The Future of Global Energy

[ProKeymaster]

The Future of Global Energy

Pro ‘The Future of Global Energy’

Pro – M_Vos and I were discussing the future of global energy and alternative power sources yesterday. The fossil fuel resources will eventually run out, perhaps sooner rather than later and so we’re going to need alternatives. We also need to try and reduce harmful carbon emissions and try to reduce global warming.

What are your thoughts everybody? Will every house in the future run its power from hydrogen fuel cells? Will we see more and more wind turbines around? Will solar panels be more common in the future?

Pro ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

Pro – For example in England a friend tells me that every newly built house must conform to certain energy standards. I’m not entirely sure what these standards are yet but it interests me. He was talking about a new regulation coming into force requiring every newly built house to be fitted with a small wind turbine which is great to see.

I was born in 1979 and all my life since I can remember “the environment” has been an important issue. From the videos they showed us in school, to the green energy and carbon neutral adverts on tv, it’s always been present somehow. I remember that CFCs were a big thing when I was younger as they are destroying the fabled ozone layer which in turn increases global warming.

I’ve also noticed that we never really have proper winters any more 🙁 When I was a kid winter meant snow and lots of it but now…we’re lucky to get snow at all. It could just be a short term warming or it could be getting worse, I don’t know, but this brings us to the fact that sooner or later fossil fuels will run out. There are many alternatives to fossil fuels but historically they haven’t seemed viable until recently.

I’d love to see a small wind turbine on every home in Britain because if there’s one thing we can guarantee in my country it’s wind and bad weather. Something as simple and small as this could surely generate at least some of a family’s power needs. I’ve looked at these turbines a lot and there’s nothing to stop the people fitting more than one too, apart from the sight of lots of windmills on a roof which won’t please everybody. It’s a similar problem with the large white wind turbines that we want to use but don’t.

The massive turbines are a great idea in my opinion but they’re unpopular due to their looks mainly. People call them a blot on the landscape but yet they want free or greener energy so somewhere a compromise will have to be sought. Another argument I’ve heard against wind turbines is that they cost more energy to create than they ever will be able to generate after their installation. I know a person who works for an alternative energy company and I’m sure he said the turbines only last around 20 years but this is not proven and I’m sure efficiency and durability can be improved over time.

I’ve also heard that they kill birds and bats who fly into their blades but surely this could be prevented by a thin wire mesh around the blades like on a domestic fan. I don’t see why not anyway, there’s also the option of setting a small sonar unit on each turbine to repel the animals with sound easily as far as I understand. In the shoutbox yesterday and I said “America should turn Las Vegas off at night…” which is true, it’s a MASSIVE drain on the world’s dwindling energy resources.

Which brings me to photovoltaic cells, known to you and I as solar panels. I’ve read plenty of semi-amateur instructionals on how to make your own solar panels so why aren’t they being used more? Seeing as Vegas is in the Nevada desert they would benefit from the sun’s heat by using panels on the roofs of casinos surely wouldn’t they? I know that in certain places in Africa they use solar panels to power refrigerators for medicines and the stored energy keeps the appliance going through the night when there is no direct sunlight to power the fridge.

I won’t talk about hydro-electric power options just yet as it’s a whole other subject but it’s also a viable means of power, for free, forever as it’s based on the moon’s gravitational pull on the water on our planet. Is alternative energy available or common where you live? Do you have any ideas for the future?

mergatroidal ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

mergatroidal – Fusion energy, the power of the stars, rendered into the size of a motorcycle engine which heats water which turns the blades of a turbine to tens of thousands of RPMs.

Maybe fifty years from now, though probably five hundred years to get something practical, functional into operation. Won’t see something like what I’m referring to in our lifetimes. This is just a thought to quell the doomsayers argument that humans will revert back to some lesser quality of life once fossil fuels expire.

For a time perhaps, but it shouldn’t last long. Cheap fusion energy now? Wow, to the thought.

M_Vos ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

M_Vos – Ok, I’ll jump in and give some thoughts and reflections related to this topic 🙂 Pro; I have to agree with a lot of things you said but first I want to correct a small mistake you made in what you were saying about CFCs. CFCs indeed have the power do destroy the ozone layer, since they have a long half-life value.

This enables them to force a radical reaction with the molecules which means the destruction of this allotrope of oxygen. Not that it’s a dangerous reaction or something, it’s just bad for the ozone concentration. And to give some extra information about this ozone topic: ozone can also be used to disinfect water in a ‘clean’ way because it leaves only oxygen and no potential carcinogenic by-products that are formed when we use chlorinated products for example.

