quixotic, even

Stirling engines are woefully inefficient tho, PV panels are better unless you’re intending to supplement heat source with biomass or such. In a climate where most of energy is used for heating and little to none on AC, it just makes more sense to use solar collectors instead of PV because most of energy use will be in form of heat anyway, and per square meter collector will deliver much more. If you can couple excess heat production to seasonal energy storage, this gets you most or all of heat needs year round covered by solar, if you don’t there’s still free hot water in the summer and seriously lowered gas bill through the year. Small PV panel might make sense to keep pumps running or cover some of the rest of needs but won’t shift balance heavily either way. In a place where major use of energy is AC this approach makes no sense and PV panels with daily or a bit longer lasting storage of energy, be it in batteries or thermal (tanks of cold glycol or ice or whatever) would be the way to go, because the most sunny day is also the day when you need AC the most and this way you get most of your energy needs covered

i heard a story about varnish factory that failed quality checks after one old guy got fired, he was a smoker and used to spit in the main reactor. some enzyme from saliva made it shinier

it will vary, just after distillation (or RO/ion exchange) it should be closer to 7 then it goes down as carbon dioxide gets absorbed. that’s why it’s buffered everywhere where it matters

in my case the size of the system was so small they didn’t have that excuse, yet they were only ever able to get correct results after experimental data was handed over to them, zero predictive power, useless

seeing that jargon file has an extensive page on retrocomputing feels like figuring out that there were archeologists in ancient egypt

some people would tell you that we can simulate small bits of chemistry but it’s flat out wrong (i might be biased as i’ve wrangled for a year with computational chemists about results that don’t conform to reality) and even then errors are so large that’s it’s useless

some goods and intermediates have large energy content, like, if you wanted to use energy from large pv farm in, say, morocco, then it might make more sense to ship bauxite in and aluminum bars out (it takes some 50MJ/kg to make aluminum)

simplicity of the system would be a factor in small, unattended installations like for space heating for single home

Pain

if there’s will, there’s a way

and then some bozo says that biology is just complicated chemistry and chemistry is just complicated physics and we can simulate physics

curious thing is that i never hear biologists or chemists saying that, only some physicists and techbros. just trying to simulate your way out of small organic chemistry problems will make you even more hopelessly lost than you were before

maybe it introduces some critical contaminant (many such cases)

if you’re interested in heating only, then geo-solar hybrid might be better for you. the point is that excess heat from solar collector gets stored in soil near borehole, which can be used for heating in winter. solar heat also gets you hot water year round, and it can be made to work with heat pump or without

all of that without heat pumps too

It is a liquid that after irradiating stores that energy while still cold and can be made to release it in form of heat on demand. but also it’s low grade heat mostly useful for heating and not for electricity generation. It would be simpler to just build long range transmission lines or put energy intensive manufacturing near PV farm in sunny region

that’s a weird metric to look at because drug approval happens only like, 5-15 years after end of preclinical research, sometimes longer

clinical trials also take fuckton of money but this might be also post-2008 cuts that we only see effects of now

they’re all cosplaying medieval alchemy so at least it fits a theme

it’s transparent too so you can just put pv panel underneath to capture the rest

you get 1.6MJ/kg just by irradiating this thing, nothing else is needed and its storable for months as noncorrosive room temperature liquid

to make ammonia you need to have pv to turn light to electricity then make hydrogen out of it then make ammonia in haber process, each step generates losses and none are practical on small scale