First of 3 part series: a primer on iron-oxide batteries, hunters walk away from the Colorado Outdoor Partnership, and, because it's Friday, seed tape.
Part 1 of 3: a primer on iron-oxide batteries. Are they the long sought after fix to renewable’s inconsistency?
Per the Sun article below, Xcel will be building a giant iron oxide battery down near the soon-to-be decommissioned Comanche Power Plant near Pueblo. The idea would be that this battery would store up energy from renewables like solar and etc. The questions I had were, "Okay, so what's an iron oxide battery? How does it work? Will it work well?"
I've been doing some looking and am ready to share. I wish I had more answers to my questions, but that's life.
This will be a 3 part series on Iron Oxide Batteries. In part 1 I'll cover some quick-ish prerequisite material. In part 2 we'll talk how iron-oxide batteries work. In part 3 we'll talk about unanswered questions.
If you wanted a one sentence summary for on these batteries, the best I can give you is this: it's possible that these kinds of batteries could work as storage for renewable energy, but questions remain about their cost effectiveness and performance.
Let's get started.
1. Power vs. Energy. You need to understand the difference between colloquial English and physics English. In physics the terms have specific definitions and may not be used the same way you would in everyday language.
Power is the time rate of energy flow. If there is high power, energy is flowing into or out of a system quickly. Low power means it's flowing into or out of system slowly. Energy is a measure of content. How much is there?
Look at my simple drawing, screenshot 1. If power is the gallons per minute flowing into the tub, the energy is how many gallons are sitting in the tub.
In the context of batteries and electricity, power is measured in some form of Watts (W). You might see "megawatts" (MW) which are a re-scaled version where 1 MW = 1 million W.
Energy is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh) or if we're talking bigger scales megawatt-hours (1 MWh). 1 kWh is 1000 W of power flowing for one hour. 1 MWh is 1,000,000 W of power flowing for one hour.
Right, so to keep my analogy from before, you flow 1 gallon per minute of water out of your spout and your tub, after 3 minutes of this flow would hold 3 gallons.
2. Batteries are often rated by voltage and/or current output. You can think of voltage as how hard you are pushing on the electrical charges in a wire and current as how many charges are moving past a given point in a second.
Let's talk water again. If you look at screenshot 2 you'll get a rough sense for these two quantities. Voltage would be akin to how high you put the water level in your elevated tank. The higher the water level, the more you're going to push on the water. Relatedly, you can think of the current as how much water flows through the pipe at any given moment.
For example, the electrical service to your stove (which runs at 220 V) is about twice the "pressure" on the electrical charges as the electrical service to your microwave (which runs at 110 V). The oven also draws more current (as measured in amps or A) at probably above 30 A when the oven's on vs. the microwave at around 10 A.
More pressure and more flow for your oven.
3. Batteries are not perfect.
--They are not 100% efficient. EV car batteries might be 84% to 93% efficient at charging. That means that for every 100 units of electrical energy you put in to an EV battery, you'll get 84 to 93 units back.
--They flag as they start to lose their stored energy. Look at screenshot 3. No matter the kind of battery, as you draw them down, they start to lose voltage. In other words, as you draw them down they cannot push the electrons in the wire as hard.
--They lose power as they get colder. Like every other thing based on a chemical reaction, when batteries get colder the reaction proceeds slower and they cannot generate as much energy. Take a look at screenshot 4. As batteries get colder their fully charged voltage starts lower and they don't last as long.
--They have a finite lifetime and this lifetime is frequently related to how deeply you discharge the battery. Take a look at screenshot 5. It's a graph of battery life vs. discharge depth. Kind of a weird one to read, so let me help. I circled two points in blue. On the left it says that you only ever discharge a battery to 95% of its capacity (i.e. you only use 5% of the capacity before a recharge), you will get 15000 charge/discharge cycles out of the battery before it dies. However, if you discharge it to 100% of its capacity each time you use it, you'll only get 500 cycles out of it before it dies.
So a quick primer on the concepts we'll discuss in the future. See you in part 2 where we'll talk about how iron oxide batteries work.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/01/27/xcel-energy-renewable-battery-storage-pueblo-comanche-form-energy/
Hunting groups walk away from CPW's Colorado Outdoor Partnership.
Let me start with a quote from the Sun article:
"The resignation of hunting and angling groups from the partnership reveals a growing schism in Colorado’s wildlife community as recreation access takes a more prominent role in resource management discussions."
