Posted on 11/25/2009 10:38:33 AM PST by staffjam
Volts, amps and watts are myths. All electrical engineers know for a FACT that it is smoke that makes these things work.
When you let the smoke out of a motor, the darn thing doesn't work anymore.
This is true about all electrical and electronic devices. The smoke that escapes from the generating plant smokestack is excess "electricity" that can't be put in the hoses, or as the uneducated call them, "wires".
I imagine these solar lites were produced to reduce and deminish the GLOW that comes from the One and Only God Jesus Christ!
Thank You My Lord Jesus, no selfish power grabs of men can ever downgrade, or deminish Your Glory! May You rule and reign forever and ever! Amen Maranatha Lord Jesus!
ROFL!!! OK, you get the prize for the wiseass comment of the day. I'll need to remember that one the next time we burn up something at work.
We occasionally lose a UPS battery. No smoke, but it does get a little hot and stink when it vents.
Yes, if only there were some way to harness the power of the atom!
I came up with 1.07 square miles for 500 MW solar. Assuming no spaces and we know this is not feasible.
Way off from what I had come up with earlier.
Ya...when the global warming and Kyoto crowd gets done with oil/gas...there’ll be parity..
BTW...that’s why the left HATES Palin...they know...she knows..how to solidify carbon based energy sources for the next 20-30 years...about the time it may take for PV to “get real”.....
But, that's okay because I just got a couple of strings to see how they'd do. They didn't do much. Happily, my thousands of other lights make up for them.
PS: it seems strange that someone called STD would ramble on about God and light. Jes sayin'...
Ah yes the ever popular “within five years”. There’s been a lot of great stuff that been 5 years out for a few decades now, cancer cures, useful solar power, life expectancy climbing over the century mark. I’d sure like to live in that 5 years from now world, sadly it’s probably not going to exist.
Great to meet another EE here on FR.
I’ve got a BS Eng in EE too. We should collect up a bunch of FR engineers and start writing educational pieces for non-technical people to read and ponder as we get more and more of this nonsensical “green power” hype pushed down on us. I foresee a hugely expensive tangent/dead end coming down the road here...
We should start with an explanation of the three laws of thermo, and in particular, law #2, explaining how all conversions come with with an inefficiency/loss. I have the hardest time getting it across to some people that you cannot convert/store energy without an attending loss; eg, solar into heat, or air pressure, or pumping water uphill, etc - all come with a cost on the way into storage, and another cost on the way out of storage back into electricity.
The people who do follow my explanation often come away with a much more skeptical eye/ear for all this fantastic “green energy” hyperventilation.
/bingo
...some interesting developments which have the potential to make solar power as cheap as fossil fuel on a cost-per-watt basis within five years. Getting us to that state, called grid parity, would require solar companies to produce power for around $1 a watt.IOW, $1 for the part of the photovoltaic (?) array which will produce 1 watt (at peak?) -- not a comparison with the cost to generate, say, a kW-hour using conventional means.
BTW, the answer to that is "More than you'd think, but not nearly as many, or as cheaply, as management would like."
I agree on the "Tech pieces". The best way to combat bad info, is with good info. Don't be surprised, though, if you get pushback. I've received plenty here on FR alone (one guy told me that I was an idiot, because "Denmark had gone to renewable power, and if they can do it, certainly the US can!). People don't like having their basic beliefs questioned. :-)
As far as the current thinking on "Green Energy" goes, I think that it's pretty useless. The technology, largely, has existed for years (in the case of wind power, windmills have been around for 100s of years). Just thinking about it realistically, if any of these were viable large-scale energy sources, wouldn't power companies be using them, instead of gas/coal? Right now, the only thing that's keeping solar/wind tech alive - on a large scale - is billions in government subsidies.
Please note - I keep specifying "large scale" because I think that solar/wind is excellent for targeted applications - Off-grid power. Hot Water heating. "Power Assists". Maybe some sort of device used to power electric cars...the car battery is a good pre-existing storage device that could be charged on a trickle from solar.
As far as a practical large-scale "renewable" solution goes, I think we'll need to keep looking. As I said in earlier posts, either it exists and hasn't really been explored yet...think geothermal or wave action. OR, it's going to be something so far out of the box that we haven't imagined it yet. And, until we get some of the smart people thinking out of the box, instead of wasting time on technologies that we know won't work, we'll be stuck on the same treadmill.
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