On Sep 11, 2005, at 3:43 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I suspect that large arrays of wind farms would have an effect similar > to forests. We've chopped down a lot of forests over tha last few > hundred > years, so this doesn't worry me. > > Tidal power would slow the earth's rotation a little faster than it is > slowing anyway from friction - probably not a big deal. > > Removing a significant fraction of energy from say the Gulf Stream > strikes me as asking for trouble. > > Regarding jet streams, I would be worried if it were possible. They > wiggle around so much that I can't imagine any practical method of > tapping their energy.
I remember some blue sky stuff that proposed wind turbines hanging from high altitude balloons, anchored by long tethers. I suppose the tethers were supposed to carry current to the ground, though I'm now struck by the weight of a few miles of high tension copper or aluminum line. As far as staying in the jet stream, It seems like it would be trivial to design a self-steering system like that used for singlehand sailing. If the tether's anchor points were far enough apart, the system could probably swing a few miles north and south and around a hundred degrees or more of the compass, tracking the strongest winds. I think the jet stream shifts hundreds of miles, so I don't know what that would be worth. Anyway it was this kind of big scale extraction that seemed like it could have devastating consequences. Of course you'd need millions of acres of ground level turbines to extract the kind of energy that a wind farm hanging in the jet stream might capture. But I remember reading about this and the proposals to hang big blades in the gulf stream and thinking, "Oh Jeez! Another massive engineering project with wildly unpredictable side effects! Taryn http://ornae.com/ _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
