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Alternative Energy Thread!

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Makk

Member
Lots of good info in this thread. I've read about all the different types of Alt. energy out there and the different possibilities on the horizon, However, I've learned not to rely on anyone anymore, There is too much incompetence out there. You have to take it upon yourself. Don't wait for this technology or that technology, bullshit! I don't care if the saudis give us free oil,and the oil co's convert it to gas for free! and the trucking companies deliver it for free!! The greedy bastards are still gonna RAPE you! And you gonna wonder WTF!!!! I really like geo-thermal, the system can be installed in different ways to make installation cheaper. If you do a vertical system, you will have to pay to drill the holes. The rest can be done yourself! If you don't know how...Learn!
 
Space Toker

Space Toker

Active member
Veteran
great post man! geothermal, solar, and wind all need to be part of the answer. depending on where you live, one may be better than the others but usually a combo can be done. I hope more people awaken to the reality that this can be done and needs to be done.
 
M

Makk

Member
Thanks space toker.
One thing I heard that really pisses me off is: If you buy an electric car, You won't be paying the tax that is added to the cost of gas. So,you will be taxed on the miles you drive. Then, since you SHOULDN"T need an emission test with an electric car I'm sure their gonna try to get that money somehow too. Probably why we don't have electric cars here yet..there trying to solve that problem.
 
Space Toker

Space Toker

Active member
Veteran
yes, exactly! People choosing to be responsible should not pay what the irresponsible pay. IF you do the right thing and get an electric car, you should not have to pay for those who don't! The gas tax should not fund roads, that should be funded through the state budget which usually gets its revenue from sales and income taxes, or by the feds in a similar manner. The gas tax should remain in place but also any tax money generated from a CO2 tax on polluters should be used to help pay for roads and more green technology.
 
T.Baggins

T.Baggins

Member
wait...... i thought all the Gore-ons were saying that the pollutants and greenhouse gases from electricity generation accounted for a significant portion of worlds greenhouse gas emissions??? and that in the United States, electricity generation accounts for nearly half of all emissions?

oh yeah...those electric batteries are pretty bad for the environment too... what with all the Lead, Nickel, and Lithium in them... hmmm, wonder how they get all those metals?... wonder whats the environmental impact on all that nickel mining??
 
H

hunt4genetics

Active member
Veteran
I have been to the future. By 2030 the US midwest is littered with big white domes. They look similar to that huge golf ball at epcot center. Inside the domes are thousands of cows. They are not farmed for their meat(beef is over 500$ per pound), but their poop. The mathene that their manure gives off is used to power various cities. In Detriot, cows out number people 3 to 1.

Animal shelters no longer put down animals that fail to get adopted. They are worth too much alive. A Japanese scientist named Hideki Tanimoto invented a process that turned pet waste into fuel. For every 1 dollar of food that is fed to a cat, they are able to generate over 40$ in power.
 
Space Toker

Space Toker

Active member
Veteran
Bacteria that turns cellulose crop waste and weeds into ethanol is a promising fuel source for cars. I would like to see cars that can run on more than one fuel, ethanol or hydrogen for instance, or maybe even also have a plug-in option to recharge it. Diversity of sources will be a valuable innovation to allow ending gasoline use even in areas that do not have hydrogen filling stations. But I would like to see hydrogen emphasized.
 
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kaze420

Member
ya electricity. mostly run from coal? i think

so why not more solar panels, family homes solar panel roof. im sure they have weather proof panels..seems like sun can grow nice resin, common 50+' high trees, growth everywhere. are they not cost efficient enough yet?

wind dont think its as good but why not no emission.

wave power, harness that shit constant up and down tides energy!

oil. hemp oil right? good stuff mayb? pull c02 down plant mad trees..

car, stop driving hummers to when not in snow/storms/flood, pulling up to the club looking fly..with rims.

do electric car plug into special outlets built into new homes building code..

hydrogen cars sound sketchy, that tank of bomb in your car be careful

led lights everywhere, but only in good applications they produce little heat.

turn that light off when you leave the room and not come back soon..

cfl everywhere, but if broken they give out mercury?dangerous?

Live close to town.. have off days from work? go into town often..buy a bicycle! my area cars dont give f about bike on road be careful. many places beside usa i think use bike daily as a way of life..

all this knowledge lets see progress

Get by with what you need, save the rest, it will be better..

wean the people from these bad emissions.. its good for all anyway.

yes create jobs more money more energy good energy happy energy green energy
 
K

kaze420

Member
i click read about carbon credit somewhere here?
really carbon basics of life. so what are you worth? you eat how much drive how much spend how much? to the government really joke squad. just from the sound of that 'program' let database this information for taxes whatever

any1 heard about, beside usa doing credits? i haven't so just implant the chip at birth press {0} -beep-.. and begin, its now us think we need to set goals for the future, i think we have taken these bad energy emission to far,, political and physically all the shit burning up like this extra cig smoke
 
Space Toker

Space Toker

Active member
Veteran
Carbon credits are not a bad idea, in fact a damned good one if done right. It makes polluters pay for their pollution and rewards non-polluters. I don't know if any of the proposed systems are "done right", but I know it CAN be a good thing.
 
Space Toker

Space Toker

Active member
Veteran
I use wood heat, want to get solar or wind where I move next, and don't drive any more than I have to. I want to get a hydrogen fuel cell car when it comes out, is it Nissan or Honda that is doing that?
 
facelift

facelift

This is the money you could be saving if you grow
Veteran
I'm thinking for private homes here...

