23 June 2006

Birthday

So Entropy Production was one year old as of yesterday. Such an anniversary presents a good opportunity to reflect on the general state of the blog, where it's been and the overriding themes:
  • Electricity is my favourite energy carrier with high density chemical fuels as the second choice. Overall the economy and environment would benefit from a push to offset our petrochemical consumption with electricity − in particular the transportation sector.
  • Intermittency of electricity sources such as solar and wind power is not a serious problem at present but it is likely to grow into one. I put a lot of emphasis on this issue. There is a need for some form of energy storage or flexible demand (such as electric vehicle charging). Solar power correlates reasonably well with peak demand while wind is a volatile electricity source. Some form of base-load power production is highly desirable.
  • Conservation is necessary but proceeding at a fairly limited pace. Government action could raise the standards for many applications to increase their efficiency.
So thoughts and comments from my readers? What do you like, what don't you like, where would you take the blog.

4 comments:

Engineer-Poet said...

I'll make the same complaint others have made about me:

You don't write enough. ;-)

Tag, you're it.

Robert McLeod said...

LOL. Just imagine if you or I didn't have to spend 8 hours a night sleeping. Imagine how much blogging we could accomplish.

Over the past month I had 8 posts and 2 comments til you popped by this morning. If I could just manage to post every day I would accumulate an average of 7.60416666666667 comments a month. Imagine that.

Anonymous said...

Your blog is right on target, and just the antidote needed to counteract the dozens of "we're screwed" sites out there. Things to look into going forward:

1. Best way to bank energy from intermittent renewables such as wind. Also best ways to distribute it, e.g. wind energy from US midwest to coasts and Canada, solar from US southwest to parts north and east, etc.
2. Best biofuel strategies, taking ERR, land use, and byproducts into account. Ethanol? Butanol? Biodiesel?
3. More on nuclear power, best reactor design, need for breeders, etc.
4. Any solutions to global warming, which is happening no matter what we do.

Anonymous said...

I am interested in comparing the cost of producing wind or solar energy per megawatt to the cost of a mineable oilsands plant-- is that possible?

echo