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Originally Posted by erich
Dear Uncle Al,
Your logic and math are impeccable, However you seem to ignore the macro energy equation.
All fossil and nuke fuels ultimately add to the heat load of the biosphere while most of the solar / wind / thermal conversion technologies (except geothermal) recycle solar energy instead of releasing sequestered solar energy. This is the goal and definition of sustainability, not over loading the dynamic equilibrium of the biosphere.
Dear Damocles:
At least you seem to take account of this. Although I feel you dismiss the rising curve of increasing efficiency for PV, direct solar to hydrogen, wind and thermal conversion to electricity.
Cheers,
Erich J. Knight
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Mr. K.
Uncle Al is a formidable no-nonsense logician. I KNOW he didn't ignore the heat loading question. He has a flair for the dramatic to make his point without cluttering the argument with "secondary" considerations-his primary point being that electrical efficiencies involve concentrations of generating capacity as well as throughput efficiencies of delivered work.
GSWB is not as efficient as the fossil-fuelled system we have now or simple economics(the profit motive) would have people(corporations) drilling heat taps, building solar collectors, establishing wind farms, erecting PV cell arrays and producing ethanol by the million gross metric ton lot.
There are many reasons why this doesn't happen;
NIMBY
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in560595.shtml
is just one.
I understand that PV cells have recently shown dramatic increases in efficiency that promise a decrease of up to 2x in surface area to generate the same amount of electricity as current PV cells.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/renewa..._PIER_ENPV.pdf
That is significant.
But note that some of the PV cell approaches require scarce and often extremely poisonous resources with energy intensive extraction processes?
http://www.solarbuzz.com/Technologies.htm
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to cram PV cells or GSWB applications into the overall scheme wherever we can.
But how do you supply electricity to a continental railroad network? PV celled locomotives? Try dragging 20,000 ton trains with that solution!
How do you run a wheat combine? Or a farm tractor?
How do you move 100,000 ton freighters?(I have the idea that returning to efficient airfoil[sailing] ships for freighters under 5000 tons; when the cargo transshipped is not time critical makes great economic and environmental sense. Engineering scales where appropiate?)
See? You can be sensible, green, and PRACTICAL.
My argument is that GSWB is not the primary means. It is a niche approach to our energy needs.
Fusion is the means we know that gives the energy outputs we require to maintain our current standards of living in our concentrated cities. It is hugely scalable so that we can become energy rich per person. It isn't clean, though.
Those shells that surround the fusor and act as neutron traps will be radioactive hells to process and safely discard, as one example. And there is HEAT POLLUTION.
Still the throughput work efficiencies of fusion, while lower than our hydrocarbon fuelled generating plants at present, have no limit to scalability or improvement to its practical upper bound as we learn by doing. We can build HUGE and we can build efficient as we learn more about working plasmas in commercial fusion plants.
Then we have to tackle the HEAT LOADING in the bio-sphere. I know this may sound crazy to some, but you could pipe or radiate that heat to secondary systems to do work. Like a two-stage generating plant does now. We are clever hominids. We will find a way to mitigate.
Hydrogen fuel cells by comparison is like the stepchild in the overall energy equation. It, however, to my mind, is the GREEN half of the equation. In the United States, about half of our manmade greenhouse gases comes from autos and trucks. I would clearly like to replace that air pollution with water vapor.(More potable water to precipate out as RAIN! See I lump everything together. Hydrogen fuel cell cars can[very marginally] affect the current potable water shortage in America's west.)
Jokes aside, I have very green reasons for my argument.
