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One Worldwide Power Grid
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
I'd imagine that the market forces in play here are a lot like the ones in play in the 80's for phone service. If given a monopoly, a company will fight to maintain exclusive control over its geographical domain, to the detriment of consumers.
The evolution of the internet is in stark contrast to this, where bandwidth can be bought from any one of many vendors (despite efforts of existing local telco's and cable providers to restrict the market by controlling the wiring).
The (U.S., at least) government needs to take the same steps as they took with AT open up the market for energy distribution. Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines, and this will grow much like WiFi is, starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there. Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had; with market forces in play a company is going to be very careful about making sure their customers don't lose power--the damage to a competing company's reputation from something like the recent blackout would be terrible for them to contemplate.
I'll look forward to the day I can have a box on the side of my house into which I can plug whatever sources of electricity I choose, and I expect that the costs of this commodity will then drop dramatically, much like telephone service did.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
From my perspective (Canadian) it's more accurate to say it was in the south-east. :)
One Grid to rule them all,
One Grid to find them,
One Grid to bring them all,
And in the Darkness bind them...
A world wide power grid mean that the whole world is connected with one power grid.
However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
One solution is to have distributed, smaller, RENEWABLE sources of energy generation. Windmills and Solar installations go along way to making a neighbourhood, or small city 'black-out proof'; further, it provides an opportunity for community self-sufficiency and de-centralized administration of a communities' infrastructure.
instead of building 10 new natural gas power stations, we should build 1000 new small wind installations, distribute them around liberally to off-set the heavy reliance on out-of-reach massively-capital intensive projects.
The good would also be that this would cause NO POLLUTION.
Seeing how reliant we are on electricity in the West a couple things come to mind: A) Conservation, as always, is being overlooked by the pro-consume propaganda of western consumer-culture advocates. and B) The Re-regulation of the NorthAmerican Hydro infrastructure will only lead to a culture of capitalist finger-pointing, profiteering and irresponsibility. If the Hydro system is COMPLETELY privatized, who would get power first after a blackout? Residents who need it to live or Industrial/Commercial Interests who will write contracts to assure their production?
Wow, this must've been a real ordeal. It's not like some people in Quebec missed electricity for a month during winter 5 years ago. I mean, not having power for a whole summer day must be so bad...
Once the grid is fully functional, the only excuse for power shortages will be greed.
Good thing we don't hafta worry about greed!
Why move electrons across a grid and have to worry about cascade failures, power station accidents, etc?
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batteries.It is very likely that the interconnected power grid has prevented far more blackouts than it has caused. The interconnected power grid allows for local failures to be mitigated by non-local resources being brought instantly into play.
The blackout is far more likely the result of aging and inadequate infrastructure in the Northeast, and not the interconnected nature of the grid.
IMHO, if things were designed properly, all the power grids would be linked, but would be 'selfish' -- that is, if they started to reach their maximum load, they'd cut off surrounding areas. Kind of a "You can borrow some power from us, but only what we don't need."
I think it's no different than the Internet -- the big backbone providers 'peer' with each other, giving each other transit. But that doesn't mean that big DDoS attack aimed at one provider will cripple the whole Internet.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The problem is doing it correctly. Obviously NYC, Detroit, and a few other areas did not do it well. The grid in Massachusetts did what it was supposed to do.. Instead of feeding power everywhere else, overloading and shutting down, it set a limit and stopped where it should have, leaving some residents in Western MA without power, but overall did not fail like the flawed power systems in NY and elsewhere.
Nikola Tesla suggested a *wireless* worldwide power grid around (IIRC) 50 years earlier, and demonstrated the technology to make it posssible.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The power outage would have never occured if the power distribution system was distributed and centralized.
Uh, I think Distributed and NON-centralized is a better idea. Otherwise your just giving monopolies even more power to gouge consumers and make big mistakes. If it did go ahead. we should be able to use any supplier in the world, including ourselves. Like that's gonna happen.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Severe storms hit Memphis around 7AM on July 22. Hurricane force winds slammed the whole city, knocked over thousands of trees and power lines, damaged hundreds of homes/buildings, and immediately killed the power to 300,000+ buildings. Speaking of killed, I think the death toll wound up being 7, people died in fires started by candles, people died by carbon monoxide poisoning from generators, and one poor guy was crushed by a falling tree.
