Austrian Nuclear Plant Goes 100% Solar – At .003% Capacity
August 21st, 2009
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The Zwentendorf Power Plant in Austria was built in the early 1970’s with one nuclear reactor rated at about 700 MWe. At the time, the Austrian government hoped to expand it after it began operation. Unfortunately it was not to be, as a combination of scare tactics and political muscle forced a popular vote on the topic of nuclear energy, resulting in a near tie, in which nuclear energy won by just half a percent. The anti-nukes managed to time things very well, cashing in on the ridiculous amount of panic and scaremongering in the media that occurred at the time of the Three Mile Island incident.
Since that time, the plant has been sitting idle and countless lives have been lost to the exhaust from coal power plants that could have been prevented had the plant been open. The Greens love something like Zwentendorf, where they can hold it up as an example of an expensive power plant that never produced a watt of electricity. (Don’t bother mentioning that it’s their fault that this happened.)
Now they’re all giddy again because the plant now hosts a pathetically puny and absurdly expensive solar power station. And yes, this is getting TONS of press, with no mention of the relative energy produced, just the fact that it is now converted to 100% solar, implying that it somehow is equivalent.
Here’s what Greenpeace has to say about it:
Austria ââŹâ Last night Greenpeace was invited by the Austrian authorities to hang a banner from a nuclear power station, unlikely but true. The Zwentendorf nuclear plant was never operated and has been mothballed since the 70’s. Today it is to open as a solar power station: our banner simply stated: ââŹĹEnergy Revolution ââŹâ Climate Solution.ââŹ
The plant’s operation was fiercely contested and in 1978 a national referendum sealed its fate. Nuclear fuel rods were never inserted into the reactor and the concrete plant on the edge of the Danube River in western Austria never produced electricity. It has stood dormant as a testament to Austrian concerns over nuclear energy. Now, a 1.2 million Euro project has turned the nuclear power plant into the largest solar power station in Austria.
A testament to the fact that the only safe nuclear power comes from the sun.
At a ceremony hosted by the State of Lower Austria, the head of our climate campaign, Thomas Henningsen, received an award presented by American actress Andie MacDowell, for our work to raise alarm over climate change and the promotion of climate solutions. The ââŹËSave the World AwardsââŹâ˘ are the first international awards that honour exceptional individuals and organisations working toward a sustainable future.
…
If a nuclear power station can go solar, then why canââŹâ˘t our entire energy system be diverted to clean and safe renewable energy sources, backed by energy efficiency and conservation? If we can bail out the banks, then why canââŹâ˘t we provide the 140 billion US dollars a year needed to help the developing world adapt to and mitigate climate change: that includes 40 billion US dollars needed to end tropical deforestation which is responsible for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Well, I will tell you why our entire energy system can’t go solar. It’s pretty simple actually. Before the installation of the solar panels, the plant produced zero watts. Now it produces… just slightly more than zero. It still produces approximately zero in utility terms or as compared to the actual energy a country like Austria consumes.
The average amount of power that this 1.5 million Euro project will produce is about twenty kilowatts. That is assuming that it meets the 180,000 kWh/year target that it is suppose to. In general such estimates are more likely to be too high than too low. But lets give them the benefit of the doubt: Roughly 20 kilowatts.
If you were to produce that much power in a fossil fuel power plant, your power plant would look something like this:
No, this solar project won’t be replacing any power plants, but it could replace a generator about the size of a large beach cooler.
A few things which are more powerful than this project:
- My car (by about seven times)
- A professional grade riding lawnmower
- A modestly sized outboard motor
But what could this power anyway? Every time they build a solar power system or a wind farm, they always like to talk about how it could power X number of homes. This tends to be pretty deceptive, since the amount of power a home needs can vary quite a lot. So here it is in terms of some common appliances and end uses of electricity:
Today a high power hair dryer can easily go up to 1800 watts. Some even go up to 2000 watts. So if you were using this power plant for drying hair, you’d be able to run roughly twelve of them.
A good sized air conditioner can draw more than three kilowatts of power. If you have a window unit intended for a large room then you’re going to be using a very significant portion of the power this thing produces. If it were used to run air conditioners, you could run about eight good sized ones.
