Sorry - but I've been there. I was an "alternate energy" engineer quite a
few years ago, specializing in solar, both in North America and overseas in
India, Pakistan and Thailand. Wind power is inconsistent (like I
said). Solar power - if you put panels on every square metre of the US -
may supply lots of energy. Prohibitive cost? Yup.
We also have three levels of hot air in Canada: Federal, Provincial and
Municipal. Lots of potential there.
Small hydro? Location-specific, but as I said, consistent.
Biomass? Lots of logging here in Canada, as well as crop waste; lots of
potential. Some years ago the Tennessee Valley Authority had some
excellent, quite ambitious plans for harnessing biomass. Like I said, they
tackled the logistics and the rest fell into place.
P.
At 04:21 PM 3/15/2006 -0500, you wrote:
Philip Winestone wrote:
For countries such as the US and Canada, renewable power such as solar
energy is quite inadequate.
That's incorrect. The U.S. wind power in the top ~5 states is larger than
the power from all of the oil produced in the Middle East. (That is, wind
power from places where turbines are allowed, excluding national parks,
bird migratory lanes, urban areas and so on.) Solar power in the southeast
could also easily supply all U.S. energy needs. As I recall, advanced,
large scale solar in the Mohave desert could probably supply the entire
world with energy, but the cost would be prohibitive.
There are areas in the U.S. without much renewable power, such as Georgia
and Washington DC. (If we could harness stupidity, cupidity and hot air,
Washington alone could supply the whole nation.)
Power sources such as small hydro, where to some extent the power output
is consistent, is attractive, as is biomass to some extent.
Hydro is tapped out. Biomass is far too small to make a significant
difference. Biomass is a form of solar energy which happens to be less
than 0.1% efficient, which is ridiculous.
- Jed
