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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."
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
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.
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
IIRC, it was the plan under the previous government too, that the funding for wind mills should be slowed down and eventually stopped. The goal was (again, IIRC) to reach 14% in wind power and we have reached that goal. It's not good to have an industry that can't live without government funding. Furtunately the wind mills are getting (a lot) bigger and better and should soon be able to compete in the energy marked.