A small electric space heater will use an even larger portion of the output of these solar cells. On a cold Austrian night, one might break out a four thousand watt heater to heat up a garage, workshop or augment a home’s heating system. Four kilowatts is a fairly standard size for an electric room heater. The plant’s capacity will be maxed out if more than five are in use at once.
Portable flood light towers are used for construction or for various events. You may have seen them lighting up the parking lot at a concert or along the side of the highway during night work. A good sized construction site might use several. Good thing they come with their own generator, because the above solar power system could barely power two of them.
Finally, the Austrians are going to have to get their power from some other source if they plan on having pizza on a regular basis. That’s because if this system were used to power restaurant sized pizza ovens, they’d only have the capacity to run one of them and there wouldn’t even be enough power left over for the lighting and the cash register or anything else in the pizza parlor.
Well, at least they got to use the event to give themselves an award. After all, isn’t environmentalism really all about patting yourself on the back for what you’ve done?
Am I the only one who sees irony in this picture? (Think energy use versus energy production)
This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 21st, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Saying this is a “nuclear plant converted to solar” is complete bull****. That implies it was a functional nuclear power plant and now functions in a similar capacity using solar power. It doesn’t. It never was a nuclear power plant. It was a could have been but never was. It doesn’t become a nuclear power plant until it starts putting out power and goes critical. So they turned an industrial hulk (that could have been an assett but wasn’t for political reasons) into an expensive and useless solar power plant.
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August 21st, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Excellent way of illustrating just how much real power this joke of an installation really produces. The comrades at Gazprom are probably laughing so hard they can’t drink their vodka. I wonder how much celebrating will be done when a Winter cold snap comes through and the Russians grin and unzips the fly on their pants when the Austrians need more NG.
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August 21st, 2009 at 11:02 pm
This was an outstanding article.
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August 21st, 2009 at 11:56 pm
^Agreed; great write-up, doc. That press release is one of the most misleading things I’ve read in a while…
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August 21st, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Good Illustrations, although regarding the air conditioners. Those are one room a/c. If you had central air, it would barely run a single small office!
Back on topic, it’s interesting that nowhere on any pages I’ve found does it actually give the rated power. That is what they normally do “It has an output of 120,000 kilowatts” or something, ignoring the fact that it rarely, if ever, produces that.
Average power is a more fair way of measuring it and I’d prefer to see that as the more common standard for measure because its much less missleading about what you’re really dealing with. Of course, the flip side of that is that it might power 20 hair dryers at noon and zero after dark.
20kw = ~28 horsepower.
If you put an engine in the average car that produced as much power as the average output of this power plant, it would be unsafe to drive on interstate highways because it would be so underpowered you couldn’t accelerate in a reasonable time or have the power to adequately pass.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 1:00 am
Perfect example of the damage these nut-jobs can do. An extremely expensive utility shut down before it could even really be turned on, and then “converted” to something the greenies love, with NO regard as to cost and efficiency.
Complete insanity!
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August 22nd, 2009 at 1:06 am
Your title contains an error. When you say the solar plant yields 0.03% of what Zwentendorf would produce, you left out a zero: it is actually 0.003%.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 am
uvdiv said:
Thanks. I’ll correct that.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 2:08 am
And Greenpeace was invited. Those bastards are really getting me steamed. They claim to be a renigade, “fighting the man” outside, grass-roots kind of organization. They’re invited to events like this by their political darlings who are just as full of **** as they are and they even get direct government funding in some countries.
They’re so full of lawyers to protect them, PR people to market them and conmen running it all, they’re all about as legit as the Church of Scientology. Those idiot college students and yuppie hippies are just the jackasses who the marketing people send out to be their public face and make asses of themselves.
God, I’ve grown to really hate them and the other groups that are part and parcel of that (FOE, Earth First, Earth Liberation Front.) I’ve spend enough time doing enviornmental services to know that they collectively never contribute a goddamned thing to anything and if they ever do get involved in something they only want to make it a big stinking problem and make themselves out to be heros.
By the way, this power plant project should provide just enough electricity to run the conveyor systems at a big coal mine, which will actually be providing the power. Of course, it would never be enough to power the draglines, but that could be something to aspire to, right? Some day, if they build enough of these, they’ll be able to power a coal mine and then the coal mine will provide the rest of the power.
When are these groups going to finally start to have their high holy image collapse in the public view? I’m still waiting!
