Quote:
Originally Posted by daddio
there is not sufficient airflow everywhere to use wind. we're basically talking about replacing oil for electricity and the best reliable supply of that is nuke. or you could use the clean and abundant coal from out west as opposed to the high sulfer coal RObbie Byrd forces power comanies to use.
|
Well, in the US there would be the simple solution of solar-thermal electricity production...
The technology is available since the 80s and the US is blessed with some huge desert areas.
In Spain they are building 3 of those... each with 50MW... very simple and effective technology. (for comparison... Nuclear Powerplants usually have about 1000-1500 MW electricity production)
What you should not forget is, that besides incredible high construction costs, Nuclear Power plants ALSO are consuming fuel... Uranium is not free and with several nations going extensivly nuclear (for example China) the price for Uranium will not go down I suppose.... same for coal... Soon mining in Germany could even become profitable again! (at the moment, highly subsidized)
Wind Power has a really high potential... so does Solar-Thermal energy... it is widly underestimated...
We got alot of windpower in Germany, but overall it's just 20.000 wind mills... that's incredibly few!
Now there is alot of "old shit" among those... but it is covering about 7.5% of the German electricity consumption... several states even cover more than 30% of the electricity consumption using windpower...
Modern Windpower plants have an output of 5MW each (6MW is the most at the moment)
There are quite some areas where there is steady wind... especially offshore or at the coastlines (US has enough) and especially at over 100 meters above the ground..
Considering the fact that even offshore windpower plants produce the energery that was required to build,transport and put them up in about 5 month, they are the greenest and best developed technology currently available.