I think maybe you don't understand the scale of Hydroelectric production in N. America! I think perhaps you're referring to the US.
I think you're thinking of the wrong numbers. I'm not talking generating capacity, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but individual sites. Hydropower in North America is big generation spread across relatively few sites. Scaling up wind power to ginormous levels would involve small generation and zillions of sites, most in remote or very remote areas, often nowhere NEAR high voltage transmission lines. That makes a significant difference.
The only pebble bed reactor design I've heard has any problems is with the South African design. The Chinese design seems pretty good. My information on this topic is sadly about 3 years out of date, so if anything new has come out since then, I'm unaware of it.
The problem is that "dirty power" can be cleaner than "green power" overall in some circumstances.
I've never seen that proved. The real cleanliness of dirty power hasn't been calculated yet (and likely _can't, except theoretically), since we have not been able to clean the environment of the true impact of dirty power. Until you can capture all that CO2 that nobody has been worrying about for decades, you don't even know the scope of what dirty power is really doing.
Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?
Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually.:)
> Most people whining about......environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives.
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
Indeed. WRT nuclear power plants, I can't say I'm all _that_ impressed by 4th gen. Water cooling is a pretty horrible way to go, very expensive, plus it limits your site selection at the same time it forces your site to be dangerous to locate on - it MUST be near a significant source of water for cooling, which means in the worst-case scenario - a meltdown - you can contaminate your ground water. No thanks.
I really like the gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor design the Chinese are working on. Way safer, gas-cooled, and modular. That's a good way to go.
A high temperature gas-cooled plant could also be used to economically produce hydrogen, which can then be used in a CoGen situation to produce even more power, or to use in hydrogen-powered vehicles.
My favorite NIMBY moment in the electricity game (I used to be a reporter reporting on the energy grid in the western United States) was when California decided that not only did they not want to generate electricity generated via a certain percentage of non-green power, they also didn't want to IMPORT it. Yikes. My article title was something along the lines of, "California Says: Not In Your Back Yard". (I can't remember it exactly, this was a few years ago).
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
I think you misunderstand the scale we're talking about. There are comparatively few hydrodelectric dams in North America compared to the number of wind turbines being discussed here. The difference in number is _vast_.
No ink costs & no layout worries. As a former reporter, I gotta say, almost all problems I see with the newspaper industry, as with the U.S. auto industry, are of their own making. *shrug*
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
And yet, even with being partly subsidized by the government, UPS and FedEx compete quite well with them for package deliveries. My point here is that the USPS is a great example of how a government-subsidized health plan is hardly an automatic death sentence for HMOs, etc.
We see what you are doing here. Government provision of services, by definition, is the exact opposite of free market competition. When you take money from people by force and give it to others, that is NOT competition. Please stop saying that it is.
It seems you don't understand the situation. Let's use an analogy. The United States Postal Service has overnight service, 3-day, and ground service. So do UPS, FedEx, and others. USPS is a quasi-government firm, and yet, mysteriously, UPS and FedEx both compete very well with USPS in the areas they compete in (obviously, only USPS is allowed to do the first-class access-your-mailbox thing). I see the universal health care plan in a similar light. Competition comes when you have options for service. If HMOs, etc. have to compete on quality of care for the first time with someone who DOES absolutely guarantee service (rather than denying claims, dumping clients who actually file claims, refusing service to potential clients with preexisting conditions), then they are likely to get better - one of the tenets of competition. Without such competition, they will continue on like they have been, which only an absolute FOOL would argue FOR.
I always take my car in for service at the dealership. I just trade for a new car when the mechanics there tell me it's time to replace the blinker fluid. The mechanics let me in on the auto industry secret that once that happens, it's only a matter of time before everything starts breaking down. It's saved me a lotta hassle. Sure, it's more expensive, but this is one of those instances where you get what you pay for.
If it's Disney doing a sequel to a Pixar movie, that's probably bad. If it's Pixar doing a sequel, (ala Toy Story 2, which I much prefer to Toy Story), then it's probably okay.
The reason I haven't been looking for a ZipGS is because there are some upcoming projects for the TransWarp GS to enable it to go even faster than it already does (which seems to be faster than the top end of the ZipGS). I'm looking to the future (for my Apple IIGS)!:)
I'm gonna buy one and put it next to my Apple II GS.:)
Was that a joke? Some of us actually HAVE working Apple IIGS machines.
Too bad the comparatively low-res iPhone (competing phones are at WVGA resolution) is still much higher-res than an Apple IIGS.
I'm _still_ looking for a TransWarp GS accelerator board for my GS... I'd like to get it beyond the default max of 2.8mHz. Maybe some day I'll find one on eBay. *sigh*
I find it interesting that companies that make ATMs for systems that track things down to the penny are unable to track much smaller numbers with errors of plus or minus THOUSANDS.
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I think maybe you don't understand the scale of Hydroelectric production in N. America! I think perhaps you're referring to the US.
I think you're thinking of the wrong numbers. I'm not talking generating capacity, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but individual sites. Hydropower in North America is big generation spread across relatively few sites. Scaling up wind power to ginormous levels would involve small generation and zillions of sites, most in remote or very remote areas, often nowhere NEAR high voltage transmission lines. That makes a significant difference.
The only pebble bed reactor design I've heard has any problems is with the South African design. The Chinese design seems pretty good. My information on this topic is sadly about 3 years out of date, so if anything new has come out since then, I'm unaware of it.
> ... MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. .
