kgwilson

Well FB, 105 posts in under 3 weeks, almost all negative about moving to a better less polluting future and almost none relating to flying even though you tried to make everyone think that this thread had some sort of Aviation focus which it of course does not. Create your next thread in the Whats Up Australia site and leave Recreational flying to real Aviation topics.

 

 

Speaking of Reef damage, what happened with that starfish infestation that was doing all the damage a few years back, is that still going on?

That's the Crown of Thorns Starfish and there has been a big outbreak on the southern reefs. It is native to the reef and eats live coral and leaves only the coral skeleton. It apparently can extend it's stomach which it wraps around the coral & sucks it dry. They don't know why these outbreaks occur but wherever they occur large swathes of the reef are decimated. Last I heard they were working on some parasite to reduce the numbers in the outbreak areas.

And what of the millions of others who are struggling to afford the house, let alone a solar with battery system. What is the environmental impact if everyone suddenly bought batteries that need replacing every few years?I would love solar with battery, but:1. It's 3 times the price for the same output,

 

2. You don't just install and forget, the batteries need maintenance, lose efficiency and need to be replaced.

 

3. To get one that will comfortably run workshop tools (yes, I work on stuff when it's cloudy and/or dark) I would need an even bigger system than I have.

 

4. Supplimenting it with a diesel genny sort of defeats the purpose and annoys the neighbours.

 

It's not as environmentally friendly as you would like to believe.

 

What if people do start using electric cars? Just the trickle charge is about 2400 watts, that's like have your kettle running non-stop, and usually this needs to happen at night.

If you are already on the grid, stay on it. If you are not the cost to get connected can be astronomical depending on the distance from an existing supply. That is why people are putting in their own systems. They have independence at a cheaper cost than getting connected. The 40k system that went on to a farm was likely considerably cheaper that getting poles & wires to the place. Yes current technology batteries need maintenance but so do poles & wires. That's called the supply charge on your power bill.Mainstream electric cars are a little way off yet and when they are commonplace, city dwellers will benefit more than out of towners. If you live 200km from nowhere it is hard to imagine how you could reliably transport yourself around using the current electric technology. Development though in this area is exponential and the problem may well be solved with new technology and inventions. I cannot see into the future but I do know that holding on to old, outdated, polluting energy generation is slowly killing the planet. Luckily that is on the decline.

 

 

Going 100% renewable is feasible and possible within 20 years. It is more probable that it will take 30 years & that is only due to political interference. What we need is the least polluting options during the transition phase. That may include gas and nuclear even though nuclear has a waste problem as well as a decommissioning problem not to mention the enormous cost to set up both in time and money.

 

 

This is because Snowy 2 is a write off right from the start. The cost estimates are now around 8 billion, 4 times more than announced not so long ago by Turnbull. The government has absolutely no idea how to deal with changing from fossil fuelled energy to renewable energy. Private industry has ignored the politicians and is just doing it and profitably. The 22,000 potential pumped hydro sites around Australia identified in the ANU study are nothing like the ridiculousness of Snowy 2. They are much smaller less capital intensive & many use an infinite water source, the Sea.

 

Small scale stuff is also something that scares the crap out of the pollies. Individuals can install their own PV arrays, batteries and small hydro turbines and easily put in their own pumped hydro for a few thousand dollars. Off grid the government gets nothing from it and it worries them. Larger community schemes can sell and buy power from one another by storing excess generation and selling it to neighbours when they don't need it, buy it when they do. This is all existing technology and is working around the world.

 

The biggest wind turbines now produce 10MW turning at 2 rpm. Why are they being developed & installed at an exponential rate? The answer again is glaringly obvious. Quite cheap to manufacture and install and the raw material to produce the energy is free. It all adds up to PROFIT. All they have to do is a bit of ongoing maintenance and pay royalties to the landowner. It's Win-Win and THERE IS NO POLLUTION.

