Various Energy Alternatives
I’ve been reading about energy this morning. I read about solar steam turbines for a while. There was a person in the late 1970’s who built a solar boiler out of 100 1-foot square mirrors and a lot of metal. The square solar concentrator had to track the sun to focus all the light it collected onto a boiler that generated the equivalent of 6 kw of steam. Very interesting, but not very practical.
Then I read about windmills. The Siemens corporation makes some giant windmills. I read all about how they cast the blades out of a wood-epoxy-fiberglass composite, all in one piece. I read the technical specs on their 3.6 Mw wind turbine. What it said nothing about was the cost of all this machinery. I’m sure these things run in the millions. It costs a lot of cash for tons of materials. Still, it would be a good solution and the wind is basically free. If I had billions of dollars like T Boone Pickens I too would probably buy a lot of windmills.
I just got done reading about using grass as a fuel for a powerplant. Apparently, some places in England and Iowa are already doing this. The plant in Iowa plans to replace 5% of the coal they burn with switchgrass. This will take 50,000 acres of land to grow all this switchgrass. Still, it is supposed to be marginal land that is not in production of food crops. I’m not sure, but there must be a lot of solar energy that falls on 50,000 acres. A quick calculation shows me that that much land could produce 40,000 Mw of peak power if it were covered in photovoltaic panels. That’s not small potatoes.
Of course, the ultimate energy alternative is to just not use so much power in the first place. It is a well-known fact that most of the energy that is used in the world is just wasted. Look at incandescent lightbulbs. These things waste 80% of the energy that they use because they generate so much heat. Just replacing them with fluorescents would cut the energy cost of lighting by 2/3. Still, people use the filament bulbs because they are cheap. Maybe the problem is really not energy. Maybe the problem is money.
Filed under: Main on May 31st, 2008