I used solar and wind power for FREE this week - drying laundry on the line.
I wonder if THAT will ever catch on, or am I headed for the Re-Education Camp now that I’ve admitted to cutting out the Middle Man and denying politicians their cut of the action?
*SNORT*
Have never understood why the greenies haven’t insisted on going back to the installation of clothes lines. We didn’t have a clothes dryer for at least the first 25 years of my life. Loved the smell of fresh sheets on the bed and whites certainly were whiter without having to use so much of that “evil” bleach.
There is a place and economically viable means of applying both solar and wind power - neither of which involves the production of electricity.
Wind power is just great for pumping water up from a well, and delivering it to a storage cistern, especially in areas where no electricity is readily available. Rural homesteads all across America had just such a system in place over a century ago, and it proved to be reliable and pretty largely trouble-free, if sited and designed effectively. Its biggest objection - it was slow, and during extended periods of no or minimal wind, the stored supply of water would run out, unless augmented by hand pumping of water.
Solar power is an excellent method of creating dehydrated fruits, as witness the production of raisins from grapes, and as a means of storing heat energy for various residential and industrial purposes. A well-designed heat collection pond, which is built on an impermeable base (lined with high-density plastic), then carefully filled first partially with highly saline water, then a layer of fresh water (which is much less dense) is flooded over the saline layer, carefully avoiding mixing at the interface. So long as the water is NOT agitated, the saline layer will be always on the bottom, and the sunlight penetrating the fresh water passes through to the saline layer, which traps the heat, growing warmer and warmer, but without the action of evaporation (prevented by the top layer of fresh water), most if not all the heat is retained in the saline layer.
By using heat-exchanging coils that extend from the site where the heat energy is to be used, some sort of heat pump may be set up to extract this heat energy, resulting in net cooling of the saline layer, but for purposes of space heating, the heat retained in the saline layer is enough to carry through most of the cooler times of the year to maintain a decent indoor temperature in home or industrial locales, and recharges over the following summer.
Electrical generation from solar and wind sources is absolutely a niche solution, applicable only where the grid is too far away or it is impractical to run external power supply lines because of terrain or low population density