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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (398519)	7/13/2008 11:36:29 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576002

I disagree. I think an efficient way to store massive amounts of electrical energy would be a major piece of our energy puzzle. Some ideas I've seen proposed are using electrical energy compressing air when we had more energy than demand, then using it to drive turbines when the energy was needed. As an engineer, I just LOVE efficiency!

To: TigerPaw who wrote (398519)	7/14/2008 12:14:11 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576002

TP, Current set up, where you have coal and nuclear running non-stop and natural gas/oil filling peak demand is very efficient. You have some baseline power all the time, and additional power when you need it. With wind and solar, you have power when the source feels like providing it, which is not exactly the ticket. The wider the deployment of these technologies, the bigger the need will be for back-up power sources to be in place, which means you are paying mainteneance of 2 plants but getting output of only one. It is not exactly the path to efficiency. Wind is actually the poorest of the sources from the point of view of reliability of output. The highest output is when the winds are the strongest, which covers only a small fraction of operating time. So you may have a strong wind when there is no demand, and no wind when there is strong demand. A large grid can smooth out these variables somewhat, but not entirely. Excessive reliance on wind power will lead to blackout and brown outs - or excessively high costs of keeping in place nearly all of the power generation wind is supposed to replace. Joe