Your comments on this kind of Green/ Sustainability projects in this thread? Pros? Cons? Whatever your Economic, Environmental, Political, Personal, Religious, etc. views? Individually or collectively? You are most welcome to post here any Green/ Sustainability projects that you like/love or dislike/hate!
Q http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/12/solar-bike-lane-making-electricity One Short Bike Path Can Power a Home for a Year Embedded with solar cells, the world’s first energy-producing road is humming along in the Netherlands. UQ
Q http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/11/30/texas-climate-change-denial The Reddest State Goes Green (Just Don't Mention Climate Change) As drought and heat waves wallop Texas, ranchers, farmers, and cities are quietly embracing renewable energy and adapting to an undeniable truth. ... Ninety-seven wind turbines about 500 miles north of Georgetown near Hereford started generating power for the town last year, nearly meeting the town’s energy demand. A 150-megawatt solar farm near Abilene should come online by 2017. By then, Ross says, the city would be generating so much electricity that it could sell the excess back to the grid for other municipalities to purchase. “Other communities will be going green and not even know it,” he says. Many of Texas’ 10,000 turbine towers—which supply 9 percent of the state’s electricity—are on private property in West Texas that is leased to energy companies. For landowners, the wind-farm boom has been more of a cash grab than a green revolution. Taylor Hill in front of a wind turbine blade being transported by train. UQ
Q MIT engineers have built a tiny power cell that produces electricity from being bent rather than from burning fuel http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/01/06/mit-micro-electrochemical-energy-generation New Technology Could Generate Energy From Every Step You Take The prototype device is about three centimeters wide and as thick as a sheet of paper. The engineers performed hundreds of automated bending tests for the device at this workbench in their lab and measured the electricity it generated. UQ
Q https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_technology Sustainable urban design and innovation: Photovoltaic ombrière SUDI is an autonomous and mobile station that replenishes energy for electric vehicles using solar energy. UQ
Q Renewable energy could supply Russia and Central Asian countries with all the electricity they need by 2030 — and cut costs significantly at the same time. https://independentaustralia.net/en...a-and-central-asian-energy-needs-by-2030,8557 The Kosh-Agachsky solar power plant in southern Russia. (Image: Darya Ashanina via Wikimedia Commons) UQ
Green energy isn't widespread because it's not cost-effective, relative to hydrocarbons. That simple. If it were cheaper to produce electricity via solar panels then it is to pump and refine oil from the ground, everyone would own solar panels. Not gas-powered cars. The logical conclusion, which is also true - the green energy industry only exists because of Government subsidies in the form of additional taxation (carbon taxes) on oil and gas energy users. Carbon taxes are widespread, ever growing, and take many forms. That money is being channeled into subsidies to green energy producers, who otherwise, operate a bankrupt business model.
Q Nuclear And Nonsense: An Insider’s Guide On Making Renewables Work By Terry Leach on January 4, 2016 https://newmatilda.com/2016/01/04/n...e-explanation-on-how-to-make-renewables-work/ The numbers So let’s do the maths. We currently spend about $6 billion each year on the grid that services the National Electricity Market with 9 million customers. That’s $666 per customer. Most of that cost is about meeting peak demand. So when batteries that last 5 years drop to about $3,300 to meet the storage needs of the average customer, the grid (in its current form) becomes uneconomic. So battery prices need to reduce by about 55 per cent from the current $7150 quoted by Russell. To put that in context, solar panels reduced in price by 60 per cent between 2011 and 2014. In a few short years, giga-battery factories are going to be springing up just as quickly as coal mines and oil refineries are shutting down. How to charge But how to charge those batteries? My household uses about 10 KWH (kilowatt hours) per day in winter. While a 10KW solar system will produce on average 42 KWH per day, it will still produce 10 KWH on the most miserable of winter days, even on a south facing roof. I can fit over 15 KWs of panels on my small house. I can buy enough solar panels to provide my own electricity for the next 25 years for $10,000, today. And as long as the grid survives, those panels would feed in three times as much energy as I use. UQ
The green footprint and costs you present simply doesn't work for urban environments. The huge portion of our western population lives in urban environments. Many live in 30 story apartment buildings with roof space for solar panels that could only power 6 apartments within the building - making the majority powerless. The footprint necessary for batteries in an urban environment is not only unworkable from a physical perspective but impossible from a square foot cost perspective. I know how difficult it is to install battery backup for an urban data center from a cost and space perspective. The concept of individualized solar with battery support in an urban environment is simply not feasible. In order to support wide-scale support of renewable energy across cities and industrial areas in the U.S. the entire U.S. electric grid must be updated to be a "micro-grid" rather than the current "macro spoke grid" built around traditional large power plants. This grid upgrade will cost a tremendous amount of money in the U.S. ($800B+) - it will need to support back-metering, reverse flow, local source switching, autonomous event monitoring & correction, and small localized natural gas generation plants for backup.