California Regulators Adopt $2.9 Billion Solar Power Plan

 2006/01/13: ENN: California Regulators Adopt $2.9 Billion Solar Power Plan

The California Public Utilities Commission Thursday approved a $2.9
billion program to make California one of the world's largest producers of solar
power.

The "California Solar Initiative," backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, aims to
add 3,000
megawatts of solar energy over 11 years through the installation of 1 million
rooftop solar energy
systems on homes, businesses, farms, schools and public buildings.

That amount of electricity would be equivalent to about six new power stations.
[...]
<http://www.enn.com/today.html?id –59>


See also:
2006/01/14: SF Gate: State solar power proposal gets OK from regulators
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/13/PUC.TMP&type=printable>  

2006/01/14: TruthOut: State Solar Power Proposal Gets OK from Regulators
<http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011306EB.shtml>  
    

<regards>
-het


--
"We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments
 for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising."
-Sir Isaac Newton, Principia, 1687

Energy Alternatives: http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/energy/energy.html
H.E. Taylor  http://www.autobahn.mb.ca/~het/

  California could also exploit cold Pacific water as a heat sink.


Bret Cahill

 Bret Cahill wrote:

Breath-taking!  Or maybe Bret-taking.

If done on a small scale, it would provide trivial energy.  If done on
a large-enough scale to be meaningful, the global warming alarmists
(and maybe even some sensible people) would be aghast.  Ocean
temperature, and ocean temperature gradients, have a big effect on
global climate and on food chains in the ocean.  The environmental
extremists' Precautionary Principle forbids it!

Looks like there is no practical large scale alternative to nuclear
power after all.

 

Even the most simple calculations can show how silly any worries would
be.  One ton of cooling capacity is 12000 btu per hour.  One btu raises
one cubic foot of water by 1 degree F.  So each ton of cooling capacity
raises 12000 cubic feet of water 1 degree F per hour, therefore each
cubic mile of seawater could provide over a half million tons of cooling
capacity per day for a one degree temperature rise (assuming 24 hour
needs for cooling, which is rarely if ever true in California)

So say you had some pipes with some non-toxic fluid in them that held the
heat pumped out of wherever, running in large serpentine loops for maximum
surface area, through parts of the ocean where there are currents to move
the heat away quickly and mix it in with everything else.  It would never
be an issue.  It sure wouldn't be cheap, and if you went to all that
expense to collect enough heat in one place to make this workable, it
would be better to try to use some of that heat for some useful purpose
(providing process heat for various needs, generating electricity,
whatever) rather than just dumping it so it would never be reasonable to
do it on a really large scale because getting partway there gives you
better alternatives as to what to do with your excess heat.

If you were going to do this for cooling, you could also extract heat
from the oceans, if you had a climate like California's, where for much
of the year and much of the state there is some cooling need and some
heating need on the same day, and there would be even less for alarmists
to be alarmed about.  Its not as if the sun isn't going to be many orders
of magnitude in the lead for heat contribution to the world's oceans no
matter what.

--
Douglas Siebert                          dsiebert@excisethis.khamsin.net

Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute.  Set him on fire, and
he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

 Douglas Siebert wrote:

Technically, a British Thermal Unit raises the temperature of 1 pound
mass of water by 1 Fahrenheit degree.  There are 62.4 lbm in one cubic
foot of water at standard conditions -- give or take.

This would seem to strengthen your point, by implying that each ton of
cooling capacity would warm a given volume of ocean water even less.
But the people living right at the beach tend not to need air
conditioning, and the people inland would have to invest lots of energy
in pumping capacity and insulated pipelines.  Actually, I had guessed
that Mr. Cahill was talking about using cold ocean water as the heat
sink into which thermodynamically rejected heat could be dumped --
nothing to do with air conditioning.

Bottom line -- using the oceans as a heat sink is probably not the
answer, whatever the question was.