Nobody mines Thorium anymore. I'm not sitting in Whispering Gorge waiting for nodes to spawn, either.
Hey, Heinlein said Thorium is cool. That's good enough for me! :)
The problem is that "dirty power" can be cleaner than "green power" overall in some circumstances.
I've never seen that proved. The real cleanliness of dirty power hasn't been calculated yet (and likely _can't, except theoretically), since we have not been able to clean the environment of the true impact of dirty power. Until you can capture all that CO2 that nobody has been worrying about for decades, you don't even know the scope of what dirty power is really doing.
Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?
Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually. :)
> Most people whining about... ...environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives.
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
Indeed. WRT nuclear power plants, I can't say I'm all _that_ impressed by 4th gen. Water cooling is a pretty horrible way to go, very expensive, plus it limits your site selection at the same time it forces your site to be dangerous to locate on - it MUST be near a significant source of water for cooling, which means in the worst-case scenario - a meltdown - you can contaminate your ground water. No thanks.
I really like the gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor design the Chinese are working on. Way safer, gas-cooled, and modular. That's a good way to go.
A high temperature gas-cooled plant could also be used to economically produce hydrogen, which can then be used in a CoGen situation to produce even more power, or to use in hydrogen-powered vehicles.
:) Nice one.
My favorite NIMBY moment in the electricity game (I used to be a reporter reporting on the energy grid in the western United States) was when California decided that not only did they not want to generate electricity generated via a certain percentage of non-green power, they also didn't want to IMPORT it. Yikes. My article title was something along the lines of, "California Says: Not In Your Back Yard". (I can't remember it exactly, this was a few years ago).
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
I think you misunderstand the scale we're talking about. There are comparatively few hydrodelectric dams in North America compared to the number of wind turbines being discussed here. The difference in number is _vast_.
No ink costs & no layout worries. As a former reporter, I gotta say, almost all problems I see with the newspaper industry, as with the U.S. auto industry, are of their own making. *shrug*
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is ... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
And yet, even with being partly subsidized by the government, UPS and FedEx compete quite well with them for package deliveries. My point here is that the USPS is a great example of how a government-subsidized health plan is hardly an automatic death sentence for HMOs, etc.
We see what you are doing here. Government provision of services, by definition, is the exact opposite of free market competition. When you take money from people by force and give it to others, that is NOT competition. Please stop saying that it is.
It seems you don't understand the situation. Let's use an analogy. The United States Postal Service has overnight service, 3-day, and ground service. So do UPS, FedEx, and others. USPS is a quasi-government firm, and yet, mysteriously, UPS and FedEx both compete very well with USPS in the areas they compete in (obviously, only USPS is allowed to do the first-class access-your-mailbox thing). I see the universal health care plan in a similar light. Competition comes when you have options for service. If HMOs, etc. have to compete on quality of care for the first time with someone who DOES absolutely guarantee service (rather than denying claims, dumping clients who actually file claims, refusing service to potential clients with preexisting conditions), then they are likely to get better - one of the tenets of competition. Without such competition, they will continue on like they have been, which only an absolute FOOL would argue FOR.
IMO, anyway.
That doesn't work for my car, it's a VW - it needs metric blinker fluid, which, of course, is really effing expensive! :(
I always take my car in for service at the dealership. I just trade for a new car when the mechanics there tell me it's time to replace the blinker fluid. The mechanics let me in on the auto industry secret that once that happens, it's only a matter of time before everything starts breaking down. It's saved me a lotta hassle. Sure, it's more expensive, but this is one of those instances where you get what you pay for.
It was kinda obvious to me that this was a scam when they told me my warranty for the car was due to expire soon.
I don't have a car.
Okay, smartypants, if you don't have a car, how do you know when its warranty expires?
Finally, proof there IS such a thing as a dumb question! Congratulations! Was this one of the Millennium Problems?
"In one ear and out the other."
If it's Disney doing a sequel to a Pixar movie, that's probably bad. If it's Pixar doing a sequel, (ala Toy Story 2, which I much prefer to Toy Story), then it's probably okay.
Don't be hatin'!
I've never found a free one that was worth a damn, but there are several pay alternatives that are quite good. I'm currently with easynews.com.
If you don't need the binary groups, I'd bet the chances of finding a usable free one will be much higher, though.
As for my Transwarp GS, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Your proposal is acceptable. My ROM 03 machine feels the need for speed. What's your address? :)
The reason I haven't been looking for a ZipGS is because there are some upcoming projects for the TransWarp GS to enable it to go even faster than it already does (which seems to be faster than the top end of the ZipGS). I'm looking to the future (for my Apple IIGS)! :)
Most Obvious Stories are Obvious, Full Story at 11!
I'm gonna buy one and put it next to my Apple II GS. :)
Was that a joke? Some of us actually HAVE working Apple IIGS machines.
Too bad the comparatively low-res iPhone (competing phones are at WVGA resolution) is still much higher-res than an Apple IIGS.
I'm _still_ looking for a TransWarp GS accelerator board for my GS ... I'd like to get it beyond the default max of 2.8mHz. Maybe some day I'll find one on eBay. *sigh*
I find it interesting that companies that make ATMs for systems that track things down to the penny are unable to track much smaller numbers with errors of plus or minus THOUSANDS.
Maybe we should just start voting at ATMs?
Oh wait, that's what the lobbyists do already.
Guess it only used to be a problem then ... although the proof is in the pudding of course.
It makes *pudding*, too?! Jesus Christ, sign me up for one of those bad boys!
I hope it has a Butterscotch mode...