It's all over but for the sweating?

[niky]

I imagine a coastal cave with an exhaust windmill powered by air pressure would give you a tidy amount of power.

You know... a lot of factories round these parts used to have exhaust turrets that simply free-wheeled in the air, pumping hot air out... I wonder how much power you'd get out of them?

[freebeard]

They're small and can barely get out of their own way, but it hurts if you stick you finger in one when it's running; so maybe you could light some LEDs. I've got one on the roof of my abode. I run it seasonally to reduce load on the air conditioner.

There exists a feature on the Oregon coast near Otter Rock called the Devil's Punchbowl. It will blow sea-foam 20-30ft into the air and that's just from the surf. But waves aren't driven by the Moon.

[Arragonis]

The latest Al Gore promotion tested...

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/reality-drop/

Ha....hahahahahahahahahaha

[Arragonis]

Some more on the UKs Climate Change Act - nobody read it, not even the government proposing it!

The green energy mirage will cost the earth - Telegraph

One reason Britain has gone so far down the green path is that politicians have not been honest about its economic implications. During the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, which commits Britain to cutting net carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, the energy minister Phil Woolas rejected his own department’s estimate that the costs could exceed the benefits by £95 billion. The House of Commons never debated the costs and the Bill was passed, with only five MPs voting against.

An even more egregious example is provided by Ed Miliband, when he was climate change secretary. The Tory MP Peter Lilley had written to Mr Miliband to say that, based on his department’s own impact statement, the Climate Change Act would cost households an average of between £16,000 and £20,000. The future Labour leader replied that the statement showed that the benefits to British society of successful action on climate change would be far higher than the cost. Mr Miliband should have known this was untrue; if he didn’t, he had no business certifying that he’d read the impact statement, which he’d signed just six weeks earlier. The statement only estimated the benefits of slightly cooler temperatures for the world as a whole, not for the UK.

"Ed" Milliband might be our next PM...

...we're doomed.

[Arragonis]

More wind farm joy

Wind farms paid £10,000 a day to sit idle in blustery conditions | The Times

National Grid has begun paying wind farms to turn themselves off to balance the system when either electricity demand plummets or the amount of power generated is higher than anticipated. These extra costs are passed on to electricity suppliers such as British Gas and ultimately paid for by consumers in the shape of higher energy bills

So I pay and get nothing back.

Madness.

[NeilBlanchard]

Right, and we will get grid storage soon enough. We can't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

[freebeard]

Another triple post, Arragonis. The rest of us need to hold our end up.

In the USofA, in the anti-war movement of the 1960's what we learned is "to fight it is to feed it". To focus on political machinations is to court madness; the abyss stares back.

The social anarchist solution would be to just go out and create the solutions directly and not even ask politics to stop screwing up.

R. Buckminster Fuller, who refered to himself as 'Guinea Pig B', saw his life as an experiment to see what one person could do:

"I AM NOW CLOSE TO 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed."

from the forward to Inventions

NeilBlanchard -- Highly efficient (DC?) transmission, pumped storage in the mountain-tops or flywheels, base load from Moon power, opportunistic harvesting of solar (wave, wind, solar), peak demand met with localized solutions (methane, geothermal). It ain't rocket science. Or is it?

An electrical inter-tie cross the Bering Strait would for more for peace than anything else could, IMHO.

[freebeard]

Double post. I took the document at the link, the Introduction to Inventions, and ran it through OSX Summarize. Here is the single most relevant sentence:

I saw that there was nothing to stop me from studying -- hopefully to discover, comprehend, and eventually employ design-wise -- the integrated total family of generalized principles by which nature operates this magnificent, human-passengered, spherical spaceship as entirely enclosed within an external set of physically unique, spherically concentric environmental zones altogether producing the critically complex balance of intertransformative energy conditions essential to maintaining an omniregenerative planetary ecology -- all accomplished in local Universe support of eternally omni-interregenerative Universe itself by means of planet Earth's syntropic, biochemical capability to photosynthetically convert stellar radiation (primarily that of the Sun) into hydrocarbon-structured vegetation that in turn is converted as "food" into all manner of biological proliferatings, ultimately after aeons of enormous heat and pressure treatment produced by deep-Earth burial -- to be converted into fossil fuels.

He did love his run-on verbosity. Here is the single most relevant paragraph:

I hope this book will prove to be an encouraging example of what the little, average human being can do if you have absolute faith in the eternal cosmic intelligence we call God.

Not to offend the atheists, look carefully at his wording.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

More wind farm joy

Wind farms paid £10,000 a day to sit idle in blustery conditions | The Times

So I pay and get nothing back.

Madness.

So explain how this is fundamentally different from having peaker plants in the system, which may run only at infrequent times of high load, and so command a high price for their output? Why are customers paying for those plants when they're just sitting idle most of the time?

Or indeed, why hospitals, data centers, and suchlike should pay lots of money for backup generation in case of power failure. Back when I used to work for the local power company, their office building, which contained the system control room, had backup power from batteries and a diesel generator. You could, with equal justice, ask why the customers were paying for the cost of that seldom-used installation.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

So explain how this is fundamentally different from having peaker plants in the system, which may run only at infrequent times of high load, and so command a high price for their output? Why are customers paying for those plants when they're just sitting idle most of the time?

Or indeed, why hospitals, data centers, and suchlike should pay lots of money for backup generation in case of power failure. Back when I used to work for the local power company, their office building, which contained the system control room, had backup power from batteries and a diesel generator. You could, with equal justice, ask why the customers were paying for the cost of that seldom-used installation.

The CCA commits the UK to an 80% cut in CO2 "emissions" - we've had that argument over earlier pages, lets stick with power for the moment.

To do this a lot of power has to come from "renewables". To build those, private investors had to be "incentivised" with a guarantee that they would see a return, otherwise they would invest elsewhere and none of this stuff would be built and the 80% target would not be met.

Those subsidies include provision for when the wind doesn't blow - after all how can those poor investors be expected to handle the risk of no wind ? (hang on, isn't risk part of the idea of investment, oh never mind...)

So even if windmills don't make any energy they still get paid - from energy bills. And when they need backup, which is idling and uses energy to do so - those will also be subsidised from energy bills.

If we do see some blackouts or maybe some brownouts and people begin to realise that we have just closed our coal plants due to the CCA and this is only going to get worse then the public may no longer be willing to accept this situation.

Background to the CCA here.

One of the most bizarre features of the Climate Change Act – put through by Ed Miliband when he was our first climate change secretary and passed almost unanimously by MPs – is that it was largely drafted by a young green lobbyist, Bryony Worthington, seconded to the Civil Service from Friends of the Earth, where she had been in charge of their global warming campaign.