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Post by ironhold on Dec 13, 2012 2:19:36 GMT
One of the perils of getting my DVDs from second-hand stores is "There's very often a reason why the DVD was in the second-hand store in the first place".  So it was with an anime series entitled "Earth Maiden Arjuna", an anime series that I managed to score for the cheap. It was billed as an action / adventure series, but in reality it's a long-winded ecological spiel that would make Al Gore retch from the awfulness of it all. Episode #2 has the title lead trying to stop a monster from destroying a nuclear power plant located near Tokyo. During the fighting, the head of the power plant is working with a female soldier to try and activate the fail-safes; this way, in case the lead fails, the reactor hopefully shouldn't go up. The female soldier goes off on a tirade about how nuclear energy is an abomination that shouldn't exist in this day and age. The plant head agrees with her, claiming that "Nuclear energy wouldn't even be needed if everyone could live without air conditioning for two weeks in the summer." It's patently obvious that the writers were just pulling that out of their nether regions for the sake of preaching to the audience. But the question is - How much of the energy demand on any given power grid comes from air conditioning during the summer months? |
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Post by silverdragon on Dec 13, 2012 10:06:03 GMT
Depends on where you live....
Whole House A/C is "New" in the UK, we dont go for that much.... well, "Normal" people dont anyway.....
But then again, we just dont have the climate to warrant the expense of whole house A/C anyway... maybe two weeks over the summer is the most it would be used?....
I would suggest that we would be spending many times more on Heating over the colder months than we do on Cooling?....
I would also suggest that that may be true of any climate that gets Snow during Winter....
Of those that dont get any snow, perhaps not.
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Post by privatepaddy on Dec 13, 2012 14:08:20 GMT
Lets all take for granted Australia is a land of climate extremes we live with it and deal with it. Last week Melbourne had conditions of 40+ deg C heat low humidity as the winds came off the desert interior as Lex and I put up with 35+ deg C higher humidity. This kind of weather extreme is when the bush can explode into an inferno and depending on the fuel load does.
I live in subtropical Queensland.
Back when AC (air-conditioning) was no longer the province of the rich/privileged and window bangers were becoming cheap (around the late 70's/80's) we had a heat wave. People got home from work sweltering in the traffic and turned on the AC for relief. This coupled with the normal peak load sent the grid into melt down, suburbs were shed as the grid "struggled to survive". Not that I am sure it was the same event, but one person in one control room took his generating system off line before it tripped out due to overload. The system managed to come back online using its generation as a source of electricity for the fields for other generators.
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Post by Cybermortis on Dec 13, 2012 15:24:14 GMT
The specifics would vary on the climate, the size of the building the AC is being used in and the efficiency of the AC in question.
However, from what I can tell it appears that a typical AC system uses 3.5 KwH per ton of system.
New York State has a population of just over 19,000,000. Factoring in sharing of systems, and the higher demand of units in offices ect, lets assume half the population uses an AC system massing a ton.
That would give 9,500,000 units working at 3.5 KwH, or 33,250,000 KwH.
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Post by srmarti on Dec 13, 2012 23:17:49 GMT
Reading the title I was ready for a really dumb video game post. Surprise!
Here in the US, it's fairly common during a heat wave for the News to be reporting on the high electrical demand. The most obvious cause for that higher demand is people trying to stay cool.
Cyber, how are you accounting for sharing AC systems? AC is utilized in such a variety of buildings. Offices, factories, stores, homes, contractor trailers on job sites, uninhabited places storing sensitive goods..... Just curious on the numbers you came up with.
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Post by Cybermortis on Dec 14, 2012 0:06:37 GMT
Cyber, how are you accounting for sharing AC systems? AC is utilized in such a variety of buildings. Offices, factories, stores, homes, contractor trailers on job sites, uninhabited places storing sensitive goods..... Just curious on the numbers you came up with. I ball-parked the figure. I'm assuming a half a ton of AC equipment per person - assuming some people don't have an AC, others will be sharing with at least one other individual and that AC systems in offices etc are going to be considerably larger and heavier than domestic versions. |
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Post by srmarti on Dec 14, 2012 1:29:05 GMT
OK. Seems like there's considerable room for error then. Probably not so bad a starting estimate though.
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Post by wvengineer on Dec 16, 2012 1:55:19 GMT
A major part of it is the efficiency of the given system.
As a rule of thumb, the larger the system, the more efficient it is, up to a point. I'll take my house as an example. When I first bought it, there was no cooling system. I ran 2 window AC units, which was enough to cool 2 rooms of my house, maybe 1/6th of the area. June and july power pills were over $200 a month, over 2,500 kwh. In late July, I got a central AC system installed to cool the whole house. The August power bill, the hottest month of that year, my power bill fell to $70 and about 900 kwh. Needless to say, that Central AC has more than paid for itself over the years.
On the other hand, my father recently upgraded from a old SEER 7 air source heat pump/AC to a geothermal system. running the numbers there, we figure he is saving about 200 kwh of power. Not nearly enough to justify the expense of the system.
I also know someone who keeps their house at 68F though the summer and then loudly complains about their power bill.
So reasonable use and upgrading to higher efficiency systems would have more impact than anything and still keep your house cool.
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Post by ironhold on Jan 26, 2013 16:17:08 GMT
Finally brought myself to watch episode #8, and in so doing discovered even *more* bad science.
