It's late so you may not see this before this thread goes to thread heaven.

We all want to believe that there are alternatives that will work.  But, the reality is that homo sapiens are sucking every resource dry - water, aerable land, gas, oil, the sea, minerals, forests; everything.

It is a package deal.  Gaia if you will.  There are no magic answers.  I say this from personal experience since I embraced alternative energy and a concern for sustaible living 30 years ago.  I'm not into theoretical arguments about alternatives.

I'm not going to tell you are wrong because a change in reality only comes through experience.

Todd

"Renewables can provide more than enough.  Wind in the US could generate twice the electricity we use now.  The earth receives 100,000 terawatts of solar energy continously from the sun, and humans use the equivalent of 4.5 terawatts on average."

One thing that interests me about renewables is that there seems to be a tacit assumption that, because they're renewable, they don't have a significant downside to their use.

All that solar energy being dumped on the Earth isn't going to waste, for example. Much of it heats the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, which makes conditions amenable for life. I wonder what environmental changes would result if humanity were to capture a significant chunk of solar energy, say 10  or 20 percent (20,000 terawatts), and redirect it through technological infrastructure. Sure, waste heat would contribute to keeping things warm (perhaps too warm!), but it would be distributed through the atmsophere in a different way. Could be detrimental.

I wonder what harnessing 4.5 to 9.0 terawatts via wind energy would due to local environments? Wind turbines tap into fluid momentum, and must produce a lot of friction on airflow. On a massive scale, wind "farms" could, perhaps, alter local wind-climates (at the surface), which may also have some interesting effects on local ecosystems.

Just some ideas. I would like to see more deep thought on just what the true ramifications may be for a full-scale "power-up" on renewables.

-best

The future may look a lot like the past:

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My car's a darkish color and heats up quite a bit, I have to run the AC once the outside temperature exceeds 75F! I could avoid using the AC a lot more if it were a much lighter color, and didn't have a huge expanse of black dashboard under the sloping windshield. Anyone who has a Prius knows what I mean.

The A/C unit aboard a car will use up energy if for no other reason being that it causes the engine to have a faster idle. That causes the gas mileage drop. With my Kia Rio of Year 2001 the car has the mpg as above. 28 in winter and 24.5 in summer. Aggressive driving is no help! :)

As I drive home on my commute, I get to see (and marvel at) a substation. You have the "extreme" voltage transmission lines go to it, then it feeds huge transformers and it has giant capacitors to even out power factor. The conductors between the parts are exposed pieces of pipe.

In downtown Chicago, the extreme voltage power is carried underground. But that takes heavy-duty insulation on the wiring. Possible all right, but not cheap. Even a "mere" 4,200 volts takes some impressive insulation on the wires. It's way cheaper to have exposed cable on towers for long range power transmission - despite lossiness.

It was an uphill battle for U.S. Dataport, a company in San Jose, Calif., that planned a $1.2 billion server farm that would be the world's largest data center. It called for 10 huge air-conditioned warehouses on 174 acres that would constantly draw 180 megawatts of electricity--about enough to provide energy for all the homes in a city the size of Honolulu.

Relocating server farms to rural locations shaves pennies per kilowatt-hour. But because server farms can consume as much power as a city of some 35,000 people, even modest reductions in electricity rates can save millions of dollars a year.

Known as telecommunications hotels, server farms or data centers, these warehouses for computers, operating 24 hours a day, are also huge power guzzlers.

Developers are planning more than 46 of them in New York City and Westchester County over the next four years, according to Consolidated Edison. Dozens of similar projects are planned for the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs, according to real estate firms and power companies.

But while the explosive demand is good news for an industry that needs some lately, it is alarming to some others -- most notably to energy providers. Con Edison officials say that the growth of server farms in coming years could contribute to already-looming power capacity difficulties in the New York region.

A single low-rise installation planned for the South Bronx would draw 180 megawatts all by itself when it is operating at its peak. By comparison, the World Trade Center, with its twin 100-story towers and underground shopping mall, draws 87 megawatts.

Con Edison engineers say they have been taken aback by the fact that the 46 server farms have asked for a minimum draw of 500 megawatts of electricity -- roughly the amount of power required by 500,000 homes. The requests would increase the load in Con Edison's service area, all of New York City and Westchester County, by 4 percent. The peak load, the maximum power used at the height of consumption, is now about 11,850 megawatts.

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The average data center consumes 60 to 100 kilowatts of electricity per square foot, compared with 6 to 8 kilowatts per square foot in an average commercial office building, said Tom Uhl, the project manager for Con Edison's telecom hotel team.

Q&A: Amory B. Lovins
Energy Expert Talks About California's Crisis

Don't the big Web-hosting facilities such as Exodus consume a lot of power?

You will often read in the press that they use 100, 200, even 300 watts a square foot, which would mean that they look like an office but act kind of like a small smelter. They don't actually use that much -- the measured intensity is typically around 30 to 60 watts per square foot. However, even that could be very much lower.
In our own office last year, we replaced four Windows NT servers with a little Linux box the size of a book, called a Rebel NetWinder. It peaks at about 15 watts, and normally pokes along at a few watts. It's faster, cheaper and more capable than the four NT boxes put together. It doesn't take up much space, and it uses 98 or 99 percent less electricity than the four boxes it replaces.

I pledge allegiance, to the flags,
Of the Divided States of America,
And to the Republics, for which they stand,
50 Nations, under Greed, further divisible,
with poverty and injustice, for most.

I developed that not-such-a-pledge back last century!

The big cost is the man hours for designing, producing, assembling and testing the satellite, its custom instruments and the launcher.

The sensetive part is probaly if something would stop those workers from working and not move closer to work during a powerdown scenario and if manny producers of parts and subassmeblies goes bankrupt and wont restart buisness with new owners due to having the bulk of their business in other areas with low demand.

But a tenfold increase in metal prices and a hundredfold increase in rocket fuel cost will not stop launching of essential satelites.

If you worry about the above scenarios get the satellite, rocket and key subasembley manufacturers to increase the ammount of in-house work and move suppliers closer to the main factories. Use non in-house electronics and so on with a solid demand in the civilian and military sector. And plan for building some nice neighbourhoods close to the factories perhaps even staring on them.

The proof for this being possible is in Indias space program when India were much poorer then today.

But it is of course possible for a military industrial complex to prioritize away the production of vital services and fuble the means to assure fulfilling long term contracts. But that is not an energy problem, its a management, politics and smart customers problem.

This prompted a complete reanalysis of the Nordic grids and a revision of the common standards. The basic goal is to weather one N-1 during maximum (winter) load and then another one after the 15 minutes it takes to get the spare gas turbines on line. (An N-1 is the at any time most loaded powerplants, powerline, transformer or busbar going down. )

The freak accident seems to have led to about a doubling of the maintainance pace of the switchyards but I dont know if and how they have solved this kind of sensitivity to arces blowing in an unfortunate direction. And I am only 90% sure since I have not cheked the budget and yearly reports from the authority running our HV grid but they use to do what they plan.

The larger investments in redundancy will take a few more years before they are done, they are slowed down by NIMBY politics. And I guess the old work for making the major powerplants able to go to house turbine running have continued, not all of them weatherd this disturbance and thus took extra time to get on line.

Perhaps this is helped by the political dynamics of the grid spanning several countries? We do not accept wekanesses in our neighbours powerlines taking our grid down and vice versa. Chould not Canada put preassure on you?

Asian cars seem to be the only quality ones these days.

I'm so poor I owe the bank $5,000

To which his friend replies:

I'm so rich I owe the bank $500,000