 

A real life example is a mate of mine who owns an airfield and is a farmer. He decided to build a new house to retire to on his property. The quote to put in poles & wires to provide power was more than 30k. He has 3 big freezers, 4 buildings, and no gas other than his BBQ. He put in solar panels, solar hot water, led lighting, energy efficient appliances, reverse cycle aircon, extra insulation and batteries. This was done nearly 3 years ago so he opted for existing deep cycle lead acid batteries rather than newer more efficient lithium technology. He also purchased a pretty big diesel generator as a backup. Not only was the cost less than the grid connection but to date he has only used the generator to make sure it still works by testing it at regular intervals. It has never had to be used to provide power that his renewable system was unable to supply.

 

 

Of course they are uneconomic if you use fossil fuelled energy to run the pumps. If you use wind or solar energy that is surplus to demand to run the pumps, that makes it much cheaper with no pollution. Energy cost though is determined by the spot market. If the owners of the pumped hydro also owned wind or solar farms then they could divert energy to the pumps when the demand and therefore price is low and make a killing when the demand is high by selling the power now generated by releasing the water that was pumped up at a fraction of the cost. Not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. It just requires real vision and detachment from the government influenced by the coal industry.

 

 

You don't get icing conditions when there is no water vapour present no matter how cold it is. Antarctica is the driest continent on earth. There will be situations when icing can occur though but do you really think they did not consider that? In other words Sh!t happens and we learn from experience just as we have learned that coal pollutes and it's time has come and gone. That is why no one will invest in it any more. I note that your precious Adani can't get a backer for it's plans here. Even the the government (who were originally duped by the promise of jobs that would never materialise) pulled out. Not really surprising given Adanis appalling environmental record.

 

 

Ubuntu is an Operating System (OS) a derivative of Linux which itself is a derivative of the original Unix based OS. It mostly runs on PCs and also network servers. iOS has its original roots from Unix and Android uses a derivative of the original Linux kernal. So basically they all have the same ancestry but Linux (Ubuntu) and Android are open sourced operating systems so hardware manufacturers can modify them as they wish and end users who gain access to the root directories can modify what they like as well. Not so with iOS as Apple jealously guards its OS to make sure no-one else can use it and make sure users keep on paying and paying.

 

The i apparently stands for Internet or it could stand for Idiot or Intelligent depending on your point of view.

 

It doesn't matter what you are using so long as it is reliable for your purposes and you find it easy to use.

 

Personally I do not like how iOS works from an end user perspective and find my Android phone & tablets far more intuitive, easier to use & by enabling root access (Americans call it rooting your phone) I have been able to get rid of the bloatware manufacturers install.

 

I am really only exposed to iOS using iPads & iPhones we have at SES. They confuse a lot of people. Even turning an iPad off is not an intuitive process. There are all sorts of problems with screens freezing or the unit just will not respond requiring a reboot or it requires iTunes for something or other.

 

 

Now, do we have a vast array of PV panels to achieve this? No. We have a 4kW PV array, fitted on part of the shed roof, facing north. We have a solar hot water panel roughly 2.5m x 1.5m on the house roof. Do we get 60c/kWh from the state? No. Our feedin tariff is 11.30c/unit. We pay 17.6c/unit from the grid, plus $32/month for poles & wires.

Wow you get a great rate. In northern NSW the standard peak rate from AGL & Origin is around 50c a unit. I am with Red Energy & get peak at 31.7c & off peak at 18.3c before GST & then a 10% discount for paying on time. My feed in tariff is 11.1c. Not so long ago it was only 6c. Daily supply charge is $1.31 again before GST & discount. I did a recent check & no supplier can match what I am paying. I have a 2kw system and use just over 50% of what I produce. I thought that gross meters had all disappeared. They have in NSW anyway so the retailers can never owe you anything.

It amazes me that there are so many diehard Apple fans and many seem to have problems with their hardware and/or software. All Apple products are expensive and Apple keeps their customers by coming up with new innovative things. But then bleeding edge tech = bleeding issues. They also make sure that everything is theirs with proprietary operating systems and software that costs and usually has a finite lifespan. For years every new apple phone had a different charging jack when Android gear standardised on the mini USB so one charger fitted everything. There are millions of Android apps, most of which cost nothing.