To paraphrase:
"If people would just eat even a little less meat, they would free up enough wheat to feed every last person on Earth! The first world nations would just need to suck up the cost of distributing it to everyone! Instead, they had to be evil and try to corner the meat market!"
Here's what I'm looking at:
1. What percentage reduction in the amount of meat consumption equals what percentage increase in the global wheat supply? The writers were apparently presuming that "cattle feed" accounts for such a high percentage of global grain consumption that even a modest decrease in the use for cattle feed would equate to a large release of wheat for human consumption.
2. In contrast, Ethanol has become a *confirmed* sink for corn, in that the amount of corn needed to make the nation's Ethanol supply is having a direct effect on the amount of corn available for the food supply. Would doing away with Ethanol and allowing the corn back into the food supply have a bigger impact than the wheat from cattle feed?
3. Whoever wrote the episode is apparently unaware of just how much food aid is either stolen by bandits or waylaid by warlords.
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Post by the light works on Jan 26, 2013 16:45:23 GMT
on a slightly related topic, I happened to have been the witness to thermostat wars in Los Angeles. there were an Oregonian and a New Yorker - neither one an example of average or above average sensibility. it was an old mechanical heat/cool thermostat. one would push it to maximum heat, and the other would push it to maximum cool. it was stupidly ridiculous.
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Post by ironhold on Jan 28, 2013 22:10:40 GMT
Episode #11: (paraphrases)
"The reason why the boom in prescription medicines corresponds to the Industrial Revolution is because some of the early prescription medicines were made using industrial waste from the factories."
"Leftover chemical weapons from the World Wars were used to make the first insecticides and chemical fertilizers."
"Humans could save the world if they just gave up such modern luxuries as electricity; they're just too afraid to."
"Energy-wise, one bite of food is potentially of greater value than one human life."
"There was a time when no one on this planet had any garbage."
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Post by the light works on Jan 28, 2013 22:20:22 GMT
so this was meant to be a comic character? those are getting more and more far afield.
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Post by ironhold on Jan 28, 2013 22:37:25 GMT
The bit about the food comes from the guy in charge of the Japanese branch of a global organization designed to fight against the monsters created by pollution and other "human" misdeeds. Making it even more heinous is that he was talking to a 10-year-old girl at the time (the younger foster sister of a barely teenage boy who used to be the branch's resident psychic until he over-exerted himself in battle and nearly died) and telling her that it was why she should eat her dinner.
The rest come from the woman who serves as the Japan branch's sergeant major. Her story is that, although she's female, she was born with a Y chromosome because her mom was taking some sort of medication while pregnant. Once she found that out, she went all uber-green. A guy from a previous eco group she was with proposed to her even *after* finding out about her condition, but by her own admission she was still so uptight about being a hermaphrodite that she ditched him.
And yes - these are two of the heroes in the series.
I kid you not.
Anyway, I've got two more episodes left on the series. So there could still be even worse insanity.
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Post by the light works on Jan 28, 2013 22:45:22 GMT
well, I guess it is as logical a reason for eating something as that someone else is hungry.
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Post by ironhold on Jan 28, 2013 22:45:29 GMT
Oh, and speaking of insanity -
I tried to block out the entirety of episode #9 owing to just how wrong and disturbing it was, but here goes.
According to the aforementioned 10-year-old, who is herself a psychic, babies are fully conscious even while still in the womb, such that they even know what their mothers are thinking.
She also claimed that it's not normal for infants to cry after birth; they only cry because the average hospital is too artificial and so it frightens them. An infant born under "natural" circumstances will only cry once to clear its lungs, and that's it. The reason why modern society doesn't know this is because we're too used to the notion of hearing infants crying and think it a sign of a healthy child.
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Post by Cybermortis on Jan 28, 2013 23:40:48 GMT
The rest come from the woman who serves as the Japan branch's sergeant major. Her story is that, although she's female, she was born with a Y chromosome because her mom was taking some sort of medication while pregnant. It is quite possible for females to have a Y chromosome without drugs being involved, or for males to have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. In fact they used to allow students at my old college (That's not university btw) to run a simple test on their cheek cells that highlighted the X chromosome. But more than once some of the guys turned out to be XX and some of the girls XY, so they naturally decided to avoid the red faces this caused by stopping such testing. |
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Post by ironhold on Jan 29, 2013 1:19:01 GMT
That was *literally* her story - she told it to the title character as a way of explaining why she never married.
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Post by the light works on Jan 29, 2013 1:29:59 GMT
The rest come from the woman who serves as the Japan branch's sergeant major. Her story is that, although she's female, she was born with a Y chromosome because her mom was taking some sort of medication while pregnant. It is quite possible for females to have a Y chromosome without drugs being involved, or for males to have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. In fact they used to allow students at my old college (That's not university btw) to run a simple test on their cheek cells that highlighted the X chromosome. But more than once some of the guys turned out to be XX and some of the girls XY, so they naturally decided to avoid the red faces this caused by stopping such testing. you're sure they weren't just getting the wrong cheek cells?  |
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Post by srmarti on Jan 29, 2013 2:39:40 GMT
Episode #11: (paraphrases) "Humans could save the world if they just gave up such modern luxuries as electricity; they're just too afraid to." Then how would we watch anime?  |
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Post by ironhold on Jan 29, 2013 2:43:52 GMT
I think by now it's been clearly established that Mr. Kawamori didn't exactly think things through here...
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