Actually, I am not opposed to windfarms, although they certainly dominate the landscape and carve up any turkeys that are dumb enough to fly through.
I used to live in Oregon, which prides itself on being the first to try any environmental scheme that comes along. A lot of people put in windgenerator towers back in the 70s, but the weather consistently shredded them to bits.
Another scheme was small hydro. The federal government subsidized anybody who wanted to dam up a tiny little stream to produce a minuscule amount of power, and we had to give them permits if they wanted to do it on national forest land. I think some of those installations may still function.
If you've ever seen the Kevin Costner movie "The Postman" some of the scenes were filmed on a hydropower installation that for many years was the most efficient in the world. Water flow was regulated from a man-made lake through a stream to another lake where it was fed into a big pipe and transported several miles to another lake, whereupon it was given a precipitous 300 foot drop before it drove the generators at the bottom. The turbines turned so fast they generated a lot of electricity for the amount of water that went through them. When they had to stop the generators, the water column blew many yards across the river before the pipe emptied. You can see some of this in the background in one of The Postman scenes.
Another cockamamie idea (I thought) in the same area was to pond up water in a high valley, let it down for generation during peak periods and pump it back up during low demand to regain the head. One other idea was to dam up a river, pipe it underground through a tunnel into another drainage, and generate electricity there. Hydropower in my view is efficient but insidious because it puts good bottom land under water.
The archipelago in Southeast Alaska intrigued me because in places it had two tidal cycles a day of more than 20 feet in some places. Tides don't look like they're doing much, but that is one heck of a lot of water moving along there. There oughta be a way to harness the power of tides somehow.
Solar power was popular for a while, and my brother put in a rooftop generator. His neighbors complained bitterly about the reflection from it.
Geothermal power seems like a win-win, if you can get the temperature gradient. Iceland is close to 100% geothermal, if I'm not mistaken. |
