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Danish Goal: 50% of Electricity from Wind
tres3 writes "The Danes have an ambitious
plan of producing 50% of their national electrical needs from wind by 2030. The website has tutorials on everything related to wind energy you can imagine. The index gives you an idea of the detail of the site. It includes land and sea wind turbines as well as details about the machinery needed and where to locate it. There are over 100 pages so I didn't link to them all. [ed. note: thanks] A picture says it all."
Ireland also plans to get 10% of their power by wind. You can read a BBC article here.
It gets 43% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, 22% from geothermal, and another 4% from other renewable sources.
The city really focuses on finding plausible, cost-effective power sources, but for some reason it doesn't get any of its power from the wind. Perhaps the Santa Clarans know something the Danish don't?
Athlons have circuitry to disconnect from the system bus when idle (on a signal from the Northbridge, which gives the signal when the OS enters the ACPI C2 idle state), reducing clock rate and essentially going into a standby mode (~5W power consumption). Unfortunately, it's not enabled by default, partly due to minor performance problems (~3% is the normal performance hit), and partly due to intermittent problems with some motherboards, especially when using PCI bus-mastering cards that require low latency (such as video capture cards). I'm not sure why it's not available as a BIOS option though.
In any case, you can enable it manually by setting the relevant bit in the Northbridge. For Linux, see the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO for a variety of methods to enable it.
For Windows, there's a utility called VCool, whose site was at vcool.occludo.net, but it appears to have disappeared in the past week or two.
When idled using the setpci trick mentioned in the HOWTO, my Athlon 1.33 GHz, which used to idle at 57 C, now idles at 33 C (case temp is 31 C, so it's generating very little heat and by extension using very little power, especially compared to what it used to do).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The report was from Sven Auken, a leading member of the social democrats, and the primary hate figure for the then opposition, now current government.
The new right wing government have basically stopped or severely reduced funding for all environmental programs, and the current "wisdom" is that the emphasis on wind power was a mistake, because it (despite Denmarks 50% markedshare of the world production of wind mills) hasn't been short term profitable.
The new government appointed Bjørn Lomborg as head for the only new environmental institution.
If you had bothered to look on this page (same site) and read the second paragraph you would have found out that the goal is to get 35% of our energy from renewable sources, that is wind, waves, solar etc..
My opinion? See above.
One of the stated goals of Osama Bin Laden was to drive a wedge between the US and Saudi Dictatorship. He is offended that US soldiers are stationed on holy ground and wanted the Saudi govt to kick the American out. To achieve this end he recruited saudis to ride along on the airplanes and act as strongmen (keeping the passangers scared) while other arabs actually planned the attack and drove the planes (mostly egyptians).
it was no accident that the bulk of the terrorist on 9-11 were saudis and egyptians, those two countries are by and large friendly with the US and Osama wanted to to end that. He nows full well that americans will not be able to differentiate the actions of a dozen terrorists with the actions of the countries those terrorists were born in.
He had basically two main goals. Break any alliances between the US and the arab world, and incite a religous war between the US and the Arabs.
On both of those he succeeded brilliantly. As comments like yours and many others on the media demonstrate there has been a severe strain on US saudi relations post 9-11. After all Saudis have been opressive theocracy for ever yet only post 9-11 are americans bringing it up. I of course need not mention that we are about to start a religous war with iraq any day now and that iraq, libya, somalia, and yemen will not be too far behind.
When Iraq is attacked by the US Saddam knows he is going to die so he will attack Israel with all he has and this time there is no way in hell israel under sharon will stand on the sidelines. Once Israel starts droping bombs on iraqis Osama is hoping there will be massive riots in the arab world and the current spate of govts will fall only to be replaced by more radical fundamentalist govts.
I think so far his plan is working great.
War is necrophilia.
A device running at 120VAC can consume 4 Amps *without* consuming 480 Watts.
:)
How? Well, most real-world devices are slightly (or sometimes not so slightly) inductive loads - this causes the current draw to lag after the voltage "peak" supplied.
In the DC world, your formula is valid: P = U * I, effect equals voltage times current.
In the AC world, it is still valid but it cannot be used the way that you used it. You multiplied the voltage with a current that was drawn at a different time - what you need to do is to find out the "power factor", the phase distortion (or whatever the english word for that is), of your devices.
The formula becomes:
P = U * I * cos(d)
where d in most household devices would be anywhere from near-zero to 0.3 or so.
The minimum cos(d) is regulated by law, at least in Denmark and probably everywhere else, since the power companies have a hard time measuring and correcting phase distortion.
Anyway, what this all means is, that your devices probably only consume 60-80% of what you *think* you measured.
It's still a lot though, I'll give you that
I work in Europe, but travel to the US and one thing I instantly notice in their offices is no one turns their machines or monitors off when they go home. Is it any wonder there is an energy shortage with this kind of attitude?