Space, Turbines, Birds vs. Drones, Metal Problems and More!

[@phxmark]

3:56 It is amazing that the movie Idiocracy is slowly coming true.

[@mikesradiorepair]

Wind turbine components are HUGE. My brother works for SKF bearing. He frequently brings home out of spec bearing rollers. They are huge, weighing in at almost 100 pounds each. I use them for weight's on the tractor and temporary hold downs for amateur radio antenna mast in the field when camping. What is really amazing is when you look at the size of one of those bearing rollers and realize the tolerance they have to meet, a couple microns.

[@stevengill1736]

Enjoy the solar maximum! Cheers...

[@JMW-ci2pq]

@@mikesradiorepair each component you mention requires diesel for it’s material to be mined; refined; and moved. Each turbine and its platform will never make up for the heat; CO2; bio-destruction during this process.

[@mikesradiorepair]

@@JMW-ci2pq Your correct. They don't make up for it, they far exceed it. The wind turbine those bearings go in produces on a average year 5 to 6 MILLION kilowatts. The "payback" for energy need to produce it is produced in under one year.

[@JMW-ci2pq]

@@mikesradiorepair Your statement is either from utter ignorance or you are simply lying. Learn some physics so you are not prone to such garbage.

[@AlForte13]

@franlab Bob Newhart was a scientist - Professor Proton - thank you for all you do...

[@FranLab]

That is true!

[@Ale.K7]

Copper and brass theft has been common where I live (Buenos Aires, Argentina) for a number of years now. Electric and telephone wiring, plaques, door handles, even gas meters. Recently the brass intercom panel of the building where I live was stolen, it has been replaced with a plastic one. I have seen fiber optic wiring with the text "FIBER OPTIC CABLE. DOES NOT CONTAIN COPPER" or something like that to avoid it being cut by thieves...

[@jamesgibson3582]

Watched that Newhart finally 'live' with millions of other people on TV. I stood up as soon as the bedside lamp went on...wow. Amazing TV moment.

[@hotpuppy1]

Talking about metal theft: Years ago thieves tried to steal hundreds of urns from flat markers at one of the cemeteries in town. Left them next to r.r tracks next to the cemetery. Thieves later tried to steal a life sized bronze sculpture from a monument. A building I do maintenance for had a few feet of small diameter line cut from the A/C units. They got MAYBE a dollar and cost the not for profit that owned the building $500 for repairs. That was before R22 got so expensive. I would have like to have electrified the units with the 480 volts that fed them. I could sweep up the ash later. Had problems with 'huffers' stealing the Freon too so had to put locks on the service ports. Not looking forward to the future. Fortunately, I'll be long gone hopefully when the shite hits the fan big time. Darwin needs to start working overtime to reduce the surplus population. I have some ideas where he can start.

[@stevengill1736]

Good grief, the Freon too? Yikes!

[@Broken_robot1986]

If we build too many wind turbines we'll use it all up and i need my wind during these hot summers.

[@TheAechBomb]

LOL

[@MeteorMark]

When it's very hot and no wind at our beach, we'll call the energy companies if they please can switch their fans on and direct the breeze to shore... 😉

[@CathyS_Bx]

In the late 1970s, I had a job as an editorial assistant at McGraw-Hill, which was (and is) located in a skyscraper on NYC's Avenue of the Americas. We used those vacuum tubes all the time. We'd put, oh, gosh, telexes in them and they would whoosh through the building to Telex Central where they would be (you guessed it ) telexed. Kinda fun, actually. Also, that's how you would pay for stuff at Saks Fifth Avenue. They took your money/credit card and whoosh it to some payment center and then your receipt would whoosh back. How quaint! Buy now, tell me about you. Do you like my memories? LOL. Another worthy news lowdown from Fran Lab!

[@richiebricker]

Beethoven is considered to be the first Heavy Metal star. Now hes the first heavy metal star killed by heavy metal

[@LDuncanKelly]

My favorite "moon landing conspiracy" movie is the 2016 comedy "Moonwalkers" - CIA hires "Stanley Kubrick" to fake the moon landing as an ultimately unnecessary "Plan B", only nothing goes quite to plan...

[@cr8cat794]

Fran would make reading the classifieds fascinating!

[@nilo70]

Tweakers are the people stealing copper.

[@stevengill1736]

It's a non-sectarian career - lots of people steal metal scrap.....

[@TheGreatAtario]

The thing about renewables vs. coal is that the renewables have very quickly declined in cost and are now cheaper than coal and even gas. I imagine it won't be long before we see data centers being built with renewable energy generation and storage paired onsite or nearby, owned directly by the same entity as the data center.

[@tets4316]

There's plenty of copper under my neck of the woods, noticed it in maps while looking for lay lines & stone circles for my UFO project lol

[@ScottfromBaltimore]

Love the news curation and presentation.