 

I have a 4 year old LG Android phone with an AMOLED 5.2" screen with no front buttons, thin bezel physically smaller than the iPhones with smaller screens & cost less than a quarter the price of the iPhone. Apple also use LG or Samsung screens. I use XCsoar as a Nav aid (designed for gliding but totally configurable for my aircraft) & Avia weather. Both cost nothing and are continuously being updated. The latest airspace data can be installed at any time & the waypoint data includes most airfields. You can of course add your own way points. This runs on any old cheap Android phone or tablet. It only needs to be version 2.2 or higher. It also runs on PC, Windows mobile & Linux but not iPhone as it is open source & free. I have a cheap 10" tablet I bought at Aldi & it runs perfectly on that.

 

 

The poor woman who was sucked out the window is a good reminder not to unbuckle your seat belt as airlines tell you during the safety briefings. If she had been restrained by the seat belt it is highly likely she would still be alive IMHO.

 

 

Releasing water to generate and pump back up looses much of the energy generated.

Generation of electricity always uses more energy than it consumes. When you have sources such as wind and the sun that is irrelevant. The wind is blowing and the sun is shining so you pump water from the sea up into a storage lake when there is more supply than demand. When the sun goes down and the wind dies you generate power from the water going back down into the sea (or it could be a lake). The hydro generates less than it took to put the water up hill but what does that matter when the sources are free and there is no pollution.

 

The only way storage works is if there is a surplus or cheap power source to begin with.Solar and wind need storage to be considered feasible replacements but this makes them even more expensive.Not many work out that storage options use power not make it. So contribute little to the energy supply problem. It just supports unreliable sources. Not a bad thing but costs energy and lots of money.

Only the initial construction costs more. Operation is cheap. With 22,000 potential pumped hydro sites around Australia & being the sunniest continent on the planet & the wind is always blowing somewhere these sources are far from being unreliable. Venture capitalists wouldn't be investing billions if they thought the system was unreliable.Also the key points in a study just released today

 

• Renewable energy capacity is set to exceed 41,000GWh by 2020, a level the coalition government deemed as impossible before it slashed the RET
   
   
   
  
• Market already delivered the government's 2030 emission reduction target, rendering the NEG meaningless:
   
   
   
  
• Business-as-usual under the NEG will lead to 118 million tonne shortfall in the government's CO2 reduction commitment
   
   
   
  

 

 

 

As usual the government is way behind the 8 ball. Business, Industry and private individuals are doing what they still claim to be impossible

 

 

The only problem I have had with my M760 is me not following the installation instructions to the letter and believing other people whose opinion I now know to be rubbish. I threw out the original harness I made, and made a new one with proper shielded cable, earthed at the radio end only, installed a power filter and ferrite chokes where specified as per the manual. Now everything works well. I still get a bit of noise when hearing broadcasts from long distance in CTAF but then these are 40 or 50 or even more miles away so it doesn't matter. This can be improved with replacing the mag switch cables with shielded cable & earthing these at the engine so I will probably do this one day when I am looking for another project.

 

 

I only add hours for the last year when my membership is due. I assume most others do the same. There is a massive cockup here

 

 

I just logged in to see what the hours are and a couple of minutes ago the total hours flown is 300,867.2 an increase of over 100,000 hours in 1 day. Wow & I didn't fly yesterday so assuming everyone else did that is 30.2 hours each in the last day for 3312 aircraft. I only put my hours in when I renew my subscription annually so how do they get these numbers?

 

 

The ANU study released last September identified 22,000 potential pumped hydro sites which could store 1000 times the energy that Australia could ever conceivably need. A tiny fraction of those could transition Australia into 100% renewable energy within 2 decades See Pumped Hydro Storage . The only issue is we have a government with no forward energy policy bankrolled by the coal and fossil fuel industries with right wingers who only think about getting re-elected so they sensationalise ignorant and incorrect (read fake news) information to the ignorant and gullible public.

