On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 05:02:44PM +0530, shiv sastry wrote: > Nobody knows the local effects of removing 0.05% (or more?) of energy locally
Have you heard of trees? Solitary big ones, like redwoods? Well, there are even no trees offshore. But I wouldn't do it offshore, I would put the installations directly on the coast, or where there's wind. I'm not a big friend of tidal and wave power, but there U.K. might have certain advantages, particularly if we assume insolation up there is a fraction of the continent, e.g. Southern Germany. > from surface winds in terms of pollen and seed dispersal, insect life, and > micro-regional weather patterns over say 50 years. But we do know the alternatives of doing nothing, which will result in a population crash, and a world that is unlivable. > We THINK it is probably OK. When you analyze the impact of aeolean installations my first thought would be fabbing footprint, and the operation costs, including environmental aspects of building and maintaining offshore platforms. But frankly, the issue of energy is a red herring. It doesn't exist in resource space, only in engineering space. > What percentage of energy extraction is safe? How was the figure arrived at? Currently, humanity needs about 1/10000th of entire Earth (that is surface, not orbit) insolation. In contrast, we're tapping one third to one half of Earth entire photosynthetic resources, which is certainly not sustainable. > What regulations are in place to ensure that excess energy is not bled away? Are you suggesting we should mirror space? > What is known about overuse? You've lost me here. How can you overuse a free source of energy, which gets constantly replenished, and would otherwise be only useful to heat up the cosmic microwave background? -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
