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Vatican To Build 100 Megawatt Solar Power Plant
Karim Y. writes "The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create what will effectively be Europe's largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! 'The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome's Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.'"
Or, we could RTFA, and find:
Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener. As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting, or if that is too abstract it could get 3x the MWH offset per dollar by buying new fridges for the poor who have old fridges from 1990 and earlier. Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
There will be a lot more people dying prematurely from starvation and other avoidable causes if global warming isn't checked. That aside, its hardly as if the Roman Catholic Church is uninvolved in feeding or providing medical care to the needy. On the more general "platform" issue, one could RTFA:
Read the article. Plant is being constructed a days walk from Rome.
The project is on the same 740 acre (~1.15 sq. mi.) extraterritorial holding on which the Vatican Radio's transmitters are located. Its in the secord paragraph of TFA.
No, Catholics don't leave it out, or at least not when used as part of the mass. They just say it a little differently. The problem is, the Catholic form, "For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and forever," didn't allow me to end with the word "power" and have the fragment make much sense....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The only way the Catholic Church is worth a hundred billion of anything is when you calculate its worth in Lira.
Sorry, but nope. Catholic church is very wealthy... here's a pic of the solid gold alter in Cuzco... the picture does it absolutely no justice ... and there's probably 5 times more gold than in this pic and an equal amount of silver (this pic is not mine; I don't know who this pic belongs to; they don't let you take pics inside the church, so this person committed a bit of sacrilege by taking this)
And I'd say the items contained in this photo are worth a few bucks.
In terms of net worth, they are very clearly rich.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
You're thinking of Immanuel Velikovsky. He started out as a Jungian Psychotherapist. Jungians are fond of spinning theories about myths and their historical origins. The history IV needed to make his theories work included a lot of near collisions between Earth and other planets. When told that this totally contradicted current physical theory, IV just went and invented his own "science" of planetary cosmology.
This "science" has always had a huge following, despite it's sheer aburdity. Perhaps it's the vivid imagery in his writings. Jungians have a talent for pushing people emotional buttons and triggering a "shock of recognition" effect.
One thing that didn't help was the attempt by various physicists who got upset over the bad science in IV's work and threatened to boycott the textbook arm of his publisher. Gave him the usual validation through martyrdom.
In any case, I wouldn't worry about there being anything to it. Aside from the bad science, Velikovsky's claim that certain myths are universal doesn't stand up. For example, he claims that all cultures have a Noah myth. Some do, some don't. The ones that do always turn out to have a history of city building in river flood plains. That allows us to explain the Noah myth as a simple flood disaster that grew in the telling. A much simpler explanation than Velikovsky's claim that the planet Saturn exploded one day...
For some reason I think I've read that were Jupiter a star at its present size, if such a thing were even possible, at the distance to the earth it wouldn't be too horrible. The closest approach between Jupiter and Earth places is nearly twice as far as the Sun is from Mars. It might jack up the temperature by a degree and melt all the icecaps on earth, but other than that, it wouldn't be too big of a deal...
For a Brown Dwarf star, you aren't that far off. Here is how it would work:
Lets say you increase the mass of Jupiter 18-20x. It wouldn't just expand, it would actually contract. The increased gravity (and small starting volume) would cause the object to collapse inward to something near Jupiter's size. Eventually the contraction would heat up the core enough to start fusing the hydrogen. This would result in a sudden outburst of energy, and likely cause the object to expand to a volume where the force of gravity was equal to the forces pushing outward.
But here is the neat part, sure, it is technically a star, but it isn't fusing all that much material to heat up all that mass. The surface of the star could actually be below 1000C. In fact, these stars wouldn't be visible to the naked eye, the light they would emit would mostly be in the infrared spectrum.
At the distance that Jupiter is from Earth, I would be surprised if it had a measurable effect on Earth.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
When God tells you to do something, don't do it by half measure. Seems that people are reading more into that passage than was intended.
Which really isn't surprising.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Actually, on looking further, I think my source for that ROI figure is probably pretty unreliable. Does anybody have figures from broad deployments?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is why, for example, the Catholic church prohibits contraception; it makes the church grow more quickly.
Hardly. Here is the argument:
1) God created nature, and nature was good. Thus, the law of nature, or "natural law", is good and God-created, and must not be broken. Therefore, things that are "unnatural", or break the law of nature, are evil.
2) In natural law, the purpose of sex is procreation. Thus, anything that interferes with that is evil, such as masturbation or birth control.
The first is pretty commonly accepted, but by no means universal, even by those who disagree on the Catholic church's position. To see one case where this plays out, most people's response to homosexuals is, "Ew, gross. That's just wrong. It's not natural." A large number of peoples aversions fall into this category.
