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Expanding the Electricity Grid May Be a Mistake
Perhaps T. Boone Pickens was onto something. Al writes "An article in Technology Review argues that plans to string new high-voltage lines across the US to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, could be an expensive mistake. What's needed instead are improved local and regional electricity transmission, the development of an efficient and adaptable smart grid, and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than transmitting power from North Dakota to New York City."
I spell carbon capture "c o a l s u b s i d y".
It's not going to work, it's just another way to subsidize coal companies, as if letting them blow the tops off of mountains wasn't enough.
Installing renewables local to where the power is needed is, of course, a great idea.
Absolute statements are never true
The slowing of the Earth's rotation is already the cause of those damnable leap seconds. You want more?
You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No. The wind is surface wind, so imagine how much wind is actually in the atmosphere. The wind pushing your clouds is a bit higher up. With sunlight, the energy is either heating your tiles, or charging them. It is a preference, not a robbery of some sort. And we find charge has more uses than hot tiles.
Free, though, it is not, and you are correct about there being a downside. It is in the form of cost, infrastructure, and energy efficiency, among others.
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
The problem with the large power grid is that power is generateed at a 60 Hz frequency. This corresponds to a 5000 km wavelength. A quarter wave line has a length of 1250 km (about 780 miles for the unit-challenged).
A quarter wavelength line has the property that a short circuit at one end appears as an open circuit at the other end and an open circuit appears at a short. This makes it very difficult to transmit 60 Hz power over a line of approximately that length, the line must be "impedance matched", by putting capacitors and/or inductors at several points along the line. Worse still, the line impedance varies with load, because when a higher current runs through the wires they heat up and, by dilation, lengthen and rest at a lower position, thereby increasing the capacitance to ground, which means those capacitors and inductors must be variable.
One solution is to use direct current, but that's as expensive or more than matching the impedance, although the grid becomes easier to stabilize when direct current is used.
All in all, any solution for making more electricity available is expensive. Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
Has anyone considered the meteorological effects of removing all that energy from the atmosphere?
Yes, and it's insignificant.
According to the NOAA, an average hurricane releases roughly 14 Terawatt-hours of energy per day. According to the EIA, annual global electrical production comes to about 20 Terawatt-hours.
To summarize, one single hurricane can power the entire world (with room to grow) for an entire year if captured for two days.
Now consider how many hurricanes and typhoons there are in a year, how long they each last, and do the math. And don't forget about lesser weather phenomenon like thunderstorms (An average thunderstorm releases about 10 gigawatt-hours) and wind in general, which also release a non-trivial amount of energy.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. The sun hits an earth size disc at the earth's orbit with more than 100 petawatts (I would guess that at least 30 or 50 petawatts actually make it to the ground).
There is some chance that it will cause problems, but we don't have the capacity to build up fast, so we are going to have quite some time where we are harnessing 1/10,000 of the Sun's energy. We can use that experience to decide if 1/1,000 of it poses some risk to the environmental conditions that we like to live in.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Arguments against DC power lines is based on ignorance.
Québec and Manitoba have big power lines and they save tons of money. The cost of the converters on both ends is offset by the lower cost of the power lines. DC power lines have less loss and only need 2 wires instead of three. You don't have the inductive losses in DC lines.
When the line exceeds 1000km the savings are huge.
And in case anybody doesn't want to RTFA (Read The Fine Abstract), the key word is "negligible", as in:
Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature, and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO2 and air pollutants.
Nuclear is only a partial solution (currently) also. It is all mostly in your wiki article, but the high points IMHO:
1) shortage of Uranium mining (used at 2* the rate it is mined currently.)
2) shortage of manufacturing capacity (containment vessels)
3) many reactor technologies that can reduce #1 just haven't been proven to be viable yet(breeder reactors, fast reactors, etc)
I agree objections to any nuclear expansion are just wrong. But we can't just drop any options, because their is clearly no one solution to cover our energy addiction, let alone to get us through the next 20 years.
Am I the only one who gets nervous with this concept?! If the beams are even slightly out you could be frying people rather than generating electricity.
The beams intended to be used are in frequencies that specifically pass through water, since it'll have to pass through a lot of it to get to the surface. Since people are ugly bags of mostly water, they're not going to absorb significant amounts of the radiation.
I really wish people would research this before posting about it. There are some problems with SBSP (like using up a geo slot, or if launch costs are ever going to come down enough to make it economical), but frying people with the beam isn't one of them. I blame Will Wright, who should have known better.
Not a typewriter