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August 22nd, 2009 at 3:27 am
Russ said:
The global warming sceptic blog Climate Resistance claims that the rise of environmentalism in politics is a result of the fact that it provides a sense of purpose to politicians (on both left and right) which had lost their original causes with the end of the Cold War.
Russ said:
Isn’t the fact that politicians these days are more concerned with campaign contributions than with actual votes one of the reasons why Greenpeace uses the tactics that it does?
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August 22nd, 2009 at 4:31 am
One has to start somewhere.
And George, I disagree that people on the right show much concern for the environment. At best they in the US pretend to care about it but the right does not enact the major kind of reforms that Obama has, and we need.
http://www.poweronline.com/article.mvc/Obama-Administration-Awards-More-than-119M-0001
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August 22nd, 2009 at 5:54 am
Bruce, I’m sure you wer the pride of the re-education camp you graduated from.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 6:57 am
Bruce said:
Maybe not in the States, but here in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron has jumped on the micro-generation bandwagon in a big way…
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August 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 am
Oh, and the article Consuming Democracy (by Frank Furedi, and originally published in issue 123 of Living Marxism) is an interesting analysis of the decline of electoral politics and the rise of activist groups (Green and otherwise)
(Could you delete the previous version please?)
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August 22nd, 2009 at 8:14 am
The one good thing about this is that when they do something so obviously stupid, it’s easier to make people understand that they are just stupid.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 10:30 am
Bruce said:
This crap has been going on for the past 30 years.
No matter how much money you throw at something and no matter how much R&D you do, how much publicity you gain, how many prototypes you create, how many times you revise and refine the designs, no matter how much time and effort you sink into it, you will never change one thing: There is a finite amount of energy in a given area as illuminated by a given radiative flux of light. That amount of energy, on the surface of the earth at least, is not that great and is highly variable.
That is the Achilles heal of solar energy. You will always, regardless of what technology you use, need a truly enormous amount of space and a truly enormous amount of collection material to generate even a small amount of energy.
Bruce said:
I’m not a right winger, I’m a libertarian. I care about the enviornment and hence I prefer to see solutions that work. No matter how much something is supported by the “enviornmental” groups, no matter how popular it is, no matter how in vogue it is, no matter how trendy it is, if it does not actually reduce emissions or replace dirty energy with clean then it is worthless or worse.
This is why I don’t support solar or wind. Yes, they’re very trendy and very hip and very much the thing that everyone loves to talk about. THEY DON’T WORK. They’re NOT effective solutions. That is all I care about.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Bruce said:
Why must everything be politics with you? As soon as the technical facts and the numbers are talked about it’s all “Well, the republicans didn’t support it and the democrats do..” Also, it’s so black and white! Most people don’t define themselves as being 100% to the right or left. It’s not like there are the good guys and everyting they support is good and the bad guys who want to destroy the world.
It’s not a political issue. If solar power is considered to be a viable solution for mass market energy production, then that is flat out wrong. The numbers show it does not have it and it is not a realistic plan. It doesn’t matter if it’s republican, democrat, green, libertarian etc. You know Arnold Schwarzenegger (a republican) backed funding to subsidize solar and wind heavily. Either he did it for political reasons or he is ignorant of the facts.
Can you step away from your political beliefs and the idea that everyone who is on one side is right and try to just think about things in an objective manner? Forget what Obama says and forget what Bush says too and just look at the issue as an individual who is trying to evaluate it for their self?
This is so annoying. It’s not a party thing. (well it has become one, but the issue really is not)
This is almost as dumb as the “Sarah Palin thinks its a good idea so it must be a bad idea”
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August 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I don’t think Bruce was talking about you, but rather that he was replying to my comment about the Climate Resistance site, where I referred to both left- and right-wingers latching onto environmentalism in order to give themselves a sense of purpose.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 12:11 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
Please don’t dignify Bruce’s tribalism with the label “politics”!
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August 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
We should consider not only replacing plants but increasing the percentage of electricity generated, by building additional nuclear capacity. Vehicles
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August 22nd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Greenpeace leaders are smart and know what they are doing: they aim to tear down western civilization and replace it with a dictatorial regime they intend to control. Power to them means more than anything else.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes episodes said that when you eliminate the impossible, you are left with the improbable. It is impossible for leaders of the greens not to know that what they do will bring on another dark age; so we are left with the improbable, but actual fact that they are charlatans who make the worst con artists encountered before their time, look like honor scouts.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Props to the great article. I have also used examples of what solar systems could potentially power while explaining to residents where I live why we cant (or why we shouldn’t) install solar power systems. I found it funny because it was proposed that solar power be installed to power a site with over 60 residential units while the site itself only occupies a small area (about a 100×100m area).