But you have to keep global warming and ozone layer reduction separated. Global warming is caused by numerous effects CO2 emission, human activity, animal activity, and who knows natural processes which we can’t control 😉 Ozone layer reduction is caused by CFCs, not by greenhouse gasses.

When the ozone layer would be gone we would risk having skin cancer, but it doesn’t have a direct effect on the climate.Global warming on the other hand tends to have its effect on our climate (although not everyone agrees at this point). You were a bit right though, since some greenhouse gasses could have a (rather small) effect on the ozone layer.

It is also stated that the effect of the greenhouse gasses on the lower layers of our atmosphere (cooler environment) interacts with the ozone production in the higher regions of our atmosphere. And also mention that ozone is a greenhouse gas itself; and dangerous at low altitudes in high concentration.

This said; just keep the 2 things separated mate 🙂 I must agree on what you say about the winters recently. I can remember as well that when i was a kid i always loved snow But now we should pray every day during the winter to get some snow really. Maybe we’re racing towards a dramatical change in climate, or maybe it’s only a small temporal variation.

Either ways; I never thought such minor variations in temperature could have SUCH an impact ( no snow, hot summers, weird weather behaviour). And in so little time…@Mergatroidal: You are right, fusion energy won’t be in a small box in a couple of years from now.

We will however manage to control the process in the coming 50 years. ITER is only the first step. This project is a 50 MW reactor that is built by all the big countries in the world (USA, china, India, Japan, Russia, south Korea).

It will be the turning point on fusion energy, since it should learn us once and for all that this technology is ready to be controlled by our scientists. I have heard from a reliable source that the countries I just mentioned have agreed to build the first commercial fusion reaction in Japan. It is said that their deal would’ve been off if the other countries didn’t agree.

So my guess is, when ITER will be ready in 2016-2020; We’ll be seeing the first commercial reactor(S) in 2030. Of course there are many variations on nuclear fusion but unless the USA doesn’t surprise us before 2030 I think this will be the most acceptable option (the US army possesses a special way of creating nuclear fusion with high power lasers). I’ll stop giving my thoughts now since it’ll be nicer for you guys to react on what I just said 🙂 Feel free to ask questions.

Pro ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

Pro – Some great points there mate 🙂 Thanks for clearing up the ozone and CFC thing for me there, it’s been years since the word CFC passed my mind actually but in the past it was a buzz word for us as kids and it was the big thing on the news a lot. Strangely nowadays it’s all about global warming it seems but I remember aerosol cans being branded as bad for the ozone layer and stuff.

To be honest when I was young we never really thought about recycling much but it’s good to see the change in TV media and general awareness of the issues affecting our planet. Recycling/reuse of things is a good way to go imo as it sometimes prevents using as much energy to make a new product or whatever if we use something we already have made.

We now have 2 different rubbish bins at every home in Britain I think, at least where I live anyway. One is blue for recycling cardboard, plastic etc and the green one is for all other rubbish. I always try to turn off unnecessary lights and appliances in my house to save power, it all helps I figure.I like the fact that alternative power/energies are no longer seen as such a novelty but more of a reality.

Wind turbines and hydro-electric plants and dams are becoming more and more popular and hydrogen fuel cells are a lot more common now too. I’ve even seen an electric bus and I’ve also been in a car that runs off natural gas and diesel.

I’d like to see more efforts towards making a super-efficient wind turbine soon, one that lasts for 100 years out at sea or something. Off shore wind farms are often mentioned on TV in my country and I can’t think of a better place to put them seeing as everybody wants wind turbines but not near their houses.

I think that all in all my favourite change is the change in global consciousness and general awareness of these problems. I’m still not sure on nuclear power though to be honest, I think I have a legacy of worry from when I was a kid and we were told that all nuclear power was bad but if we could possibly find a way to manage the harmful waste products I’d be interested in using it somehow.

Pro ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

Pro – I’m also interested in a major way because I’ve grown up within the shadow of some the largest power stations in England. My old house had a railway track behind it with coal trains shipping coal to the power stations 24 hours per day. The stations are massive, and so it’s a constant reminder of fossil fuels being burnt and used up every day.

West Burton is a 2,000MW coal-fired power station that stands on a 410 acre site. It satisfies the needs of around two million people. Apparently there’s a new gas-fired power station being built at West Burton. The other station still running is at Cottam, High Marnham station closed down a few years ago, and there’s already a gas plant there as I know a few people who worked on the contract.

Cottam is a 2000MW coal-fired power station with a production capacity of up to 4% of the UK market, which is manned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is situated on the west bank of the River Trent presumably to feed the steam boilers or whatever they are. These are both potent reminders of coal and fossil fuels being consumed at an enormous rate.

