| |
VK3FBD > ENERGY 22.06.05 06:44l 339 Lines 12817 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : F30296VK3FBD
Read: GUEST OE7FMI
Subj: If I ruled the world
Path: DB0FHN<DB0RGB<DB0MRW<DB0WUE<DK0WUE<7M3TJZ<JE7YGF<LU6DTS<ED1ZAC<EA5RQ<
VK7AX<VK3AVE<VK3FRS
Sent: 050622/0256Z @:VK3FRS.#MEL.VIC.AUS.OC #:52356 [Kilsyth] $:F30296VK3FBD
From: VK3FBD@VK3FRS.#MEL.VIC.AUS.OC
To : ENERGY@WW
If I ruled the world
Hi to all on the energy thread.
This is a sort of a bulk reply to the many people who replied to my bull.
Its early days yet but I felt that all of the replies had something valid
To say including the two overseas call signs who went to the effort of
looking
me up in the call book and making an international call to debate my
comments.
Nobody was offensive and for this I am extremely pleased, there may be
hope
for amateurs in general regardless of what you see on packet.
However one of the replies threw down the gauntlet as to what "I" would do
to fix the energy crisis and global warming. Here's my reply
My first thought is that the current approach is psychologically wrong.
Just
think of the old fable of the donkey and the carrot. Current green policy
is
to wave a big stick in the form of trying to take the much valued toys
away from the populace. By toys I mean all the high energy and resources
consuming goods that the industrialised nations have and the non
industrialised nations want. Like the fabled donkey
people will dig their heels in and resist this sort of forced change.
Better to present a carrot and lead the populace along the perceived
better path.
Now what can we use as a carrot......
Let me digress for a moment and mention a
nifty little scam being perpetrated in the name of green technology by a
couple
of our local power companies. They advertise on television and in your
invoice
that you can "volunteer to pay extra for your electricity and they will
put the
extra to building environmentally friendly energy generating plants". What
has
surprised me is that many people are doing just that, paying an extra
donation of 10%
or so on to of the invoiced amount. So far after about 5 years of this
option
I have seen no extra green electricity being produced.
Okay well back to the carrots.
If I ruled the world, or even just ran the green movement I would
institute
several programs.
(1) I would work hard to remove the long haired dirty persona as the
face of
green and would try to project a corporate father figure image.
I
would do this to restore the creditability of the movement and
try
to give an aura of respectability and knowledge. No more
terrorist type
publicity stunts.
(2) I would then divert the green funding away from the upkeep of
world
cruises for the lucky few in the fabled Rainbow warrior and its
sister ships
and start the biggest industrial conglomerate I could fund with
the
single stated aim of finding a use for carbon. Why would I do
this?
Well history has shown that the best way to cause a shortage of
anything
is to find a widely acceptable consumer use for it.
Example. Can we find a way to make carbon conduct better than
copper
or aluminum. Now if we could replace aluminum with a carbon based
cost comparable replacement then straight away we are saving
horrendous
amounts of electricity normally consumed in the production of
aluminum.
As a bonus we are locking up carbon in power distribution
infrastructure.
Example. The production of a carbon replacement for aluminum
also
leads to the thought that it could replace aluminum in lots of
other
consumer goods. Imagine the industrial muscle of a company that
would
be prepared to accept cad (computer aided design) items
electronically
and produce a ready to fit out carbon body for a car, or skin for
a
refrigerator. Carbon based products could virtually replace the
plastics
industry with consequent reductions in the need for petrochemical
products.
Okay that's the first part. Find a use for carbon in consumer products
and we
should have a large reduction in power usage straight off and also less
dependence on oil.
The second part of the large conglomerate would be put to work in the
software arena.
Currently we are being harangued with the need for a method to recycle old
computers
To me it seems obvious that the problem is not the computers themselves
but the ever
increasing demands of (windows based) software. My green software team
would produce
equivalent programs to all the common windows versions but capable of
running on
a Linux or similar environment and on a 286 computer with 32Mbytes of Ram.
Make it uneconomical to throw away that old computer.
As an example I have 24 computers
networked together here. These are all my old 386's and up that have been
replaced
as the ever increasing hunger of modern software made them obsolete. What
wasn't
made obsolete was the disk storage units or the original software. For
instance this
post is being typed on a 386 using notepad. It handles that really well
and at a speed
more than I need for typing. When I have finished I will save the file
over the
network and onto the 486 that I use for running packet. I will turn off
this computer then
until the next time I wish to type a letter.
In this manner I have recycled every single computer that I have ever
bought.
and I am sure other people could do likewise if the incentive was there.
One method of power generation that wasn't mentioned in the various posts
was the
hot air engine. Way back in 1850 or thereabouts (don't quote me on the
date) at
an international world fair a hot air engine developing about 30hp was
demonstrated
The fuel source for this engine was about half an acre of black canvas bag
laying
out in the sun. The working fluid was air. It worked something like a
steam engine
only used the heated air. I don't know how it achieved the thermal
gradient needed
to perform work. It wasn't very efficient but it was only a prototype.
Dare I mention the great Australian (hot) outback yet again. Perhaps
instead of
nuclear power plants we should cover the outback in big black carbon based
sheets
and make a number of large modern efficient versions of this hot air
engine
for generating electricity to use elsewhere. OK I know this only works
during the day time.
but there is also the Gobi and Sahara deserts that get hot at different
times of the
24 hours cycle.
