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Showing posts from July, 2009

Wind Power is Broken - How to Fix It

Any advocate of "wind power" should go through the “Electrical Energy, Science & You” presentation by John Droz, which very capably dissects the problems of wind power . However, many of the conclusions derive from lack of a way to store wind energy, and I’m not yet convinced that is a dead end. Regardless of the validity of the CO2 global warming hypothesis, we’re now politically on a path to CO2 reduction, so it makes sense to do it as economically as possible. Since there is also a lot of pressure to use wind power, we should also see if we can overcome as many as possible of the (quite reasonable) objections in the presentation, finding a way to make wind technology affordable and efficient enough to be picked up even in developing nations that are rapidly expanding their electricity production. Rather than generating electricity and distributing it, wind power could be used locally to generate storable, transportable, useful products. While production would va