In this case 20kW is pitful… I am amazed they bothered. I have some computers that consume about 1.5kW continuously (24/7/365), plus about 500W of other equipment around the place. If I have a shower and the hot water system kicks in, there goes another 5kW for the next half an hour. If It’s a hot day I might have the aircon on which can use up to 7.2kW. If someone was to be cooking something at the same time, we may be very nearly approaching the full 20kW. Bye-bye to almost 20kW from two people in a 40 sq meter unit.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Vehicles said:
If you mean more electricity in general, I agree. I’d like to eventually see a net increase in electricity generation in order to allow transition to electricity as a greater portion of energy usage for things like vehicles and also heating and industrial processes that currently depend on fossil fuels. Also, nuclear energy can be a big part of providing direct process heat. A huge amount of natural gas is burned to provide process heat for things like chemical production.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 8:25 pm
These days are not kind on the laws of thermodynamics…
Google for Ceren Burçak Dag. The news stories you find tells you about an 18 year old girl who won the Stockholm Junior Water Prize.
http://www.siwi.org/sa/node.asp?node=681
Never let it be said I have anything against people patting the back of someone who came up with a creative idea… even if the idea is a bit goofy and won’t work.
But when you award said goofy idea with 5000 USD, a (presumably) exclusive chrystal scuplture, press that goes around the world, and send her to a big conference as a speaker, making her think she has come up with a fantastic solution to a world problem… then I take issue with the whole circus.
So what was the idea?
To convert the kinetic energy of raindrops into electricity
The concept is brilliant, I agree: to use piezo-electricity as a conversion apparatus. So far so good, that is kind of clever.
But the laws of therodynamics knocks on the door with two little factlets:
1) Raindrops has a terminal velocioty of between 2 and 9 m/s… never more than that.
2) Extreme rain is said to be 50 mm per hour or more.
Assuming 50 mm/h rainfall, terminal velocity 9 m/s, and 100% energy conversion… we arrive at an energy density of 0.56 W per square meter.
I looked at the precipitation figures for Sweden. National average is approximately 1000 mm per year. assuming a terminal velocity of about 5 m/s (remember that in many parts, much of this falls like snow… with negligable terminal velocity)… in one year, one square meter of this rain catcher generates 12 500 J. That is just barely enough to raise the temperature in a 2 dl cup of coffee from room temp to body temp!
Still… this girl thinks she has invented a revolution in clean energy production. How sad is that hm?
Further more… I looked a little more at the material she proposed… polyvinylidene fluoride. Turns out to make that piezo-electric you have to heat it to 70-100 degrees C. Someting tells me this “rain catcher” will have a hard time to even make up for the energy that went into making it.
This is the kind of nosense that makes headlines these days.
/Michael
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August 22nd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
True, raindrops don’t have the required energy, but I wonder if it could be used as an variant on hydro, tapping into large waterfalls or particularly turbulent rivers? That might be interesting to look into.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Well, hydro does harness the power of rain. Rain and also snowmelt, but the reason it works is that to get any energy from rain, you have to have lots of it collected over a massive area. Hydro accomplishes this by using an entire river watershed to do so.
Matthew said:
The easier and more effeicnet way to do that would be just to divert the water flow through a turbine. Niagra falls would be an example of using a naturally occurring water fall for hydroelectric power. No need to build a big dam because nature has created a favorable situation to begin with, where the water has to fall because of topography.
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August 24th, 2009 at 8:44 am
The public’s perception of the magnitude of a particular risk is usually exaggerated relative to the actual risk. We have touched on this several times as it applies to nuclear energy compared to other forms of generation. This article neatly illustrates the other big issue with selling nuclear energy as the best technology for the future: the public’s perception of the magnitude of the output of a particular renewable energy source is usually exaggerated relative to the actual output.