[@4362mont]

I love the news you present.

[@alveolus2854]

Vacuum Tube systems are still used in some hospitals in Dublin Ireland. The loud thud of the shuttle falling out of its tube into a box is really stressful for patients.

[@peterlaycock917]

Thanks

[@FranLab]

As always Peter, Thanks!

[@mikesradiorepair]

Lead poising was common in the "old" days. I live just outside of Gettysburg, PA. There are numerous examples of musket balls being chewed on in the museums there. That's where the phrase "bite the bullet" comes from.

[@stevengill1736]

Mercury too - arsenic in the wallpaper, copper in faux absinthe, all sorts of heavy metals.....

[@Teukka72]

One idea which could offset the energy demands with new datacenters at least would be to utilize the heat that often is dumped into the environment for heating, but it'll require investment in fifth generation district heating and cooling (google Cold District Heating) as well as convincing people to use it rather than electricity and gas. Others ideas for that is to run the DC's ever so slightly hotter than today, and intelligently powering down servers or using server component power down states (laptops do this especially, but there are desktops that begin to do this these days too). And you could do similar things with other which need or generate heat. But it's only offsetting power demand, not eliminating.

[@sadiqmohamed681]

If I might supply some info about how to deal with EV charging in urban areas. The issue is not "is there enough generation", it is "is there enough distribution infrastructure". I live in a mostly residential borough in south-west London in the UK. All our street lighting has been changed to LED. As a consequence the load on the system has been reduced by more than 50%. The utility has done a deal to fit EV charging units in the street lamp posts! They worked out that for 5Kwh charges there is now more than enough excess capacity. If you take a proper holistic approach, then you go at the problem from both ends. The investment needs to be in the distribution infrastructure. The utilities will build renewables because they are cheaper to run. If you get the consumers to move to be more efficient, then it is not a "problem". In the UK there is a national organisation that manages the infrastructure called "The National Grid". They monitor usage, and manage generation. If the US had that, the debacle in Texas would not have happened. The real problem is not the engineering but political BS getting in the way!

[@mikebarushok5361]

It's true that cheap energy is the basis for modern technology. Coal and natural gas really aren't preferred for the costs, but for reliability. But, data center electrical usage for training AI can easily be configured to use mainly excess wind and solar when generation exceeds other useful loads. One way to implement is by colocation near generation, greatly reducing the need for expanding transmission capacity, combined with either battery banks or simply throttling down the AI training while excess generating capacity is not available. Large data center cooling needs are a major expense and a concerning consumer of clean water.

[@karlharvymarx2650]

The large data-centers probably belong in Iceland. Geothermal base-load, cool air, and if on a hill probably pretty safe from lava. Or at least tax away any incentive for not using their own wind/solar. Or allow coal plants to temporarily extract energy from burning climate deniers. j/k

[@MeteorMark]

Hey Fran, Not all coasts of Europe have waters that deepen quickly. In the North Sea, plenty of Windfarms were and are still being built, I can see several of them from our Lifeguard Station, and they are needed for the transition to Green Energy (IMHO Nuclear counts as well) We need our own sources of energy, got 12 solar panels as well and get the remaining from a Cooperation with some wind turbines als PV farms. And the excess from our Solar & Wind we need to store and for "Green" H² to power Direct Reduction & Electric Arc furnaces for Iron ore to produce raw Iron and later Steel.

[@tracyjayne9926]

Fran, STOP the gloom & doom. The National Grid is becoming Obsolete. These new Hyperscale Data Centers will generate their power locally and will have to have Battery Storage, think of a Giant UPS, that will back up their electrical needs and there are very large PV arrays planned to be built as close to them as possible. I happen to be involved with the communication side of these new type data centers. Some of them are going to be using an optical GPU made by Lightmatter in Boston. THese new Optical GPUs Smoke the current GPUs and use very little power.

[@stevengill1736]

I think they'll end up going with sodium batteries insofar as they're safer and a lot cheaper - that'll be cool....

[@tedmich]

Scaling energy generation to commercial scale for wind and solar creates real issues that are absent at smaller scales; bird kills remain a serious concern for mega windmills.

[@FranLab]

Up to one billion birds die each year in the United States due to collisions with glass windows. The number killed by turbines is minuscule, but it is the big political argument.

[@CDmatt]

Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, I lived in the midwest, we had many violent wind storms. There were no large windmills back then to break. I think mechanical failure by design shortcomings is causing the windmills to fail. But I’m just a machinist not a rocket scientist

[@viddabroun8613]

We had the problem of people saying they didn't want to see windfarms in the countryside and at sea here in the UK, Our government doesn't give a rats arse what people want, it's all about the huge corporations so we got the windfarms. There's a three stage windfarm off the coast where I live (Owned by a Danish company) that's unbelievable in size, each of the three farms produce around 650 mw in total there are 189 turbines covering about 55sq miles, if memory serves the tallest of the windmills are 640 feet tall (195 metres). I always said to people who didn't want to see them "Stop using electricity and you wont have to" personally I like looking at them, through binoculars you can clearly see them go over the earths curvature.