 

The climate has always changed from ice ages to there being no polar caps, but has never changed at such a rapid rate as it is now with our help. You can't just take all the fossil fuel out of the ground that took many millions of years to accumulate & burn most of it in under 200 years and expect that there will be no effect on the climate.

 

Banks and venture capitalists are way smarter than politicians. None of them will have anything to do with financing fossil fuel energy and industries but they are falling over themselves to finance wind & solar. The new Liverpool range wind farm is a prime example. 267 turbines over 36km creating 1000MW enough to power half a million homes.

 

 

The camera screen on my car is part of the photochromic mirror and I can only focus on 1 part at a time. Initially I didn't like the camera but use it all the time now & don't see anything in the rest of the mirror.

 

 

Basically in summary the turbine slows the wind down as it uses some of the winds energy to generate electricity and wake turbulance occurs up to 5 rotor diameters down stream so that would be 500 metres if the blade diameter is 100 metres but the effect is less than normal turbulence found in day to day flying conditions. Doesn't seem to be an issue to me as I am not likely to fly lower than the height of these things if I am that close just as I don't fly lower than radio masts either.

 

 

So true, KG.Now the extreme Right have set up the Monash Forum. As GetUp says, it has a clear mission: national energy policy that slams the brakes on renewables and backs new coal-burning power plants instead.Giant coal corporations have money to burn. They have the Murdoch media on their side. And, not content with polluting our air and water, the coal lobby is now polluting our democracy with its very own faction in our national parliament.

 

The founding members of the Monash Forum are people like Tony Abbott, Craig Kelly, George Christensen, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews. We've all seen these names before. We know these guys won't be satisfied until every politician in our Parliament sprinkles coal dust on their cornflakes and pledges eternal allegiance to the fossil fuel lobby. -

I hear the Monash family are pretty unhappy with this group using their name for such a backward environmentally disastrous looking proposal. I bet they all have shares in the coal industry.

Wind Farms + Solar Farms (PV & Mirror/molten salt) + pumped hydro & batteries & you have a complete solution. Base Load is a myth, it's peak demand that is the issue. Coal & nuclear take weeks to get going & the output continues unabated even when there is little demand. That's why the spot price goes to umpteen thousands of dollars per MWH. Coal is dirty & the technology dead. No-one will finance coal anymore (other than stupid governments).

 

 

They are pretty tall at between 130 & 160 metres from the base to the tip of the rotor at the top & there are even bigger ones in the pipeline coming in at 240 metres, That is 787 feet so don't fly round at 500 feet when these things are there. They are pretty easy to see though unlike radio masts that are much higher and very difficult to see.

 

 

Evans Head, Feb this year. Zoom in to see the speed record claimed.Yakovlev Yak-3 - Wikipedia

The only issue here is that this radial version was manufactured in 2002 with a Pratt & Whitney R1830 radial so hardly a WW2 warbird. The original Russian radial engined version was only produced as a prototype & never entered production as it was completed after the end of the war.

In theory the pilot should have identified that the runway was clear of obstacles on final. By the time he got to the flare stage he could not see a thing in front of him. The Yak 3 has a very low and narrow canopy. The reality though is that at an airshow like Wanaka all sorts of paraphernalia abound near the sides of the runways like Military vehicles, pyrotechnics setup, camera crews, crash vehicles, paramedics etc and so it is likely he thought the cherry picker was further away. He passes several items and people off to the side before impact.

 

 

I flew in to WOW in a C172 in 2000. It was a club trip & we stayed in Queenstown & there was a temp control set up with a temp VTC with reporting points etc. It's the only time I've been No 10 on final. 600 light aircraft flew in on the Saturday. The show was fantastic & the location spectacular. It was a real buzz flying in & feeling part of it all.

 

 

My old Cherokee Archer held 50 US gallons (189 litres) of which 48 were useable. Where did the other 211 litres come from? If the cause was fuel starvation then one tank would be empty so the amount of fuel spilt would be a maximum of 90 litres. Sounds more like engine failure & the wing must have fallen off if it "fell out of the sky" but no they reported it being ripped off by the trees. Where do they get this stuff?