already using gas for heating purposes anyway. Now the heat production of the engine will be exactly matched to this need (same as before). All extra gas consumption is fully transformed into electricity (which is possible, even for only 40% raw conversion efficency, as long as the electrical output is much below the heat load).
So, overall, the extra gas consumption (compared to conventional heating) is transformed with 100% efficiency into electricity which is a vast improvement over all competing technologies with similar flexibility.
There's not much air conditioning going on in Germany in the summer. Maybe for two weeks we use some fans, and in the rest it's not that warm to turn on any aircon or fans. It's also not that cold in winter anymore. A friend of mine basically uses no heating or cooling at all during the whole year, because his apartment is pretty well isolated by being on the first floor of a high-rise.
Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but OP is RIGHT. Nuclear plants themselves emit NO gases (unless there's a serious problem.)
Your link stacks up all the carbon emissions produced to mine, process, refine, enrich, clad (and the emissions from mining, processing, smelting, casting and welding the cladding), assemble, ship and swap a nuclear plants fuel source.
Fair enough, just let me in on the fossil fuels refill fairy and your secret's safe with me!
I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
Massively flawed reactor designs being run by complete idiots is simply not acceptable. Modern reactors are extremely safe and (in the West) well regulated. If you're going to ban the modern nuclear industry on public safety grounds, you'd better ban the whole chemical industry too since that deals with chemicals that are way more harmful and is far less well regulated. Replacing all the coal fired power plants with nuclear plants would massively cut pollution (coal plants put up a *lot* of particulate pollution into the atmosphere, much of which is radioactive and/or highly toxic, not to mention the environmental concerns of the toxic and radioactive fly ash which has to be disposed of - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill [wikipedia.org] for why this is bad).
"generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. "
since when is heat generation anything but 100% efficient. Now delivery to where you want it perhaps not. ANd it might go up the stack. but citing a 92% efficiency does not tell me much about the electrical generation efficiency.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 10, @02:00AM (#29375611)
Well,
you could use math...
If 20kW+34kW is 92%, then the total input energy is 58.7kW, therefore the electric efficiency is approximately 34%.
However, natural gas boilers for heating and warm water are very common in Germany, so replacing some (and 100000 is "some") of them with units that can also generate electricity is not such a bad idea.
Yes it can be that efficient.
You are right about the electric efficiency which is of cause bad. But what happens to the waste energy? All the rest is heat is stored in a big water tank for your home warm water. Only 8% of the energy escapes that system and will leave your chimney.
I live nextdoor to Germany, in the Netherlands, and here airconditioning in homes is not very common. I assume it's the same in Germany. It can be hot, of course, but never for very long. "Airco" is considered to be a luxery. And hot water is still needed in the summer.
Just be sure not to install such a system near your carefully stored wines in the cellar.
Very few homes in (North-)Western Europe have air conditioning, and the warm water tank would obviously not be placed in your living room. Average summer temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees Celcius. And while the system would probably be overall less efficient in summer than in winter, you will still need some warm water anyway to do the dishes, to clean, to take showers, etc. There are also washing machines and dish washers nowadays that can take warm water as "input" rather than cold water that is subsequently heated using electricity.
What about during summer? Or are German summers much cooler than they are in the Mid-Atlantic states of the USA?
How efficient will it be to run the gas generator, using the waste heat on your hot water heater, then crank up the air conditioner when it gets too hot?
Summers are much cooler in NW Europe than in the Mid East Coast states. Like 30F cooler on average. Because of that difference of climate, AC is really not common in homes (those that have it probably do so for its dehumidifying properties FWIW) and peak power demand comes in the winter.
Natural gas is easy to deliver (the infrastructure already exists), and you can make extremely small power units (this is a perfect example, personally I was looking at a 5kw unit to power my house but power is reliable enough so why bother). The problem however is that most natural gas in Germany comes from Russia, and every time they are feeling tetchy they have this tendency to turn off the gas (literally). Hope it works out, personally I think the higher up front cost of nuclear is more than offset by the stability it provides (typically you have enough fuel on site for quite some time).
