Is there any type of power generation that....

...would not be opposed by a large percentage of people?

Coal fired plants are protested because of their emissions.

Nuke plants, cause they are nuke plants

Hydro plants would seem like a good choice but environmentalists say that the warmed up back waters harm the environment

Wind farms kill birds and then there are the aesthetics of looking at large numbers of them, plus they make a lot of noise

Solar farms would seem to take up a lot of acreage but on the plus side the acreage they would use would be in the desert
but then that puts them too far away from where the power is needed.

So what is the answer?

I'm guessing you are saying that conserving is more important than producing more electricty.
But I'm sure some new generation capacity is going to be required.

a cheaper more efficient product that is thin and can be put almost anywhere! oh i can't wait til the day an affordable, efficient solar panel is available. solar seems the least problematic if we could get those two things in line.

that can be done on a large scale?

way to put it.

it appears to be low profile and you can rely on the tide changing as long as there is an earth and a moon

or off shore? I'm guessing if they are near shore you would get complaints from shore line residents about the view.

Wave energy extraction can be done anywhere there are waves.

here's one they are building in Ireland

http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-fist-commercial-scale-tidal-energy-generator-nears-completion/9110/picture/43534/

Waves are not caused by the tides, nor vise versa.

Wave energy extraction has far more potential for development than does tidal energy extraction.

I'm guessing that a tidal generator at bay of fundy (the place with the 60 foot tidal change) would be efficient because of the dramatic tidal changes

If you know, why do waves have more potential than tides? I would have guessed that the tides were more reliable/predictable

Wave energy can be tapped anywhere there are waves, although it's easier in relatively shallow areas where anchoring the generation facility is not so difficult.

Also waves tend to build height as they reach a shallower bottom. A tsunami for instance is often not even detectable on a ship in deep ocean but can build to tens of meters or even more when it reaches the shallows.

unless there are issues about heat pollution.

Or OTEC for short..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion

Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC or OTE<1>) is a method for generating electricity which uses the temperature difference that exists between deep and shallow waters to run a heat engine. As with any heat engine, the greatest efficiency and power is produced with the largest temperature difference. This temperature difference generally increases with decreasing latitude, i.e. near the equator, in the tropics. Historically, the main technical challenge of OTEC was to generate significant amounts of power, efficiently, from this very small temperature ratio. Changes in efficiency of heat exchange in modern designs allow performance approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency.

The Earth's oceans are continually heated by the sun and cover nearly 70% of the Earth's surface; this temperature difference contains a vast amount of solar energy which can potentially be harnessed for human use. If this extraction could be made cost effective on a large scale, it could provide a source of renewable energy needed to deal with energy shortages, and other energy problems. The total energy available is one or two orders of magnitude higher than other ocean energy options such as wave power, but the small magnitude of the temperature difference makes energy extraction comparatively difficult and expensive, due to low thermal efficiency. Earlier OTEC systems had an overall efficiency of only 1 to 3% (the theoretical maximum efficiency lies between 6 and 7%<2>). Current designs under review will operate closer to the theoretical maximum efficiency.

nt

http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/info/energy/renewable/otec

The first ever OTEC was in Cuba though, in 1930, so it's hardly a new technology.

I thought that an amazing amount of our energy usage was for cooling (air conditioning or refrigeration). If only 'cold' could be tranported directly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

But it's not practical for long distances..

The vast majority of our air conditioning is pumping heat to (or from in the winter) the atmosphere, if we were to switch over to using the earth as a heat sink the efficiency of our A/C plants would rise considerably although such systems are more expensive initially since you have to install piping several feet below ground level to move the heat carrying liquid below the earth.

This is known as "geoexchange", you pump heat into the ground during the summer, when the ground is cooler than the air and out of the ground in the winter when the ground is warmer than the air.

