[RTC List] New record set yesterday for alternative energy generation

[William Van Hefner]

A topic that Larry briefly brought-up is at the real crux of the problem
when it comes to energy independence for the United States.
Infrastructure. We could potentially save many billions of dollars each
year by powering vehicles solely by electricity. The technology is there
today for cars that will fit the needs of most Americans without an extra
1,000 lbs of engine to carry around, like hybrids have to. The problem is,
what would happen if even 10% of the people in this country bought one? As
soon as everyone got home at night and plugged their cars in to recharge,
our electrical grid would suffer a complete meltdown.

The problem with wind, solar, hydro and most other "green" technology is
that energy generation is sporadic. Solar doesn't work at night. Wind only
works when it's windy. Hydro only works when there is enough extra water,
etc. All of today's modern generation facilities, whether they run on
natural gas, coal, nuclear, whatever... have one thing in common. They can
all output a steady flow of electricity 24/7. Our nation's electrical grid
is simply not built to handle large volumes of energy that are only
available "some" of the time. Unlike small home-based systems, the
nation's electrical grid has no "batteries" to store energy for later use.
You would need a battery the size of the empire state building in order to
provide enough back-up power for most parts of the country.

Even if we had such as system, another part of the problem today is that
unless the location of these new power generation plants just happen to be
in the same place as the old ones, major upgrades to infrastructure are
also going to be needed in order to get the power generated to where it
needs to go. In this regards, nuclear is much more of a "drop-in"
replacement as a power source. Our local power plant is an excellent
example of how interchangeable the technology is. Just don't build a
nuclear power plant on top of an earthquake fault!

I think that the best shot we have right now at a new "green" source of
energy generation, which could output a steady source of power 24/7 and
could be built at the location of most existing power plants is fusion
generation. It's a lot closer than most people think. Try taking a look at
https://lasers.llnl.gov/ for more info. It won't solve everything. There's
still the problem of handling peak loads for things like electric cars,
but it's a big step in the right direction.


-- 
William Van Hefner - President
Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: editor at humboldtonline.com