This is one of the areas that we need to step up the effort to educate. As long as the public is allowed to believe that projects like this can indeed replace a nuclear plant with solar energy, we cannot get our own message through. This needs to be attacked tooth and nail in every forum we can reach, and since the renewable sector often uses the utterly arbitrary ‘number of average homes’ as a standard to express output, I submit that we should select some standard of our own like drbuzz0’s ‘pizza ovens’ to report actual output. Since the real output of these facilities is always a fraction of their nameplate rating and pizza ovens represent a easily understood industrial load, I think it would be a great way of showing just how ineffectual these power produces are.
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August 24th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Don’t forget radiation is lethal to humans. The nuclear power industry is so corrupt that a few people dead from spilled waste or cracked storage containers is just collateral damage. Hate nuclear, love solar.
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:03 am
newsreader said:
Then why aren’t you dead yet? You’re being subjected to radiation as you sit and read this very sentence. You are radioactive… approximately 5000 to 7000 Bq depending on bodyweight and fat/muscle raitio.
newsreader said:
Straw man argument. I dare you to stand up to a real nuclear worker and say that, you cowardly troll.
You don’t see the flaws in your argument, do you? Here… let me transpose your post. You do know that solar panels use arsenic in them, right? Hence, your post becomes…
So lets dispense with the BS and see your post for what it is: pure uninformed nonsense. Now go spout it to someone that enjoys that kind of horror-stories. Here we do science… not fairy-tales.
/Michael
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
newsreader said:
Oh? Name 6 people who have died as such “collateral damage” in Western Europe or North America in the last 50 years. Not talking about the guy who fell from a catwalk and broke his neck or miners killed in cave ins (mining is dangerous work, that’s why it pays well) – find me 6 people who have directly died as a result of issues unique to the nuclear industry.
Name a single commercial solar plant that pays for itself (payback being defined as having generated enough electricity to have paid back it constuction/installation costs if sold at market rates).
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:47 am
newsreader said:
It is in high enough doses. Sunlight is too. Just try standing in the focus of one of those concentrated solar towers. However radiation at dangerous levels is contained and it decays away quickly anyway. Coal exhaust is also lethal to humans and it’s blown out into the atmosphere and it does kill people
newsreader said:
Do you have any proof of this? Some of the biggest nuclear companies like GE and Hitachi Heavy Industries are just as invested in solar and wind. Also, the amount of money spent on political action and lobbying by the nuclear industry is peanuts compared to other industries.
The nuclear industry is corrupt? More so than other industries? More so than Greenpeace? Lets see some evidence.
newsreader said:
Well there goes rationality. I don’t “hate solar” I see it as totally ineffective in providing energy for grid power. I mean, it’s great for satellites and calculators. Obviously this is an emotional thing.
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August 24th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Just today I saw some solar ‘tards suggest that all of solars back-up problems could be solved by electrolysis to and large-scale cryogenic hydrogen storage.
Using uvdiv’s figure of 97 billion euros to match the energy output of a single 1650 MW EPR operating at 90% capacity factor with a scaled up Zwentendorf solar plant you get 200-400 billion euros with 25-50% efficient hydrogen back-up(and I suspect that’s rather optimistic) without even including the cost of the storage itself.
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August 24th, 2009 at 11:46 am
newsreader said:
Are you deficient in potassium?
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August 24th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Soylent said:
That does seem rather optimistic. Electrolysis is not very effecient. Then the other thing to consider is that storing the hydrogen takes energy because electrolysis gives you the hydrogen at the ambient pressure – you still need to compress it and to compress it down to the level where it becomes cryogenic is extremely energy intensive. You need to about 20 Kelvin.
That does not even include the fact that the electricity produced by fuel cells is DC and needs to be inverted. Good inverters can achieve 95% effeciency, but loss compounds in these circumstances, so that is something that must always be considered
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August 24th, 2009 at 11:52 am
newsreader said:
Are you deficient in potassium by any chance? Ever get a dental x-ray?
Like a typical anti you left out any kind of qualifiers. It’s like saying falling is lethal to humans, hence jogging should be abolished.
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August 24th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Great use of visuals to demonstrate the futility of solar power. This makes Greenpeace look very foolish. Great post.
