My Original Poetry | Classic Poetry | My Photography
Hi, I'm Tom Orpheon, poet, voice actor, and sometime landscape photographer producing readings of poetry on YouTube, some mine, some classic stuff, and at some point, maybe some modern stuff.
Without turning, he heard her,
a willowy-whispery slip of a thing:
“Is it very dark at the other end of your tube?”
He wondered if there was a right answer.
He simply said, “Come with me.”
And she did.
These are the times,
That no-one tells you how to live.
The times when you wake up,
Hours early,
And your mind is filled
With thoughts of them
What they’d say,
What you’d say
What they’d want you to say
What you’d want them to say
No-one ever tells you how to live those times,
No-one ever tells you how to not be hurting,
No-one ever tells you how to silence the fantasy.
The times when you look up
From your own life,
And the world around you seems to have gone mad,
The stable society you trusted all your life
Seems to be breaking at the seams,
And the people in charge
Don’t seem to know what they’re doing,
Or care to listen to those who do.
No-one ever tells you how to live these times,
No-one ever tells you how to not feel hopeless,
No-one ever tells you how not to feel helpless.
The times when you go to bed,
And as your brain shuts down,
And all the civilised parts of you switch off,
You’re left with pure feeling,
Loneliness
Hurt,
Sorrow
Love.
No-one ever tells you how to reconcile those feelings,
No-one ever tells you how to deal with them,
No-one ever tells you how to live,
Without feeling loved.
Scientists invented fabric that makes electricity from motion and sunlight. To create the fabric, researchers at Georgia Tech wove together solar cell fibers with materials that generate power from movement. It could be used in “tents, curtains, or wearable garments,” meaning we’d virtually never be without power. Source
Y'all are fucking idiots. Clean energy will NEVER be enough to replace the energy we have now. We’d have to tear down DOZENS of forests just to fit enough windmills and solar panels to get even a QUARTER (probably less, tbh) of the energy we can produce now.
Yeah, sure, when they’ve already calculated that a few square miles of panels in the empty ass Arizona desert could power the whole nation. But ok, fracking and the diminishing petroleum supply is worlds better.
Nevermind that windmills are often most efficient off the coast. There they take up no land, impact no trees, don’t pollute the water, and are conveniently located where winds are often strongest anyway.
And solar panels can literally be built into roofs of buildings and in empty areas like deserts. The sun strikes the Earth with the same amount of energy in an hour that our civilization uses in a year.
But yeah, it would be impossible for us to ever have enough energy from clean sources.
Durr hurr technology is bad and I would rather light shit on fire than have clean energy
also…no forests were cleared to make space for Denmark’s windmills and yet they regularly produce so much power that it covers almost all of the country’s power needs. Oh, and then there’s the times when the windmills generate 140% of Denmark’s power needs. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand
The fact that anyone can believe a limited amount of dinosaur oil is more plentiful and efficient than moving air or fucking sunlight is proof that entire populations can be completely brainwashed.
It's worth noting that as things stand, while yes, we could be generating way more energy in clean ways, purely renewable energy mixes generally aren't deployable yet. Why?
Well, this turned out to be rather lengthy, so, on the off chance that you would like my answer, you’re going to have to click to read below the line.
Because we don't currently have a good option for the grid level energy storage necessary to balance out the volatility/variability inherent in renewable energy sources. Now, I know what you're thinking; "but Tom, Tesla's demonstrated big grid level batteries, it's just a production and political will issue."
Up to a point that's correct, if people were to get behind that sort of thing and push it would be useful... In the short term. Unfortunately, Lithium-ion batteries have some serious problems when it comes to performing as a grid level solution in the long term:
1) Battery Life: Typical Li-ion cells have a lifespan of around 1500 charge-discharge cycles, very good (and expensive to manufacture) ones can just about push it to 2200 cycles. If we assume one cycle per day, even the really good ones have a lifespan of 6 years before they have to be replaced (this is perhaps optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, as some types of Li-ion cell will be defunct within 3 years of manufacture regardless, while over capacity and good battery management could telescope the basic charge-discharge lifespan to 12-15 years). So, that’ll be a rolling program of replacing a sixth of the world’s grid energy storage every year, which is exacerbated by the next point...
2)There’s not enough lithium or cobalt: I’ll admit that I’m struggling to find hard numbers on this one, but current known sources of cobalt and lithium are limited, both in scope and in rate of extraction, cobalt especially, given the political instability of the world’s primary producer (the DRC). Scaling up production of lithium-ion cells is possible, but the rate of raw material production is going to limit the degree to which we can do that. This may yet be mitigated by undersea mining of course, though that would, in turn, (with current regulations and technical standards atleast) have the potential to do unspeakable damage to oceanic ecology. This in turn has to be considered in terms of the future global food supply.
3)No-one’s yet figured out how to economically recycle lithium-ion batteries: It can be done, but doing it both to a purity that it can be manufactured into new cells, and cheaply enough to be practical/more efficient than just buying in more raw materials has not yet been done.
