Category Archives: hydro electric

Are We Going To Die Of Thirst – Two views presented

Posted on by
Reply

I do not usually put up two opinions in one post. These are timely articles so I think it is important to hear both sides. One side basically says we are going to die. The other side says we will have to move ourselves or large amounts of water. You decide.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959

The 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water – like Cape Town

  • 11 February 2018

Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water.

However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about – water scarcity.

Despite covering about 70% of the Earth’s surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh.

Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month of the year. A 2014 survey of the world’s 500 largest cities estimates that one in four are in a situation of “water stress”

According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth.

http://www.straitstimes.com/world/water-why-the-taps-run-dry

Severe water shortages around the world: Why the taps run dry

Published

Feb 13, 2018, 7:30 pm SGT

PARIS (AFP) – The world has abundant freshwater but it is unevenly distributed and under increasing pressure, UN agencies say, as highlighted by the severe shortages in Cape Town.

WATER, WATER ‘EVERYWHERE’

More than 97 per cent of the planet’s water is salty, most of it in the oceans and seas, but there is also a good supply of freshwater.

Every year around 42.8 trillion cubic metres of renewable freshwater circulates as rain, surface water or groundwater, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

This equals 16,216 litres per person per day – four times the amount required in the United States, for example, for personal and domestic consumption, industry and agriculture.

Depending on diet and lifestyle, a person needs between 2,000 and 5,000 litres of water a day to produce their food and meet their drinking and sanitation requirements, the FAO says.

About 60 per cent of the planet’s freshwater reserves is locked in the Antarctic.

:}

They don’t even agree on how much water we have. Go there and read a lot. More next week.

:}

The Swiss Endorse Renewable Energy – If a land locked mountainous country can do it

Posted on by
Reply

Then anybody can do it. Really, think about it. They are a really affluent society, who have never directly been involved in a war. They are Bankers to the world. They have no incentives what so ever. Yet here they are, for the good of the world. They deserve a postcard from the world that says, JOB WELL DONE!

https://www.thelocal.ch/20170521/swiss-vote-for-gradual-nuclear-phaseout-preliminary-results/

Swiss vote for gradual nuclear phaseout

AFP
news@thelocal.ch
21 May 2017
15:10 CEST+02:00
The Swiss voted on Sunday in favour of a massive overhaul of the country’s energy system by gradually replacing the power from its ageing nuclear reactors with renewable sources.
A full 58.2 percent of Swiss voters supported the shift, according to a final tally after Sunday’s referendum, with only four of the country’s 26 cantons voting “no”.
“This is a historic day for the country,” Green Party parliamentarian Adele Thorens Goumaz told public broadcaster RTS.
“Switzerland will finally enter into the 21st century when it comes to energy.”
The move has been in the making since shortly after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed in the March 2011 tsunami disaster, when the Swiss government decided to gradually close its nuclear plants.
Instead, it aims to increase reliance on hydraulic power as well as renewables like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.

:}

Go there and read. More next week.

:}

Springfield Needs Another Lake – Like it needs a hole in the head

Posted on by
Reply

There are so many problems with Hunter Lake, like it would turn into a mudflat during the summer or the need to plant 1000s of tree in Springfield if it was build. The biggest reason not to build is that Springfield doesn’t need it.

http://www.sj-r.com/article/20151012/NEWS/151019864

City of Springfield touts second lake as potential backup for region, including Chatham

By Jamie Munks, Staff Writer

Posted Oct. 12, 2015 at 5:52 PM
Updated Oct 12, 2015 at 10:32 PM

Springfield officials are emphasizing to permitting agencies that the city’s long-proposed backup water supply, Hunter Lake, could serve the entire region during a severe drought.

Mayor Jim Langfelder and other city officials met last week with representatives from the three agencies that Springfield needs permit approval from before the second lake could be built.

“If a drought hit, we’d be a regional source of water,” Langfelder said Monday.

Langfelder and Ted Meckes, City Water, Light and Power’s water division manager, met with representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, following the Springfield City Council’s reaffirmation vote in July of a commitment to move forward with the Hunter Lake projec

 

:}

Go there and THINK. More next week.

:}

Wave Power – It could crash through traditional power sources

Posted on by
Reply

Attempts to generate electricity from tidal and river flows has had some success. People that tried to generate electricity from ocean waves have struggled. They may be on the edge of real change and I find that to be exciting.

http://qz.com/634989/the-promise-of-ocean-wave-power-has-enticed-and-eluded-engineers-for-40-years/

sea change

The promise of ocean wave power has enticed, and eluded, engineers for 40 years

It’s 1974. A man stands on the Scottish coast and stares out to sea. His dark hair is ruffled by the wind, while his mind is fixed on a new, pressing problem: How can all the teeming, crashing power of the ocean be harnessed to produce electricity, in a world that has just discovered it can’t rely on cheap oil forever?

