Try it and let us know how it goes.

God, I wish I had your world view…

Yeah I agree completely, and I also agree with MADDs original mission: make tangible consequences for driving drunk.

They achieved it, and like you say having stores closed on a weekend means an alcoholic might turn to isopropyl alcohol, washing alcohol, hand sanitizer .etc it isn’t going to make them stop… If anything it shifts the burden onto our already overtaxed healthcare system as alcoholics destroy their bodies even more.

Edit: it also turns out most provinces have moved away from doing this, since most of them closed on at least Sunday.

I think it’s misdemeanour and felony probably? Like the difference between petty theft and theft over $5000

My gripe is MADD’s original sole goal was getting a legal limit for drunk driving and an appropriate consequence for it. They succeeded, and each time they succeed they change what their mission is. Here in Canada they’re part of the reason liquor stores close so early or aren’t open on weekends in different provinces.

Again, I don’t drink so whatever, but my complaint is they just don’t stop and go “ok we won let’s shut it down” instead they change the goal and keep pushing harder. I think they might reach a crisis point if they manage to prohibit alcohol again, but I guess then they just start lobbying for harsher laws on other drugs.

The answer for why is MADD and the reason it’s illegal to drive above zero is MADD. They lobby hard for zero tolerance whatsoever. They want the criminal limit to be zero as well. Once they get that they’ll try to ban cars entirely.

BTW I don’t drink so I don’t necessarily care. My criticism is about the goalpost moving of a successful non profit after it gets what it wants. You change the goal to keep your org and funding. They’ll never ever go “mission accomplished, let’s wind this down”…

Yep same here. It also gets more abstract and takes longer to explain in one breath to a person. Eventually you’re justifying being baby sat by other fellow babies in the office whom all mutually babysit each other while the one autistic guy does the work of 11 people while being paid $40k/year and he barely gets to keep his job every review because corporations are retarded.

Illustrative example

Yet another example. I unironically experience this

All that matters is a good manager who has your back. I’ve only quit managers, never jobs. Also the most overworked I’ve ever been in my life was working minimum wage… I felt like an actual slave. The more money I make the more relaxed my job somehow is. I don’t want to doxx myself since I have a pretty niche job (this helps a lot btw. Especially trades or semi-engineering jobs) which can narrow me down a lot.

Find something you’re interested in, and try to line that up with demand that’s consistent for years or decades. Anything involving maintaining critical infrastructure, repair, fixing stuff, estimating, helping people do those things. That’s going to be pretty crucial as our society enters old age. Our infrastructure is at the end of its life and we’re out of debt capacity… That means we start prioritizing things that are critical and diverting funds away from “repair/replace all bridges” to “repair/replace only the bridges that would paralyze the nation if they were missing” which is cheaper.

My job is a mix of in the field wrench turning, fiddling, pulling cables .etc along with elective decision making, engineering, cross-domain collaboration, inventing my own tools to fix my unique problems that maybe 1 other guy in China also has? Maybe? That is extremely difficult for AI or robotics to replace. It can supplement certain aspects of this but it won’t be able to replace all of it by the time I’m retired (ha! I might die first but who knows) or if it can, everyone is out of a job.

Afaik you build buildings on raised foundations and the viaduct decks span the gap between buildings creating a raised “ground floor” above the actual dirt. They eventually do wear out given enough loading cycles accumulating fatigue in the metal reinforcement, but can last a hell of a long time if you keep heavy vehicles off of them.

In an ideal world the viaduct top is for pedestrians or bicycles only, and there’s enough space underneath for logistics to supply businesses from loading docks at their basement. Overhead LRTs would be a natural pair with viaducts since you can just build the LRT piers to put their load path into the viaduct columns (which you also engineer to be larger.) that way you can separate all traffic types by verticality instead of all sharing the same grade.

The big benefit there is the viaduct deck doesn’t fatigue hardly at all. Maybe emergency vehicles allowed up on the deck? Otherwise it’s just bicycles or pedestrian traffic.

The city burned down which allowed these sweeping changes to happen. The minimum height is set by preventing yearly flooding due to heavy rains and strong tides since the area was filled in tidelands. The maximum was set by the rest of the city and its Hills. This is an engineering problem so you solve it the way an engineer would.

