T w e n t y S i d e d

Brian Tiemann poses a question about using flywheels to store produced energy, and Steven Den Beste runs the numbers.

A couple of years back SDB moved from writing about politics to writing about anime. This didn’t bother me much, since I love both subjects, and thinking about anime is arguably better for my blood pressure. However, the one thing I missed was these posts about why magical solutions to our power needs were preposterous.

Real engineers like SDB – as opposed to software engineers like myself – have the ability to translate the world into numbers and play with it in a way I can only envy. A real engineer can tell you why you can’t generate power using 600 million tons of turkey guts or billions of tons of corn stalks . He can tell you that to provide power for vehicles in Southern California you would need 231 square kilometers of solar panels that we can’t build. (And even that’s assuming you allow for some 2^nd law of thermodynamics violations).

In a lot of ways this stuff is similar to the old, “how much would a million pennies weigh” sort of things we’d read as kids. They are fun problems that tell us more about the average person’s slippery grip on large numbers than they do about actual science.

Take a look at SDB’s answer to the great big flywheel proposal. There are a lot of serious engineering problems with it, and he outlines them in cruel, pipe-dream-killing detail. Looking at the list, most of the challenges would be mitigated by moving to many smaller flywheels. This moves the challenges from the areas of physics (how do you dissipate all that heat / maintain a huge vaccuum / keep it structurally sound / balance it / etc) to logistics (how much will all the flywheels cost, how much space will they need, and where the hell would you put them?).

If I had any grasp of it, I would work out just how many you would need and how much space they would take up. But I can’t. However, if you think about it, you can intuit that the flywheel array would need to be many, many times larger than then dam / wind turbine / solar collector / turkey gut liquifier / etc, and (unless you want to deal with a whole new set of problems) it would have to be part of or next to the existing power source.

I find this stuff to be fun to read and think about. I only wish people who advocate these pie-in-the-sky proposals felt the same way.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I occasionally do vanity searches. That’s where you type your own name into google and see what you get. I do this from time to time because my name is really unique, so most of the results I get are related to me. During a recent search I found a page of quotes. Here is one:

I (heart) technology. Last Thursday, I was eating a hard pretzel when I broke off the front of one of my back teeth and was left with a giant bleeding hole in my tooth. This was terrible. However, four hours later, I walked out of the dentist’s office with a totally rebuilt tooth. A few hours after that, the novocaine wore off and I enjoyed a meal as if nothing had ever gone wrong. In the thousands of years of human history, only in the last few decades has this sort of thing been possible. In centuries past, I would either have had to have it pulled (if I had access to a dentist) or wait for the tooth to become infected, die, and fall out on its own. Either way, that one mishap would have meant weeks of pain and discomfort. Technology is cool.

That’s an actual quote of mine, from my first blog. This was probably written sometime in early 2001. I no longer have the site, but it is cool to see someone found one of my quotes worth saving. The tooth is still going strong, almost five years later. In fact, another tooth has failed and been replaced since then.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.