And nobody cared. Friends and relatives in other areas didn't see it on the news and call to see if we were okay. We had to call them, because it wasn't on the news anywhere else. I was lucky enough to have a good friend in a part of town with power, and went to his place by the afternoon, we were sitting watching all the news stations. The only place we saw any reference to it was the tiny ticker at the bottom of CNN Headline News, one blurb about "Thousands without power after storm slams Memphis." I think the only reason CNN bothered is that they're based in Atlanta (in the south) instead of NYC.
300,000 homes and businesses (more than half a million people in all) were without power for days. Most of us didn't see our lights come back on for 4-5 days. And it took more than 10 days to get everyone turned back on. But nobody noticed.
If NYC loses power, it's an instant media blitz, with all the networks scrambling to make new imposing music themes and clip-art for "Massive Outage: Are Terrorists Responsible?" And now, days later, it's still the top headline everywhere. But when half a million Memphians lost power for a week, no one cared. I guarantee if Fedex had lost power they would have cared..
When I was a teen in the 70's I went to visit some people that live in the desert of New Mexico.
The dude and his wife were typical peacenic, hippy types, long hair, shaggy beard, robes and beads and, *a college professor*.
Anyway, this couple dug a hole in the desert and built a log cabin in the hole. They then covered the cabin back over with the dirt from the hole so that from outside the place looked like a big dirt pile with windows.
You walked down a flight of steps from ground level to the enterance, 12' below ground level.
They had burlap on string for internal doorways.
Everything ran on low power battery lamps that they charged from solar panels on a big tower outside. They also had a huge hot water tank buried undergound that kept near boiling hot water year round. There was a HUGE hottub that would seat about 15 people lined with turquiose tiles they collected themselves from the desert.
Everything in there was handmade from logs, there was no store made furniture, just adobe and logs. The fireplace was about 3 feet thick and it was bloody hot even 20 feet away.
I was in awe of the place, it was mega cool and I decided then that I wanted to live like that too. Ever since then I've been a strong advocate of non-polluting, renewable energy sources. I would love to see the world powered by solar and geo-thermal power.
MOST of the methods in use today have horrific enviromental impact.
Even wind mills have serious drawbacks. There is a place where they landscape is littered with the damn things, they are huge, ugly behemoths and they make a veyr low rumbling sound that the residents are saying is causing them ill effects. Most things that man produces cause someone or something serious problems.
Imagine the world on solar power. Silent cars. No pollution. A clean sky to look at, clean air to breath. Quiet to enjoy, not noisy cars and trucks roaring around and stinking the place up, spreading more of the agents that cause cancer and other horrible diseases.
And last but not least, when the people can generate their own power for free then there would be no need for parasitic energy companies like Con-Ed, Entergy, etc...
The world is a parasitic circle jerk system, everyone screws the next little guy down the ladder and those at the bottom of the ladder are slaves for those above them. Those at the top are the oppressors and the tyrants.
not so sure I want my grid connected to this new york grid. at least right now I just get to read about the blackout, not participate. ;-)
Disclaimer: I work in the power trading business.
;-( - into partially stored hydro... could be interesting.
This article has a few oddities. The idea that everyone will be connected to "one" grid is misleading. There will always be multiple grids, and interconnectors between them. This can be thought of similarly to ISPs peering arrangements.
The article is really saying that it may be economically feasible to have extremely long interconnectors, eg across Siberia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, or up the length of Africa.
I have some reservations with this. When power is transmitted, there is a loss through the resistance of the transmission lines. This clearly becomes more acute the longer the transmission. In most grids in europe, the costs of these losses ( and the requirement to cover them with reserve power) is built into the fees to become a trading company within those countries. There are exceptions -eg the UK -> France interconnector - there is ~ 1.5% loss which the trading party must bear. This is for a 26 mile link. So 3000 miles might be a bit hopeful... I can't be arsed to do the math, but...
It is very hard to see how exploiting the varying liquidity of these markets would offset the huge transmission losses. Especially when compared to the ability to ship huge amounts of oil and gas in pipelines and tankers, with little loss, even at the expense of flexibility.
If this is about some new technology for power transmission ( eg superconductors) this could be great.
Australia could do pretty damn well by covering WA with solar. This could be transmitted to China, converting the Three Gorges Dam - an ecological crime, but its there, I've seen it
Dubya was beginning
Davis: What happen?
SoCal Edison: Somebody set up us the blackout.
