Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner

We meet monthly for dinner on the second Monday of the month to discuss climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering.

We feel that you can't be of much use as an environmentalist unless you are technically well-informed. Environmental problems are scientific problems, and how to solve them is an engineering question. If you are not technically well-informed, you will make inaccurate statements about science that are an embarrassment to the environmental movement, and the solutions you advocate will be ill-advised and/or counter-productive. So the purpose of these dinners is to create a space for informative discussion of climate science and zero-carbon energy engineering.

Environmentalists who are scientifically poorly-informed have an infamous track record of making predictions (often dire) that do not materialize as scheduled, and advocating solutions that are poor engineering choices.

We will meet on the second Monday of every month from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the Skylight Diner see (map) at the southwest corner of 9th Avenue and West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan, within easy reach of the A/C/E & 7 subways, and a block away from LIRR and NJ Transit at Penn Station.

The restaurant has a large menu with many cuisines and does separate checks for large groups, so everyone can pay with their own credit card.

Once everybody has ordered food, the organizer will give a 30-60 minute talk which will be followed by general discussion.

If we are to transition to a non-nuclear grid powered by renewables (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, wave) we face the intermittency problem. People want the lights kept on even when the weather isn't cooperating, which means that some form of battery storage is needed. I was in the same room as Al Gore 7 years ago when he said "Wind and Solar are already cheaper than fossil fuels." which is highly misleading -- they are cheaper in the middle of a sunny, windy day, but on calm nights and calm, cloudy weeks, battery backup is needed, and that's expensive.

Nuclear advocates typically say that enough battery backup to provide a renewables-only grid is prohibitively expensive. Renewables advocates typically anticipate that batteries will get cheap enough before long.

Our topic today is electrical storage technology -- we will be discussing various different storage technologies and comparing their advantages and disadvantages.