There is no such thing as an energy crisis...

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
Hmm, a 200kVA transformer isn't exactly a big thing, I am somewhat confused by the need to build new substations in order to simply provide that small an mount of power. I guess that might be because in my summer job they design substation which use banks of 3 transformers totalling 1200 MVA in their substation and 500kVA transformers are needed simply to run the fans to cool the larger transformers.

500kVA is really big from my experience in the distribution area. You must be in transmission? From the distribution side, most of the substations that I dealt with was less than 100kVA.

 

[BrownTown]

Uh yeah, 1200MVA is the production of a nuclear plant, so that aint exactly gonna be flowing down 13.2kV lines, these are 500-161kV autotransformers that are the size of a small house. But still, I often see 200-500kV transformers outside of buildings, thats only enough power for a medium sized store.

 

[Rogodin2]

I am working on a small scale windfarm. In my county (douglas) there is a green buy back program. If i can get the land adjacent to my property I'll be golden and can go completely off grid and eventually end up creating green energy. I've wind maps for our area (and a new 200 pole site went online not long ago).

I don't think there's too much more than what has been discovered already-we just need to change our way of life.

Rogo

 

[Qacer]

I was just looking at this graph:

Budget Graph

If the government can shift some of the money we're giving to Egypt and Israel to the Department of Energy for research, then that might help a little. They can also trim some of the budget from the Department of Defense and shift more of it to energy research. I'm sure the DoD folks would be happier if they can get their fighter jets to stay up in the air for a couple hours especially during dog fights.

 

[potato28]

I got 3/4's of the subject, and I agree with OP that there's no energy crisis. It's just the problem that government's don't want to switch over to alteritive methods of power generation without many years of testing to make sure that the money they put into thie project is gonna be put to it's fullest. With nuclear power, most countries jumped onto it without studying it's problems and we have some of the minor effect's(look it up on Wiki, all of the inccidents are there). With fusion, there's a huge potential for power but there's the issues of it blowing up from all of the hydrogen involved. Solar power is utilisable, but unfirtunatly we don't have very effecient panels... making it futial to setup a large field of panels to produce power for a small town of say.... 250,000 people? Coal burning is one of the best ways to produce power, as coal is one of the most occuring objects in the earth. And coal technology has been advanced so much that in Europe, they use coal as their main power source. If only we(North Americans) could adopt their power generating effeiency...

 

[Qacer]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
I am working on a small scale windfarm. In my county (douglas) there is a green buy back program. If i can get the land adjacent to my property I'll be golden and can go completely off grid and eventually end up creating green energy. I've wind maps for our area (and a new 200 pole site went online not long ago).

I don't think there's too much more than what has been discovered already-we just need to change our way of life.

Rogo

Changing one's way of life could also be the key. I actually saw a documentary regarding energy effecient houses that had a "natural" design for cooling. The only problem was that these houses were fugly as hell.

You got pics of your windfarm?

 

[Jeff7]

Why if only I had a way of converting all this damn bulky matter into pure energy. Why I'd have enough energy in this house to vaporize this entire state!

Originally posted by: potato28
I got 3/4's of the subject, and I agree with OP that there's no energy crisis. It's just the problem that government's don't want to switch over to alteritive methods of power generation without many years of testing to make sure that the money they put into thie project is gonna be put to it's fullest. With nuclear power, most countries jumped onto it without studying it's problems and we have some of the minor effect's(look it up on Wiki, all of the inccidents are there).

Newer reactors are much safer though.
And if we'd make use of breeder reactors, the amount of waste produced would be much less.

With fusion, there's a huge potential for power but there's the issues of it blowing up from all of the hydrogen involved.

This is news to me, and probably to the people working on fusion reactors.

Solar power is utilisable, but unfortunatly we don't have very efficient panels... making it futile to set up a large field of panels to produce power for a small town of say.... 250,000 people?

Inefficient and expensive.
For large scale applications, Stirling Generators are seeing increasing use. They use focused light from the sun to heat a part of the device, which is used to turn a generator.
Pic

Coal burning is one of the best ways to produce power, as coal is one of the most occuring objects in the earth. And coal technology has been advanced so much that in Europe, they use coal as their main power source. If only we(North Americans) could adopt their power generating efficiency...

Except that it's dirty, and strip mining is devastating to local ecosystems. I think that coal is the main power source in the US too.

Originally posted by: BrownTown
For all you put on there you might as well put on matter-anti matter reactions, i'm sure we could get alot of energy out of harvesting anti-matter from deep space and reacting it with matter here on earth.

Good luck finding anti-matter in space. Maybe a stray atom in empty space, but any antimatter out there was probably anihalated during the first few seconds of its existence, shortly after The Big Bang.
Even in Star Trek, antimatter is only used in the way gasoline is used today - as a means of transporting energy. As I understand it, fusion reactors are used for stationary power generation, as creating antimatter is inefficient, and consumes a lot of matter and energy.