PG&E: We get bankruptcy.
Davis: What !
PG&E: Electricity turn off.
Davis: It's you !!
BC Hydro: How are you gentlemen !!
BC Hydro: All your power are belong to us.
BC Hydro: You are on the way to Stone Age.
Davis: What you say !!
BC Hydro: You have no chance to Chapter 11 make your payment.
PG&E: Governor !!
Davis: Take off every 'regulation' !!
Davis: You know what you doing.
Davis: Move 'regulation'.
Davis: For great darkness.
Wind and Solar power would not solve this problem -- they would make it worse.
The entire reason we have a power grid is to improve reliability. When a power plant needs to be taken down for maintainance, power is brought in from somewhere else; without the grid, we'd have blackouts every time plants were shut down for maintainance.
Solar and wind power are far less reliable than fossil and nuclear power. As a result, using them would require a larger, more expensive, grid in order to maintain the same quality of service.
Having distributed generation might be a good idea, but it would need to be distributed *reliable* generation; wind and solar just don't make the grade.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Small Is Profitable - The Hidden Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size by the Rocky Mountain Institute covers the technical, financial and quality of service arguments for making a mixed power generation economy the standard approach to service provision.
What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.
It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhsap matching and energy futures.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Power losses are too great to ship electricity over very far distances. It makes cross-continental power delivery very expensive and inefficient.
A more-interconnected electricity grid will likely be one that is even less stable.
There is a cure for all of this, in two parts: regulation and decentralization. Electricity regulation worked much better than the current insane system. Ask California and now the Northeast for details. Decentralization allows for waste heat from power generation to be used for heating, improving efficiency (i.e. your office building could heat & provide power for itself with a small on-site plant). Solar and wind (but esp. solar) can be easily added to residential buildings, further insulating homes from grid instability.
More grids, more massive centralized facilities, less regulation: big power problems in the future. Guaranteed. Trying to do this on a world wide basis is general idiocy.
Here's some articles from around the web about the power outage (all collected by one site, CommonDreams.org). Personally, I would rather live off the grid totally. It's inevitably going to be so much cheaper, which is the main incentive for me.
An Industry Trapped by a Theory by Robert Kuttner
The Latest Bogus Fossil-Nuke Blackout: This Grid Should Not Exist by Harvey Wasserman
Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House by Greg Palast
A Tale of Two Power Outages by John Turri
Geopolitically, a global power grid distributes risk and there are good reasons, hypothetically, to do so, particularly for mitigating the extremism that leads to violence. For example, if Iran, which has moderate tendencies, joins the grid, it would have a strong incentive to itself quash extermism precisely because if Iranian terrorists go Allah Mode in a place like France and try to knock out infrastructure, moderate Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, may suffer as well.
The problem is that the major global powers have not indicated that they are willing to obey or respect any international law or organization. In Rwanda, France, who has lately championed the use of the UN in Iraq, aided and abetted the genocidal army over and against the UN force working in the region to save a few beleagured Rwandans. The United States has similarly revealed little or no inclination to respect the UN or other international "decision" making bodies on critical issues.
Lately I've felt as if advocating isolationism makes some sense, and this power grid idea is a example of why: it seems likely that, like the U.N. and like a great deal of international law, the major powers will disingenuously support such structures for a variety of reasons (appearances, genuinely felt convictions and ideals, gains in prestige and power). Unfortunately, unlike the U.N., where flaunting it just means that geopolitics is like geopolitics without a UN, an international power grid is physical, and dependence on it and control of it could become dangerous and unwieldy.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
A bad idea? In Wired Magazine!? Say it isn't so!
This article was pretty short and skimpy, certainly no earthshaking insights. Whether Buckminster Fuller or anybody else proposed it first, of course there will be a worldwide power grid eventually. Lots of things are evolving into worldwide nets, for example all the stock markets will be linked eventually. So the discussion veers into the merits of solar energy, living in a log cabin in the desert, etc.
Ok, how about this: what would it take for the distribution systems of various utilities, not just electricity but things we all need at some level -- food, water, medicine, communication -- to evolve into networks with uniform, demand-driven price structures? And if that happens why not collect a uniform payment from everyone, eliminating all the effort spent moving individual beans around between individual piles? I'm not talking about socialism, I'm talking about a 100% efficient market. Is that possible?
Networking spreads information uniformly. Could the business world as we know it even exist without the scarcity of information that enables one person to find a better deal than someone else?