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August 26th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
About the agenda of Greenpeace:
There was an Interview with Gerd Leipold, outgoing leader of Greenpeace International, on BBCââŹâ˘s “Hard Talk”. In part 3 of the You Tube video he reveals quite openly why he is against nuclear power despite his conviction of a coming climate catastrophe: We have to change our life style to a less energy intensive one. It is not about more energy, be it carbon free or not, it is about living with less energy (his opinion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knJnOUgWbtc
Greenies donââŹâ˘t like wind and solar although they donââŹâ˘t work. They like them exactly [i]because[/i] they donââŹâ˘t work. They yearn for a future in which we all live more like Hobbits in The Shire.
Best regards, Daddeldu
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August 26th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Daddeldu said:
I think this is the nub of the whole thing, at least for the ‘true believers.’ Unfortunately for all our offspring, it is a hard argument to counter on an intellectual level (because for the true believers, it is an emotionally derived belief). Also, it is easy enough to spread to the generally well meaning but not too critical population. That’s how we end up with the compact fluorescent bulb pushers and their ‘every little bit helps’ mantra. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is heating up and the ocean is rising… Most people have no concept of scale or ‘order of magnitude.’ To them, a kilowatt or a megawatt, or a kw-hr, it’s all just too much, like logarithms in 10th grade algebra…
Let’s build the starships now, and leave these idiots behind. There’s a real universe out there for us to explore and mine.
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August 26th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Mike Oliver said:
Greenpeace produces no service or goods that have any value in the global marketplace and relies totally on funding from outside sources. As such, they are trying to stay alive year after year by keeping the funds flowing. Their “product” is their philosophy that when allied to certain political groups gains them prestige and that limits or expands their influence. So it’s really about money and survival of the organization than it is any great plot to take over the world. If their all contributors said they were not going to donate anymore because greenpeace doesn’t support nuclear energy, then we would see greenpeace change its mind about nuclear energy.
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August 27th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I hope they can get their story straighten out and build solar panels should be in good use not exploited.
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August 28th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Thanks for the great visuals – really puts into perspective the energy use of commonly used devices. A friend of mine is designing a 12 kW solar system for a client in CA and I’m almost afraid to show him this article!
Until the past year I had been pro-solar and agnostic about nuclear. However, I’ve had the good fortune of finding several informative blogs – Rod Adams, Charles Barton, Kirk Sorensen, others – and have really recognized the vast superiority of atomic power. When you combine the electric power with desalination potential, you have the ability to positively affect millions, even billions, of people.
Have any of you read through http://www.coal2nuclear.com? What do you think of Jim Holm’s approach?
BTW, newsreader … you need to do some homework before spouting off such inanity here.
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August 28th, 2009 at 12:35 am
DocForesight said:
I like the concept Doc, but I think it would have too many regulatory hurtles to get past that it probably will never come to reality. If it does, I’m sure we will see it work in China first where they don’t have nearly as many hangups about getting new things done as we do.
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August 28th, 2009 at 1:51 am
DocForesight said:
Crucifying idiots is the national sport of this forum, you are welcome to join in the fun.
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August 28th, 2009 at 2:27 am
I finished off my basement and put in electric basebaord heating. It is a 6000 watt system. Puts things in perspective about how much a home can use at any given time. I am sure it averages out to a much lower number because factor in the time my home is empty because everyone is out at work or school and plus at night we don’t use much power. Still, even so, you realize a person can use a lot easily.
I am absolutely convinced that conservation is not going to change things. Conservation is fine, but we can’t move mountains with better light bulbs.
We just can’t have people all moving into smaller homes and using less heat and less gadgets and doing less things. This economy is in a condition where it needs more production and more consumer spending and that is what scares me about this message. If everyone decides they have too much of everything then what happens to the producers and the workers?
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August 29th, 2009 at 2:01 am
WilliamN said:
Interesting that this site, or rather the sites that points to, [b]don’t actually tell you how to build them[/b]. Instead they try to sell you ‘plans’.
My policy on this, I think, should be the same as my policy regarding claims of successful perpetual motion: [i]Absolutely no revenue should goto the person or people making the claim until and unless the idea checks out when tried by a reputable independent third party.[/i]
If it pans out, then I can suggest all users of the idea donate the cost of the first electric bill that they don’t have to pay, or the first tank of gasoline that they don’t have to buy, as the case may be, to whoever invented the device. He’ll still get fabulously rich that way. But in the event the idea is bogus (still very likely), it is imperative that the claimant get [i]nothing[/i].
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