That man, and his colleagues, are still searching for the answer.

For four decades, the problem of how to create an economically viable business producing power from waves has fascinated a specialized group of engineers, many of whom are concentrated around the sea-beaten coast of Scotland. Inventors have created all sorts of strange and wonderful devices to coax energy out of the water; investors have poured millions of pounds into the effort.

The problem is arguably one of the most perplexing in energy production. And maybe, just maybe, the answer is getting closer.

Seeking lovely, smooth lines

:}

Go there and read. More next week.

:}

Berta Caceres – She was murdered for the environment

Posted on by
Reply

Sure everybody in power down there says it was a robbery gone bad but she was assassinated. I mean the cops that were suppose to be guarding her were guarding the wrong house blocks away in another neighborhood. Damn those damn dams.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/gunmen-murder-honduran-environmentalist-leader-160303181349473.html

Politics

Honduras: Environmentalist Berta Caceres shot dead

Berta Caceres, who won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, has been shot dead at her home in the town of La Esperanza.

| Politics, Human Rights, Environment, Latin America

Honduran environmentalist leader and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize Berta Caceres has been shot dead at her home in the town of La Esperanza.

Caceres was killed early on Thursday by two assailants who broke into her home, a member of her group, the Indian Council of People’s Organizations of Honduras, said.

“Honduras has lost a brave and committed social activist,” fellow activist Tomas Membreno said in a statement.

Caceres, a mother of four, led opposition to a proposed dam on the Gualcarque river, considered sacred by the Lencas.

She had previously complained of receiving death threats from police, soldiers and local landowners because of her work.

Activist Carlos Reyes described the assassination “a political crime by the government”.

:}

Go there read. More next week.

:}

Hydroelectric Power Is Under Assault – Soon it could be dead

Posted on by
Reply

As this article makes clear, we need dams. In my mind they are a trade off we can live with, and the excuse that it is just unprofitable to repair them is disgusting. Still, there are environmentalists who disagree.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-of-africas-biggest-dams-is-falling-apart

One of Africa’s Biggest Dams Is Falling Apart

By

The new year has not been kind to the hydroelectric-dam industry. On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world’s largest reservoir, was in “dire” condition. An unprecedented drought threatens to shut down the dam’s power production, which supplies nearly half the nation’s electricity.

The news comes as more and more of the biggest hydroelectric-dam projects around the world are being cancelled or postponed. In 2014, researchers at Oxford University reviewed the financial performance of two hundred and forty-five dams and concluded that the “construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.” Other forms of energy generation—wind, solar, and miniature hydropower units that can be installed inside irrigation canals—are becoming competitive, and they cause far less social and environmental damage. And dams are particularly ill-suited to climate change, which simultaneously requires that they be larger (to accommodate the anticipated floods) and smaller (to be cost-effective during the anticipated droughts).

:}

Go there and read. More next week.

:}

National Geographic Climate Change Issue – It doesn’t get any better than this

Posted on by
Reply

The November issue of National Geographic magazine is totally devoted to Climate Change. Please read the whole thing, but here is as small taste.

 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/climate-change/germany-renewable-energy-revolution-text

How Do We Fix It?

Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future

The European nation’s energy revolution has made it a leader in replacing nukes and fossil fuels with wind and solar technology.

By Robert Kunzig
Photographs by Luca Locatelli
Published October 15, 2015

Hamburg knew the bombs were coming, and so the prisoners of war and forced laborers had just half a year to build the giant flak bunker. By July 1943 it was finished. A windowless cube of reinforced concrete, with seven-foot-thick walls and an even thicker roof, it towered like a medieval castle above a park near the Elbe River. The guns protruding from its four turrets would sweep Allied bombers from the sky, the Nazis promised, while tens of thousands of citizens sheltered safely behind its impenetrable walls.

Coming in at night from the North Sea just weeks after the bunker was finished, British bombers steered for the spire of St. Nikolai in the center of the city. They dropped clouds of metallic foil strips to throw off German radar and flak gunners. Targeting crowded residential neighborhoods, the bombers ignited an unquenchable firestorm that destroyed half of Hamburg and killed more than 34,000 people. Towering walls of fire created winds so strong that people were blown into the flames. Church bells clanged furiously.

The spire of St. Nikolai, which somehow survived, stands today as a mahnmal—a memorial reminding Germany of the hell brought by the Nazis. The flak bunker is another mahnmal. But now it has a new meaning: An urban development agency (IBA Hamburg) and the municipal utility (Hamburg Energie) have transformed it from a powerful reminder of Germany’s shameful past into a hopeful vision for the future.

:}

Go there and read 1000 pages. More next week.

:}

Reliable Tidal Power – If we do this right we may avoid global warming

Posted on by
Reply

I am not kidding. Can you imagine the impact that a couple of thousand of these power plants could have. Not only that but the highest tidal differences are in the places where the impact of global warming will be the greatest.

http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/poetry-in-motion-power-plant-will-use-ocean-tides-to-power-155k-homes/

Poetry in Motion: Power Plant Will Use Ocean Tides to Power 155K Homes

by Terry Turner –

This planned power plant in Wales may look like the Guggenheim Museum but its benefits far outweigh the beauty: it will use the rise and fall of ocean tides to generate enough renewable electricity to power 155,000 homes for 120 years.

When completed, the structure will produce electricity enough to displace more than a quarter million barrels of oil each year— while leaving virtually no carbon footprint.

Power plants have been generating electricity using the tides since 1966, but the Swansea project is the first to employ a radically new method of harnessing the natural forces. The secret lies in its nearly six-mile-long barrier wall that will enclose a huge amount of water in an artificial “tidal lagoon”.

The lagoon captures and holds seawater at high tide. As the tide goes out, water in the 4.5 square mile lagoon will be as much as 27 feet higher than the water outside its walls. This tremendous pressure will be routed through 26 turbines, rushing out to sea until the water level equalizes on both sides of the lagoon. At high tide, the flow is reversed, keeping the sea out of the lagoon until it reaches maximum height, then letting the water rush through the turbines again until it fills up the lagoon.

:}

Go there and read. More next week barely.

:}

Wave Power Comes Back In A Big Way – Or should that be wave

Posted on by
Reply

No real comments here except the sponsor is the government and the number of participants are huge.

http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/2015/07/more-than-90-teams-enter-u-s-doe-s-wave-energy-prize-program.html

More than 90 teams enter U.S. DOE’s Wave Energy Prize program

WASHINGTON, D.C.
07/08/2015
By Michael Harris
Associate Editor

 


Wave Energy Project

The U.S. Department of Energy has accepted 92 teams from industry and academia to compete in its Wave Energy Prize program that seeks to encourage the development of wave energy conversion devices.

The program, which was introduced in April by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the National Hydropower Association’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., is a design-build-test competition that supports the department’s goal of making marine hydrokinetic generation more competitive with traditional forms of production.

Teams will be competing for a total prize purse that totals more than $2 million.

“We’re extremely pleased with both the quantity of teams and the diversity of participants reflecting broad expertise from so many established companies in the ocean energy space, universities, and newcomers to the industry,” said Julie Zona, Wave Energy Prize administrator.

Since registration for the program closed June 30, teams are working on the first requirement for the prize — a technical submission describing their concepts, which is due later this month. A panel will then select up to 20 of the top teams by mid-August, with those groups invited to build a 1/50th scale model for small-tank testing.

:}

Go there and read. More next week.
:}

Warren Buffet Loves Renewables – Shouldn’t you

Posted on by
Reply

When Warren speaks everyone listens. So for this Thanksgiving buy a little stock in a renewable energy company and enjoy…

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/27/when-it-comes-to-renewable-energy-buffetts-not-blo.aspx

Here’s What Warren Buffett Thinks About Renewable Energy

By | More Articles
November 27, 2013

“Rule No. 1: Never Lose Money. Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1.”
–Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is famous for both his legendary investing acumen, and his simple, straightforward investing advice. For years, alternative energy has been viewed as non-competitive with traditional energy production from coal and other fossil fuels, making them money-losers for most investors.

Buffett’s own Berkshire Hathaway  (NYSE: BRK-B  ) subsidiary MidAmerican Energy is heavily investing in alternative energy sources, including both wind and solar. And considering that MidAmerican produces more than $1.2 billion in annual “ammo” for Buffett’s “elephant gun,” the story on renewables is clearly changing.

Should investors follow the Oracle into “green energy” to make more greenbacks? Let’s take a look.

MidAmerican has been investing in wind energy for a decade, and is easily the largest producer of wind energy in North America; wind actually accounts for more than 30% of the company’s total energy generation capacity. Current projects will move the total to almost 40%.

MidAmerican has relied on both General Electric  (NYSE: GE  ) and Vestas  (NASDAQOTH: VWDRY  ) for wind turbines for different projects. A large project in California, which deployed more than 300 megawatts of power generating capacity, featured 100 Vestas wind turbines. GE’s turbines, on the other hand, are the most commonly used in MidAmerican’s fleet

:}

Go there and read.  More next week. When it is my birthday, YAA.

:}