http://www.groundloop.com/inthenews9.html

Geothermal Comes of Age

To mitigate these risks and reduce the carbon footprint of a typical home, there has been renewed and increasing interest in ground-source geothermal or geoexchange heating-andcooling systems. Indeed, there are 1 million of these residential units installed and working in the United States today. Geothermal systems do not depend on commodity fuels (oil or gas), and they depend only minimally on electricity. The name geothermal derives from the fact that the units use the moderating temperature of the earth to help condition the air of a home. (Residential geothermal should not be confused with drilling to find ultra-hot water sources below the earth.) Through a heat-pump cycle of evaporation, compression, condensation, and expansion, the geothermal system in summer concentrates heat from the house and emits it into the earth, while returning cool air. In winter, the geothermal system concentrates that ground heat to well over 100°F and circulates it back into the house using traditional forced-hot-air, hydronic, or radiant heating systems. With geothermal units (just as with a refrigerator, which is a mini heat pump), a coiled loop contains refrigerant under pressure, but the geothermal coil is not strapped to the back of the unit. Instead, the coil, or loop, is run through the ground, below frost depth. A pump and compressor located above ground drive the system to circulate the refrigerant and deliver hot or cold air to the home, depending on the demands of the season. The EPA found that geothermal can reduce energy consumption by over 40% compared with air-source heat pumps and by over 70% compared with electric resistance heating or standard air-conditioning equipment. (Industry sources claim that geothermal units are, on average, 48% more efficient than the best gas furnaces, over 75% more efficient than oil furnaces, and they outperform the best gas technology— gas heat pumps—by an average of 36% in heating mode and 43% in cooling mode.) Geothermal systems are widely considered highly reliable, require little maintenance, and have long service lives. As for homeowner comfort, surveys by utility companies cited on leading trade association Web sites show a higher level of consumer satisfaction for geothermal than for conventional HVAC systems: 95% of all geothermal customers would recommend such systems to a family member or friend. The EPA, the DOE, and state agencies like the California Energy Commission all endorse geothermal. President Bush’s house in Texas is heated and cooled with a geothermal unit.

With the number of U.S. installations at 1 million, geothermal technology has clearly matured to the point where it is risk free for the builder or developer, if the units are sized and installed properly. The manufacturers of geothermal units are well organized, and they offer remarkably long warranties on the above-ground and below-ground aspects of the systems (50+ years). A leading trade association, Geoexchange (Geoexchange.org), offers excellent resources, including contractor locators, marketing materials, case studies, even a brief educational movie that can assure the most skeptical homeowner.

How Geothermal Works l Accessing ground-source heat. Everywhere in the world, just below frost depth, the earth maintains a constant average temperature between 45°F and 70°F. (In the United States, the average is 50°F–55°F.) To generate heat in the winter and cold in the summer, geothermal systems use a loop of copper or plastic piping buried in the earth, hence the origin of the term ground-source geothermal. The loop contains ecologically friendly refrigerant, which is circulated through the loop under pressure. In the winter, the loop collects the relative warmth from the ground and delivers it to the home’s traditional forced-hot-air system through a pressure-reduction and heat-exchange system. In the summer, the refrigerant collects heat from the house and emits it through the same loop back into the earth, while distributing cooler air like a conventional air-conditioning system (see whole-house schematics, previous page). The compressor and heat exchanger needed to run a typical system require electricity, which can be supplied through photovoltaic panels or from traditional AC power. Geothermal systems emit no gases, so they can be located indoors, even in a closet. They are also notoriously quiet.

If we could get a program going like Germany where individuals and companies install solar on their roofs, each small contribution adds up to a large amount of energy production. Decentralized power production is probably going to be how the future evolves.

Fuel is hydrogen, perhaps lithium as well. Waste products are helium and energy.


Ocean-wave power. Mostly concrete, PVC piping, and stainless steel. I did a post about it here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x190460


Rooftop solar panels would keep the power close. So would vertical-axis domestic wind turbines, small ones, about the size of a refrigerator, that make a kilowatt or so.



I think hydro plants that are designed to allow water creatures to navigate the river (like the salmon) are generally good ideas.

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,180854,00.html

Problem is it requires inexpensive access to space to make it possible..

You would need something like a "launch loop" or a "laser launcher" to make it possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-97b.html

Which we should make anyway.

It's kind of like getting a line to a large ship at sea to tow it, first you shoot over a very light line which you use to haul a somewhat heavier line which you then use to haul the actual towing hawser with.

Going from disintegrating totem poles straight to a space elevator might be just barely possible but it would be ungodly expensive.

:rofl:

Brilliant!

Saying you need cheap access to make the elevator is kind of missing the point; the goal of a space elevator would be to cause relatively cheap access. Of course building the initial one would be expensive, though most of the estimates I've heard have been in the low billions range, which might as well be free considering what it would do to lift costs and volumes afterwards.

Of course, we're still waiting on the strand materials, but that seems to be a case of when rather than if. When those are handled the biggest problems would be political, not economic, between the siting problems, conventional partisan BS, and the utopia-first morons who believe that we need to be flawless before we ever consider such a thing.

The distance of course will be greater the smaller the counterbalancing mass, which then means it takes more energy to put the mass even higher.

