QuoteOf course it's possible Schumi, the faeries make it with honey and locks of blonde hair and pony tears.
There's no money to be made from an unlimited energy source, because it's impossible.Originally Posted by Stevo Da Gull
We're not arrogant, we're just better.
Of course it's possible Schumi, the faeries make it with honey and locks of blonde hair and pony tears.
The initial stages of harnessing such energy would require a fair amount of employment, but once you're tapping the energy then the need for employment shrinks. There would always be jobs in research, but there'd be nowhere near as many labourers needed.
With regards to proving the legitimacy of renewable sources. It is a reasonably new field. We already know of the phenominal potential of various forms of renewable energy, and the technology to harness the energy is not many years off becoming a reality. Unfortunately, most of the top scientists around the world aren't being paid to solve the problem of efficiently extracting renewable enrgy from the earth.
I'm aware that I haven't proved anything. But I think it's bizzare to scoff at renewable energy. With technology constantly improving, it's only a matter of time before we find extremely efficient ways of harnessing renewable energy. But we'd rather keep throwing money at the present systems.. sure we're just crazy with all this talk of renewable energy, like those fellas years ago who said that people could build crafts that could fly through the air.
You do realise there's a difference between renewable energy and magic energy, right?
What part of his post is this a reply to?
Last edited by osarusan; 18/03/2010 at 1:51 PM.
Yip, I just don't think that we should dismiss it completely. Let's have a bit more research, rather than taking digs about faeries and whatever else. I'm not saying that we should throw all of our money at researching magnetc energy, that would be crazy. I'm not a fanatical advocate of magnetic energy (well, I am a fan of MagLevs, but that's different), but such a complete dismissal seems a bit short sighted to me. I am more of an advocate for other forms of renewable energy myself, I just dislike the thought that because we don't know how to do it yet, we should forget about it.
It's not that "we don't know how to do it", it's that we can prove that there's no energy gain there to be harvested. That's why people with technical backgrounds are so dismissive of it.
You can't spell failure without FAI
Since when do ethics come into price setting?
In my experience, business size is inversely proportional to the application of ethics. In fact, awareness might even be a more appropriate term, if you exclude use for marketing purposes.
Yup. And a company with free energy with be rather big.
Anyway, it's amazing how many people won't believe professional scientists when they say something physically can't be done.
Man do I hate this..
I mixed up the magnetic energy mentioned in this thread with the sort of stuff that these folks do http://www.amsc.com/aboutus/about_super.html So let's say I may have been wrong there.. and let's never speak of it again
With regards to ethics, price setting and profit from renewable energy. If, in future we effectively tapped, for arguements sake geothermal energy*, you couldn't possibly charge more for the use of energy than we do for the use of something as abundant as water. Well, you could possibly, but it would be very wrong. It would would like producing shoes that cost a few dollars to make and then selling them for a couple of hundred euros while paying the labourers pittance.. oh wait
*Not of direct interest to us in Ireland.
Anyhow, how have foot.ie'rs been voting so far?
Last edited by Stevo Da Gull; 18/03/2010 at 8:02 PM.
Ireland does lag behind other countries with reguards harnessing Wind,Solar,Wave energy.I often thought why not put a couple of hundred wind turbines along the west coast where there's a near constant wind blowing(gulf stream etc).It obviously too expensive to put them out at sea.I've seen more and more of them slowly but surely crop up out in Connemara,Aran Islands and along the Clare and Kerry coastline's.Its a start i suppose but more has to be done.Was'nt there that plan about 10 years ago to build a huge Wind Turbine farm off the coast of Bray on the Irish sea?Seem's like West or South coast would have been better suited.
There is a company from Spiddal which harnessed wave energy with special devices they developed.They tested them on Galway Bay a couple of years ago and won a contract to set up loads of them off the coast of Florida or the Carolina's or somewhere.More of these companies are needed and for these companies to get Irish contracts.
The monorail.
I would think there's other issues - sea bottom, sea depth (the one off Arklow is on a sand bank, so in shallow water), close the users.
btw, I'm not sure how wind energy would've done this winter, so it has to be a mix of renewables.
btw 2 A pity movement has been snail pace at getting homes connected two ways to the grid to allow for home systems. It's the cost of the batteries which make domestic turbines uneconomic, whereas if you could sell excess back to the grid it would become viable.
