Our CO_2 emittance
For electricity: 110 tonnes per month of carbon. When electricity companies say this, I don't know whether that means 110 tonnes of carbon atoms, or 110 tonnes of carbon dioxide molecules. To be conservative, let's assume the latter (and multiply the final result by 44/12=3.67 otherwise). 44 grams of carbon dioxide fills a volume of 22.4 litres at sea level and 0 degrees celcius. Thus, 1kg will expand to fill a volume of 510 litres, or 1 tonne gives 510,000 litres, or 510 cubic metres. 110 tonnes becomes 56,000 cubic metres. And that's just our electricity consumption -- I don't know how often we go through one of our industrial tanks of gas.
For comparison, an olympic swimming pool must be greater than 2500 cubic metres in volume. Imagine 22 olympic pools filled with carbon dioxide gas, every month.
When utility power disappears, our backup comes on. Pikiwedia claims infernal combustion engines have an efficiency of ~20% (dunno about 35 year old engines though). There goes another megawatt or two of waste heat. Fortunately, we don't lose utility power that much, even out here.
Yowchies. It would be nice if we succeed in working out how to significantly decrease all that (and a lot of it would involve replacing aging infrastructure), but most of it is the air conditioning that keeps the atmospheric turbulence in the dome/atmosphere interface to a minimum (surely adaptive optics would be cheaper! Perhaps harder to retrofit to a 35 year old telescope). One obvious thing to do to minimise our LNG usage is to enable a timer on the workshop's boiler. Apparently leaving that on accidentally over the weekend costs several hundred dollars worth of gas. Course we have plenty of other ideas. Most of the telescope operators would be more than happy to drive a 4.6L/100km car over our 12L/100km falcadore stationwagons.
The director shall get a report next week.
For comparison, an olympic swimming pool must be greater than 2500 cubic metres in volume. Imagine 22 olympic pools filled with carbon dioxide gas, every month.
When utility power disappears, our backup comes on. Pikiwedia claims infernal combustion engines have an efficiency of ~20% (dunno about 35 year old engines though). There goes another megawatt or two of waste heat. Fortunately, we don't lose utility power that much, even out here.
Yowchies. It would be nice if we succeed in working out how to significantly decrease all that (and a lot of it would involve replacing aging infrastructure), but most of it is the air conditioning that keeps the atmospheric turbulence in the dome/atmosphere interface to a minimum (surely adaptive optics would be cheaper! Perhaps harder to retrofit to a 35 year old telescope). One obvious thing to do to minimise our LNG usage is to enable a timer on the workshop's boiler. Apparently leaving that on accidentally over the weekend costs several hundred dollars worth of gas. Course we have plenty of other ideas. Most of the telescope operators would be more than happy to drive a 4.6L/100km car over our 12L/100km falcadore stationwagons.
The director shall get a report next week.