Aren’t the thermodynamic laws some are complaining about just a statistical phenomenon? If our multiverse is indeed bifurcating infinitely, won’t there be some universes in which a turbine, whether aided by a leaf blower or not, has the good luck to churn out far more power than expected?
I ask because I (or rather what’s left of me, after 307 years) have such a turbine in my own backyard, in such a universe. It keeps generating electricity to keep my beer cold, and enough money flowing in to keep myself surrounded by [del]gorgeous young nymphets[/del] erudite philosophers.
If you’re reading this message, presumably you’re stuck in the same universe as myself. Drop by sometime for a cold beer!
On a serious note, what would happen if you used solar panels to power the artificial wind source?
I’m not sure if the end result would be any more efficient, exactly, but it seems that having a steady wind would make the turbine output better and more usable by making it more dependable.
I know that the variability of wind speed is one of the drawbacks of wind power. Eliminating that might be worth tolerating a lower overall efficiency.
I’m guessing that you would still waste energy overall, but the gain that you get in eliminating variability could outweigh that loss from an economic perspective, although not an energetic one. But of course, using solar power to smooth out the variability in wind power is limited by the fact that solar power is itself variable.
If you’re talking about photovoltaic solar cells, then the answer is what Bozuit said.
If you’ve got some sort of passive solar panel that heats up in the sun and creates useful convection currents, that could be worthwhile. There have been convection-tower designs based on this idea.
Isn’t that just another way of saying “let’s never entertain the notion of wind or solar power” ?
A worldwide grid isn’t an absolute essential for these forms of power generation. I’m not sure it’s even practically possible, without introducing costs and losses that would outweigh any benefit.
My little town of less than 2000 people was just invaded by the anti-wind people. They held a public meeting, alleging all kinds of crazy shit. Like they might cause cancer. Saying we don’t know the effects of wind power, lets ban it until we can study it.
Isn’t saying it’s not absolutely essential still overstating it? There’s no reason to not to build solar and wind installations tied into our existing grid. The first thing to do is definitely not wait for a worldwide grid.
Somewhat related is the importance of intelligent placement of elements of the array so that individual turbines’ vortices do not decrease the output of their neighbors, and how hills may allow for some of the same funnel-like effects.
Actually, a grid isn’t even the issue. Connecting a solar power plant to the grid and getting it operating is easy because the utility is required to pay for the renewable power that goes into the grid at the same price that it charges to customers for its own power. This is one of the benefits of public regulation of utilities, and is probably the single most important reason why clean energy is going to take off in the very near future; this is not to say that there aren’t significant capital costs and fixed costs involved (including the cost of land). But what is not the case is that an entire “grid” has to be built up from scratch for the new forms of generating power. You just have to “plug in” this new energy source into the already existing grid.
There are already many legitimate businesses that install solar panels on homes and then five years after costs of installation and other fees are paid off, the homeowner gets to make “free money” from selling to the grid. People who are skeptical about clean energy as a business opportunity aren’t up-to-date about what’s really going on. It’s like the time in the 1860s and 1870s when oil drilling and refining was new. It was viewed as a speculative area of business, but in the 1880s, it was growing rapidly, maturing, and anyone who said oil was speculative would be laughed at.
I’m probably biased myself because I’m looking to start a business in the “green jobs” industry. In my humble opinion, the grid is already there. There is no need to make a new grid. You just have to connect different energy producing sources to the grid; in the end, everything converts to electrons flowing through wires.
I’m also a big believer in a less dramatic version of “Moore’s Law” for clean energy (especially photovoltaic cells). Photovoltaic cells and integrated circuits are both made from silicon/other semiconducting materials. I only say “Moore’s Law” in that there will be significant improvements in photovoltaic cells, not in that there will be exponential improvements. There’s just not as big of an upside, for fundamental physical reasons, for solar panels.
But I do expect the “full-spectrum” solar panels that take advantage of every frequency of solar radiation that is emitted to emerge, improve in quality, drop in price, etc. until solar panels’ efficiencies are increasing so quickly and their prices dropping so quickly that solar panel producers that don’t innovate will quickly see, in a few years or so, that their product is obsolete.
Unfortunately, many of the same wind farms are offline because of a lack of adequate transmission lines and political missteps by the foreign (non-Northwest) power companies.
FYI, this is a complete mis-application of Moore’s Law.
Moore’s “Law” (and its many variants) are related to the apparent phenemonon of the doubling of transistor density on a silicon wafer every 18 months (used to be every 12 months).
I believe the particular type of growth you are looking for is logistic, which can be used to model the improvement of a technology and may be applicable to semiconductor technology as well.
No, they are not. If that’s the message you got from this earlier thread, then you need to reread it.
Or to summarize it: last spring, NW wind farms were taken down for several periods due to low demand and the need to reduce water in reservoirs without spilling water. Those periods were just overnight on several days. It may happen again this year.
This assumption is not accurate.
Generally, the faster moving parts move, the more strength required in their materials, and the more maintenance they will need. So costs are probably higher, not lower.