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Ask Slashdot: Minimizing Oil and Gas Dependency In a Central European City?
An anonymous reader writes I live in a big city in central Europe. As most of you know from recent news, most of Europe's (and quite a bit of China's) gas supply comes from Russia and is very likely to be cut off several times during the next few winters (China's time will come in later years). What many might not know is that not just our natural gas supply, but also our petrol ('gas' for the Americans in the audience) often comes partly from Russia and some of our electricity comes from gas powered stations. Most of our leaders, at least in Germany and Hungary, are in bed with the Russians and likely won't do anything about fuel security. I live in an building with a south-facing roof and I own the roof space but I don't have enough land here to put a wind turbine or something similar on. Can anyone make good suggestions for ways to cut down my dependence on unreliable power supplies? Extra points for environmentalism, but I am even willing to pay more to be sure the heating is there in winter and my server keeps running.
I will use Germany figures as that is what I have access to. The yearly average use of electricity is 3,471Kwhrs/yr. Daily use is average 9.6KkWh. The potential energy is water follows the following formula 1000 kilograms of water (1 cubic meter) at the top of a 100 meter tower has a potential energy of about 0.272 kWh. Since the house is a lot shorter than 100m lets use 10m which means for ever cubic meter of water on the roof you get 0.0272kWh. To store half a day's energy you would need 9.6/2/.0273 = 176 cubic meters of water which weighs 176 metric tonnes. You better have a very strong roof.
Switching back and forth daily to different energy sources more than doubles the capital outlay. Bloody waste of resources.
Natural Gas, Coal, or Nuclear - nothing else has matured enough, and won't for decades.