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page [wikipedia.org]
Not quite. That's assuming a "once-through" fuel cycle, and ignoring things like the newer generations of breeder reactors that burn waste from other reactors. Depending on a number of factors, estimates range between 80 and five BILLION year.
I quite like Bernard Cohen's take on things, cited in that same article, that effectively suggests that we can keep getting uranium from seawater at least as long as the time we have until the sun burns out. I don't quite know how realistic it is, but it's certainly interesting and worthy of further examination.
With all due respect, nothing on the wikipedia page you cite actually supports the argument that we're going to run out of uranium any time in the near future. Did you just put up a link and assume that no one would read it?
"Uranium depletion is the result of extracting and consuming uranium, a finite resource. However, uranium resources may never be fully depleted as the economically-recoverable reserves (including those in seawater) may be effectively inexhaustible." (opening statement)
And remember that the sky-is-falling crowd have, for the last 40 years, been claiming that we only have 40 years left of oil. IOW, knock it off with the FUD.
Fearing the EV revolution behind the door, the motor engineers are finding ways to stay relevant, but the idea of a Volkswagen gasoline engine running in every home is questionable, fossil fuels are not something people want to stay here forever (nor in their homes).
They sure have a great marketing team at Lichtblick and Volkswagen: so much rah-rah to describe a generator made out of recycled WV engines, that's pure genius.
What I am curious about is why this technology is being deployed on a wide scale now. Cogeneration, where a heat engine's waste heat is used to heat a structure has existed for a long time. There's no reason that natural gas generator/heater couldn't have been installed in your basement in 1970. It would have made your house more efficient then much as it would now. So what has changed over 40 years that make the arguments for/against shift in favor of doing it? The biggest change I can think of is maybe better communications makes it easier for the power company to remotely control the generator. (since it wouldn't do any good to only have a generator in your basement for supplying power to your own house, wouldn't get enough return on investment...that power needs to be sold/credited to other users as well)
AT&T has "distributed generation", and not just in central offices. Some in-ground network nodes have a small engine fueled from a gas line. This provides backup power if commercial power goes out.
In some areas, there's been grumbling about this; somebody in the subdivision gets stuck with the big green box in their yard.
It's mostly a problem in high-density suburban areas. In urban areas, there are underground vaults and commercial basements in which infrastructure equipment can be placed. In low-density suburban areas and rural areas, big metal boxes that make small amounts of noise aren't that bothersome. But in areas where everybody has their little patch of lawn and little else, there are complaints.
I have one of these nodes at the end of my driveway. I get landline phone and DSL through it. It's about 1m x 2m, projecting about 30cm above ground, with a big exhaust vent. I've seen the box open; it looks like a server rack. Normally, it just produces fan noise; the engine is only run for tests and power outages.
Thats exactly what they want to do. "Lichtblick" is basicly a energy company selling renewable energy. They simply found out that if you want to sell lots of solar energy, you better should have a backup for..say.. nighttime. Espescially nights that aren't windy...
Germans sometimes perplex and leave you breathless...
You seem to assume that this is something "the germans" as a whole have something to do with, or that it's inherently something that wouldn't happen elsewhere.
In reality, it's just capitalism finding a way to exploit a legislation loophole. There are some hefty subsidies for energy put back into the grid, on the assumption that (A) it would be some green energy like solar or wind, and (B) that it wouldn't happen otherwise, because, (C) there's not much you can put in that way.
Germany is way north, and in at least half of it there are plenty of cloudy days. The same gulf stream influence that makes us not have the climate of, say, Canada or Siberia, well, warm air coming from the direction of the ocean, you do the maths. In, say, Düsseldorf probably a vampire could probably get a day job because there aren't many days with direct sunlight;)
So solar power isn't a very efficient way to generate energy. Wind is a bit better, but still takes a long time to pay for itself otherwise. So someone figured they'd subsidize people who nevertheless buy a turbine or solar pannels, to have _some_ green energy, even if expensive green energy. Debatable, but Idon't think it's downright stupid or perplexing by any reckoning.
It was not particularly designed for people running diesel or gas generators in that basement, because, well, there weren't any significant numbers of those.
So now two companies figured out they can use a loophole to sell more of their own crap.
Whop-de-do. If you think no American company would do the same abusing a loophole, you haven't been paying attention much. There have been even more stupid attempts, all the way to trying to sell a SMG without the trigger (it would start firing automatically when you chambered a round, and only stop when the magazine was empty) because some PHB thought it wouldn't qualify as an automatic weapon that way. Apparently the BATF thought it still did, though.
Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say"
So when we're all supposed to be scared to death of EVIL GLOBAL WARMING, the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2 with... car engines... running on natural gas which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Germany and Spain allow nice allowances for those that produce the power at home. For example, the price paid for residences in grid-tie solar systems is $.60 per KWH in Germany ("Solar is only economic for installation on rooftops because of the feed-in tariffs for solar electricity of 60 cents per kWh". http://www.edn.com/article/CA6432171.html )
Note that Germany is doing this even though solar is much less efficient there. Germany is located at ~ 51' N latitude . For reference, Great Falls, MT is at ~ 47' N Latitude.
If the US tariffed-in rates were set at even $.38 per KWH, solar would be a no-brainer investment for majority of homes in the US and coal and natural gas generation would die a natural death with no power infrastructure upgrade needed.
As a side note, the price of natural gas sets the world price for Ammonium nitrate - a product which uses natural gas as a major catalyst to produce. Therefore the price of Natural Gas has a great impact on the cost of food for most of the world. ( http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/icm/2003/4-14-2003/natgasn.html ).
That is to say: the electricity we use that is generated by natural gas, increases the price we pay for food-stuffs here and in the rest of the world.
Parent
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Here come the chemistry Nazis: natural gas is a reactant, not a catalyst, and not to produce ammonium nitrate. It is used to produce hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen to get ammonia, with which you actually get the ammonium nitrate when you combine it with nitric acid.
Though you're right that the price of NG has a large influence on that of ammonium nitrate.
Parent
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Is that why we here in AR have wildcatters coming out our wazoos? In less than 2 years we have had more than a half dozen natural gas wildcatters popping up all over town, and we are just a little speck on the map so they must be all over the place. I figured the price of natural gas wasn't high enough to explain all the rigs popping up everywhere, but if it is as you say and the natural gas is required for food production that makes a lot more sense.
Because everyone here has known for decades there was natural gas all over the place, just nobody bothered because the price of gas was so cheap. hell in the days of family wells out local fire dept was getting called out all the time because somebodies pump kicked on and the natural gas blew the well house sky high. I was wondering why all of a sudden we have natural gas companies building like mad here, and can't hardly move for all the semis carrying gas production equipment. A tie in with food production makes a lot more sense as to why we have suddenly become a boom town. Thanks for the info.
Parent
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some serious problems with this home generation concept.
1) When is extra peaking most in demand? In the middle of the day in July, when everyone's AC comes on. How much home heating is generally needed in the middle of the day in July when everyone's AC comes on? Not bloody much. But you're going to have the full heat output of a car engine pumping into your house; there's no way water heating alone will justify that.
2) Instead of spending the capital costs to build a couple really big peakers, they're going be building millions of tiny individual peakers, each with their own pollution controls? I can't imagine that would be even *remotely* cost-competitive. Or as clean.
I just don't buy it.
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Germans don't have home AC (Score:5, Interesting)
Being German, I can tell you that I have yet to meet someone who has AC in his home. Public buildings *sometimes* have it, but AC isn't common here at all.
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Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
Just a statistics i remember (i can not cite it anymore thou) is that about 40% of green energy is wasted because the electric grid couldn't handle it.
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Re:Uh? (Score:5, Funny)
Alternatively, instead of having hundreds of thousands of CO2 producing generators with the ability to rapidly ramp up and down production, you could have a few nice green nuclear power plants and ramp up and down the load instead (e.g. by using the excess power to do useful stuff like cracking water).