So task four for my big green company would be to develop really high
efficiency
means to transmit power long distances. If we could achieve the art of low
loss
wireless transmission then we perhaps could stick the nuclear power plants
on
the moon or in space and remove the problem from earth completely. I know
this has been
postulated utilising microwave transmission but we are talking about only
5% or less
efficiency and at that rate the solution is worse than the problem, and
that's not
even thinking about the magnificent weapon of mass destruction that this
big
microwave cooker would make. I wouldn't trust myself with this weapon,
much less
any politician.
Even if we couldn't achieve lossless transmission, any method of power
transmission
that was more efficient than the existing system would go a long way
towards cutting
back the heat load on the planet.
Talking about the heatload and global warming, assuming that it is real,
then task 5
for the big green company would be to research and implement a method of
deploying
reflective plastic (carbon?) sheets in orbit. Sheets of sufficient size
to
reduce the incident heat on the planet by an amount equivalent to the
human introduced
heat load. I haven't done the math's but apparently this is not a major
task in that
the sheets can be incredibly thin.
If these were metallized sheets then maybe HF comms could take a sudden
boost in reliability. As with the microwave power transmission these
sheets could
become a two edged sword in that they could be used to deny a "hostile"
nation
any sunlight. Perhaps it might be better if we just deploy the reflective
sheets
directly on the ocean in positions to keep the thermal balance of the
great ocean
currents correct to maintain their flow to the best advantage.
Task 7 would be to produce a better portable energy storage system. Now I
know that
lots of people are working on this but only the fuel cell approach seems
to diverge from
just squeezing a few percent ounces of efficiency from an existing
technology. This
sounds good in theory but I hope I live to see a really new breakthrough
in energy storage.
Something that will store 50 or 60 megawatt hours in a lunch box. Maybe
then we can
offer an alternative to the numerous combustion processes that constitute
the majority
of our portable energy systems. The thought of all vehicles being
electrically powered
I find somewhat pleasant, however you have to remember that this just
shifts the
problem to one location. The energy to charge these lunch boxes has to
come from somewhere.
Finally I would postulate the thought that any improvement in energy
provision has to
be practical, cost effective, and user friendly.
Let me give you two personal anecdotes to illustrate. When I was farming I
lived at
the end of a 50km long single wire electricity distribution system. This
was an 1100 volt line
that fed several households using an earth return with transformers for
230v at each
households connection point. Apart from horrendous voltage variations
due to the heavy machinery
that operated at each farm along the way the line passed through some
inaccessible
mountain country to get to me. When a tree fell on the line or something,
we quite often lost power
for two or three days at a time until a lines team could find and fix the
problem.
To keep my house and farm operating I had two 5Kw portable generators and
one 10kw
semi fixed unit. These were hungry on both diesel and petrol. So being a
stingy
farmer I looked pretty closely into running a methane plant to produce at
least part
of my energy need. First advice I received was to power it with the sheep
"poo".
Well this might have worked but it was totally impractical. Sheep poo is
scattered far and wide
over the paddocks and it would have cost more in energy expenditure to
collect
that what would be recovered from the bio fuel process.
The second fuel suggested was rather clever. Where I was farming we were
inundated
with a non native weed species known as serrated tussock. Normal control
of this weed
was obtained using chemical spraying. Well the suggestion was to harvest
this weed
and use a digester process to extract the fuel.
I built a small digester and utilising a tractor slasher combination
harvested enough
of the weed to fuel the digester for about a year. What a joke. The
process produced
negative energy. By the time the system had been warmed (electrically) to
keep the
digestion process running and the energy costs of the harvesting
included. Plus
the serrated tussock fuel was almost indigestible, the whole system ran at
about -200% efficiency.
Better results were obtained with utilising the serrated tussock in a gas
producer.
For those of you old enough to remember world war two this was a process
where a
combustible fuel was burnt in very oxygen deficient process. It was used
quite a lot
in civilian populations during the petrol shortages of the war time. I
made up
a gas producer and in a reasonably short period had the gas production
going
fairly well using compressed serratted tussock blocks.
. Filtering is very important as the process also produces large amounts
of fine grit and tar in the gas lines.
This process produced useable amounts of gas for the 2kw generator but the
main
disadvantage was that it was not a continuous process and the gas was not
consistent
in BTU's. You had to recharge the system every hour or two with tussock
and that was a major
disadvantage. It meant I had to stop doing all the other farming things
and become
a slave to feeding the gas producer. Okay for a power outage but
definitely not
a replacement for commercially generated power. At least it kept the
fridges cold
and provided a bit of light. A secondary disadvantage was that being
somewhat
isolated we had two fridges and a deep freeze. The 2kw generator could
only start one
of these at a time, so my poor xyl was tasked with switching the units
on and off in a cyclic fashion so that only one ran at any one time. Not
user friendly.
I thought of trying the process with separate combustion and generating
chambers
but never got round to it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
to be continued ...
If long posts like this are not to boring and any one bothers to ask I
will
continue to relate my experiences with alternate energy sources I have
personally tried.
73's to all
Tony VK3FBD
Read previous mail | Read next mail
| |
