SM,

Regarding nuclear. You claim that flying is the safest way to
travel. And when a plane crashes I believe you can clean it up
with a minimal amount of inconveniece. Nuclear power however
may be very efficient but when the power station fails the fall out
will remain for 100 years leaving future generations in the area
left to suffer.

spindoc,

Thanks for your info about wind farms. I believe that any new
technology will improve with time and be perfected. We have to give
renewable energy solutions a chance to work. Sailing ships circumnavigated the earth and today we have giant self-powered liners
doing the same in shorter time and more efficiency. So wind-farms will evolve. It's the inevitable advancement of technology. Dreaming is part of innovation and that's how civilisations advance. Nothing
is achieved through inaction.

Lexi, much as it would be nice to think so, wind power can not deify physics. It is not going to evolve, it is a blind alley.

Yes it was once the best we had for sailing ships, or the Dutch to pump water, but it was never even reliable enough to mill grain. We used water wheels for that, & only very rarely wind mills.

Today the Swedes get wind power from the Danes, who can't use it in their grid, for almost nothing, & guess what they do with it. Yes, as did the Dutch for hundreds of years, they pump water with it. It's too hard to use it for anything much else.

When I first went sailing in 1972 I spent quite a bit of money on a wind generator, & a solar array to charge my batteries. They failed miserably. Even in the trade winds, in the tropics, combined they could not do what a 0.6 horse power Honda generator could do using only 2 litres of fuel a week.

So don't dream of wind power, all it really does is make annoying, & possibly health damaging noise.

I'm sure solar will become useful sometime, but not anytime soon. If it does it will be because of some developments from private enterprise. It will not come from any amount of tax payer money thrown at some academics. They are always too comfortable to do much that is useful.

A number of EU countries now know that wind won't work, ask the Danes, & are now telling the EU to go jump, with it's requirements for percentages of renewable power. Germany is one of them. It now appears it is only the rather silly poms that are trying to destroy themselves with wind power investments.

Dear Hasbeen,

Yes with the current technology you are right. Computers today in comparison to ten years ago have made major advancements so too utilizing computer technology and advanced mechanics such as super-efficient gearing no doubt could make the simplest breeze more
efficient. We may not see it in our life-time but unless efforts are made to develop wind technology we may never succeed. I'm not an
engineer but to me it's only logical having seen the advancements made in the past 30 years in all forms of technology - why should
wind be any different. If at first you don't succeed --- well you know the rest. Why dismiss something that doesn't work today - don't give up. There are many great inventions that came out of the minds of Australian inventors that we use today. I'm sure somebody in the future will solve your concern about wind energy.

Lexi, Otokonoko, rstuart,

Now that you’ve all had your little dreams and diversions, when are you going to at least attempt to advise Angela M on how to convert 6.2% of energy contribution after 15 years of effort, into 30% contribution in the next 13 years?

Do we just leave reality out of the debate and “hope” or “believe” it will all just happen?

Or is your case dependent, like Germany’s, on burning more lignite?

Lexi, mate, it is like this.

Electricity is energy. It can only be produced by the expenditure of energy. Electricity is merely one medium we use to transport energy from one place to another, where we wish to use it.

With thermal power plants we harvest the energy in a fuel, fossil or renewable, by burning it, & using it's heat energy to generate steam, which drives turbines, to generate our electricity.

The energy density in a fuel is critical. With fossil fuels this is high, but with many renewables they are very low. You could generate electricity by burning straw, but if you have to transport that straw very far to a power house, you will use more energy in the transportation, than the straw can generate, a loss situation.

With solar & wind you are harvesting the power generated by the nuclear reaction in the sun. Wind is merely redistributing the heat from the sun, that has been unevenly distributed/absorbed on the planet.

It is the inertia in the traveling air that we harvest with a wind mill. This inertia is "used up" in driving the windmill. That is the wind is slowed or stopped, it is not there to use again. This is the reason the turbines have to be widely spread, to be in a different wind stream.

Once used the wind is stopped it's energy is gone, & some research is suggesting the stopping of the wind might have very serious consequences. Wind also has the problem of being very variable, & intermittent.

There is no way that any technology can increase the energy available for harvest in a given wind stream. It is finite.

Technology may overcome this variability, by inventing a storage system to overcome this intermittent nature. So far the only practical system is to use hydro. Pump water up hill, [as Sweden does with the Danish wind power], & run that water back down later, generating power when needed. Otherwise you can only use it when the wind is blowing.

Continued.

Continued.

Using photovoltaic generation [solar cells] has a similar problem to wind. Although the energy coming to earth form the sun is huge, it is also very thinly spread. You have to harvest it from a very large area to get enough to be of much use, & a huge area to supply even a village.

The effort required to keep them clean & connected is so great, that if applied to a few pedal powered generators, would produce more electricity, in my experience.

It is also intermittent. You only get it for a small percentage of each day. In some cases, even in the tropics prevailing weather can mean you get very little for many days.

Here again our inability to store electrical energy becomes a problem. What do we do at night, or in sustained periods of little sunshine. You can't just let the freezer defrost, because it's cloudy, & calm, now can you.

I threw out, a quite large investment in wind & solar generating equipment, about half way from the Solomons to Fiji, when they had combined, failed to to produce enough power to run the 3 small, low wattage bulbs that lit my navigation lights, for the last time. They had beaten me, but they could not beast the Pacific ocean, they did not float.