If you attack me with stupidity, I'll be forced to defend myself with sarcasm.
I take your point about this winter being calmer then normal and that a variety of energy sources are needed,we didnt have a good old fashioned Atlantic storm in January or Febuary as opposed to other years.The exceptional cold spell obviously meant it was calmer then normal.
A couple of years ago my brother and his fiancee(sp) were buying a house and looked into the possibility of buying a solar panel for the roof of the house.It costs 3,000euros but apparently saves you 300 a year on your bill so its meant to pay for itself after 10 years.They decided against it however as the sun makes only a brief appearance in Galway City for 2 weeks of the year.
Renewables are kind of my thing. The reason I'm in Edinburgh instead of the Carlisle right now! One of the reasons is that all of the major wind turbine manufacturers are actually working at full capacity right now. It's very hard to get your hands on one of those big 5 MW (AFAIK) offshore turbines that we have on the Arklow Bank. Last thing I heard is that there is still an expansion planned. The problem with onshore wind is that a lot of people don't like it. It needs access roads built to the middle of nowhere, and high tension wires built to take the power away. At the moment, things work like a tree, big, heavy duty wires near the large power stations, Moneypoint, Ardnacrusha, Poolbeg, smaller ones going to isolated communities in the West, where the developments would take place. Water depth is a major problem for offshore turbines, which I think are going to be the future of renewables. At the moment they're pretty expensive, but the technology is developing all the time. At the moment, however, it's cheaper to get your energy from a combined cycle gas turbine. Another thing about wind power is that it's not constant. You have gusts, lulls, and days when there's no wind at all. It has to be backed up with something that can respond quickly to changes in supply and demand, and that's usually what's called pumped storage. You use the extra energy from a gust or a windy day to pump water up to a lake on top of a hill, then when you need extra power, you open a sluice, and it runs down through a turbine, releasing the energy you put in pumping it up. We have one of these at Turlough Hill in Wicklow, but for more grid integration of renewables, we'd need a lot more. Wave energy at the moment is still in its infancy. Wavebob (the company from Spiddal) have a decent device, but it has a really, really low energy density. It's going to take a long time for you to get back your investment from it. Of course, it's just a prototype, and every subsequent model will be cheaper and more efficient, but it's not ready for commercial deployment yet. I think the next big new thing is going to be tidal current power. It's completely predictable, high energy densities, and Ireland (especially the North) has a massive resource. To be honest, the main thing we can improve on is energy efficiency. I did a project a while back (for the UK, but Ireland has the same climate), where we predicted that we could save more than 25% of energy used in the country just from more efficient space heating. That's just whacking up some insulation, pushing for underfloor heating, and recycling the waste heat from our thermal power plants, and putting in geothermal heat pumps. No rocket science.
As far as I know, it's not so much pumped storage that takes up the slack at the moment as gas turbines. We just don't have enough pumped storage to cope. I'm not sure why we haven't built more pumped storage. Maybe it's expensive or inefficient?
You can't spell failure without FAI
It's very efficient (90%+), but it does take a lot of investment, and with cheap oil and gas during the boom years, and a complete lack of any sort of foresight from the powers that be, none was built. There's also the problem of what people are going to say when you essentially blow up a mountain they quite like to look at!
You're right about gas turbines, the Combined Cycle ones we have at the moment operate at below maximum capacity, on what's called "spinning reserve", so they can react quickly. This does, however, mean that they run at below maximum efficiency.
Would this pumped storage not require a huge volume of water? My rough calculations tell me that you'd drop 1000 litres per second from 100 metres up to get just 1 MW. That sounds like an awful lot to me.
We're not arrogant, we're just better.
Wikipedia has Turlough Hill down as capable of generating 292MW when it's releasing water, which is about consistent with the relevent statute. Naturally, the ESB site is about as much use as a particularly helpful rock.
You can't spell failure without FAI
Well 1000 litres is 1 m^3, it's not too much. When you consider the lake at Turlough Hill is at a rough google maps estimate has an area of 135,500 square metres and a depth of say 10 metres, and the difference in elevation between the two lakes is almost 300m, you have some idea of the energy you can store in there.
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