The article linked first below will give you a lot more context, but I can abstract it for you pretty quickly. In 2016 CPW formed the Colorado Outdoor Partnership (later overhauled by Polis) to try and come up with ideas as to how Colorado can balance the competing interests of hunters/fishers, outdoor recreation enthusiasts, and conservation.
There is some dissent among that group and the latest development is that a group of 3 hunting/angling groups resigned citing concerns you can read up on in the attached screenshot.
I was not there for the meetings and I'm not going to wade in on the claims made by the groups that resigned. I find their accusation (knowing what I do of commissions and boards like these) credible and would not be surprised to find out they were true, however.
There is, as there always is, a lot more detail here and I encourage you to read on more if you want to consider yourself fully informed on both the accusation and the response by the Colorado Outdoor Partnership.
What I'd like to mention in this post is the responsibility that we conservatives have in making our voices heard.
In the sense that these groups resigned as a way to draw attention to the board's (alleged) skewed priorities, I salute the thought.
In the sense that there are now going to be missing voices, important voices, in those meetings, I hope that these groups re-engage or that others step up.
We should not be withdrawing in the face of nonsense in our government. No, we should be engaging all the more and publicizing the nonsense as much as possible.
I want to encourage you, if you are a member of a hunting or angling group or know someone who is, to inquire into joining this group (provided any of the other 3 choose not to re-engage). I put the website link second below and the contact email for the group is jody.kennedy@state.co.us.
Give it some thought if that's you. We need people on these boards to be speaking up.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/02/17/hunter-groups-quit-colorado-outdoor-partnership/
https://copartnership.org/
Make your own seed tape (and if you’re like me, a needed answer to the question “what is seed tape?”)
Last one of the day and you know what that means: something for fun and not related to politics.
It's getting close to the time to be starting seeds indoors (actually just started some onion and leek seeds recently because they are slow apparently). Soon enough it'll be time to sow outside too.
I can't hardly wait. This has been a long, snowy, cold winter. I'm eager to see Spring of course, but I am eager to get growing too.
If you've ever planted things from seed you'll know the challenge of dealing with trying to space out teeny, tiny little seeds (lettuce or chamomile come to mind--they aren't much bigger than a semicolon).
One strategy is to mix the seed into sand as a way to space them out. You mix the tiny seeds into a light sand and then sprinkle the sand out. I've had some minor luck with this but still get some bunching in the rows.
Another is to just go slow and be as careful as you can, figuring that you won't achieve precision. You're going to either have to thin or live with some tiny seedlings that lose the race to the sun.
What can you do if neither of those is good enough for you? What can you do if you have giant sausage fingers like me and struggle even with normal sized seeds?
Seed tape!
You can buy seed tape commercially, but if you have lots of time and gardening is something you do to fill it, you can make your own. I originally saw this in a Great Courses DVD series I watched about growing vegetables where strips of newspaper were used, but (as you can see in the link below) any type of paper that will quickly break down in dirt will work so toilet paper is a good fit too.
Basically, the idea (no matter what "tape" material you use) is to glue the seeds down on a strip using a paste made from 1 C flour to 1/4 C water at the recommended spacing. You let the paste/seeds dry. When it comes time, dig a trench and plant the strip.
**Quick note: the link below recommends using a small paintbrush to pick out tiny seeds for placement on the tape. An interesting tip and one I'll have to try.
Seems like a workable idea, if time consuming. I think I personally am just going to live with a lack of precision in my beds, particularly for flowers and lettuce. I mean, I don't let my lettuce go to heads and then harvest so smaller bunches of leaves on individual plants isn't an issue.
This might be a fun thing to try just to say I've done it, but I can't imagine going blind picking out individual lettuce seeds to place on strip after strip.
p.s. one last thing. There is another option that is sometimes employed for tiny seeds and that is to buy seeds that are "pelletized". I get hairy vetch seeds this way: each seed is coated with a readily-dissolving layer that makes the seed effectively bigger. The vanishingly tiny vetch seeds end up the size of about a sixlet or smaller if you know what that is.
p.p.s. one more one last thing. The fact that toilet paper is made to dissolve readily in water makes it good for seed tape but NOT for use in a wound. Never use toilet paper as a bandage. It will come apart and leave debris all over the inside of a wound.
And on that note, off I go. Have a happy Friday!
https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/design/outdoor-living/diy-seedtape.html