Here’s a number you need to keep in mind: 3 Terawatts. That’s about how much power They’re using in the USA right now.
If that were used for 100W incandescent bulbs you’d need 30 billion bulbs.
There’s no way renewable energy is going to come close to that.
That would require over 2 billion square meters of 100% efficient solar panels: that’s about the same area as all the land in Rhode Island (real solar panels are about 25% efficient so you’d need to pave Delaware’s land as well). And of course solar panels don’t do too well at night, so you’d need to at least double that area, that brings us to the land area of Hawaii, plus you’d need a way to store around 40 TWh’s which simply doesn’t exist. And all that ignores factors such as clouds, dirt, animals, etc.
So what about wind? The most powerful wind turbine today is ~7 MW, so you’d need around 500,000 of them. They have a rotor diameter of 126m, so they’d have to be at least 65m apart. That means they’d take up 6 billion square meters, about the same as all of Delaware. I can’t imagine it would be good for anything flying. Now this is the peak power, so we’d have to factor in all the time that the wind isn’t blowing hard enough, or when it’s blowing too hard. Again we need a storage system for mind-boggling amounts of energy. Also, has anyone looked at the climatological effects of taking 3TW of convective energy out of the atmosphere?
Both solar and wind suffer from a fatal flaw: They can’t be controlled. Grid operators can’t dial supply up (They can somewhat do down) to meet demand, and when you’re talking about the electric grid either you balance it or it balances itself…usually in some exciting manner.
Hydro’s pretty much tapped out in that country, not to mention ecomentalists flip their shit whenever someone mentions building dams. Same thing with geothermal, unless we want to start drilling in Yellowstone.
Nuclear could do it, but whenever you mention it the ecomentalists set a record in going from zero to stupid.
That leaves fossil fuels. There’s nothing else. Especially when it comes to moving stuff. We have nothing that comes close to the power density of hydrocarbons when it comes to mobile applications, and hydrocarbons are the only energy source that’s suitable for mobile applications. Everything else (e.g. hydrogen and ethanol) are just ways to make electricity mobile.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
3TW of Green power?
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Green fail.
L.A. community colleges' green energy plan proves wildly impractical. The blunders cost taxpayers $10 million.
The Los Angeles Community College District would become a paragon of clean energy. By generating solar, wind and geothermal power, the district would supply all its electricity needs. Not only would the nine colleges sever ties to the grid, saving millions of dollars a year, they would make money by selling surplus power. Thanks to state and federal subsidies, construction of the green energy projects would cost nothing upfront.
Sounds too good to be true.
Oh Noes it is.
He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built.
These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.
The problems with Eisenberg's energy vision were fundamental. For starters, there simply wasn't room on the campuses for all the generating equipment required to become self-sufficient. Some of the colleges wouldn't come close to that goal even if solar panels, wind turbines and other devices were wedged into every available space.
and
Weather and geology also refused to cooperate.
Three solar power arrays had to be scrapped because the intended locations were atop seismic faults.
And all you out there advocating Wind Turbines Bird Mincers.
Plans for large-scale wind power collided with the reality that prevailing winds at nearly all the campuses are too weak to generate much electricity. To date, a single wind turbine has been installed, as a demonstration project. It spins too slowly in average winds to power a 60-watt light bulb.
Do read about the whole sorry saga over THERE.
Friday, 11 March 2011
Where's this then?
Have a guess
Armies of insects once crawled through lush forests in a region of xxxxxxxxx now covered by more than 2,000m of ice.
DNA extracted from ice cores shows that moths and butterflies were living in forests of spruce and pine in the area between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago.
Researchers writing in Science magazine say the specimens could represent the oldest pure DNA samples ever obtained.
The ice cores also suggest that the ice sheet is more resistant to warming than previously thought, the scientists say.
“We have shown for the first time that southern xxxxxxxxx, which is currently hidden under more than 2km of ice, was once very different to the xxxxxxxxx we see today,” said Professor Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and one of the authors of the paper.
“What we’ve learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought,” added Professor Martin Sharp from the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the Science paper.
The ancient boreal forests were thought to cover southern xxxxxxxxx during a period of increased global temperatures, known as an interglacial.
Temperatures at the time were probably between 10C in summer and -17C in winter.
When the temperatures dropped again 450,000 years ago, the forests and their inhabitants were covered by the advancing ice, effectively freezing them in time.
Studies suggest that even during the last interglacial (116,000-130,000 years ago), when temperatures were thought to be 5C warmer than today [why didn't this cause Hansen's "tipping point," "arctic amplification," or an "arctic death spiral" from accelerating albedo loss predicted by alarmists today for warming of 3C or less?] , the ice persevered, keeping the delicate samples entombed and free from contamination and decay.
H/T to the Hockey Schtick
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Bloody hell!
As requested an Royal Air Force "Typhoon" pilot flies up to the back door of a C-130 (Hercules) for a photo shoot.
He radios, "How much closer do you want me?"
They radio, "How much closer can you get?"
Pilot Radios, ”Close enough?”
I think that proves that fighter pilots are still as mad as ever they were!!!
This make Midsommer murder plots seem trivial in comparison.
For those who have served on jury...this one is something to think about...Just when you think you have heard everything!!
Do you like to read a good murder mystery?
Not even Law and Order would attempt to capture this mess.
This is an unbelievable twist of fate!!
At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, (AAFS) President Dr Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death.
Here is the story:
On March 23, 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head.
Mr Opus had jumped from the top of a 10-story building intending to commit suicide.
He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency.
As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly.
Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.
The room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife.
They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun!
The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window, striking Mr Opus.
When one intends to kill subject 'A' but kills subject 'B' in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject 'B.'
When confronted with the murder charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant, and both said that they thought the shotgun was not loaded.
The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun.
He had no intention to murder her.
Therefore, the killing of Mr Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, assuming the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about 6 weeks prior to the fatal accident.
It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.
Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger.
The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
Now for the exquisite twist...
Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus.
He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder.
This led him to jump off the 10 story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window.
The son, Ronald Opus, had actually murdered himself.
So the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
A true story from Associated Press.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
MTR1377 Media Player - Andrew Bolt with Steve Price 9th March
There spake a watermelon who doesn't have a clue about economics. has anyone got a wall I can bang my head against? About 2/3rds of the way in.
Happy No Smoking day.
And it is Ash Wednesday after all.
To watch all the ads their you’ll need at least a pack of twenty.