A friend of mine from MIT was talking about one of the buildings there that was 18 stories tall but was on like 30 ft risers, and the wind gusts under there made it seem like a wind tunnel. Now, if we could cough up the money, we could get some wind power out of that and possibly provide some extra power to the building and cut costs in the long run. If EVERY home in the developed world ran a combination of solar and wind power, would we really need the electric companies? And no, I don't think it's actually feasible given the initial and maintenance costs.
In the UK. The electricity all comes from the same place of course and comes in through the same set of wires, but the electricity companies don't have a monopoly on the customers in their region.
e ss_for_c hange/choose_green_energy/
It means that I can do stuff like buy "green" electricity. I use the electricity, pay my green supplier and how they handle the generation, top up supply to the grid and inter company billing is completely up to them.
e.g.
http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/pr
It'll be an interesting experiment.
Deleted
Solar and wind power less reliable than fossil and nuclear power? You must be kidding. If you're talking about the new solar energy power plants, well, they're just plain silly anyway. However:
Park a few solar panels on your rooftop, put a stack of deep-cycle batteries in a closet, and disconnect yourself from "the grid". Don't run major appliances after dark, and your batteries will last longer. Install 12V DC lighting around the house, use 12V appliances and accessories (e.g. designed for cars/boats/RVs) where possible, and run them straight off the batteries. Get large appliances (refridgerators, freezers, washing machines) that were designed to run efficiently, and use even less of it. A large part of the problem in converting an existing house to solar energy is is the task of replacing the house's infrastructure to one suitable for solar power.
Another part of the problem in converting the average modern house is that, although stick frame houses are cheap and inexpensive to construct, they cost a lot to keep cool in the summer, and heat in the winter. Think of them as one big heat sink. By orienting houses with large windows to the south, and roof overhangs designed to allow low winter sun in, and keep high summer sun out, (or with a few large deciduous trees to your south for the same effect), you save a big fat bundle of energy in climate control. Add a fair amount of thermal mass to your outside walls (cob, adobe, straw-bale, rammed earth, earthship), put some of your living space underground, and you might even survive year round with no climate control.
Don't want to go whole hog? Get a grid intertie system, park the solar panels on your roof, and connect them through the intertie straight to the local power grid. It won't power your house after dark, or through a local (or widespread) outage, but you'll be helping offset the electricity demand period during the day, when electricity usage is highest. Better yet, if you make more electricity than you use (and your state requires the participation of the electric company), you can get paid by the electric company for the surplus you generate. The power company pays me $15 a month for the ability to cycle my water heater and air conditioner off for up to 15 minutes an hour (25% load reduction) in the summer, I don't see why they don't offer me $30-$50 a month for the privilige of parking an extra 3-5kW power plant on my roof.
The whole point of solar/wind/geothermal/renewable power, IMHO, is that you wouldn't need a "larger, more expensive, grid". With sufficient distribution of solar panels, backup batteries, and (worst-case) backup generators, you wouldn't need a grid at all. Each neighborhood could be fairly self sufficient, houses with good solar siting would provide the panels, those without could provide backup batteries, or house generators for emergency power. With houses built for energy efficiency from the start, you'd need a lot less power (find the exact statistics yourself) to get through your day. All of which would mean less mass power generation, which means fewer fossil and nuclear plants, which means greater energy independence, all of which is good for the future.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Ahhh, but the day will never, ever come where the laws of thermodynamics will stop, creating a way to not lose copius amounts of energy creating hydrogen. Can't get more out than you put in. Never going to so much as break even. Water is a very, very sound molecule. It doesn't even come close to trying to break it for energy. There is no energy solution, because we're talking the first law of thermodynamics, and we're talking basic science. Sounds great. "We've got whole oceans here!" So is it really going to be that much better if we went to it?
What about other chemical processes? Unless you want wholesale ecological disaster in exchange for your Playstation 2 time, I cannot imagine it. Acids? Bases? What else just makes a LARGE, CONSUMABLE AMOUNT OF H2? It would be great for a camp stove, but what about whole cities?
You can't flip a molecule and make water into hydrogen and oxygen so easily. Water is the ANTI-FUEL. It's not gasoline that is waiting to combust. It's a real nightmare to try to get the energy back. Electrolysis just doesn't cut it. We'd really need a magic bullet with hydrogen.
