From: SFPhysics@aol.com
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 12:10:11 PDT
From: SFPhysics@aol.com Message-ID: <14.15def7a4.28624f13@aol.com> Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:10:11 EDT Subject: Re: Roll Your Own Blackout..........
What ridiculous political claptrap! The "Roll Your Own Blackout" posting was
offensive and political in nature. How typical of the unenlightened and
uninformed to stage a demonstration that will have zero impact while blaming
a current person for the previous eight years of energy policy neglect.
The truth is that humanity is simply energy hungry because a higher energy
use means a better life style. High demand added with population growth and
energy supply problems become staggering. If everyone were to conserve 10%
while the demand rose 20% there would still be problems and the energy demand
has gone up some 20% per annum in many areas of California within the last
year. The 2000 United States Census showed Californian to have gained a full
20% in population since the 1990 Census. Each new person coming into the
state will need electricity, water, sewer, air, communications,
transportation, food, clothing, and other necessities of modern living
standards. Our society relies on fossil fuel energy because it is a
concentrated form of energy that is currently the least expensive form of
energy. No politician would last long if they were to tell everyone that
lifestyles would be rolled back to lower levels for energy conservation.
So then what can we do to help the planet? The following are some
tongue-in-check suggestions that make as much sense as unplugging your house
from the grid for an hour in protest:
1) Stop all further building in the United States. This means no new houses,
no new stores, no new business, no new hospitals, no new schools, etc., as
these all use energy. Included should be a moratorium on electric service
hookups, water hookups, telephone connections, and sewer hookups.
2) Limit all businesses to their current number of employees with cutbacks
of 10% of the work force annually. The major benefit would be in freeing up
office building space so the lights could be turned out.
3) Make all appliances have alternate hand-crank capability. Hand cranked
laundry washing would be good for the environment and help to keep people
physically fit. Hand crank table lamps, hand crank garbage disposers, hand
crank refrigerators are not unreasonable devices and the list could be
endless for energy saving hand crank appliances where inventive minds are at
work. We already see hand cranked radios and lamps on the market, why not
everything else?
4) Ban any increase in automobiles on the highways. There is already so
many that gridlock is a major factor in fuel consumption waste. This could
be accomplished by making you crush one old automobile for each new one being
purchased. An added advantage is that the newer cars would be cleaner and
more efficient but an unfortunate side effect would be that the more wealthy
classes could purchase junkers from the poor as credits toward their new
Porches, Beamers, and Audis thus leaving the poor with no transportation.
This could be alleviated if we force the rich to throw in their horses on the
car deals so the poor would have the horses for transportation.
5) Give everyone tax credits for leaving the power grid. Since the State of
California is now illegally paying electrical bills at the highest spot rate
in the nation out of its "surplus" that was meant for schools, it would only
make sense to give 500% tax credits for anyone disconnecting themselves from
the grid. Since prices locked in are at 800% of normal the State would be
saving money in the long run.
6) Make exercise bike generators mandatory at all health clubs. Five people
can develop a steady 1 horsepower for 1 hour and this translates to 746
Watt-hours gain. If all the health clubs did this then the grid would have
sufficient head room to not need rolling blackouts.
7) Place a mandatory bed time for everyone in the country. Generation
plants would then have a good scheduled down time for maintenance and
service. With all of the TVs off, refrigerator doors shut, and microwave
ovens off the producers of electric current could charge giant capacitors
which would then give up the charge during peaks the next day. The State of
Nevada would have to made into a giant capacitor for the western grid but Las
Vegas could be left alone as nearby Hoover Dam supplies most of their needs
while they run all night.
8) Roll your life style back into the early 1900s. Get a windup Victorola
phonograph, a pedal-it-yourself player piano, several good kerosene lamps, a
bicycle to commute to work, or a good horse. The horse is the best idea
because it burns a renewable energy source called grass and oats.
Unfortunately the resulting horse pollution may be a negative factor in
global warming from the methane coming off the horse byproducts; but, a
program of scooping up the byproduct and putting it into digesters could
yield enough methane to run gas turbines and generate even more energy. As
for the carbon dioxide exhaust of the turbine, all you would really be doing
is exchanging one greenhouse gas, CH4, for another, CO2, so maybe we could
slip this past the Kyoto Accord limits which wants us to close down power
plants anyway.
9) Some serious thought should be given to bringing back outhouses.
Outhouses require no heating of water so natural gas is saved and without the
need for pressurize water to flush the toilet we could eliminate the massive
water pumps used by all municipal water districts. People could just go to a
central neighborhood handpump each day with a pail for their fresh water. It
is a true fact that the number one largest user of electric energy in the
State of California is the pumping of water by the canal system to shift
northern water south to the Los Angeles basin. The Edmundson Pumping Station
alone draws more megawatts than all of San Francisco because it takes so much
energy to raise the water over the Tehachipi Mountains. Why don't we just
cut all of the water pumping going into LA and we could save millions of
barrels of fossil fuel wasted yearly for their lawns and pools? For drinking
water they could buy bottled water; which, since their water tastes so bad,
they already do anyway. It's a win-win situation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Enough silliness. The energy problem is one where an expanding population is
demanding more and more energy. Only two forms of energy are concentrated in
a small enough volume to make them currently financially appealing, fossil
fuels and nuclear fission. Other forms have supply problems. Hydroelectric
is dependent on snowpack and rainfall while it damages fish habitats. Wind
is dependent on wind and the turbines kill birds. Biomass requires
transportation of low concentration energy materials where a break-even point
is difficult to achieve. Solar is expensive and requires high pollution
processes to make the photovoltaic cells and storage batteries. The
pollution of the fossil fuels and the nuclear fission are largely ignored
because the concentration of energy makes them the most affordable forms of
energy. The bottom line is that there are no simple answers and throwing mud
for political ideological gains is not going to help find answers at all.
This is a science list and we should be looking for answers to problems that
affect our society, our environment, and our future. Encouraging teachers to
be part of some politically based protest should not be within our purview as
science teachers.
Al Sefl
Not a member of any major political party and mad at them all.
PS: Whatever happened to cold fusion? Did the oil companies buy it up so
cheap energy from heavy water couldn't be put on the market? ;-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 16 2001 - 12:22:24 PDT