M_Vos ‘Re: ‘The Future of Global Energy’

M_Vos – Hi Pro. I also like recycling, since it brings more order in our ‘recycling behaviour’. Most important of course is the fact that recycling partially saves energy, which is a good thing of course. The thing with recycling is that we have to build special installations of course to support the process, which is maybe the bad part in this story.

Another negative are the people who deliberately put wrong things in the bag; which requires extra trier (not sure about the word? machine to sort out the bad stuff) machine that requires extra energy.

But the overall process is good 🙂 The pictures you show there are astonishing; especially the big chimneys there. I’m wondering, are those big chimney exhaling water vapour or is that pure CO2 and other gasses from burning coal?

The black ring on top of the chimney make me suspect that a lot of carbon comes free, but it could be coincidence as well or carbon from another chimney…I must say those energy productions are huge… Very huge… I looked up some numbers from Belgian power plants and found this:

The biggest steam and gas turbine plant produces 460 MW-Our 7 nuclear reactors have a total capacity of around 6000 MW (4 reactors in Doel produce 2839 MW and the other 3 in Tihange produce 2985MW).

The hydro-electrical plant produces 1100 MWWe are of course a small country; (England is around 4 times bigger than Belgium). Still those coal plants remain huge to me. The point is, we, England, Belgium, any other western country is producing huge numbers of power which should be reduced unless we revolutionize the energy production during this 21st century.

Let’s continue talking about energy: What do you all think about nuclear energy? I will give my opinion as well, but I think I’ve said enough already in this post so I’ll keep it short: I think the nuclear age is over; we don’t need new nuclear power plants at all. As I said; more talking about this topic later on.

Pro ‘Re: The Future of Global Energy’

Pro – Hi mate, sorry I didn’t reply yesterday I was just exhausted. Yes, I think recycling is a great thing, it’s also a natural human instinct as well in a way. For example people value antiques don’t they, which have been created in the past and which are re-used. I think recycling is much more prevalent than we tend to realise actually although the ultimate goal would be to stop land filling sites all together somehow as it’s not a sustainable method of disposing of rubbish.

I’m not sure what to suggest about using energy to start the recycling process, building windmills, plastic recycling factories etc, I guess it’s a necessary expenditure of energy as it will hopefully save us a lot more energy than it originally costs us to make it. I’ve been to a plastic recycling place before and they just shredded the plastic into chunks and melted it, then they poured it into trays of water in thin long strips which were chopped up into uniform sized pellets ready for an injection mould or whatever it is.

I imagine a similar process is used for glass too, it will be melted down and reshaped and remoulded which costs energy but if we get our factories’ energy from renewable sources I think it would not be of any great consequence as we only need to build a recycling plant once.

The power stations, the pictures of are both still fully working, there is a third one but it’s slightly smaller and it’s been shut down now. They all run on coal and gas to create steam to drive the enormous turbines, generations of my friends and their parents etc have worked there and I’ve been inside one of the big towers before.

It’s just black and slimy mate, they’re known locally as “cooling towers” and so I assume they’re just for water vapour, the harmful emissions come from the smaller chimneys I think although they are filtered somehow too. The coal trains bring the coal, the coal is burnt and creates steam, steam drives the turbines and then the towers cool the steam back into water.

I think they are where they are because they’re both near the river which is important to the process as it needs vast amounts of water. Personally I’d like to see millions of offshore wind farms, more use of the sea’s energy and more hydro-electric dams being built where environmental impacts are not too great as there must always be a balance.

Nuclear power, hmmm, well I never really understood how it worked at all until recently. I watched an English series called ‘Coast’ and it mentioned a nuclear power station that basically just uses a nuclear reaction to create a lot of heat and create steam in the same way as the coal fired power stations. What I still don’t understand, or haven’t been bothered to look up on Google, is what “nuclear waste” means.

I’ve heard that the actual nuclear process is pretty near perfect in principle but it’s the waste that’s the real problem although this is a vague memory from something I’ve no doubt watched on TV. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on nuclear energy and how it works. For example I was reading a magazine the other day and it talked of a new U.S. ship that is nuclear powered and has enough fuel to be at sea for 20 years without refuelling.

d.hutch Re: ‘The Future of Global Energy’

d.hutch – I think we should all try going solar. It would really help maximize other dwindling resources. At least we’re not all ignorant when it comes to things solar since there are already solar powered houses as well as cars. Maybe we should just push our support for it a little bit so it can be really implemented.

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