How to save the earth, ....Humor.

 I have come up with a sure fire way to improve energy efficiency of the
power grid, and save a lot of power that is currently being totally wasted.

The fist thing to ban is utility meters, other wise know as KWH meters.
Those things that are on houses, and buildings where the electrical service
is. Look at the figures. Each one pulls about 3W. the newer ones pull a bit
less.  There is over 100,000,000 homes in the US. The majority has
electrical service. Safe to say that pretty much all of them have electrical
service in this discussion. The one's that don't, are not a significant
fraction. And a lot of homes have more than one meter. Be it sub metering,
or peak/off peak, and controlled load water heaters, and such. The meters
for those home will easily be pulling over 300MW continuously. That is over
2.6TWh every year that they consume. If you add in all the meters on
corporations, and industries. You should easily have over 300 to 400 million
meters. That is pulling over a GW every hour. That is over 8.7TWh a year.
All to drive little electric meters. They produce no usable work, so their
efficiency  is zero. No light, no sound, no movement that drives any
mechanical device that a person can move, or operate anything with.  They
don't improve the improve the energy efficiency of anything that runs off of
them. So they are totally worthless. If we outlawed them, then we could save
over 8.7TWh every year.

How many "cars off the road" would that equate to?

Another sure fire method. Do away with distribution transformers. Just build
appliances that run directly off of line voltage. You could improve the
total system efficiency of the power grid by a couple percent by doing that.
Yes, I know, some people may not know how to properly wire their house for
2.4kV, and a few more people may be accidentally killed by electrocuting
themselves, but it's a small price to pay. Yes, the wiring, will have to
have a lot thicker insulation, and switches will have to be bulkier, but
think of how quick the payback period will be if you can reduce the power
that it takes to run a home off of the line voltage by a couple percent
without changing the equipment you are running in the house.

Those two things will easily beat the amount of power that you would save
with the half hearted attempt to save the world by banning the incandescent
light bulb. Come on people! Get serious here. If you actually want to make a
dent in the situation, you are going to have to do better than banning a
stupid light bulb! Put your heart into it, and lets make some real changes!

 

Somewhere around 3+ homes per person - man, woman and child ?

Humour is all well and good, but ignorance is unforgivable.

  


Did we have a plague that I missed? :-)

Nick

 On 24 Feb 2007 06:54:44 -0500, nicksanspam@ece.villanova.edu wrote:


I dunno. I get 2.93 to 3 persons/home depending on whose population
figures I use.

 adm1@fastmail.fm says...

Population: 300 million.  Homes: 100 million.  Therefore, the
average is 3 people per home.

NOT 3 homes per person.


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