re: #67 Bobibutu

[Link: chizumatic.mee.nu…]

Another good post on alternative energy:

“Alternative Energy”: For people who can’t add.
(Part 1 of 2)

Sigh. I’m continually amazed how many “scientists” can’t do basic math. Like this nutwad who thinks we can solve all our problems by using solar power to light up the country.

“If 2 percent of the continental United States were covered with photovoltaic systems with a net efficiency of 10 percent, we would be able to supply all the U.S. energy needs,” said Bulovic, the KDD Associate Professor of Communications and Technology in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

And how big is 2 percent of the continental US? As Will Collier points out, slightly larger than the state of Georgia.

He also does the math on how many orbiting, and thereby much more efficient solar panels, would be required to match the output of a nuclear plant.

The Space Station solar panels are fairly large as such things go, about 8,740 square feet in area. At 64 kilowatts of power for every 8,740 square feet of solar panel, you’d need about 136 million square feet of panels to generate a single megawatt of electricity. Just for comparison’s sake, the Farley Nuclear Power Plant near Dothan, Alabama, can produce as much as 1,776 megawatts of power. That kind of output would require approximately 242 billion square feet of orbiting solar cells—about 8,700 square miles, an area larger than the state of New Jersey.

Both of these pie (or state-sized satellite) in the sky concepts have one little problem that happens to come up every time MIT professors who know absolutely jack about grid power generation start spouting off. You can not generate base power with solar energy. Nor can you do it with wind energy. Nor can you do it with tide energy. Why? Well, here’s a little primer on power generation.

There are three kinds of generation that need to happen in order for the buttons to light up on your microwave. But before I get into that, one needs to understand the concept of load. Most people would tend to think that power generation works in a positive flow model, in that when you generate a given amount of juice, it goes on the grid and is then consumed. This is wrong. In fact, power generation works in a negative flow model, meaning that there is a given demand on a grid at any given time, that demand is load, and it is not a static thing. Now, if you were to go and build a power turbine in your back yard and hook it up to the grid, you would find a rather interesting display of physics, in that you could throttle the generator based on how much load you put on it, not how much fuel you dump into whatever you have spinning it.