Posted on 03/09/2014 12:37:41 PM PDT by matt04
Oh, I don't know....
For the last 20 years California has been industriously tearing down dams; hydroelectric and otherwise.
And no, the rivers didn't just disappear.
Far as I know, no one has ever even suggested designing a windmill that would not be destroyed by a hurricanes, typhoon, and if there were, what would it be good for when the wind wasn't 200 mph?
Total madness.
The issues they have with fuel cells is getting them to work in low temps and also storing of the fuel. There is a concern with cars running around with high pressure hydrogen tanks. Mercedes has a working model so the technology is available.
(Serious!) I saw one ‘plan’ that would ‘stabilize’ wind energy by using the the power produced to not feed the grid, but rather to either:
A) pump water to a height to run though a hydro-turbine in a (mostly) closed loop system; or
B) hydrolyze water, then use the H & O^2 produced as fuel to power a steam turbine, also in a (somewhat) closed loop!
The secondary system's output would be steady & fed to the grid.
They admitted that it would take several wind turbines to produce enough ‘storage’ to give 24/7 output equal to the peak of one wind turbine.
They even had enough sky-pie left over to claim excess hydrogen for fuel uses, and O^2 for industrial or medical uses could be sold to help offset costs in times of a surfeit of wind producing more than the reserve storage could contain.
Is that just MW for MW, raw production cost?
Or is that levelized cost for new AND usable additional production?
Does that include the necessary new base load backup for wind, or is that just for 'relief power', to allow existing base load plants to throttle down, with no net gain in production?
Not bashing; just asking.
Yes. It is called “oil.”
Yes, but you make my broader point. Even the sun, eventually, burns out. There is no “renewable” energy in the sense of a perpetual motion machine.
Or used for fuel.
Nuclear submarines use electricity in carefully monitored machines that cause water molecules (2 H2O) to be reconstituted as hydrogen molecules (2 H2) and oxygen (O2) molecles. The H2 is passed overboad. The O2 is added to the submarine’s atmosphere to allow the submarine’s crew to breathe and stay alive.
I think everyone knows what would happen if one of the little hydrogen-production cells inside the machine generates so much H2 that some of that explosive gas seeps into an adjacent oxygen-production cell.
How much energy would be released in the resulting explosion that “re-creates” the hydrolyzed water molecules?
Without getting too mathematical, about as much enegy is “produced” as the amount of energy that must be “consumed” by the machines to “break” the molecular bonds in the H2O.
Soooo:
Another example of no “free” energy.
and no “free lunch”.
You are correct, on the billions of years scale.
Most people don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the heat death of the universe.
Right. But the physics principle is still the same.
Stanford used to be a good school.
Amazing how hydroelectric is never considered renewable or “green.”
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