I guess I should buy stocks of every major paint company, just in case if someone really wanted to start building 'green nuclear power plants'. Wouldn't know of any other way to turn them 'green'
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
if you mean "less impact on the environment" then nuclear power is almost as good as it get for anything that produces the kind of load needed to run a nation.
it has one by product which is easy to contain. coal emits tons of radiation and toxic gases into the air, geo thermal is limited to certain locations.
solar, wind and wave can't maintain a consistent load 24/7, so i'm curious as to what alternative you propose.
Re:Uh? (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades, and huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported. By contrast, distributed generation of electricity as proposed by the article is much more efficient, because it happens very close to the consumer.
There are already passively safe reactor designs available to be built, most of the waste that will ever be produced has already been produced as modern reactors produce far less, and where did you get the idea that there are only a couple of decades of fuel left? More like a hundred years with current technologies and billions of years if breeder reactors are used: [slashdot.org]http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html [www.nea.fr]
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Re:Uh? (Score:5, Informative)
"Had we invested a fraction of the research funding that we have given to nuclear power industries into renewable energy research, we would probably already have most of our energy from renewalbe sources. "
the fact is we HAVEN'T invested in nuclear at all for about 20 years,beyond keeping existing reactors going. and how do you come to the conslusion we could make solar/wind/wave able to provide a constant load?!?! is any amount of research going to make the sun shine and the wind blow on queue?!
"Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades" - bull-fucking-shit! the nuclear industry has a saftey record 2nd to none for a start. then consider modern reactors have passive saftey masures making a meltdown impossible.
and i've also heard this argument that uranium fuel will run out in 50 years. yes, present STOCKS will run out if we don't dig up anymore, or look for/develope new deposits. i know for a fact (i work in resources) australia has MASSIVE reserves of uranium, which could provide fuel to the world for easily 500 years at present rates. then there are breeder reactors, which can extend the life of fuel rods 50x, at which point you end up with either a low rad material which isn't dangerous or a highly active material which has a 1/2 life of 200 years - easily containable.
but i know you won't listen to reason, you've been spoon fed this nonsense for years. i'll just wait for your lights to go out.
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Nuclear power is safe (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear power IS safe, at least by any reasonable use of the term. Thing is, if you scale up Nuclear power to the same electricity production as coal, even if you include a Chernobyl every year, it'd still kill fewer people than Coal does. The statistics DON'T point to a Chernobyl level event every year - at this point you're looking more at a greater than 50 year interval between them, and every year of safe operation without another disaster extends that.
Even though I am thousands of kilometers away, it is still recommended to not eat mushrooms more than a couple of times a year, and I want a better future for my own children.
Are you sure that recommendation is based on good science? Or is it like the Vaccine scare here in the USA about Thermisol? That has parents not vaccinating their kids even with thermisol free vaccines.
showing that US research spendings on solar energy are still only half of those on nuclear energy despite the fact that you claim that there is essentially no research on nuclear energy! ; figures are from National Council for Science and the Environment.
Given that Nuclear power provides ~20% of our power, sure, there's R&D with it, but most of that's gone to increasing power production capabilities at existing nuke plants, not for building new ones. I'd also note that wind isn't listed - which might put wind/solar over nuclear in research investments(might be why they don't list it), but still under the R&D investments for COAL.
While on this topic, I'll point out that I'm for a rough power production plan of 35% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, 20% hydro, 5% other.
Given that I've considered installed a combined cycle generator in my basement*, I'm not hostile to Lichtblick's plan. I'd power it with propane though, as that's what I have access to. It can be very efficient as well - an electrical power only plant is lucky to reach 50%, most are closer to 30%. The rest is waste heat. If you're using the combined cycle to also utilize the heat that would otherwise be waste, bonus.
*Normally you don't want the generator in the house, but it is perfectly safe if you take the right steps and properly duct the exhaust to OUTSIDE the building, and in my case I'd be ducting the air in as well.
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Re:Uh? (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is, nuclear power plants, today, in practice, in the real world, *can* and *do* deliver the kind of energy required to run the power grid. They can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels if necessary, and the fuel they run on is in fact VERY plentiful, particularly modern reactors that can run on U-238. This is partly because it goes so far. A pound of uranium generates a WHOLE lot more power than a pound of coal or oil. But uranium is fairly abundant anyway. There's more uranium in the earth's crust than there is tin, for instance. Enough to meet the world's power needs for *centuries* (and by then hopefully we'll have more cost-effective solar -- but I'm getting ahead of myself).
