Nature and her tools solar, wind and the sea

[Alcoblog]

Not heard that one, i'd like to know more though.

 

 

 

Your probably right there when I think about it, oops!

You're talking to a top scientist here matey!

I'm gonna check out the photosynthesis thing though ... it was correct according to Mr Yates (my biology teacher at Tapton) in the 70's and is not my specialist field ... although the hydroponics plant (Plant, not 'Plant') in my facility tends to agree with my hypothesis. Anyway, whatever plants produce, it's still from the sum total of everything on the planet and nothing else.

Rather like having a very large box of Lego ... you can make anything you want, a penguin or dare I say... a Fray bentos steak and kidney pie. you can pull the blocks to bits and make something else but you still have the same amount of pieces!

[Alcoblog]

Wind farms simply use the strength of wind power to turn propellors that drive turbines which generate electricity. The wind is not really diminished in any way because the propellors are designed to move as freely as possible- ie they don't provide any substantial barrier to the wind.

 

Solar panels absorb energy from solar radiation (light and radiant heat) and convert it into electrical energy. They only absorb the radiation that falls on them, so having a solar panel on your roof will only absorb the radiation that falls on that part of the roof, it won't diminish the amount of radiation that the sun continuously fires at the earth.

 

Tidal power works in a similar way to wind power in that the movement of the waves is used to generate electricity - tidal generators are designed to move freely and therefore they do not diminish the power of the waves.

 

So I would argue that no, it doesn't upset the balance of nature. What does upset this balance is the burning of fossil fuels, the burial of nuclear waste and the irresponsible behaviour of some energy companies that simply leave their equipment to rot in situ once a region's resources have been economically exhausted.

Think you may be a bit wrong there cavegirl ... any power a wind farm produces is made by collecting the same amount of energy from the wind and the power of the wind will be depleted.(obviously losses through stuff like friction and resistance which will go elsewhere)

Same for wave power too ... you don't get energy for nothing and the wave power will be depleted if you collect it's energy.

I can't really see the prob with fossil fuels either ... oil is created naturally from carbon which is the most common element on the planet which includes the equipment petro chemical industries may leave to rot ... it'll all turn back into carbon and oxygen and whatever ... same as me and you, we all came from the same building blocks that made mount Everest and trees and Harley Davidsons. There's no prob with burying nuclear waste either ... it's where we dug it up from in the first place! It may kill us but we just turn back into our constituent compounds and start again!

[Cavegirl]

Think you may be a bit wrong there cavegirl ... any power a wind farm produces is made by collecting the same amount of energy from the wind and the power of the wind will be depleted.(obviously losses through stuff like friction and resistance which will go elsewhere)

Same for wave power too ... you don't get energy for nothing and the wave power will be depleted if you collect it's energy.

I can't really see the prob with fossil fuels either ... oil is created naturally from carbon which is the most common element on the planet which includes the equipment petro chemical industries may leave to rot ... it'll all turn back into carbon and oxygen and whatever ... same as me and you, we all came from the same building blocks that made mount Everest and trees and Harley Davidsons. There's no prob with burying nuclear waste either ... it's where we dug it up from in the first place! It may kill us but we just turn back into our constituent compounds and start again!

 

Ah I see you're providing your own unique brand of 'suicidal science' today Alcoblog

 

I can only answer with questions-

 

Does harvesting tidal power from the waves deplete the moon? The main driving force behing tidal movements.

 

Does harvesting solar energy deplete the sun? The main driving force behind solar energy.

 

Does harvesting wind power deplete the light chemical elements in our atmosphere? The main driving force behind the wind.

[carosio]

Wind farms simply use the strength of wind power to turn propellors that drive turbines which generate electricity. The wind is not really diminished in any way because the propellors are designed to move as freely as possible- ie they don't provide any substantial barrier to the wind.

The wind strength is diminished on the lee side of the blades, although, depending on the proximity of other turbines, turbulance may be created.

 

Tidal power works in a similar way to wind power in that the movement of the waves is used to generate electricity - tidal generators are designed to move freely and therefore they do not diminish the power of the waves.

 

They do, the energy travelling through the water (wave) is converted by turning the electical generator within the unit, and it can be shown that wave motion is less immediately behind the generator.

[HeadingNorth]

- Does harvesting tidal power from the waves deplete the moon? The main driving force behing tidal movements.