Also realize that the Christian church grew out of the Jewish religion, where "spilling one's seed" or other non-procreative sexual acts were condemned, since that was not Yahweh's purpose for sex.
Suffice it to say, the argument is usually one about what is "natural" or not. If, however, you can argue against natural law being God's law, then that works too.
It was not until recently that sex for non-procreative purposes was determined "natural" by the Anglican church, and then once one had taken the plunge, almost every other denomination followed. The Catholic church has a hierarchy that creates immense inertia, which is why their official stance has not changed, even though many of their members do not agree with it.
Of course, at various times, there were other things that supported the church's opinion. For example, at one point in time, it was believed that a sperm contained a fully formed human being, which was just housed by the woman until birth, and so prevention of conception was tantamount to killing an unborn person, which is murder.
There are big commercial solar PV projects going up all over, some for direct industrial uses, other just for generating peak power in hot climates to help with midday demand. If you knew what peak power costs at utility scales, not your kilowatt hour rate you pay at home but what heat of the day high demand costs were, you'd grok this better on how solar can be competitive now, let alone into the future. And you make money by being ahead of the curve, not behind it. In other words, the guys at the Vatican are pretty smart about this.
One really large proposal that was in the news and even covered here on slashdot would have truly massive solar farms in northern africa and run the power to europe as part of a "supergrid". If you followed solar power news you would be aware of these issues.
Solar PV is still one of the fastest growing global industries out there, even despite the latest recession, because demand has been very good for years now. And the demand has been fueling some really excellent R and D efforts as well to make it even better. The FTA is just another one, albeit the planned largest one in Europe, but there are plenty of still large operational farms out there and many more on track to be built or contracted, a lot of them by commercial existing utilities, who are in the energy business to make a buck. The companies that make them can't keep up with demand,(that's why prices have remained high for the last several years), so several new fabs are going online this year and next year just to make the silicon wafers needed. For the longest time solar PV makers relied on cast off rejects from chip manufacture, but now demand is so high they can have their own fabs.
It is still in the early stages of large scale production, but it's here now, and thin film production will magnify the efforts by hundred's fold. Think of it as a rough analogy of desktop computer use in the early 80s. Within 20 years it will be rare to be able to go out and about and *not* see solar PV everywhere.
As a Catholic, I often have people remind me that many of our traditions are not mentioned in the bible. An example would be giving up something for lent. It is useful to remember that the early Christians did not have a written Bible to work off of, and so their worship practices were based off of tradition. On other words, we Catholics don't find anything wrong with continuing traditions that were established a long time ago even if they aren't in the bible. This is not an answer to your contraception question. I'm just trying to point out that just because something isn't in the bible doesn't mean that we can't practice or believe it.
Holy Trinity isn't mentioned in the Bible either... The "it's not in the Bible" argument doesn't apply to the Catholic Church since it doesn't subscribe to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Besides, if the Church simply wanted more members, why are they against non Catholics using contraception too? If they want more members, why do they not permit infertile couples from using artificial fertilization procedures? The Church teaches that sex and reproduction go hand in hand. That isn't to say that all sex that doesn't result in fertilization is sinful, but there must not be an attempt to interfere with the process of fertilization (whether using condoms, chemicals, outercourse, etc).
Typically, excess power is stored by pumping water up into reservoirs during the day, then they do standard hyrdoelectric generation at night.
Relevant extract from the 1973 ICEL edition of The Roman Missal:
C: Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Saviour gave us:
All: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trepasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
C: Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
All: For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever.
Pirate Party UK
Note that I'm not exaggerating: it takes a good half hour to drive around the antenna.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Have you ever tried to walk 72 miles in a day? Even back in my infantry days I would have called you nuts.
One mile every 20 minutes (one km every 12 min for most of you) is actually quite brisk, and pretty fatiguing over 2 or 3 hours, let alone 24. Factor in time to eat, drink, change socks, cover blisters, relieve your self, etc, and you are looking at having to run-walk to keep that kind of pace.
While actual athletes may be able to do more, I would put the absolute limit for a fit person at around 40 miles in 24 hours if the person must carry nothing, the weather is neither too hot nor too cold and the person is very motivated. A fit person could comfortably walk around 18 miles in a day, and 12 miles per day at a sustained rate.
For the overwhelming majority of humanity (with the possible exceptions of Kenyans...) 72 miles in a 24 hour period is simply not possible.
In the case at hand, the site is 27 kilometers (a little more than 18 miles) from the Vatican.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.