It is likely that no amount of research or investment will ever make wind and wave deliver enough power to meet the world's needs at the current power consumption rate. Falling-water power plants are very cost-effective where you have a generous amount of water at significant potential, e.g., at a dam or large waterfall, but there are relatively few such sites. We do use them where they are available, but there's a limit to how many of them we can build. We can't replace all the coal and oil plants with hoover-dam-style plants, because quite simply there just plain aren't that many large rivers.
Solar power can, in the long term, deliver the power we need, but at present it still needs decades of development to get to a point where it will be economically viable. I'm very much in favor of continuing that research, but it's not going to happen overnight. Today, the most cost-effective method we have for harnessing solar power involves using acres and acres of green plants to turn it into carbohydrates, which we can then burn as fuel. If we want to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear power generation with solar, we're going to have to do better than that. Further research and development is required.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydro, geothermal and wave, fine. Wind and solar? You still have to keep fossil and nuclear plants running 24/7, or eat the brownouts. Power generation figures for wind and solar are bullshit - show me the figures for reductions in fossil and nuclear generation in areas where wind and solar are "contributing" to the load.
Re:Uh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I have a friend who's got a cabin up in the hills that's completely off the grid. Septic system, well water, solar power, electric everything (including stove and bbq). The in-house lines have a natural 16V system which powers major appliances and lights, and there's an up-converted 120V power supply for things like TV or computer.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow. more practically, as the GP said, we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this [power-technology.com]. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
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Re:Uh? (Score:5, Funny)
So, you're saying that if we all live in log cabins and drink from the same hole in the ground that we're crapping in, then there's no problem with relying on solar?
Heck, why not just live in caves and burn our own dung, like the Goddamn Belgians.
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Re:Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Uh? (Score:4, Informative)
What do you do with the toxic waste?
Store it, reprocess it, burn it in a breeder, use alternative methods to get it so it degrades faster, like other posters have mentioned.
Besides, radioactive waste isn't having a real effect on the environment because it's contained, unlike the chemical and radiological pollution coal plants release.
Going after salt flats is missing our point, because I haven't ever heard of a pro-nuclear power slashdotter propose using them for long term storage. The proposals are almost universally reprocess/breeder/netron flux with diversions into burying it in subduction zones.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
We have functioning fission plants now, the biggest fusion test reactor being built/proposed is going to cost a couple times that of a good sized fission plant and still has absolutely no provisions for actually producing electricity.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You should buy stocks in the ones that make white paint. Painting roofs white to increase their albedo is a perfectly valid geoengineering technique.
Re:Uh? (Score:4, Informative)
Different story: Technically it might actually replace those plants, because the government decided in 2000 that all nuclear power plants will be shut down until ~2019. But we have elections coming up and it's possible that this decision gets revoked.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's good, so if I'm helping them pay for two nuclear power plants, I'm getting paid for the use of my basement, or at least getting it for free, right?
FTFA: "Households would pay around $7,250 to have the generators set up along with an appropriate heating system."
W...T....F.... so, I save them the billions it costs to build a nuclear power plant [csmonitor.com], and they want me to pay them to save them money
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you didn't get the memo, Russians stopped being "Commies" almost twenty years ago and are now a good capitalist dictatorship. Plus, there's a second pipeline project on the way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco_pipeline) that'll provide access to more suppliers.
Also, in contrast to a nuclear plant, this swarm can react almost instantly to changes in supply or demand, thus complementing the fluctuating levels of power generated by wind and solar (try achieveing that with a centralized mega-plant)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk to the French [wikipedia.org].
France currently produces 1/10 of the C02 per kWh that Germany does.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How is that addressing the point of the GP?
France delivers a lot of cheap electricity to its neighbours because, having a mainly nuclear-based power system, they can only provide the base load. This means they have to produce more than what they need and sell the excess, even if the prices are not advantageous and would not justify the sale economically.