[@richiebricker]

Drone motors shut off when they hit something. Large birds are not hurt at all

[@CDmatt]

The way we’re going, we won’t need street lights because the overhead power lines will be glowing from the power draw 😂

[@dennissarver1963]

WOW ! You nailed this video ! Excellent job !

[@CARLiCON]

totally agree with you re: Bob Newhart (RIP), totally a GOAT, & TV will never match that 70s CBS Saturday lineup of: All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett, not even close

[@davepost7675]

As much electricity as Google and such use, the home user uses MUCH. More electricity is used in the home to do a Google search than Google uses to execute the search.

[@CT-vm4gf]

I don’t really get the why looking at ocean wind turbines is a problem either. Infrastructure is all around us, cell towers, power grid, what’s the difference.

[@heathwellsNZ]

Copper theft is also a thing here in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.... copper gas piping from gas califonts on private homes and businesses.... heat pumps being stolen from public buildings (including churches and preschools!) for the cores... but most brazen... using wooden poles with grinders attached... to cut down LIVE power conductors in residential street and in light commercial areas! We've had streets and suburbs with power outages for these reasons... grrrr!

[@TD_YT066]

If there's a buyer, there will always be thieves. Force sellers and buyers to register transactions. The scrapyards know they're buying stolen metal.

[@mauaraya141]

22:48 lol

[@AlexBrandon.]

Watching the ads to help support the channel .. love when you do the news

[@tets4316]

Enjoyed the show 🌟❤️

[@amare65]

Forget solar farms and wind farms, put all of that R&D dollars into building a feasible nuclear fusion reactor. The ultimate power in the universe, the stars! PS: Not referring to Hollywood stars.

[@mrbusdriversir]

I love the news!!!

[@jobos98]

Good Video Fran

[@tets4316]

There going to need a bird looking drone to make peace

[@tets4316]

I think having river mills would be better

[@Robbie-sk6vc]

The enviros won't allow them. Their removing dams now!

[@scottthomas3792]

I like these videos ...they remind me of reading the Sunday newspaper in the '70s... There's still a vacuum delivery system in hospitals. Here, a copper thief got the Darwin award a few years ago....and overhead power lines aren't even copper...theyre aluminum with a stainless steel core.

[@tets4316]

They need a spaceship that runs on radiation

[@petehiggins33]

Satellites do run on radiation.

[@tets4316]

@@petehiggins33 oh thanks 👍

[@joshhoman]

There is no way to make a nuclear powered spacecraft that is safe for human occupants. That would be a dream come true though in terms of speed and range.

[@tets4316]

Oh sorry your are talking about that idea 😏

[@bewew8156]

Keep doing the news :-)

[@protox07]

Awesome

[@stevengill1736]

Not just energy, but water for cooling data centers....so called AI is a huge burn, literally....why I don't use ChatGTP, but I do use Google, so I'm an eco criminal too.. PS: as far as windmills go, I could live with seeing them at the beach as long as you didn't have to hear them... Finally, the birds attacking the drones? Probably shouldn't be there...(the drones, not the birds. ;*[}. )

[@marpleka]

Metal stealing is the main sign of economics problem and USA here repeating post-USSR which after collapse & hyperinflation went through epidemic of copper theft.

[@John-wd5cb]

What if Beethoven and Van Gongh got poisoned from "alchemical recipes" they though would bring them "intuition"

[@tets4316]

When I was young was on my knees gathering potatos

[@sa8die_electr0n]

Yes solar but with the wind farms. They are building them too big. Think about nature. The wind farms shall be as high a tree with like 80 fan generators and all of the wind (which is likely increasing bc of global change (it's sounds like the Earth is having menopause))so the ground could be covered in solar, and have 🌴 tree generators too. Much electrons could be harvested 🎉. That's an electric Forest lol

[@sa8die_electr0n]

Why would you Make dinosaur 🦕 wind turbines? The amount of energy produced from 80 tree 🌴 generators with like 50 small generators in them. And solar on the ground. We would have too much energy

[@captaindunsell8568]

The engineering of the present electric turbines is crap. The eggbeater style is less strain on the mechanics, the generator is on the ground easy to maintain, takes less space to operate…

[@filepz629]

❤️‍🔥

[@arobatto]

Speaking of crazy conspiracies and in particular, the moon landing hoax conspiracy theory, and to your comment how t conspiracies will eventually win in the end, the movie Interstellar did a great job of presenting a possible future where the moon landing hoax is taught in school as factual history.