http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/13/mackay.energy/index.html
Begin quote from cnn.com above web article:
In total, the European lifestyle uses 125 kWh per day per person for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity. That's equivalent to every person having 125 light bulbs switched on all the time. The average American uses 250 kWh per day: 250 light bulbs.
And most of this energy today comes from fossil fuels. What are our post-fossil-fuel options?
Among the energy-saving options, two promising technology switches are the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles can be about four times as energy-efficient as standard fossil-fuel vehicles) and the use of electric-powered heat pumps to deliver winter heating and hot water (heat pumps can be four times as energy-efficient as standard heaters).
Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.
As a thought-experiment, let's imagine that technology switches and lifestyle changes manage to halve American energy consumption to 125 kWh per day per person. How big would the solar, wind and nuclear facilities need to be to supply this halved consumption? For simplicity, let's imagine getting one-third of the energy supply from each.
To supply 42 kWh per day per person from solar power requires roughly 80 square meters per person of solar panels.
To deliver 42 kWh per day per person from wind for everyone in the United States would require wind farms with a total area roughly equal to the area of California, a 200-fold increase in United States wind power.
To get 42 kWh per day per person from nuclear power would require 525 one-gigawatt nuclear power stations, a roughly five-fold increase over today's levels.
I hope these numbers convey the scale of action required to put in place a sustainable energy solution. What about tidal power? What about wave power? What about geothermal energy, biofuels or hydroelectricity? In a short article, I can't discuss all the technology options.
But the sober message about wind and solar applies to all renewables: All renewables, much as I love them, deliver only a small power per unit area, so if we want renewable facilities to supply power on a scale at all comparable to our consumption, those facilities must be big.
If you don't want to build 1 million wind turbines, you can drill 1 million geothermal boreholes instead.
Before I close, I would like to say a few words about the idea that "the hydrogen economy" can magically solve our energy problems. The truth is that, in energy terms, today's hydrogen-powered vehicles don't help at all. Most prototype hydrogen-powered vehicles use more energy than the fossil-fuel vehicles they replace. The BMW Hydrogen 7, for example, uses 254 kWh per 100 km, but the average fossil car in Europe uses 80 kWh per 100 km.
In contrast, electric vehicles use far less energy: as little as 20 kWh per 100 km, or even 6 kWh per 100 km. The problem with hydrogen is that both the creation and the use of hydrogen are energy-inefficient steps. Adopting hydrogen as a transport fuel would increase our energy demand. And, as I hope the numbers above have shown, supplying energy to match our demand is not going to be easy.
The public discussion of energy options tends to be emotional, polarized, mistrustful and destructive. I hope that focusing attention on the numbers may make it possible to develop honest and constructive conversations about energy. end quote
So, to sum up my reaction to all this: Obviously, a California sized wind farm is not only not going to supply all our energy needs 42kwh per person per day nationally as opposed to the 250 kwh per person per day we need at present. Also, I'm not sure anyone would put up with a California sized wind farm anywhere in the United States even if it were distributed between western states that have plenty of deserts and unused lands, especially because that would be only 1/5 of our energy needs per day per person in the U.S.
So, obviously a variety of options need to be considered. But I think a good start would be to solarize(install solar cell collection centers on site) for individual schools, hotels, government buildings, and corporations like Google has done in California already. If there is enough sun and the electricity doesn't have to be transported very far there wouldn't be enough electrical line drop even at lower voltages at individual independently owned generation stations. This fact enables individual property owners, ranchers, farmers, hotels, companies, corporations, government both local, state, and federal to put up either solar arrays for power or in some cases wind power would be allowed. This would be a good beginning to solving our problems long term. And at least in California they would be allowed to sell any excess electricity back into the national electrical grid through their local power companies.
This next website should take you to an article Called:Ranch Harvests Suns Power
http://www.montereyherald.com/news/ci_12357900
If it doesn't come up under above website number go to montereyherald.com and type in:
Ranch harvests suns power.
This article talks about Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur and how they rent their power from Recurrent Energy out of San Francisco from Solar panels installed on Post Ranch Inn Property. 90% of their energy is supplied by the panels at lower rate than they would pay Pacific Gas and Electric for electricity. They are also able some days to sell the overage of electricity back to Pacific Gas and Electric and make money on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment