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Tech That Will Save Our Species - Solar Thermal Power
NoMoreCoal writes "Salon has up a story by Joe Romm, former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, discussing a lesser-known alternative energy solution. It's a technology that (he claims) is ready to provide zero-carbon electric power big, fast, cheap and (most importantly) right now: solar thermal power. 'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. CSP makes use of the most abundant and free fuel there is, sunlight, and key countries have a vast resource. Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources.'" Interesting stuff, even if he does mention the Archimedes Death Ray.
1.) Mirrors are made of glass and silver.
2.) Nobody cries for scorpions
3.) Nobody lives near the hoover dam
so we simply build it *on top of* new jersey. it's about the right size, plus there's no wildlife anywhere in NJ to displace. as for the locals, who cares? it's fucking new jersey. the power can then be transmitted directly to new york city. i mean, sure theres *supposed* to be enough power to go around, but when has NYC ever fell short on a challenge to guzzle resources?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
For us humble taxpayers, yes, but won't somebody think of the weapons industry?
Your mom's basement.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
maybe you two can get a room
... and placed our solar panels in orbit around the sun rather than in orbit around the earth, that would scale out indefinitely Come on! We just need to plug the wire directly into the sun!No, no, no! We need new Wars. I am getting tired of watching new WW2 movies every few years. Need something fresh and interesting. Hopefully the US will increase their funding of this and other conflicts so we can have a large scale regional war with Iran and Syria; now that could make for some interesting movie epos in the future.
Energon cubes?
Well, in the case we'd have plenty of hydroelectric ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm both. At least, that's what my paycheck says. When I'm funding something, I'm a taxpayer. When I'm voting on something, I'm a citizen. Seems about right.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
A human being is capable of doing approximately 60 watts worth of work. So for three-shift operation, three people could generate about 50 watts of continuous power. A treadmill takes about two square meters. Mouse scales down in size and if we assume that the drop in power is linear to size we can safely use this 25 watts/sqm for mice also. A square mile is (takes out a calculator and curses the imperial system) approximately 2.56 square kilometers. This would yield about 64 MW of power. My question is, how many mice are needed?
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
that only 1 or 2% of global power needs are met by solar power at current time! Whereas, power generation techniques such as nuclear, which my hippie buddy Zed assures me are "bad" and will "be totally like Chernoble, like booom man," is account for some 20 odd percent of global power generation and is being expanded in many countries! Some places use nuclear almost entirely!
Apparently a crazy sect of cultists called "scientists" (who I believe live in California and are led by Tom Cruise) are contradicting the knowledgeable and sagely hippies and spreading lies about how nuclear power is actually safe when done right, and waste can be stored safely at Yucca mountain for some 10,000 years. Furthermore, they suggest that spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed so that it will have a significantly shorter half life, on the order of a few hundred years. I think we can safely ignore these crackpots, with their "Phd's" and other cultish paraphernalia, and listen to my friend Zed who works at greenpeace.
These same crazy scientists in an effort to derail solar panel have pointed out some problems with Zed's plans to save the world. Before we can deploy solar power plants of any size, we must address these obstacles. I am not familiar with them myself, as I don't get outside much, but I read about them on wikipedia. They are called:
1. Night time.
2. Clouds.
"Night time", judging by it's title, seems to be some kind of dark temporal force preventing the rays of the sun or "Sol" from reaching the earth. I suspect this does not exist, it even sounds like something out of a science fiction story. If it does exist, I am confident that if we set our best space/time physicists to work on it, we can eradicate this shadowy nemesis.
I'm not sure what clouds are, but according to wikipedia they are "a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body."
I don't know about you, but this sounds like an unlikely scenario to me. I mean, water "floating in the atmosphere." Water doesn't float in the atmosphere! It stays securely packed in mountain dew bottles. I'm sure we can ignore these hypothetical "cloud" problems when building our solar panels, and they will not cause any problems.
In any case, let's ignore these so called "logistical problems" (a term that sounds like cult speak to me!) and deploy solar power globally. Zed assures me that the primary problems facing global power right now is a lack of positive thinking.
"This tech is dead simple, it's scalable, and it taps a power source that won't exhaust itself for 5 billion years or so."
See? That's what kills me about people. Such short range thinkers.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
That fixed-mirror design will work very well on your non-rotating planet.
Will you guys KNOCK IT OFF! That guy was trying very hard to be a naysayer so quit trying to ruin his buzz.
Show some courtesy.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!