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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (6269)	4/3/2005 5:24:15 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

Wind Talking. A Ghost comes back to haunt. look.ca Cost competitive. If it were not, then it would fade like a roll fax in the hot sun. There are a couple of things that look attractive at first to the boon-doggied semi-technoid. One is wind/water power, and the other is satellite com. Wind Power looks great until you add up the useful system cost for an individual house and calculate how many years electricity that would buy at current rates. Of course an industrial user may pay about 11 cents a KW all up, so if he needs a meg or more, a wind gennie may start to make sense in high wind area. Still a head scratcher though. In the "old days" some of the paper plants and a few mines put in water, and unless they were totally brain dead and bureaucratically inefficient, the flow through power had to pay over time. Maybe if a 10-15 KW wind gen cost about 25 K it might start to get interesting. You would need better battery/splitters than they have currently. Something in thyristors would be good. Efficient, computer controlled wave form. If a 1.5 meg wind generator cost 1.5 megabucks -- by engineering theory, then a 15KW, or 20 HP set would be the cube root of 100 squared or 21 time cheaper or 70K bucks. (Cost increases as the square, capacity as the cube. That will produce 6570 dollars worth of electricity a year. If stored and split out properly, it might do for a few homes. But a stove, a hairdryer, a car heater, 10 lights, a microwave, a TV and two computers will need 5KW drain. Throw on the Skil saw and you suck up another 7000 watts in one knot. Peak drain is always the problem. If you can get satellite com, then it is Ok for internet. It works 60-40 for phones, as the roundtrip delay does not allow true full duplex or simultaneous bi-directional talk. Voice over IP with whacked out DSL is now very good and you can hardly tell that the other party is on it. There is a very slight amount of clip or cut out on voice in and out, as if they had a barely detectable ghostly hiccup or stammer. Otherwise it is clear as a bell. The old voice/IP was clunky and the cutouts were bothersome. With unlimited NA long distance, it is about 40 a month. I think I pay 40 for ordinary phone and 40 for ADSL now, with taxes my p+int bill is 110 bucks. A bit hefty. What do we pay taxes for? Can't we corrupt a few politicians to lower our rates? Speaking of things that should fade fast righteously, Canuckistan has the highest cell phone rates in the world, and one of the few places where the receiver of the call is charged for calls made to he. Whuffo Canuckies put up wid dat? We need an I-Rate for Lower-Rates Cell-Fone Street Gang to put the cell phone providers where they belong. I know frequent travellers who have chucked their cells in dumpsters after paying their last 1500 dollar a month cell bill. Even for millionaires that is outrageous. It can't be that expensive to maintain a network. I for one may go to vodafone for land locked lines. Bell long rates are a license for bell to own my bank account. I switch everyone to a land line instanter when they buzz me on the mobile. Going back to square cube equations, except for it being a bird trap and wind-orientation being a bit of a bug, massive wind cone "catchers" bring the speed of the wind at the impeller up impressively. This raises the efficiency of relatively small impellers quite dramatically, as the effect of wind increases with the cube of the speed. Making the rotor smaller and higher speed may bring cost down for the rotor, generator, gears, per output HP. The disadvantage is they need to be closer to the ground to handle the increased turntable weight and static pressure. The lightest weight and cheapest rotor promises to be a two bladed teeter rotor, which sheds wind gust loading by the rotor bending back out of the rotation plane. The designer in New Zealand says that the gear and gen set cost would be 1/3 to 1/2 of conventional 3 bladed rotors, which otherwise need robust and heavy torque limiting systems. The proof of this is all theoretical as no one has built a system of size. The credentials of the designer are good, and few argue the theoretics, but so far - no installed base. Teeter rotors have been tossed around since wind gen became faddish in the 70's oil crisis. Maybe they have promise in smaller systems to start as the cost per unit factor is a sticking point. EC<:-}