MercTech
Posts: 3706
Joined: 7/4/2006
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Electrical generation.... types.
Hydroelectric - cheapest method but huge permanent environmental impact. And, quite geographically limited.
Nuclear - second cheapest and minimal environmental impact if you take into account that the hazards are controlled.. even at the cost of the controls.
Coal and Oil fired plants - most common in the U.S. overall. Huge battle over adding precipitators, cyclone separators, etc. Coal tends to blow all trace elements out the stack that exist in the coal seam... uranium ore, cadmium, lead, mercury. Oil fired uses bunker fuel which is mainly low purity grade diesel. The basic design of most goes back to the 1920s using a burner front to tube and shell boiler to make steam to turn a turbine.
Natural gas... as with coal and oil, burner front to steam. A separate category and not as common outside gas rich areas due to the need for pipelines for transport. Although, some remote installations use tanker ships to bring in LNG for a power plant. Much more clean burning than oil or coal plants.
Gas Turbine Power Plants - good for peak loading but quite expensive and persnickety to operate. Uses massive amounts of jet aircraft grade fuel. These were a fad investment right after the electric power industry was de-regulated in the 1990s.
Wind farms - very useful if you can use a variable power generation system that is geographically limited. A good deal for remote communities to minimize how much power they need to buy from the grid but too variable for base loads or industrial applications.
Solar arrays - a bit geographically limited (never work on the wet side of the Pacific Northwest). Good for relocating small electric load needs. With current technological levels never generate as much energy as it requires to manufacture the panels.
Tidal power - see wind farms. Geographically limited and variable.
Geothermal - pilot plats work!... for a while. The problem with mineral fouling of systems reducing efficiency very quickly has not, to my knowledge, been successfully managed. And you need to locate plants in areas of geothermal activity which are prone to rapid shifts of terrain with little to no warning... yep, earthquakes. <grin>
I keep hearing "we need to change to renewable energy sources" touted. The thing is, what IS that source of renewable energy? The methods we have to work with all have a downside.
If we had to build the infrastructure from scratch; we really don't need the massive continent spanning electrical grid of the Westinghouse model that was adopted in the 1930s. Domestic loads (what they call the power demands of family homes and apartments) can readily be supplied by either individual generation systems or community systems. I'm talking combinations of solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even diesel engine driven generation. But, without the grid, industrial loads would of necessity cluster around high power density generation facilities. Think industrial cities around places like Hoover Dam, Bonneville Dam, and Niagra Falls. The large cities away from the power could not support heavy industry.
From what I see, the only really "renewable" way to generate electric power is actually a diesel engine driven generator. You want green and renewable, get an old John Deere diesel donkey engine and run a belt to a generator. Plant several acres in rape or peanuts, and make your own biodiesel. All the others tend to either be a false gain like solar, geographically limited as to where you can use it, or better suited to huge industrial complexes.
Then again, you can do like some with more time than sense (a certain actor's house in Jackson Hole is what I have in mind) and have no AC power in your house but spend six hours a day on a stationary bicycle attached to a generator each day to keep the battery bank charged. (I wonder if he knows how to do the routine maintenance on a battery bank? Hmm, may be a kaboom and electrical fireball there some day.)
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RE: Canada OKs oil pipeline to the Pacific Coast... - 
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