Nuclear plants are difficult to control. The reaction's dynamics are nonlinear and unstable, and you have only a 0.7% margin in which they respond with a 10
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Follow the link. The (G)GP said:
but he's wrong. EDF does actually run some it's nuke plants in load following mode - it's not as efficient, but when you have a lot of plants why the hell not.
Re:Uh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough, nuclear power plants used by the US Navy work just fine when the power demand spikes (or is reduced suddenly) without becoming uncontrollable.
Proper design ftw.
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Effectively 100% gas - electricity conversion (Score:4, Insightful)
You failed to consider that the target applicants are already using gas for heating purposes anyway. Now the heat production of the engine will be exactly matched to this need (same as before). All extra gas consumption is fully transformed into electricity (which is possible, even for only 40% raw conversion efficency, as long as the electrical output is much below the heat load).
So, overall, the extra gas consumption (compared to conventional heating) is transformed with 100% efficiency into electricity which is a vast improvement over all competing technologies with similar flexibility.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's not much air conditioning going on in Germany in the summer. Maybe for two weeks we use some fans, and in the rest it's not that warm to turn on any aircon or fans. It's also not that cold in winter anymore. A friend of mine basically uses no heating or cooling at all during the whole year, because his apartment is pretty well isolated by being on the first floor of a high-rise.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your link stacks up all the carbon emissions produced to mine, process, refine, enrich, clad (and the emissions from mining, processing, smelting, casting and welding the cladding), assemble, ship and swap a nuclear plants fuel source.
Fair enough, just let me in on the fossil fuels refill fairy and your secret's safe with me!
Re:Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
Massively flawed reactor designs being run by complete idiots is simply not acceptable. Modern reactors are extremely safe and (in the West) well regulated. If you're going to ban the modern nuclear industry on public safety grounds, you'd better ban the whole chemical industry too since that deals with chemicals that are way more harmful and is far less well regulated. Replacing all the coal fired power plants with nuclear plants would massively cut pollution (coal plants put up a *lot* of particulate pollution into the atmosphere, much of which is radioactive and/or highly toxic, not to mention the environmental concerns of the toxic and radioactive fly ash which has to be disposed of - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill [wikipedia.org] for why this is bad).
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Re:Uh? (Score:4, Funny)
EVERY DAY IS ANGRY GERMAN DAY, SCHWEINEHUND!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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92% efficiency?? (Score:4, Insightful)
"generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. "
since when is heat generation anything but 100% efficient. Now delivery to where you want it perhaps not. ANd it might go up the stack. but citing a 92% efficiency does not tell me much about the electrical generation efficiency.
Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:5, Informative)
Well,
you could use math...
If 20kW+34kW is 92%, then the total input energy is 58.7kW, therefore the electric efficiency is approximately 34%.
However, natural gas boilers for heating and warm water are very common in Germany, so replacing some (and 100000 is "some") of them with units that can also generate electricity is not such a bad idea.
Cheers,
Sirius
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Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:5, Informative)
You are right about the electric efficiency which is of cause bad. But what happens to the waste energy? All the rest is heat is stored in a big water tank for your home warm water. Only 8% of the energy escapes that system and will leave your chimney.
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Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:4, Informative)
I live nextdoor to Germany, in the Netherlands, and here airconditioning in homes is not very common. I assume it's the same in Germany.
It can be hot, of course, but never for very long. "Airco" is considered to be a luxery. And hot water is still needed in the summer.
Just be sure not to install such a system near your carefully stored wines in the cellar.
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Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:5, Informative)
Very few homes in (North-)Western Europe have air conditioning, and the warm water tank would obviously not be placed in your living room. Average summer temperatures are between 20 and 30 degrees Celcius. And while the system would probably be overall less efficient in summer than in winter, you will still need some warm water anyway to do the dishes, to clean, to take showers, etc. There are also washing machines and dish washers nowadays that can take warm water as "input" rather than cold water that is subsequently heated using electricity.
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Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:4, Informative)
What about during summer? Or are German summers much cooler than they are in the Mid-Atlantic states of the USA?
How efficient will it be to run the gas generator, using the waste heat on your hot water heater, then crank up the air conditioner when it gets too hot?