 

It does not; the moon (and the Sun to a lesser extent) creates a given amount of tidal energy, and that amount will not change just because we harvest some of it for our own ends. It could, in theory, cause smaller tidal movements along the shorelines because we've sucked out some of the tidal energy before it reaches the shores; but we would be talking about amounts of less than a millimetre over several centuries. Utterly trivial stuff.

 

The fact that the Moon is generating those tidal forces does, itself, affect both Moon and Earth; the Earth's rotation is slowing by a tiny fraction of a second every century, and the Moon recedes from us by an inch or two in the same time span.

 

Does harvesting solar energy deplete the sun? The main driving force behind solar energy.

 

As with the above case, the amount of solar energy being poured out, and the depletion it is causing in the Sun, will not change whether or not we use some of it for our own purposes. The Sun is expending energy at such an unimaginably colossal rate that it loses four million tons of mass every second; however, it is such an unimaginably colossal object to begin with, that even at that rate of loss, it has continued unchanged for over four thousand million years, and will continue unchanged for at least that long again before the loss of mass seriously affects it.

 

Also as with the above case, if we are subtracting from the amount of solar energy hitting the earth's surface, that could affect the earth's surface; but it could be made to do so in a beneficial manner, by for instance removing some of the heat from desert regions.

 

- Does harvesting wind power deplete the light chemical elements in our atmosphere? The main driving force behind the wind.

 

While it's the light elements of the atmosphere that move around in the wind, they are not actually the cause. The cause is simply that different parts of the Earth move at different speeds - which sounds ridiculous until you consider the dimensions of a spherical object. A point on the equator moves at about a thousand miles an hour in order to rotate in 24 hours; a point in England moves at only about half that speed. Air near the equator is moving at the same speed as the earth at the equator, but as it moves north or south, that means it is now moving at a different speed from the land beneath it, and the resulting differential is wind. (Why don't we have winds of 500 miles an hour, then? Because the various different movements of air north, south, up, down and all over the place, partly cancel each other out, and partly because air is still viscous and creates friction with itself, draining out some of the speed.)

 

If we remove wind power for our own purposes, the net effect would be to reduce the total amount of energy that is moving air around, and thus to reduce the average wind speed across the globe. But, again, the amounts involved would be immeasurably tiny.

 

 

To summarise, the Earth is vastly bigger and more powerful than we puny humans and our puny technology, and nothing we can do could seriously affect it in any way. We could make the surface uninhabitable for life if we nuked the place, but all of our nuclear weapons, put together, are not as destructive as a single large volcano going off; the planet, itself, would continue serenely on whether we survive on it or not.

[Alcoblog]

Ah I see you're providing your own unique brand of 'suicidal science' today Alcoblog

 

I can only answer with questions-

 

Does harvesting tidal power from the waves deplete the moon? The main driving force behing tidal movements.

 

Does harvesting solar energy deplete the sun? The main driving force behind solar energy.

 

Does harvesting wind power deplete the light chemical elements in our atmosphere? The main driving force behind the wind.

Not at all Cavegirl ... why is it suicidal science?

The moon is indeed responsible for the movement of the sea (through gravity mainly) and I never said otherwise.

Without getting involved in more complicated stuff, it's fair to say that energy can neither be created or destroyed. Therefore, if you harness energy from the sea it seems fairly obvious in a miniscule way that the tides will be affected. The effects of wave harvesting would be minimal in the scheme of things but nevertheless exist.The energy from the moon will still be exactly the same wether we utilise it or not.

Same with solar radiation ... the sun has expended this as energy in different forms, but where a natural converter of this (plant or something) once stood we remove the plant to make way for a solar panel which we can then use to recreate the gases the deceased plant would make ... still exactly the same amount of radiation from the sun.

You can't possibly say that the wind will not be changed by putting an object in front of it (flying a plane for instance) This applies to wind harvesters as well ... they capture and convert the energy.

The laws of atrophy dictate that an object will eventually return to it's constituent parts (including the stuff dumped by petrochemical companies and uranium)

The whole universe is controlled by atrophy, be it the sun breaking down and releasing radiation in the process (which powers our planet) to cells corrupting in our bodies causing ageing and eventually death.

(this is my theory and I'm sticking to it)

[HeadingNorth]

Apart from confusing the word "entropy" with "atrophy" you are largely correct.

