That's all lovely, but pumping massive quantities of water to store energy uphill requires having massive quantities of water, a hill to pump it up, and a place to put it at the top of the hill.
Certainly. We could've been using mostly nuclear energy these past few decades but for the 'environmentalists' who now decry CO2.
All energy comes at some environmental cost. The best, surest, fastest way to reduce that cost is to just use less of it.
Cheers, James Arthur
I didn't realize 'remote areas in Australia' were the new world standard for viability, but I'm glad to hear you've personally abandoned your diesel generator for a solar panel and a battery bank, instead. :-)
It's winter, with temperatures falling below freezing. Last month I used 128kWH of electricity and about four gallons of gasoline.
You?
Cheers, James Arthur
I've discovered they'll hop a six-foot fence with scarcely a thought, but a square of wire mesh tossed over four-foot wire fence keeps them
100% at bay. (They don't mind jumping, but they're very picky about their landings :-)Cheers, James Arthur
Pre-soaking tough cases, even overnight, for example, uses no extra energy, and cleaning-wise, works like magic.
Cheers, James Arthur
mandag den 16. december 2019 kl. 06.05.57 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@notreal.com:
plant trees and bushes harvest venison :)
An east-west power link between WA and the east coast could remove most of the need for storage. Perth is 35 degrees of longitude west of the east coast, where the most power is used, and still has good sunlight during the evening peak. Power could flow the other way during Perth's morning peak.
Clifford Heath.
Right. Energy is *dissipated* i.e. made unavailable for further use, a one-way entropic process. We don't believe there is any more being made, which means that the universe is finite - it will peter out eventually. Faster if we choose to "use" more energy (except that most of our "use" is just diversion from imminent dissipation anyhow).
This has dramatic import in teleology. It means there are no eternal goals or purpose. There is only what happens between "now" and "then".
If "more interesting" things happen and "then" is sooner, I'm generally ok with that, even if no humans are around to see those things. But I rather think that the continuation of our species is more likely to make things "interesting" than not to.
Clifford Heath.
Just be glad you don't have kangaroos. You need a 3m fence, and the top
80cm needs to be floppy (unsupported) and to lean out.CH
ve.
That is exactly what California did a few decades ago. While many were pro testing the construction of new nukes, they also pushed for the state to en courage conservation and it worked! They cut demand increases enough that no new plants were needed for a number of years.
Still, the energy issues are being dramatically changed by the continually dropping costs of wind, pv solar and energy storage.
It's a simple fact that new nuclear plants will only increase the cost of e lectricity and continue to create disposal problems we have yet to solve.
-- Rick C. -++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging -++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Lol, you sound like Larkin now.
-- Rick C. +-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging +-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Elon Musk's 128 MW.hour grid battery in South Australia is a perfectly functional chunk of hardware. His production line for electric car batteries meant that he could put it together fast.
is an equally well developed and rather more appropriate technology, but the production lines to churn out lots of cells are still being put together.
And the economists who have noticed how expensive nuclear power plants have actually turned out to be, even if you skip the requirement to keep the nuclear waste safely sequestered for the next 100,000 years.
But burning fossil carbon is lot more environmentally expensive than setting up solar farms.
It's even quicker to kill the people that want to use that energy.
It's what mathematicians call a trivial solution.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Shoot Bambi's mother? How heartless!
r if I take
ve.
e wants to make.
the shelf battery storage. It's competing with diesel-powered on-site gener ators which are lot more expensive than regular grid generation.
I live in the centre of Sydney, and the neighbours would object to the nois e from a diesel generator. You've got to go a long way outback before you n eed to go off-grid, but those places exist, and are going over to battery b anks and solar cell arrays as fast as they can get their hands on the capit al required.
It's an exceptionally hot summer here, and the weather forecast is predicti ng that quite a few inland areas are about to break their all-time December temperature records - though many of them will be pre-occupied by an all- time record bushfire season which started early, and has already clocked up more damage than any preceding fire season, with months of warm weather st ill left to look forward to.
The view across Sydney Harbour from our living-room window is a bit hazier than usual. A week or so ago we couldn't even see the harbour for bushfire smoke.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
In the UK, we've noticed that :(
It is an interesting question whether nuke or fossil energy causes more problems. Certainly they both have /different/ problems (and advantages).
Yup.
It's fairly easy for us to insulate our houses and give up driving enormous Land Rovers. But there are billions of poor people who want lights and fans and want to grow food and get their crops to market. They are going to drive worldwide energy consumption up.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
The combination of LED lights and small solar cells has reportedly given the poorest "more hours in the day". Counterpoint: when sat tv was first introduced to the Indian sub-continent in the early/mid 70s, entire villages were found asleep in front of the communal TV set :)
Fans are likely to be most desired when there is most sunlight. I don't know the power consumption of ceiling "punkah" fans.
Transportation is, as ever, more difficult.
In the real dark, even 50 milliwatts of LED is a lot of light.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Laser safety levels: Class 1 below 0.4mW, class 2 below 1mW, OK. Class 3R below 5mW = CAUTION. Class 3B above 5mW = forget about it.
We tried 5mW laser for our PIV experiments, NO GO. But apparently we can use pulsed 200W LEDs, OK.
--
Thanks,
- Win
,
ave.
An even more effective means of reducing our footprint is to reduce the dri ving. Such as not driving up to ski resorts to burn fuel in yet another ho me, hot tub, etc. I think it's funny when people focus on energy uses they don't personally use, like Land Rovers, but burn energy many other ways li ke driving to work.
-- Rick C. +-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging +-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Winfield Hill wrote in news:qtgnng0bk6 @drn.newsguy.com:
LED light is difuse. LASER light is coherent, therefore the same energy level has substantially different capabilities.
There are youtube vids on folks using the (200mW) lasers taken from DVD burners to light matches a couple hundred feet away.
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