The way you would do this for a modern city is by first considering geography and your design requirements. “How much do we need to raise it and why?” If you only need to fit utilities in there and nothing else your necessary lift isn’t that high. Maybe a few meters. If you want to also cram cars or trains down there so you can build to viaduct top lighter by mandating no cars, and to make it a walkable city, you can set a higher requirement. You’re basically building a bridge that spans the entire city and the same calculus works for a viaduct city as it does for designing a bridge. Your biggest expenses are regrading, foundations, redoing drainage, and routing utilities into the viaduct passageways and abandoning existing utilities in the ground from the old city. That’s all if you can avoid eminent domain or conflicts with property owners.

All of this is obviously way easier to do with a newly built city from day 0, or a city that burned down. The reason it happened in Seattle is because residents were sick of yearly flooding and they needed to rebuild with fireproof materials anyways. So why not solve both?

This should answer all of your questions and then some

The irony is if you designed a city with viaducts, the savings on ground disturbance and the extension in life for utilities (now high and dry instead of rotting in the dirt and corroding, being hit by fiber-seeking backhoes) pays for the viaduct system itself even if it costs tens of billions for a city.

When your domestic water system now lasts a century instead of 40 years, and leaks can be spotted and repaired from a catwalk, the savings compound over that same century. Apply that to power, gas, heating, cooling, telecom… Plus they stop hitting each other any time you need to dig more than a foot. Now telecom will stop hitting water lines when they go to repair broken fiber that was hit by a new construction excavating a foundation.

A 40 year buried power lifespan that cost $5 billion to install for a city means each year you need to replace 1/40th or your power cables and would annually spend 1/40th of $5 billion, or 125 million.

Those same cables in a utilities rack within a city viaduct system might last 2-3X as long since they’re dry, don’t move with frost heave, don’t experience being driven over by fully loaded semis, aren’t at risk of being hit while repairing something else… They also cost a fraction due to no ground disturbance being needed. It’s the same cost as installing power around an industrial plant in cable trays.

I’m going to have to fundamentally disagree with you here. Waste heat recovery boilers have existed for generations, are extremely well understood, and are extremely common. They’re one of the most efficient designs out there for power generation and they can be adapted to work as combined heat and power stations with no loss to the power generating efficiency of the primary boiler or gas turbine.

District heating water at 105⁰C can provide both heat and the energy needed for absorber chillers. Adding the district heating/cooling water tubes after the HRSG isn’t free, yes, but it’s almost free from a capital perspective compared to building a new plant or the cost of a pipeline network + furnaces and ACs in every single home. Especially when you already need to burn energy anyways… 50% of the cost of power is fuel, so if you can reuse waste heat for heating and cooling you reduce electrical demand and make low enthalpy heat into something useful.

Look up combined heat and power plants if you want a reference for what that setup can look like.

It’s not a bad idea it’s been used repeatedly on earth, its just the incentives never lined up to make district heating and cooling a thing everywhere. Sweden and old Soviet cities use district heating since it’s really cheap at scale. Dubai uses district cooling (with electric chillers though) to cool pretty much the whole city for far cheaper than every building having its own rooftop system.

In North America we take the most insane approach of every home having its own miniature thermal plant (furnace) and electric air conditioner. District heating and cooling is a hard sell because trenching in new insulated pipes would be extremely disruptive and expensive compared to if they were already in the ground prior to this. If you could somehow convince everyone to be ok with the disruption and also to have 80% or more of the city hook into the system as subscribers, it would be vastly cheaper than natural gas heat or electrical cooling.

Parts of Ontario use great lake water for cooling, so district cooling is a thing in parts of Canada.

There still are district systems in north America though they just tend to be university campuses, where all of the buildings and dorms are cooled or heated with one central combined heat and power plant.

One of the biggest benefits of district cooling is elimination of one of the biggest drivers of the urban heat island effect: AC exhaust. Every working AC unit makes every other AC unit near it work harder. A district cooling system pipes everything back to one plant where that heat is rejected out the top of a stack.

Thermodynamically it shouldn’t just reduce AC’s contribution to the heat island effect, it should also make buildings themselves into heat sinks helping to cool the city itself as thermal energy tries to migrate into buildings where the district system soaks them up and pipes it away to the cooling plant.