And the Iraq war was supposed to pay for itself..

An elevator is probably the cheapest access but, for a variety of reasons some of which you named, it's far from the easiest of the cheaper methods to implement.

As I already said, the problem is analogous to getting a towing hawser to a ship at sea.

the desert somewhere. Thousands of small, decentralized plants are better than a handful of giant farms anyway...If one is damaged by a storm or something, power outages would be contained to much smaller areas, rather than across several states as they can be now, and it would take a lot less time to repair.

Look at all the roof space that just bakes in the sun without doing anything productive. A lot of heat in a building is generated by the sun on its roof—especially homes (as opposed to businesses)—which makes it necessary to use even more power to cool the building down. If you cover a roof with solar panels, not only are you generating electricity, but you're lowering the temperature even more by shading the roof from the sun.

I used to belong to a health club that had a roof almost the size of a football field. Think of the electricity you could generate by covering that roof with solar panels! Good grief, you could cover the roofs of schools, hospitals, supermarkets, shopping malls, office buildings...Some would probably have enough roof space to completely satisfy their power needs, some wouldn't...but even those that didn't could ease the load on the overall grid by whatever amount they could generate.

It would be simple enough for local legislatures to revise municipal and county building codes to mandate that all new structures—whether governmental, residential or commercial—be equipped for solar. The cost could be incorporated into construction costs, which is cheaper than retrofitting an already completed building.

I could keep going. Blah blah blah.

You make sense.
Because you are right.
Placing panels on existing buildings also lessons the enviromental impact that would happen at large farms out in the boonies.
Plus,placing them on buildings allows the building owner to profit form power produced rather than some huge corporation.

already if were economically feasible?

"you could cover the roofs of schools, hospitals, supermarkets, shopping malls, office buildings...Some would probably have enough roof space to completely satisfy their power needs, some wouldn't..."

and so many misconceptions as illustrated in your O.P.

I know that some school districts are converting to solar power and saving tons of money on their energy bills. I think in a large scale operation like that the initial installation cost gets paid off in your energy savings much more quickly than it does for a residential installation. Prices will continue to come down though. It really is the best, most logical answer for large sections of the country.

First make it a requirement on all newly constructed federal buildings, then retrofit other existing buildings. Obviously allow an exemption for historical buildings and such. By the time the government was done buying all of the billions of dollars of panels required, the prices would start to come down for everyone else.

based on who's ox is being gored.

looking out over one.

That's just me, though.

...they are noisy. Would that change your opinion?

The ground footprint of a big wind turbine is rather modest, so it doesn't take up much cropland. You have to space them out so the blades can turn, so they're like 200 yards apart, but the land underneath the blades is perfectly farmable except for the concrete base and the service road.


Just, yanno, don't stand up on your tractor... :scared:



Plenty of people live in noisy areas. I've lived next to an RR crossing for a freight railroad and on the approach flightline to the Twin Cities airport. I didn't mind any of the noises, particularly.

:shrug: To each his own, I guess.

Bigger ones are much more efficient and much quieter, they also don't kill nearly as many birds since the blades turn much less rapidly.

Here's some big wind turbine blades being delivered..

is to get away from large scale farms/power plants and instead place many small generators of different types in every location ..

1. Hydro Generators in Storm Drains...(Imagine the power generated during rain storms to offset what is lost on solar)
2. Solar on every roof, and along the median of every interstate.
3. Small hydros in streams running off the current not by fall water in dam.
4. Power-producing Stirling engines, a type of Thermal transfer engine.
5. Wave energy (endless non-exhaustible supply)

There is no one solution. The solution is many smaller generators on driven by many sources.
The bottom line is that there are any number of ways to drive a generator or to produce the electricity, it is just a matter of how we turn the wheel. We are only limited by the imagination of the people in charge.

It has been made cost ineffective to do anting but buy power from one company, when it would be much better to produce your own and feed into a grid. However that would destroy big power companies.

As a rule, the losses in small electrical generators are considerably higher than those in big ones for a variety of reasons.

Of course there is an advantage to small, localized generation plants too, you don't have the transmission losses that you do with large ones that are spaced much further apart.

Maintenance is also a problem with a great many small plants, a large centralized facility can be much more efficiently maintained than can many smaller ones. One example is solar generation, the cells or reflectors have to be cleaned of dust and debris on a regular basis or efficiency plummets, it's much less expensive to clean a single large area than many smaller ones widely distributed around.

Edited for speling.