Chris, its damned sexy, if it it superabundant, affordable, and gives this even at 3% efficiency. Look to using molten salt for storing wind and sun power for nighttime and winter. Heats released for thermionic conversion and we have electricity all the time. Then there's the infra-read voltaic cell, recently invented (last month) that gives electricity all the time, from the sun, and whatever the Earth radiates from geothermal heat. Nifty, but not ready for prime time. So cheap and rugged is sexy ;-)
-----Original Message----- From: Chris de Morsella <[email protected]> To: everything-list <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Mar 4, 2014 11:38 pm Subject: RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LizR Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 4:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 5 March 2014 09:56, <[email protected]> wrote: according to a study today out in New Scientist, a researcher has estimated that OTEC power,even with 3% efficiency, can produce 4000 times our current consumption. It may even be affordable. We may have a good way out. What's OTEC? Oops silly me, Il'l look it up.....OK. It's solar, via the oceans. Nice. I’ve looked at OTEC in the past, as you said it is essentially harvesting stored solar energy stored in the warm surface layer above the thermocline. There are however some formidable engineering issues dealing with salt corrosion, oceanic storms and such. They tried to build one – a ship based unit -- decades ago; I believe corrosion and other such problems were too costly. One place they are using OTEC is Hawaii – maybe the only place that I know of. There is an installation (or at least was operating a few years back) where they were pumping up the deep cold water onto an on land installation. They were able to use this quite cold water for air-conditioning & concurrent production of some fresh water – the cooled air loses a lot of its water vapor as dew. I am not sure that this unit was producing electric energy as much as off-loading the air-conditioners load that would have otherwise been sucking electricity down from the grid… do perhaps indirectly in the form of negawatts (e.g. negative watts) The biggest energy source we have available in fact is energy efficiency. In the US buildings consume the lion’s share of total energy consumed, far more than the transportation sector for example. By just doing wide spread insulation retrofits, putting in double and triple pane glass, and by using energy efficient lighting – I have seen estimates that almost half the energy currently used could instead be saved (reserves would then last longer giving us more time to figure out an answer). This is by far the most significant thing we can do; this is the low hanging fruit. It is not sexy and is low tech for the most part, but it is by far the most effective action our society can take at this juncture, given the very poor energy efficiency base line of our nations built structures. Chris The trouble is, New Scientist solves the world's problems regularly, as well as discovering the secret of life the universe and everything and a cure for cancer every other week. I bet most of their gosh wow stories never get off the drawing board. I hope this one does. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