Oh yeah I forget most people have no idea… Sorry about that.

What I’m saying is we’re throwing out fuck tons of free cooling and heating that we could otherwise use. Every house in North America could be cooled and heated with no extra fuel burned from the same power plants and industrial processes that supply them? Roughly speaking?

Why would you pay for electricity for cooling when a capital expense can get you that for essentially free? You don’t have to make the plant burn more fuel, you don’t have to interfere with how the plant runs, you can just tap off low grade heat and make chilled water to supply a town or city (Dubai uses district cooling if you want an example, although they use electric chillers)

This isn’t theoretical. It’s already used on earth and it works really well.

What I was trying to show with my numbers is the heat energy you need to burn for an equivalent amount of cooling isn’t that different compared to a electrical compressor chiller with a CoP of 3.5. 83MW of heat energy burned vs 60MW of heat energy for electric chillers. The difference is you don’t need to buy 83 MW of heat, whereas you need to buy the 20MW of electrical power (which took 60MW of heat) to run your chillers.

My other numbers were to demonstrate the eye watering amount of energy we discharge out of flue stacks and out of heat exchangers into rivers or lakes… If it’s hot enough, that energy can be used for heating and cooling but currently it goes up a stack.

Let’s assume we need 100MWth of cooling capacity. At a CoP of 5 (generous case) we need 20MWe of power to move 100MWth (120MWth total with our electrical input converted into heat eventually as well)

Comparing that to absorber chillers: A single effect absorber at a CoP of 0.4 needs 250 MWth of heat energy at or above 90⁰C. If you go dual effect you can get 0.9-1.2, but need higher grade heat. I’ll do the worst case for now.

For reference, 250MWth is roughly what goes up the stack in a 125 MWe plant (hilariously tiny plant. Might run a remote community and be a portable turbine generator or two on a trailer? I’ve worked on gas compressors with higher nameplate capacities than that by miles)

A 1GWe coal plant at 33% efficiency burns 3GWth of heat energy and discharges 2GWth up their stack. That’s 2 GWth you have available as waste heat. By definition it has to be vented to atmosphere or to water at the condenser. That’s a lot of already-paid-for heat being literally thrown out.

If you count cooling efficiency using just the thermal watts you have to burn at the powerplant for the electric cooler to move 100MW of heat:

20MWe / .33 = 60 MWth needed to generate it.

If your electric chiller is a more reasonable CoP of 4:

100MWth heat moved, takes 25MWe.

25MWe at 33% efficiency, is 75.75 MWth of heat energy burned at the power plant to make 25MW of electricity.

If you used a dual effect absorber at 1.2 CoP:

100MWth cooling with 83MWth of heat energy at 170⁰C.

What these two numbers show is we can move 100 MW of thermal energy with an electric chiller by burning 60MW (or 75.8MW) of heat we then turn into electricity from a power plant, or 83MW of heat that already was burned, if we steal heat from the flue gasses and use an absorber chiller. The raw energy input to do 100MW of cooling differs by only 23 MW, so an absorber is in the same order ballpark still.

What’s important to note here is the energy needed to run an electric cooler is $money$ while the energy to run an absorber is waste heat going up the stack… These are used on earth already BTW just typically as a combined heat and power plant for universities or government/company campus. There’s no reason you can’t also apply that to an entire city.

For example, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark uses a 3 MW absorption chiller powered by 105 °C district heating water. It consumes about 4.3 MW of heat to produce 3 MW of cooling, while simultaneously returning useful heat to the district heating network. It’s operated alongside electric chillers so the most economical option can be chosen depending on electricity prices

Crucially you don’t need to oversize your power grid for a summer heatwave peak, when your power lines are hottest (highest resistance, expand, droop lower and maybe short out on trees) so you can instead use literal waste to cool a city instead. Cooling tends to be ⅓ the amount needed for heating roughly, so you a home that needs 12kW of heating roughly needs 4kW of cooling.

2GWth of cooling capacity at 4kW per home is 500 000 homes cooled with waste heat. Of course this is assuming perfect efficiency, but it illustrates my point. District cooling typically uses 1-3% of the cooling nameplate in electrical demand for pumps afaik, so a 2GWth cooling system needs 60 MWe of pumping. To achieve the same cooling with electric chillers you need 571 MWe (assumed 3.5 CoP) just for chilling, consuming more than half of the power output of our 1GWe plant.

