Met de uitspraak van de partijraad van GroenLinks dat zij niets voelen voor een missie in Afghanistan is het Urker verzet tegen de omkoping van minister Verhagen met 1 miljard euro windmolentjes voor steun van GroenLinks nu bij de Raad van State een stuk steviger in de schoenen komen te staan.

Het zet de eerdere vrijage rond partijfusie tussen de politica Jolande Sap en Ploumen (PvdA) onder druk. Want de GroenLinks leden maken Sap en publique zwakker in de missie, de Urkers molens en de fusie.

Hans,

Je laat je in de maling nemen. Dat grafiekje is ge-edit door de BBC. In werkelijkheid is de bijdrage van wind zo klein t.o.v. kolen (20 mw tov 23000 mw, een factor 1000) dat je het helemaal niet kan zien.

http://logicfreezone.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/bbc-lying-with-statistics/

Dank Richard!

In de grafiek mag het aandeel van windenergie dan wel iets overdreven zijn, maar de algehele boodschap van grafiek plus tekst lijkt mij toch correct.

20 MW, ik schrok al

Gelukkig is de wind zeer voorspelbaar, hij is weer terug, hij komt altijd terug.
2300 MW op dit moment
http://windparkwiki.blogspot.com/2011/01/constante-wind-in-uk-op-15-jan-...

Kolen en kern gaan het nog moeilijk krijgen als al die britten in de offshore Wind zijn uitgewerkt

Richard, iets vergelijkbaars geldt voor de staaf voor nucleair; die is (in verhouding tot kolen en gas) te klein weergegeven.

1 opmerking onder het oorspronkelijke artikel was wel heel leuk: I'm glad Paul's years of training are not going to waste. It's not windy all the time? It's insights like this that make we want to learn more about the weather. Any updates on if its sunny everyday? Rainy sometimes? What bears do in the woods?'

Hier nog een interessante reactie

Hopefully, people will forgive me for recycling bits of an old post from richard blacks blog. But I think it's relevant to this discussion and I've changed the odd word here or there.

So, where's all the power going to come from, if not from burning fossil hydrocarbons?

Note: This is not an exhaustive list.

First off, there’s the ocean, which is a good potential source of power:

There’s simple kinetic extraction via turbines, ducks, snakes and worms etc, which are all good. There’s osmotic power using the difference in salinity between sea water and fresh water and as discussed in a previous blog there’s also thermocline power generation, which uses the difference in temperature between warm surface water and the deep ocean to generate power.

Then there’s geothermic, which is essentially easy to extract and a favourite of some of posters on this blog (Well at least on Richard's blog):

Again this is good, but there's been some problems with associated micro (i.e. small) earthquakes, but providing you’re okay with that possibility and your geology/geography is suitable then it may be a very good bet. Iceland is the poster boy for geothermic extraction and they seem to be more than okay with it.

There’s Hydro-Electric:

Again this is highly dependent on your geography, with some knock on water availability issues for those down steam of the dam and flooding issues for the displaced people on the other side of it ;-) But there are also quite a few successful micro-generation schemes scattered around the world, which don’t have the big knock on effects of the whole massive infrastructure..... dam..... kinda.... thing.

Note: These things are always touted as entirely carbon free, but even if you exclude the CO2 generated by whole dam building program, they are bound to liberate quite a bit of dissolved carbon dioxide from the water via simple agitation. In the same way that shaking a coke bottle would, only not quite so explosively of course. I don’t suppose that anyone’s got any more information on this, I’d be very interested if you have?

After that you’ve got solar power:

The most abundant source of power that we’ve got, it literally powers everything after all. Current technologies suffer from some efficiency problems, cost of manufacture problems and some of the manufacturing techniques require the rare earth element indium to make the transparent electrodes, which is unfortunately in short supply - You can thank LCD panel TV’s for that.

Then there are infrared solar cells (new, spangly, uber-cool nanotech stuff) again mentioned previously on an earlier blog, which are very promising and would even work in the dark (woo…hoo…yippee). And for when the money truly runs out there's the cheap and cheerful dye sensitized ones.

There are also algal bio-reactors, which have had some problems in the past, but are supposedly getting much greener (forgive the pun) and much more efficient now.

Other than that, you’re looking at solar collectors/concentrators/solar furnace sort of things. Again, these are good and cheap, but they require quite a bit of sunny land somewhere (time to by up all that cheap desert). There are a number of operational power plants around the world based on those principles. There’s been one in France since 1970 and I think there’s even one in Nevada somewhere.

There’s also the Sandia Laboratories sun light to petrol project that rips the CO2 out of the air using a solar furnace and turns it back into useable hyrdo-carbons (Yay - Free petrol – Yay).

There’s also been some interesting recent work done on simply using sunlight with an inorganic catalyst, to split hydrogen and oxygen out of water. Again, essentially free stuff, just add sunlight, for you to take away and burn in a location of your choice.

One of our regular bloggers (poitsplace) quite likes the idea of orbital solar collectors beaming the power back to earth, but given our current state of development it might be difficult to stick one of these in space at the moment and as one of our other contributors pointed out it’s a bit of a long way to go to change the fuse ;-).

Finally, there’s Nuclear Power:

There’s Fission

There are many varieties of this, lots of different fission reactor types and different fuels, but the main fuel choices are Uranium, Plutonium or Thorium.

My personal favourite’s Thorium, just because there’s a lot more of it than Uranium. But there are all sorts of plusses/minuses for all of these, mostly waste product related and there's also various treaties and agreements tied up with them, non-proliferation etc etc.

One thing is for sure, the world hasn’t got vast amounts of Uranium left – especially, if in the short term it’s going to be our main source of power :-(

Then there’s Fusion (The Holy Grail of Power Generation)

Fusion also comes in a number of varieties there’s laser based fusion, tokamaks, spherical tokamaks and the z-pinch.

Also depending on your personal definition of a proper fusion reaction, there’s also the fusor, interesting to Google at least and even more interesting to build one at home (a hobby that I can certainly recommend, one with just a touch of mad scientist, if you’re that way inclined).

After that fusionwise, you’re into the slightly wackier realms of cold fusion, bubble fusion (sonoluminescence) or possibly even the odd roll of sticky tape (triboluminescence) - Last one's not really fusion, but something a tad funny is going on if you can use it as a low level x-ray source ;-)

Out of all of these, Laser based inertial confinement fusion has made some big steps forward recently.

Mostly, people will tell you practical power generation is around 20-30 years off, but they’ve been saying that for at least the last 10 years. So, your guess is as good as mine.

Oh, on top of all that power generation stuff you’ve got things like DC supergrids that would help with reducing power transmission losses and even room temperature or near room temperature super conductors to look into.

Again, I didn’t mention wind, but I really don’t think that it’s a practical way of generating power and I do quite like birds..........

Way, way into future you've got anti-matter, zero-point energy, black holes and things like Dyson spheres

Anybody, got any other suggestions that I might have missed?

Regards,

One of the Lobby