Tackling the problem of renewable energy storage

The cost of producing renewable energy using solar and wind has been dropping sharply over the years so that it is now comparable and often even cheaper that energy produced using fossil fuels. So why hasn’t it taken over the energy sector completely? The reason is that when it comes to renewable energy, there is an extra cost that fossil-fuel based power plants do not have and that is the cost of storing the energy and this has to be factored in as well.

It is energy in the form of electric current that drives all our devices but the problem with current is that it cannot be stored as current because as it flows in wires, it dissipates its energy as heat. (Superconductors don’t have any resistance and thus do not lose any heat but the commercial applications of that are far off in the future.) The production of current has to exactly match the use of current at every moment. The energy grid is is a true marvel of engineering technology that achieves precisely this. We have various power plants feeding electricity into the grid and this is the sent all over the area covered by the grid to wherever it is needed at that moment. So in the US during the summer months, for example, energy is sent to the hot southern parts of the country to meet the increased demands of air conditioning.
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Environmental racism

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver discusses how historic racial discrimination practices have resulted in poor and minority communities ending up living in highly polluted areas, where the life expectancy can be ten years below nearby communities that are not similarly polluted. He describes one community where the lead levels are hundreds of times above acceptable limit, so that signs are posted on yards telling children not to play on the grass or in the dirt! That is like asking children not to breathe the air.
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Trump and toilets

Seth Meyers had a pretty funny A Closer Look segment where he discusses, among other things, Trump’s obsession with low water flow from faucets and that toilets no longer flush properly.

I have no idea what Trump is complaining about. I never experience any of the problems that he describes and I don’t even live in the luxury world that he does. Meyers has a theory about why Trump is convinced that toilets don’t flush properly. It is because he repeatedly tries to flush documents down them, as aides have said.

Trump also has an obsession about windmills. He seems to spend a lot of time at his rallies talking about both. It may simply be that when he speaks at these rallies, he is on autopilot, just wandering through the various topics he has spoken of again and again, so that no new material or real thought is necessary. That may be why he forgets the names of the people he is supposed to endorse, even though the rally was held for that specific purpose.

What a weird, weird, man.

Lethal fruit

Donald Trump has been sued (again!) for inciting violence by urging his bodyguards and his supporters to physically attack critics and protestors at events that he attends. As part of the case, he had to submit to a legal deposition towards the end of last year and in the course of it, he expressed fears about reports that he might be pelted with fruit, especially tomatoes.

The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah say that no comedy writer could match the quality of the humor in the deposition transcript and to prove it he and Michael Kosta read verbatim from the it. That five-minute segment begins at the 5:45 mark.


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Tomorrow begins my month!

My calendar software informs me about holidays and such and today it said that May 1 is the “First Day of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month”. I had no idea.

I am not sure what to do with this new knowledge. Perhaps I’ll order some takeout Chinese food to show solidarity with my fellow Asian Pacific heritagers.

It is strange how May 1, which has been celebrated all over the world since 1889 as a day of worker solidarity known as May Day or International Workers Day, is completely ignored in the US even though its origins lie in this country. But as a result of anti-communist fervor, the labor movement in the US distanced itself from it and shifted it to Labor Day in September, which itself has become a pretty ordinary holiday, shorn of any labor militancy.

Authoritarian delusions

What is happening in Sri Lanka is an example of how authoritarian leaders will cling on to power by trying to give the impression that they still have the support of most of the people. In this case, the current president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was easily voted into office on the strength of his reputation as a ‘strong man’. This was because as defense minister when his brother was president, he unleashed the military in an extremely brutal crackdown on the separatist movement of an ethnic Tami minority. That elimination of the separatist threat made him a hero in the eyes of the Sinhala Buddhist majority, especially since the victims of that assault were largely Tamils. Then in April 2019, a terrorist cell of suicide bombers exploded bombs in eight locations including three luxury hotels and three Catholic churches, an act of senseless violence that saw large numbers of casualties.
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New trial for Melissa Lucio

I have been highlighting the potential for a gross miscarriage of justice that was due to occur today in Texas when Melissa Lucio was to be executed for the murder of her two-year old child despite the increasing evidence that she might be innocent and the appalling way that she was interrogated, using many standard coercive methods, that resulted in a confession. The potential for a massive injustice was so great that state Republican lawmakers, even those who support the death penalty, joined in a bipartisan effort to have her case reviewed. Five members of the original jury that convicted her said that if they had been told the full story, they would not have voted to convict.

Yesterday, a state appeals court stayed the execution and sent her case back to a lower court to take into account new evidence.
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Great moments in truck protests

Things have not been going well for the grandiosely titled ‘People’s Convoy’ of trucks that was supposed to bring life to a halt in the nation’s capital. They first drove all across the country to Washington DC to protest vaccine mandates or something and then hung around for a week or so at an abandoned racetrack about 50 miles north of the city. After that non-event, some of them then returned to California and decided to protest near the Oakland home of a California state assemblywoman.

But they got a hostile reception from the neighbors who were incensed at big trucks clogging up their quiet and narrow residential streets with their loud air horns blaring and told the truckers to get the hell out of there. As the trucks were leaving, they got stuck in traffic near a Safeway grocery store and a large number of people, many of them young, started purchasing eggs from the store and pelting the trucks, forcing them to flee.
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Shattering the myth of benign British colonialism

The twentieth century saw the decline of the colonial empires that had controlled much of the world over the previous centuries. Especially following the end of the Second World War, the rise of independence movements led to the colonial powers being forced to hand over power to the people of the countries they once ruled. When we look at the history of colonial rule, somehow British rule has escaped much of the harsh censure that was leveled at the other powers, with some even going to the extent of viewing the British rule as benign, with them largely peacefully handing overpower. They even like to portray themselves as a civilizing influence, brining modernity to backward nations.

That is a myth. What distinguished British colonial rule from that of the others was the great effort that they put into suppressing the brutality and cruelty of their rule by destroying and suppressing all the records of their actions and using their propaganda apparatus to create a mythical story that puts them in a very favorable light, at least in the western world. As they prepared to leave the countries, they put into action a systematic effort to either destroy evidence of their brutal rule or ship the rest of the documents to a tightly guarded facility in the UK so that almost no one even knew the existence of them.

The mask began to be ripped off in the last two decades or so as scholars discovered the existence of these documents and forced the government to reveal at least some of them. They showed how awful British colonial rule was. Some of the pioneering work in this discovery of hidden history was by Caroline Elkins who, while doing field work in Kenya as a student, stumbled across the story of the Mau Mau nationalist movement and rebellion and how it had been misleadingly portrayed by the British. [Read more…]

Trump’s health

Although I dislike Donald Trump intensely because of his many awful personal qualities and the policies he pursues (I really do not think I need to list all of them), one thing that has impressed me is his health. He is almost 76 years old, an age when the natural aging process reveals itself in the form of all manner of ailments. And yet, he seems to not have any serious health problems (at least as far as we know) and seems to be able to speak for well over an hour at his rallies. That requires some stamina.

This is surprising since he has all the hallmarks of a heart attack waiting to happen, since he eats junk food, is overweight, and seemingly does not exercise. He does have a florid complexion, but whether that is due to high blood pressure or the tanning and bronzing that he reportedly undergoes in his vanity is hard to say. The only good thing he does is get a lot of fresh air by being outdoors a lot playing golf, even though he rides around in a golf cart, thus foregoing even that little opportunity to walk and stretch his muscles. However he does not drink or smoke, which is a big plus.
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