Very cheap wind power
in [Physics]
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From: habshi on 7 May 2010 17:56 Breakthroughs in the USA and Germany-Austria enable surplus renewable energy such as that produced by wind farms or waves on stormy nights, to be economically turned into hydrogen or methane. The breakthrough in the USA is the discovery of a catalyst about one seventieth the cost of platinum that enables the efficient electrolysis of ordinary sea or river water to produce hydrogen without the need to acidify it or add some other electrolyte first. The new catalyst is a molybdenum-oxo metal complex, designated (PY5Me2) Mo-oxo which has been discovered by Hemamala Karunadasa, Christopher Chang and Jeffrey Long. All three hold joint appointments with Berkeley Laboratory's Chemical Science Division and University College Berkeley's chemistry department. Long said, "This metal-oxo complex represents a distinct molecular motif for reduction catalysis that has high activity and stability in water. We are now focused on modifying the PY5Me ligand portion of the complex and investigating other metal complexes based on similar ligand platforms to further facilitate electrical charge-driven as well as light-driven catalytic processes. Our particular emphasis is on chemistry relevant to sustainable energy cycles." The Austro-German breakthrough is to then react hydrogen, which is difficult to store and transport, with carbon dioxide. The plan is to generate methane that can be injected into the already existing natural gas storage and distribution system, or compressed and used as an automotive fuel, presently powering millions of vehicles in Pakistan and India.
From: habshi on 19 May 2010 17:54 excerpt Vertical turbineshave no propellers; instead, they use a vertical rotor. Because of this, the devices can be placed on smaller plots of land in a denser pattern. Caltech graduate students Robert Whittlesey and Sebastian Liska researched the use of vertical-axis turbines on small plots. Their results suggest that there may be substantial benefits to placing vertical-axis turbines in a strategic array, and that some configurations may allow the turbines to work more efficiently as a result of their relationship to others around them�a concept first triggered by examining schools of fish, according to a Caltech press release. In current wind farms, all of the turbines rotate in the same direction. But while studying the vortices left behind by fish swimming in a school, Dabiri noticed that some vortices rotated clockwise, while others rotated counter-clockwise. Dabiri therefore wants to examine whether alternating the rotation of vertical-axis turbines in close proximity will help improve efficiency. The second observation he made studying fish�and seen in Whittlesey and Liska's simulation�was that the vortices formed a "staircase" pattern, which contrasts with current wind farms that place turbines neatly in rows. Whittlesey and Liska's computer models predicted that the wind energy extracted from a parcel of land using this staggered placement approach would be several times that of conventional wind farms using horizontal-axis turbines.
From: spudnik on 19 May 2010 18:13 tomorrow is Draw what you like but not that, day. thank *you*. > horizontal-axis turbines. thusNso: how many infinitessimal dimensions did you want to fit in this?... is this really a scalar? thusNso: real noumbers are all "infinite decimals," iff you include all of the zeroes, "every" God-am one. thusNso: well, that was consoling; now, I'm ready for the next step ... but it's a fractal step! thusNso: I like all three of those; note that there is a raw infinity of trigona, two of whose edges are perpendicular to the other edge, as far as spherical trig goes, and I really like those "half lunes." --y'know dot the surfer's value of pi dot com period semicolon I mean it! http://\\:bllz
From: spudnik on 19 May 2010 23:20 did the article state that the problem of *bearing* is more tractable, vertically rotating?
From: habshi on 23 May 2010 07:56
This is great news. We can use it in the winter to heat molten salt in the basement and use that heat during the day. So wind power could supply most energy needs apart from transport. excerpt cleantech, business green The units make cheap ice overnight, when demand for electricity is low, using a high-efficiency compressor to freeze 450 gallons of water. In the middle of the day, the device shuts off the regular air conditioner for the peak afternoon hours and instead pipes a stream of coolant from the slowly melting block of ice to an evaporator coil installed within the building�s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning blower system until the entire ice block has melted � which should be sized to take about 6 hours � to cover for the peak afternoon load on the grid. The utility also saves energy at other points in the grid�for example, cooler power lines at night transmit electricity more efficiently. Although systems have been used in large commercial buildings � the Bank of America Building in Manhattan is a LEED-Certified example � these tend to be expensive custom-built designs. This project uses mass-produced scalable modular units. At $5,000 each, these will be within the means of commercial property-owners, and would bring up to 90% reduction in individual building�s fuel use. For California, the implications are huge. Large-scale implementation of Ice Energy�s small modular units would put off the need to build new power plants. |