Summers are much cooler in NW Europe than in the Mid East Coast states. Like 30F cooler on average. Because of that difference of climate, AC is really not common in homes (those that have it probably do so for its dehumidifying properties FWIW) and peak power demand comes in the winter.
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Re:92% efficiency?? (Score:4, Informative)
For heat generation only, 92% efficiency can be achieved using a secondary heat exchanger which extracts heat from the flue gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler [wikipedia.org]
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Russia and natural gas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Russia and natural gas (Score:5, Insightful)
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page [wikipedia.org]
Not quite. That's assuming a "once-through" fuel cycle, and ignoring things like the newer generations of breeder reactors that burn waste from other reactors. Depending on a number of factors, estimates range between 80 and five BILLION year.
I quite like Bernard Cohen's take on things, cited in that same article, that effectively suggests that we can keep getting uranium from seawater at least as long as the time we have until the sun burns out. I don't quite know how realistic it is, but it's certainly interesting and worthy of further examination.
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Re:Russia and natural gas (Score:5, Informative)
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Future for gas engines ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Swarm of CHP flexible base load generators (Score:4, Insightful)
They sure have a great marketing team at Lichtblick and Volkswagen: so much rah-rah to describe a generator made out of recycled WV engines, that's pure genius.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not "a generator". A system of 100,000 generators, scattered throughout the country, centrally managed via data links. Which is the point.
Why now? (Score:3, Insightful)
AT&T does this. (Score:4, Interesting)
AT&T has "distributed generation", and not just in central offices. Some in-ground network nodes have a small engine fueled from a gas line. This provides backup power if commercial power goes out. In some areas, there's been grumbling about this; somebody in the subdivision gets stuck with the big green box in their yard.
It's mostly a problem in high-density suburban areas. In urban areas, there are underground vaults and commercial basements in which infrastructure equipment can be placed. In low-density suburban areas and rural areas, big metal boxes that make small amounts of noise aren't that bothersome. But in areas where everybody has their little patch of lawn and little else, there are complaints.
I have one of these nodes at the end of my driveway. I get landline phone and DSL through it. It's about 1m x 2m, projecting about 30cm above ground, with a big exhaust vent. I've seen the box open; it looks like a server rack. Normally, it just produces fan noise; the engine is only run for tests and power outages.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thats exactly what they want to do. "Lichtblick" is basicly a energy company selling renewable energy. They simply found out that if you want to sell lots of solar energy, you better should have a backup for ..say.. nighttime. Espescially nights that aren't windy...
Wrong assumption (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to assume that this is something "the germans" as a whole have something to do with, or that it's inherently something that wouldn't happen elsewhere.
In reality, it's just capitalism finding a way to exploit a legislation loophole. There are some hefty subsidies for energy put back into the grid, on the assumption that (A) it would be some green energy like solar or wind, and (B) that it wouldn't happen otherwise, because, (C) there's not much you can put in that way.
Germany is way north, and in at least half of it there are plenty of cloudy days. The same gulf stream influence that makes us not have the climate of, say, Canada or Siberia, well, warm air coming from the direction of the ocean, you do the maths. In, say, Düsseldorf probably a vampire could probably get a day job because there aren't many days with direct sunlight ;)
So solar power isn't a very efficient way to generate energy. Wind is a bit better, but still takes a long time to pay for itself otherwise. So someone figured they'd subsidize people who nevertheless buy a turbine or solar pannels, to have _some_ green energy, even if expensive green energy. Debatable, but Idon't think it's downright stupid or perplexing by any reckoning.
It was not particularly designed for people running diesel or gas generators in that basement, because, well, there weren't any significant numbers of those.
So now two companies figured out they can use a loophole to sell more of their own crap.
Whop-de-do. If you think no American company would do the same abusing a loophole, you haven't been paying attention much. There have been even more stupid attempts, all the way to trying to sell a SMG without the trigger (it would start firing automatically when you chambered a round, and only stop when the magazine was empty) because some PHB thought it wouldn't qualify as an automatic weapon that way. Apparently the BATF thought it still did, though.
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