A step in the right direction
This article talks about a new design (which is actually 80 years old) for windmills and power generation. The smart thing on these is that the windmill is put on the user end of the grid, thus cutting demand, instead of the production end. As I have stated in the past, production end wind power is not reliable in that you have to keep the alternate power generation sites (Oil,Gas, Coal generators) up and running in case of a lull in wind, thus no real savings is gained. These windmills are not the magic pill either. At current costs it would take 12-17 years before you saw a savings from them and you know there would be maintenance costs during those years, thus possibly wiping out any savings or actually costing more.
I never felt we should put our eggs into one electric "basket" and that a multi-pronged approach is how we move away from fossil fuel to a re-newable source. Who is to say that the future of power generation isn't chemical, or even bio-electrical ( I imagine a soup of electrical microbes) Either way, our current policy of jumping on the newest power band wagon is NOT the way to go.
I never felt we should put our eggs into one electric "basket" and that a multi-pronged approach is how we move away from fossil fuel to a re-newable source. Who is to say that the future of power generation isn't chemical, or even bio-electrical ( I imagine a soup of electrical microbes) Either way, our current policy of jumping on the newest power band wagon is NOT the way to go.
posted by davis14633 at 05:33
1 Comments:
Fossil fuel power generation is several orders of magnitude higher in energy density per man-hour than any possible alternative. That's why we use it. All of these other ideas are high maintenance, low density, stop-gap measures.
Drill our own oil and tell the hippies to shut up; that's the short term answer. For the long term, (+100 years out), the answer must lie in new sources that are an order of magnitude more efficient than what we already have, not just a series of weak stop-gaps. Progress must produce measurable increases in the power density per man-hour, or we're just wallowing in pigshit and waiting for our society to collapse. The two most promising are controlled fusion and orbital power relays. Both, of course are expensive -- and that's the point. They're expensive to develop because the potential payoffs are enormous. Either one, let alone both, would completely change the way everyone on the planet lives. It would be the biggest leap forward in the human condition since the introduction of centralized sewage and sanitation.
If you're going to do something new, you have to think big and aim high, else your result will inevitably be squalid and miserable. But since hippies and eco-freaks are already both squalid and miserable, they instinctively aim low, with stupid ideas like ethanol. The results are invariably and predictably pathetic.
Fossil fuels work. We need to stop wringing our hands about them and start exploiting them to maximum advantage. Windmills and other such dead-end technology are just a sideshow to amuse the easily distracted, allowing the rest of us get on with the business of making the world actually work.
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