4)We’ve got more important things to be using this limited resource for: The one truly great thing about Li-ion batteries, that no other demonstrated battery technology can match, is storage per kilo. This means that if we’re to stand any chance of decarbonising our transport networks, we’re going to have to be directing as much Li-ion production to electric vehicle use as possible. Using less energy dense batteries would result in rising inefficiencies thanks to greater weight for the same energy requiring more energy per kilometre moved. Grid level storage would, by definition just sit there, so less energy dense technologies would be much better used for it.
Given these problems, are there solutions? I mean we’ve had rechargeable batteries for a long time now, NiMH and NiCd and Lead-acid batteries are all proven technology right?
Well, no, those technologies are sharply limited by the memory effect and the instability of the charging supply. Good battery management could potentially deal with this issue, but the degree of complexity may push us into the “it’s not worth the effort” range.
Which leaves us with what?
Traditional grid level storage takes the form of hydroelectric power, pumping water up hill when you have a surplus, letting it drop when you don’t - this is possible, but the quantities of water required are... Considerable. I did once sit down and calculate this, and for the US alone, assuming a margin of 20 days of power (possibly generous, but if I was designing such a system, I’d definitely be erring on the side of caution) and generators 100 metres below the water, it came to a volume of water roughly equivalent to a quarter of the Baltic sea. This of course is without considering evaporation or inefficiencies in the pumping systems.
Yeah... That’s going to be interesting to do. Especially in places like Texas or Nevada or South California, even at the best of times, y’know, when they’re not suffering record-breaking droughts and record heatwaves.
Are there other technologies? Yes. Have any of them been tested on a large scale? No. Would it be possible to do so if governments weren’t so desperate to ignore dealing with climate change/had a clue what they were doing when they did decide to deal with it? Yes.
The three main ones that present themselves are hydrogen fuel cells (using surplus energy to electrolyse water, then running that back through a PEM fuel cell to supply demand), liquid air (like with hydrogen, surplus energy would refrigerate air, while during deficit you’d allow the air to boil and drive a turbine), and liquid-metal batteries.
Of these three, hydrogen fuel cells are least likely to be usable for grid level storage in my opinion - liquid hydrogen is difficult to store, and would require far greater energy to create than would be stored by it. If hydrogen fuel cells do become a major power system in the future, my money would be on it being for aviation use, or only really once nuclear fusion comes online (producing so much energy that we don’t give a damn about the inefficiencies).
Liquid air meanwhile I can see the appeal of - most of the tech required is very much mature and well proven, while the liquid state of the air would provide an opportunity to harvest CO2 from it directly for carbon capture purposes or even just to pump into industrial greenhouses. However, this still has the problem of massive inefficiencies thanks to the refrigeration process. Possibly useful for some applications, but I don’t really think so.
Which brings us to the tech that I’m most intrigued by, and which is also the most experimental of the lot: Liquid metal batteries. There are inefficiencies in them (mostly heat loss - the metal has to be kept molten so there will be some loss of heat to the environment regardless of how well insulated it is), but they don’t have memory effects, materials are relatively cheap (i.e. common) and they’re estimated to have a lifespan of 15,000 charge-discharge cycles. So that’ll be renewing storage at a rate of one 40th of the grid per year, even at it’s most pessimistic - much more sustainable than Li-ion tech.
It gets better though - the most recent report I saw about this technology was that they’d discovered the best metal to use for energy density was lead. Now, lead is dirt cheap, we’re trying to get lead out of water supplies and buildings and need somewhere safe to put it, and it is comfortably molten at a relatively low 400°C reducing scope for environmental heat loss, and allowing the casings to be made of relatively cheap materials.
Unfortunately, it’s only really being researched by universities - last I looked at least, no major industry player was investing in the research or pushing ahead with large scale demonstrations, while governments are, of course, as useless and clueless as ever.
For completeness, before I wrap up, I should just note that there are other, more exotic technologies, generally supercapacitors using graphene or PEM based dielectrics, and some even using metallic hydrogen, but realistically, none of these are far enough along to be deployable quickly enough or in great enough scale to actually solve the problem of decarbonising the world’s energy supply within the next decade or two.
...
It annoys me when people say that renewables are entirely ready to go, because my inner pedant takes that to mean “we can generate all our power with renewables tomorrow if we wanted” and as everything I’ve said above should show, we aren’t even nearly there yet, not if we want a stable, reliable power supply.
Is that an acceptable excuse for doing as little as we are? No.
Should we be pushing for immense increases in renewable energy? Absolutely yes.
But we should also be demanding that storage technologies other than Li-ion should start being pushed, because until we crack that nut, my inner pedant is going to have to raise objections.
Worse, the fossil fuel industry’s lobbyists are also going to be able to raise those objections, based in reality, rather than just greed. And to hell with them.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
As part of my renewal of this project, I figure I might as well also start sharing some of my photography here as well - specifically the stuff that I think is good, but for one reason or another (usually because it’s portrait rather than landscape) isn’t suitable for use in my videos.
The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.
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