 

However, nuclear energy is a different matter; uranium and thorium found naturally in the rocks are so weakly radioactive that they can't do you much harm, and they expend their radioactive energy over hundreds, or thousands, of millions of years. A nuclear reactor converts part of the uranium and thorium into other elements which, while they contain only the same amount of radioactive energy, will release it in a far shorter time, at a far higher rate, and are consequently far more dangerous.

[Alcoblog]

- Does harvesting tidal power from the waves deplete the moon? The main driving force behing tidal movements.

 

It does not; the moon (and the Sun to a lesser extent) creates a given amount of tidal energy, and that amount will not change just because we harvest some of it for our own ends. It could, in theory, cause smaller tidal movements along the shorelines because we've sucked out some of the tidal energy before it reaches the shores; but we would be talking about amounts of less than a millimetre over several centuries. Utterly trivial stuff.

 

The fact that the Moon is generating those tidal forces does, itself, affect both Moon and Earth; the Earth's rotation is slowing by a tiny fraction of a second every century, and the Moon recedes from us by an inch or two in the same time span.

 

Does harvesting solar energy deplete the sun? The main driving force behind solar energy.

 

As with the above case, the amount of solar energy being poured out, and the depletion it is causing in the Sun, will not change whether or not we use some of it for our own purposes. The Sun is expending energy at such an unimaginably colossal rate that it loses four million tons of mass every second; however, it is such an unimaginably colossal object to begin with, that even at that rate of loss, it has continued unchanged for over four thousand million years, and will continue unchanged for at least that long again before the loss of mass seriously affects it.

 

Also as with the above case, if we are subtracting from the amount of solar energy hitting the earth's surface, that could affect the earth's surface; but it could be made to do so in a beneficial manner, by for instance removing some of the heat from desert regions.

 

- Does harvesting wind power deplete the light chemical elements in our atmosphere? The main driving force behind the wind.

 

While it's the light elements of the atmosphere that move around in the wind, they are not actually the cause. The cause is simply that different parts of the Earth move at different speeds - which sounds ridiculous until you consider the dimensions of a spherical object. A point on the equator moves at about a thousand miles an hour in order to rotate in 24 hours; a point in England moves at only about half that speed. Air near the equator is moving at the same speed as the earth at the equator, but as it moves north or south, that means it is now moving at a different speed from the land beneath it, and the resulting differential is wind. (Why don't we have winds of 500 miles an hour, then? Because the various different movements of air north, south, up, down and all over the place, partly cancel each other out, and partly because air is still viscous and creates friction with itself, draining out some of the speed.)

 

If we remove wind power for our own purposes, the net effect would be to reduce the total amount of energy that is moving air around, and thus to reduce the average wind speed across the globe. But, again, the amounts involved would be immeasurably tiny.

 

 

To summarise, the Earth is vastly bigger and more powerful than we puny humans and our puny technology, and nothing we can do could seriously affect it in any way. We could make the surface uninhabitable for life if we nuked the place, but all of our nuclear weapons, put together, are not as destructive as a single large volcano going off; the planet, itself, would continue serenely on whether we survive on it or not.

Bloody hell mr North! ... you snuck that in when I was typing mine (and a rather protracted phone call on what I'm doing for Christmas!)

I agree with you wholeheartedly!

[Alcoblog]

Apart from confusing the word "entropy" with "atrophy" you are largely correct.

 

However, nuclear energy is a different matter; uranium and thorium found naturally in the rocks are so weakly radioactive that they can't do you much harm, and they expend their radioactive energy over hundreds, or thousands, of millions of years. A nuclear reactor converts part of the uranium and thorium into other elements which, while they contain only the same amount of radioactive energy, will release it in a far shorter time, at a far higher rate, and are consequently far more dangerous.

Ooops ... just seen this!

I think that atrophy and entrophy are both appropriate words.

I realise that uranium and other radioactive heavy metals are not exactly condusive to our health but the point is it comes from this planet and will stay on it in whatever form. I know this isn't exactly true but you know what I mean

[Cavegirl]

Bloody hell mr North! ... you snuck that in when I was typing mine (and a rather protracted phone call on what I'm doing for Christmas!)

I agree with you wholeheartedly!

 

Reading your posts put me in mind of this clip Alcoblog

 

 

Are you George Carlin?? Enquiring minds wanna know

 

Enjoy