Conversation Upgrade #2 - US Gas Turbines
Can one person ever individually know all the relevant factors at once? Could we achieve this if we had better tooling / mediums to support us? Or can we more simply wobble from one partial understanding to the next?
Can one person ever individually know all the relevant factors at once? Could we achieve this if we had better tooling / mediums to support us? Or can we more simply wobble from one partial understanding to the next?
In that part of the video though they talk about how the US is a world leader in building combined cycle gas turbines. Implying that the US should just build more of them instead of inefficient coal fired plants.
Anti-thesis
I do not have the full picture but I recently heard that the Maximum delay for gas fired power plant turbines in US is 7 years. If that's true then it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect alternative sources of electrical energy to be sought after even if they're inferior from perspectives of health, economics, thermodynamics, environment, etc.
Synthesis
Hank Green is clearly very smart and very passionate about us all living better lives. That's great. I have a question that was raised by watching some of his content. I can't easily answer that question. That's what this post is about, that inability to easily answer the question of whether the demand for and delay in obtaining gas turbines in the US is relevant to the point Mr Green is making and whether that point has been factored in to his model of the world.
Conversation Upgrade?
It also makes me wonder what other factors are relevant and missing from this conversation? Could we have a better conversation if we had better tools and mediums to support us? Sense-making tools & mediums that would require us to construct knowledge in such a way that later down the path the older knowledge with its constraints would automatically be brought into the conversation?
The alternative might be fine: that we just wobble from one partial understanding to the next and accept that we'll never have the full picture at once. However, even using the analogy of walking or riding a bike does not help here because sometimes you need to pick a route and keep going. "Yes" side of road, okay! "No" side of road, okay! "Guess-so" side of road, not okay!
Notes
¹ I've given Hank Green that title of expert, they might not agree they're an expert, but many of the claims that they make concur with my own experiences and knowledge.² ³
² Things like methane being a more potent green house gas than CO2. Basic chemistry such as the various components of coal gas such as particles and acid that would be hard to pass through a turbine; the products of burning methane which are only CO2 and water; that methane originated from microorganisms breaking down organic matter
³ Also basic physics such as how burning fuels generates heat and gases which generates pressure. How turbines work to extract that energy. How cooling the exhaust gases on the downstream side of the turbines decreases pressure and further aids the system and turbine to extract energy.