Seven Generational Ruminations

The "cubic mile of oil"--a metric roughly equivalent to the amount of oil consumed worldwide each year--is frequently used to explain the challenge facing solar, wind, geothermal and biomass power. What would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil? The best location for specific technologies varies, and some areas are best for one technology or another. Some places are windy, others sunny, the wind varies from season to season, and geothermal power is easily tapped only in volcanic regions.

"Clearly, the world needs a massive amount of carbon-free electricity by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions." This is the key of a salon.com article discussing a specific form of energy technology that could very well make a huge difference to our world. Basically, to solve for global warming requires getting to an energy which doesn't have, as a side effect, to cause global warming.

There are many alternative energy technologies which could do this to some extent but might not work so well. For example wind power only produces electricity when the wind is blowing..

The Princeton, N.J.-based company is working on a material that, when combined with another substance, will generate electricity with ambient room heat, Andrew Surany, the company's president, told CNET News.com this week.

Conceivably, one could take that material and fashion it into a passive fuel cell that can create power by just sitting in an ordinary room heated to about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to self-charging electronic devices.

One common critique of wind power is it's only available when the wind is blowing. Often hot days have no wind, hence the power isn't available when it's most needed. And wind is gusty, the strongest winds might be happening at times other than when the power is needed. While this point is thrown out to say that wind power is no good, what it means is to use wind power means finding a way to store electricity generated when the wind is strong and releasing it when its needed later.

Want to get off the grid? the Electric grid that is. The QR5, from U.K.-based Quietrevolution, is a residential-scale wind turbine that generates enough electricity to power a standard U.S. home or a small office. It also looks like a piece of wind-powered sculpture. Unlike the shape of a conventional windmill propeller, it’s a Vertical-axis wind turbine.

Prior coverage of vertical axis wind turbines: Vertical axis versus horizontal axis wind turbines

This seems to be an interesting threshold to have reached ... for a whole country, Spain, to get the majority of their electricity from a renewable resource like wind power.

Route 50 Conversations: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio is part of a goofy series of stories on NPR this week. Their idea is that as the New Congress is heading towards Washington DC, they're calling regular folks from across the U.S. For this story they're following U.S. Highway 50 calling people in small towns along the highway. The series of stories is largely fluff, but this particular one has several people saying stupid things about the Oil situation.

According to Tree Hugger, Audubon Society "Strongly Supports Wind Power" even though many environmentalists get knots in their stomach thinking about the birds being killed by wind turbines. There have been studies recording birds being killed by being hit by wind turbine blades, but there are other studies on why birds get killed by wind turbines, how to avoid the bird deaths, and in any case the rates of bird death due to wind turbines are lower than birds killed by flying into skyscrapers.

The typical wind turbine is a propeller sitting atop a tall pole. It makes a fair amount of noise, apparently from vibrations that also require frequent maintanence of the turbine. It's difficult to get this kind of wind turbine installed in urban settings because of the noise. Yet, wind energy is inexpensive and becoming cost competitive with the major power systems.

While wind power is getting economically feasible, it's facing one repetitive criticism. That the turbines kill lots of birds.

I saw a study once describing this. The idea is based on the wind farm in California's Altamont Pass. The experience there is that those turbines do kill lots of birds, especially rare raptors. However further study showed several fixable problems with the Altamont Pass wind farm, and the solutions have been put into use in newer wind farms. Why the solutions haven't also been put into use in the Altamont Pass is beyond me.