Are hydrogen lines better than power lines?
IMHO It's never been about the resource, it is all about the energy you consume. We need to learn to lower our overall energy usage. That is my solution to all of this.
Hydrogen sounds like the greatest idea ever, too bad physics doesn't seem to back it up, at least right now.
OK, that's equivalent to an electric power system where every building is connected to a low voltage line. Highly wasteful, the amount of power wasted in the lines would be a significant percentage of the power used. it's the same thing with hydrogen, if you connect everything with small pipes the amount of power wasted in pumping the gas would be too much. If you want to reduce wastage in your hydrogen system, you would need large pipes, at high pressures, conducting large amounts of the gas. But then you would start getting the same stability problems you get with a large electric power system.
For every mile of huge arm thick copper wire linking .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
power plants across the nation, we could invest in
local power plants based on technology similar to
smith Cogeneration
http://www.smithcogen.com/aboutcogeneration.htm
There are other vendors out there as well, and throughout
alot of the US natural gas is plentiful and affordable
Each mile of copper wire carrying 100,000+ volts and
1,000's of Ampere lose alot of their power due to the
natural resistance in the wire
The costs of the giant towers, and the huge copper wires
is truly amazing, and could be better spent on local power
The Tranmission model allows for less human workers is
its biggest cost savings
In a time with a job crunch, and a weak grid in California
and the upper east coast, it is time to think differently
Smaller regional grids are less wasteful, and make more sense
10,000 miles of Transmission towers and wires must have
cost billions of dollars . It may have been a good idea
at the time, but the smaller Cogeneration model is better
under current political, financial, and economic conditions
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Since deregulation, there's no one to blame, of course. The invisible hand of the market is supposed to do it all. Generating companies, transmission companies, and retail delivery utilities are all separate organizations now.
It's not really economic to have reliable electric power. Would you pay 20-30% more on your power bill for 99.99% uptime vs. 99.9% uptime? That's about what it costs.
Well, given that we already had a grid much larger than the area where the power went out, and automatic safeguards kicked in on a lot of its connections and limited the area of the blackout... If the rest of the world had connections to our grid too, I think what most likely would have happened would be a blackout of the same size we did see, or just a little bit larger. Big deal.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
Leave it to wired and you slashdot wankers to screw up a perfectly good idea.
:)
The worldwide power grid idea was detailed in fuller's book Critical Path and its not a new idea by any stretch (
Yeah bucky was a ridiculous optimist, but the jist of this whole book (and his life's work for that matter) seems to be that if we can eliminate inefficiencies and work together on a global scale, there will be more than enough power/food/resources for everyone to live extremely well.
Of course the wired people decided to drop their grid on a truly crap-tastic map which kills the whole point. take a look at the worldwide grid on bucky fuller's dymaxion map which shows the earth as one giant continent without distorting the relative sizes of the landmasses.
Electricity demand is low on one side of the world at night, they send their excess capacity to the other side of the globe where it is day. and vice versa. same deal with summer/winter in the northern / southern hemisphere. of course we need to solve the sticky problem of transmission loss
and if you are whining about being without power for a day someone needs to unplug your ass and send you outside for a little nature.
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
I've always wondered why urban places end up without local backup for infrastructure needs like power.
In my home town (pop. 325) the power often goes out in the winter. When it does, most of the time they get the big old diesel generator up and running and the town has power again within an hour or so. Day-long blackouts are really rare, even if it takes them that long to find and fix the downed line.
Is there some reason why cities can't have relatively local (say, block by block) emergency backup for things like power?
Or is it just habit, or maybe just being cheap?
I doubt the folks in Downieville have more money than the folks in [big city of your choice].
This Like That - fun with words!
Utilities are no longer required to buy power from producers, since an act of congress in 1990s...
This is my sig.
Yeah, the internet was deregulated, and the power system was regulated. But think about how generally unreliable the internet is compared to the power system. Parts of it go down all the time. Think about the last network outage compared to the last blackout. How long did that blackout last compared to the network outage?
The power system is much more critical then the internet. Without power, people can get stuck in elevators, AC goes out, the cellular phone system can go down, etc.
Another problem that showed up in the power system is that companies like Enron were, with no equivocation, bandits. They actually fucked with the California power system in order to extract better deals from the state, along with the well-known securities thieving they pulled off.
