Random thought

[unixronin]

"It's not so much that I hate my life, as that I find the Universe's current implementation of it deeply unsatisfactory.¹"

[1]  See also:  "It's 2008.  We're supposed to be launching manned missions to the outer solar system by now.  And where the !(*%&($% is my flying car?²"

[2]  No, the Möller Volantor doesn't qualify.  How many decades of development and he still can't fly it off a safety tether?  And I don't want to know what its fuel consumption is.  I already have a pretty good idea what its noise level must be — eight Wankel engines driving ducted fans?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uh ... have you checked the math on that? On a global scale, there really isn't all that much solar and wind power available. Most of what there is, is in inaccessible or hostile places like the Sahara and the Gobi Desert, or Antarctica. The Antarctic is a great place for wind power ... if you can keep the equipment from freezing solid or icing up, and if you can get the power off the continent.

In any case, a global grid is a massive engineering problem. Honestly, I don't think it's one we're capable of yet. We have enough trouble just with national supergrids. Expand the US supergrid to global scale and every technical problem grows by at least an order of magnitude. And I don't want to think about the resistive losses, or the size of induced-current surges in a grid that big. I honestly think we'll have beamed-power solar satellites before we have a global power grid.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

hrm. interesting. Fuller had pretty strong math backing up the global grid and decentralised wind (you may be thinking in terms of large power plants rather than distributed systems) back in the 70s.

Grids are funny creatures- you don't really ship power from siberia to NYC, even if that appears to be the net effect.

For solar power specifically, just look at peak power. if every resident of LA had a 50 watt panel running at 50% output on a peak day (say, a heat wave) you'd have 250 megawatts of peak power into the grid. More on a hot cunny day, that 50% output is a bit excessively conservative.

Wind is similar, you don't build megafarms but rather put vertical axis wind generation systems on power poles, more or less.

Obviously, the Sahara or Altamont will be more efficient in some terms, but they ARE inaccessible, they are centralised where power *consumption* is decentralised. So they really aren't more efficient.

There's a lot of power out there, it mostly requires a shift in thinking to harvest it.