Solar and wind are only useful near where it will be used. Geothermal can cool and heat water using the Earth's temperature. The big problem is that transmission of electric powers causes a loss. So you generate 1 KW 400 feet from the home and lose 2% by the time it gets to the net meter. The longer the wire run, the bigger the losses.
 
DiscoBiscuit

DiscoBiscuit

weed fiend
Veteran
America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate

America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate

More green improvement.

By Alexis Madrigal - Feb 19, 2010

The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.

Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available.

Though new and better data was used to create the assessment, the big jump in potential generation reflects technological change in wind machines more than fundamental new knowledge about our nation’s windscape.

Wind speed generally increases with height, and most wind turbines are taller than they used to be, standing at about 250 feet (80 meters) instead of 165 feet (50 meters). Turbines are now larger, more powerful and better than the old designs that were used to calculate previous estimates.

“Now we can develop areas that in [previous decades] wouldn’t have been deemed developable,” said Michael Brower, chief technology offier with AWS Truewind, which carried out the assessment. “It’s like oil reserves. They tend to go up not because there is more oil in the ground but because the technology for accessing the oil gets better.”

The new maps, above, are useful for would-be wind-farm developers who need to find promising sites on which to place their turbines. They want locations with high wind speeds, access to transmission lines, cheap land and a host of other smaller logistical concerns. If you purchase the best versions, the Truewind maps have a resolution of 650 feet (200 meters), which is less than the spacing between modern machines. That means they can be used to provisionally site individual machines on the ground.

Many estimates have been made of the wind energy potential of the United States and the Earth. John Etzler made one of the first way back in the 1830s. He used loose numerical analogies to sailing ships to calculate that “the whole extent of the wind’s power over the globe amounts to about … 40,000,000,000,000 men’s power.”

The water-pumping windmill industry flourished in latter half of the 19th century, but wind energy potential calculations did not advance past the back-of-the-envelope until after World War II. When Palmer Putnam attempted to find the best site in Vermont for the first-megawatt sized wind turbine in the early 1940s, his first line of analysis was to look at how bent the trees were.

The 1980s saw a boom in wind energy in the state of California, driven by a number of federal and state incentives as well as an active environmental culture. Back then, the only way to really know how hard and often the wind blew was to put up a tower covered in sensors and measure. So, wind-farm developers concentrated their efforts on three areas — Tehachapi, Altamont Pass and San Gorgonio — and covered the places with towers to measure the wind.

“I still have some databases from back then and you look at them and say, ‘Oh my, they had 120 towers up,’ or something crazy,” Brower said. “That’s not how it’s done anymore.”

Even low-resolution regional maps did not exist until the early 1980s and the first national map was only published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (née Solar Energy Research Institute) in 1986. As you can see from the map above, it was more of a general guide than a series of detailed local estimates.

The real boom in wind data came with the availability of cheap computational power in the late 1990s. It was then that Brower’s company began being able to marry large-scale weather models with small-scale topographic models. They created a parallel process for crunching wind data and ran it on small, fast PCs to get supercomputer-level power at low cost. Then, they refined their estimates with data from 1,600 wind measurement towers.

The result is a much more accurate forecast. Truewind’s estimates of wind speed at a location have an uncertainty margin of 0.35 meters a second. Good wind sites have average wind speeds of between 6.5 and 10 m/s, though most onshore areas don’t get above 9. Perhaps more importantly, their estimates for how many kilowatt-hours a turbine in a location will produce are accurate to within 10 percent, Brower stated.

The newest models are now sufficiently good that developers don’t need as much on-site data. They do still use towers to check the maps and models produced by companies like Truewind, but not nearly as many, which reduces the expense and time that it takes to execute a project.

“You might see 10 or 15 towers over an area that would have had 50 or 100 towers before,” he said.

The new data, including these maps and forecasting models, may not directly make wind farms cheaper, but the advances certainly makes them easier to plan for, develop and operate.

“I think of it more as greasing the wheels of the process more than producing a really big cost savings,” Brower said. “You reduce the friction, the transaction costs, and that enables you to get where you’re going faster.”

The better processes, along with state renewable-energy mandates, seem to be helping. In 2009, 10 gigawatts of wind capacity was installed in the United States to bring the nation’s total to 35 gigawatts.

The data plays a more subtle role, too. In helping make the case that wind energy can play a very substantial role in supplying electricity, the new maps and estimates could help convince industrial and political leaders to support renewable energy, particularly in windy heartland states like Kansas, Montana and Nebraska.​
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Hephaestus

Hephaestus

Member
Problem with wind has always been it's inherent nature... It's strong when you need it least, and weak when you need it most... At least in general... This has always been one of it's biggest detractors...

Our off grid system - is being planned for an area where wind will play a big part in our off-grid needs... However we're having to get creative... Little of our wind power is actually going to produce electricity directly (would need huge battery banks). Instead we're looking at using good old school wind driven pumps and a pair of large resevoirs - when wind blows strong, pumps water up the hill into the upper resevoir... Between the upper and lower resevoir is a hydro electric generator... When we need that wind power - open the flood gates and let the power flow...

This works when you have dozens of acres - or can buy an old municipal water tower... The rest of the time - storing that much in battery banks... Well it's a big challenge...
 
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