November 4, 2012

Energy Contradictions - work in progress


There is an increasing reaction against wind farms from farmers and other people in Australia who actually need (or are forced) to live near wind turbines.  There are many theories why turbines coincide with, or cause, health problems. On top of noise it could be that turbines are visually confronting hightech machines for people used to country living. Solar has the advantage of being passive, with no high towers or moving parts.

As energy issues are invented and become more pressing the contractions increase:

There is a constant need for baseload-power station redundancy (or a home gas-petrol powered generator) for each unit of renewable solar-wind electrical production.

But the technology to interconnect or share renewable energy could be developed if it were invented first. If interconnecting lines were more efficient.

If, by definition, far distant regions of solar-wind producers could efficiently be interconnected.

The most energy efficient that is low energy use lifestyles is in medium to high density multi-story units in cities. But at the same time it is least suited to benefit from solar-wind electricity production. Solar on roofs provides the minimum possible roof area per high density dweller. Wind production takes up the most land and so is restricted to rural areas - no use for cities.

The coldest parts of the Northern Hemisphere need more energy when it gets coldest - on still, cloudy days.

Thousands of tons of heat retaining rocks are at their hottest in summer when heat is not needed. If the target market is air conditioning that is a previously unneeded luxury that even Western societies did not have.

But air conditioning allows people to live longer in hot climates and allows more people to live in hot climates. All this accelerates higher use of energy.

Air conditioners are becoming increasingly cheap in Australia while the cost of running them is growing as electricity costs skyrocket use most of the extra power needed in hot climate houses.

For people to achieve most in combating climate change involves conferences requiring more mobility, which means more cars in their own country and more aircraft rides between the countries that use the most energy or high energy per capita (China, US, Canada, India, Japan, Europe, Middle East, Australia).

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