This would just be a minor improvement, but we should all stop and think how much better all society would be if every country just flat out banned fishing trawlers every where in its territorial waters. For one we would have more and tastier fish. We would also have less cables being damaged.
While it's technically lighter than air, as a result of spilling it tends to form an aerosol, which travels low to the ground - a cloud of death if you will.
Hydrogen is impractical, but ammonia just dangerous.
Meanwhile methane apparently can be synthesized pretty efficiently:
I was hoping they would have a clever way of determining what to do with the brine solution, but looks like they just disperse it on the spot. I wonder what the environmental impacts of that looks like.
The Danish government owns 50.1% of Ørsted. (See: https://orsted.com/en/investors/shares - "Danish State (majority stakeholder)) It's effectively a state company. So, when you think Ørsted, instead think Denmark.
It’s possible for there to be a distinction between state-owned and state-run (see the BBC). Perhaps you could discuss why you think it is state-run rather than just state-owned instead of resorting to insults.
I responded to an insult. And I was being factual. Please reflect on your own behavior.
And no, no there is no BBC-like distinction here. Ørsted is company run by the Danish government, period. The link above should be proof enough to any thinking person.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments and ignoring our many requests to stop. You've resumed doing it a great deal lately, and that is not ok—no matter how right you are or feel you are, and no matter how wrong others are or you feel they are.
What you say is not a joke. There has been research into space based solar power which would beam this power down to earth to a collector point. Perhaps it is possible? Could power be safely beamed from sea to port?
The maximum power density before the air ionises is surprisingly low. Well before this point, it’s a terrifying industrial accident waiting to happen, given 1 mW is supposed to be the safety limit for eye-safe lasers while 500 mW lasers set things on fire and blind people who are only looking at diffuse reflections of the beam.
Ok, so we establish vacuum tubes to blast the lasers through, maybe with some sort of glass fiber to direct the light, and...wait a minute, that's just a different, more fragile kind of cable. Darn.
I have no idea if this is a good idea that just hasn't been developed very far, or if it's like powering cars with compressed air (technically possible but not valuable).
My completely uninformed guess is that light can be incredibly information dense, but not all that energy dense compared to electricity.
Also fiber is a little more brittle and persnickety than electrical wire, so in this specific use case it would seem to be strictly worse, at least when it comes to the immediate challenge of cables experiencing physical harm.
Not too serious proposal, beam up, beam sideways, and then beam back down starlink style? I wonder if the losses and costs here could ever be competitive with HVDC lines.
They should use the power to disassociate sea water into hydrogen, store it, then have a barge come by and collect it. See the "Sea change" ferry project by the SF port for inspiration.
I suspect it's because people get a bit tired of every article on infrastructure challenges getting responses along the lines of "They should just do this thing that I just read about that sounds really cool!"
Chances are that the possibility occurred to at least one of the numerous technical experts and professional engineers involved in the project, and there's a reason that's not the favored approach.
Sometimes it's because the linked idea has other complications that aren't actually that much easier to solve than the present complications (hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store, because it's so dang small, and it's pretty volatile too), and sometimes it's because a super cool emerging technology that might become the standard for the future isn't actually ready for large-scale deployment, because people literally just figured out how to make it work (why don't people simply have large batteries in every home to balance out grid loads? It seems like a really good idea!).
Sometimes problems are hard, and as smart as I'm sure you are, I don't know that you're smarter than everyone involved in this project combined.
I did not imply any of that in my comment. I also did not violate any HN guidelines that I'm aware of. You are assuming I'm a bunch of things I'm not, and then acting accordingly. I don't think that's fair.
My comment was applying a classic problem solving technique of combining two problems into one symbiotic solution. Things like using waste heat from industrial processes to heat offices, etc. Check out TRIZ
I am not just some random idiot on reddit, I have deep experience here. I don't really feel the need to explain why or how.
Random people proposing unrealistic solutions is something I personally am very tired of. It just really derails any intellectual discussion with baseless fantasising. For example it often happens for discussions on EV. So if you don't state your experience in any convincing way your comment is just noise to me. I won't research your credentials and google you just to judge wether it's random sci-fi or a realistic comment, there are just to many of these comments. I think the down-votes you got reflect this general sentiment. You don't have to explain your experience but then your proposition might not be taken serious. Your comment is also so short that it is really indistinguishable from the sci-fi spam comments.
I checked out a lot of your other comments and you have a lot of negative and angry comments abound. One even says a general "F U" to anyone who does XYZ.
You're also a student. If you're a student and already "very tired " of people (experts, I'm actually an expert in this situation) proposing solutions on a tech chat website. I don't really follow why? Are you an expert in this field? Who are you to judge that this idea came from someone who isnt?
this really is a nice straw-man argument. I stated that I don't trust your comment (even if you just plainly state you're an expert...an expert in what?). If you don't like it, don't try to deflect by attacking my personality.
The amount of downvotes shows that it's a common sentiment and this reply is pretty childish I think.
Random people trying to make the world a better place is how we move the world forward. There are a million examples of this.
Getting outside ideas, outside blood into these kinds of projects is exactly what moves us forward.
I'm a engineer, I've been designing large complex systems for 2 decades and I always welcome and even encourage outside perspectives and folks from other industries lending their advice.
I was just chatting with the head of a robotics automation startup who found some great synergies in the cabinet making industry.
It sounds like you are just tired. It doesn't matter much what your tired of, it sounds like you are tired of all new ideas unless they come from the same old places. That's just exclusionary.
So a lot of the bigger hydrogen projects in Europe are doing that except at the onshore connection point.
Electrolyzers are hideously expensive so you probably don’t want to cosite them on the actual wind turbine itself. But IIRC there is a pilot project to build a “hub” in the North Sea like this.
I can easily believe the piping is hideously expensive, likewise the storage, but I find it difficult to believe that the actual electrolysers themselves are expensive, given I built a small one at such a young age I’m not even sure how old I was (single digit, but apart from that, IDK).