So my background is in instrumentation and process control as an engineering technologist. In my country that means I can do limited engineering within my scope of practice, part of which extends into thermodynamics, balance of plant, steam enthalpy calculations, sizing and speccing heat exchangers, boilers, condensers, compressors, turbines, valves, and the controls for all of it.

I’m very familiar with all of this, so I can tell you from experience that these absorber plants can be bolted on after an economizer (in the case of a single effect) or you can supply higher grade heat if you’re willing to sacrifice part of your economizer capacity in exchange for cooling in order to get high enough generator temperatures in a dual effect absorber.

Otherwise you have to trim with electrical resistors to get your preheated water up to the generator temp to run the absorber plant (also viable. Bolt on after the economizer and use a small amount of electrical heat to finish the missing heat to run the generator)

The 30-40⁰C you’re referencing is the condenser temperature at an electrical plant. That’s not the flue gas temperature which can still be quite high depending on the plant, in the range of 80-170⁰C depending on how efficient their design is.

Other processes like cement kilns, glass making, garbage incineration all can produce the temperatures you need for dual effect absorbers.

This isn’t theoretical, you can find these absorbers already in use at combined heat and power (CHP) plants running university campuses and government/company campuses. They are already used for limited district cooling for these places to accompany heating.

The overall benefit is they are extremely low impact on the environment since LiBr is non toxic, isn’t poisonous, doesn’t deplete the ozone layer, doesn’t contribute to GHG emissions like released butane or isobutane emissions would. It doesn’t produce toxic gasses or use high pressure or exotic temperatures or materials.

It also reduces electricity demand for cooling massively. An absorber chiller runs on practically unusable waste heat that’s too low enthalpy for any other use. You get free cooling and the plant is very low maintenance, ingests waste heat that would have gone up your chimney or flue, and spits out cold water. What’s not to like?

The best part is they also work extremely well with renewables making them natural partners if you have a thermal sand battery paired with it. District heating and cooling can run from one very simple plant, which is going to be more and more important as our climate gets more hectic from global warming.

Yeah that’s the big thing. Absorption chillers can work on marginal heat that isn’t useful for much else except maybe boiler economization. They run at low temperatures but aren’t efficient.

If you have a neighboring cement kiln that exhausts at 300⁰C, that’s perfect for use in district heating or cooling?

It’s basically a heat recycler for trash heat you might throw out anyways.

Because if you can find a free or cheap heat source that you’re going to vent to atmosphere up a flue, or dump into a river/lake/evaporation you can make cooling with it for almost no marginal cost once you’ve made the capital investment, plus with very little moving parts. An absorption chiller can be the last useful process on your exhaust heat before venting to the environment and all it costs is maintenance and a few small electric pumps.

You use the kiln exhaust gasses which are waste heat. You don’t need to ask the kiln to burn hotter or with more flue gas mass flow. The absorption chillers are already used in district cooling systems on university campuses and government offices. Usually where you have a combined heat and power unit, so you have your own heat source.

Theres nothing stopping you from using any viable heat source though… Plus single effect chillers run on 90°C. For waste heat that’s literally free heat why not as opposed to paying for power? Double effect chillers need 170⁰C heat for their generators, so a cement kiln could provide the heat needed to run the chillers using their exhaust gasses.

A district heating/cooling setup using low grade waste heat around ~150⁰C, plus a soapstone battery (resistively heats soapstone sand when renewables are over producing and need to either sell at any price or shut down) could provide both heating and cooling with nothing but waste heat and a thermal battery that tops up using over productive renewables.

For the same sized electric chiller, you can use 99% less electricity (you just need low pressure low velocity pumps for moving liquids around the absorption chiller) and the heat can come for free or cheap elsewhere.

Most large heat consumers try to reuse their own heat, and if they can’t they pay to discharge it into lakes, rivers, or evaporate water. If instead a district cooling company paid them for their heat they can turn a cost center into a profit center?

I’m summary, absorption chillers work on heat that’s so low temperature it’s almost useless for anything except boiler economization. That’s the value proposition.

Edit: I keep adding more to this comment as ideas flow. Sorry for the rapid edits.