Any attempt at power deregulation should also require a much, much better standard for open-ness and honesty from the companies. Peoples lives are actually at state here and leaving our power grid in the hands of criminals is not a very good plan.
And we also need to design a much more fault-tolerant grid system as well. It's just ridiculous that one fuckup can shut down the entire east coast, especially 40 years (or whatever) after the exact same thing happened...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html
, .
.
.
.0025 Ohms per foot .
.0025 Ohms = .
.
.
.
If you consider one loop at just 5,000 miles,
and 3 strands one for each phase of AC
then you are looking at 79.2 million ft. Transmission
line
As the size of the wire goes up so does the resistance,
and as the heat of the line goes up so does the resistance
Summer heat can cause "sag" which actually makes the
wires longer for the equation as well
The only figure I have found is about
So at optimal conditions we have 72.2 million ft. x
198K ohms and that is if you figure in Zero resistance
in interconnection
198,000 Ohms * 1,000's of Ampere of current, you get the idea
All so we can build centralized power plants, and have
lower staffing levels
Local power is honestly a better way to go, and I think
deregualtion leads to corporate corruption
Ask Enron !
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
That link I offered is not a very good one, here is :
.
.
a better one , with better numbers
http://www.ramgen.com/about_doe.html
9 - 15% loss is the overall factor they think
At 12 trillion watts of usage, that is a GREAT deal of power
Thanks,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
sigh
Ok, all of this is answered quite comprehensively in 20 Hydrogen Myths a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.
Good enough? But there's more!
Electrolysis *IS* good enough: you can still take 3c / KWh grid electicity, make hydrogen, and run a fuel cell car cheaper than a gasoline vehicle.
Not much cheaper, but it's a start.
And here's the kicker: renewables can power hydrogen cars, so as well as cheaper driving now, you get to build the infrastructure of a renewable economy while you're at it.
Now, do I believe even 50% of the hydrogen hype? No, but it's a viable alternative for some situations now, and people are going to explore those first: hydrogen fuel cell car and bus fleets will be here in a few years.
If those work, then let's talk about a hydrogen economy.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Hydrogen Sulfide is largely burned off at this point, .
.
.
and is considered VERY explosive, and the famous movies
about poison gas wells are talking about this gas
Oil refineries actually end up making more of this
stuff in their processes, this would turn it into a
revenue stream like they did with Carbon Fiber
Carbon Fiber, Stronger than steel, lighter than Titanium
Excerpt:
http://www.cas-bikes.com/page9.html
The carbon fiber and the epoxy matrix has the best strength to weight ratio of any material in the world.
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
i think it's pretty obvious what the real problem is .. you're talking about executives who have localized power monpolies, and as they have no comptetion they have no incentives to give af uck outside of whatever the law absolutely mandates them to do.. this is the same reason why many areas still do not have cable modem access.. and heave to deal with absolutely retard phone companies
monopolies destroy competition in the market and when that happens a market economy fails to be the most efficient which invariably leads to problems
This all sounds well and good until we come down to the nitty-gritty of power engineering. Somehow, I don't think a 345kV, 60-Hz, 3-phase feeder is gonna cut the mustard in a 3,000 mile power link... But, ignoring that, there are many electrical standards in the world: 100V, 110/120V, 208V, 230V, 220/240V (which, in retrospect, wouldn't be much of a problem). What would be a problem is the whole 50/60Hz thing and the delta/wye issue. Not to mention that reinverting the power (or using rotary converters for that early 20th-century touch) would cause intolerable losses and clocking to ensure synchronicity of a world-wide grid would be...well...a mess.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Wow, what's your Greenpeace card number?
"It is now common knowledge that if all countries in the
world switched to nuclear power, we would run out of
material to power them in just a few decades "
And I'd like some data to backup this piece of troll work.
I need:
1) estimates of what is in the ground that hasn't been mined.
2) how much material is now in circulation
3) how much "waste" material, such as U238, can be converted into fissionable plutonium for further energy production?
4) Please list as many nation estimates as possible, and give the sources of your data for each nation.
5) authenticate those sources.
Pls Thx
TurboD
Here in Florida, we're on the same grid as the North-east and likely the rest of the south and midwest. It's one big grid from Canada down to Key West. The dominoe effect occurs due to how power is routed on the grid. Here in Florida, we're pretty self sufficient and usually sell power to the rest of the eastern US in winter, now that Crystal River Nuclear plant is back online.
I drank what? -- Socrates