.
Isn't this heartening, Icarus revisited, almost.
I have already mentioned that when I burn old wood, not often, I generally intone the phrase, Look at all that stored-up sunshine and I have been amazed by how many people do not understand what I'm saying, one MBA believing that coal was made in a Tesco factory. Oh, really, compressed organic matter, like from millions of years ago? That's why it's called fossil fuel? Well, I get that but what's the Sun got to do with it?
The primitives had a better understanding of Creation than do the NewPeople, with apps4brains. There is something delightfully re-connective about this adventure in flight which may make people wonder about other things than cheap flights; it ought to be the case that the Sun provides all our energy requirements, directly, and not through the convoluted media of oil and coal and gas and trees, why doesn't it?
This real adventure which might alter the world unimaginably - the first heavier-than-air craft, flown just a century ago, eventually led to massive jet airline travel and to Sputnik, to the Moon, to Voyager and to Hubble - is wondrous to behold. The size of Solar Impulse compared to its payload is obviously problematic but one hopes not beyond resolution. We must wish them well,
if for no other reason than that they show this grinning oaf for what he is.
if for no other reason than that they show this grinning oaf for what he is.
Bon chance et bon aventure.
18 comments:
Why doesn't it? A good question. However, across East Anglia there are also people arguing that plating over prime agricultural land with pv panels (rather than rapeseed, modern wheat, sugar beet) is not the way to go.
I have a rather old-fashioned view that since we are sitting on coal and C02 is plant food, we should be able to re-arrange the molecules to our advantage if we can only think of how to provide fume-scrubbing. We'll be arguing about the 80s again, but I have never been convinced that fume scrubbing was properly explored.
There is a good deal of facetious sanctimony about energy. My electricity bill has paid for my neighbour, across the bay, to run a sports car, silly old fool, from the proceeds of his windmill and thst greedy tale is repeated across the land, in the guise of ecological benevolence and self sacrifice.
I believe that carbon capture was strangled at birth, mrs woar, in order to further justify Whisky Maggie's vandalism of the coal fields but there will be many reasons fof the carbon impasse, mainly in the form of donations to political parties from whichever carpetbaggers have the biggest bribes funds.
A Phantom writes... Why doesn't it? Because the sunlight falls upon the earth at somewhat less than a kW-and-a-half per square-metre, a bunch of it is absorbed, much of it is the wrong sort of sunlight, it is night half the while, and winter half of the other half, and some of us even live in Orkney and our square-metres are at a disadvantageous angle. So we use ancient trees and such as solar-concentrating devices. Solar harvesting is as yet disappointingly inefficient. It is though a massive amount of energy to take a pot-shot at, so the potential returns of all sorts are huge. (A much more sensibe idea too than paying relatively well-off people to build wildlfie-slaughtering and engineeringly-risible windmills at our expense.)
If you bear in mind that the atmosphere, and the angle, and all of that play hell with the efficiency of the technology, the solar plane is onto something. The earth intercepts but a tiny, petty proportion of the energy that the sun fires out in all directions. If we could find a way of harvesting just a little bit more of that, then storing and perhaps concentrating it, and then sending it somewhere useful, the game would be over. The sending is the big problem BTW but intriguingly, I have seen a large silvery thing floating up in the sky at night and it reflects towards us a share of its sunlight. It's just an idea.
Yeah, don't the moon look good, shining down through the trees?
I remember, way back, being shown a silicon chip, informed of what it could do and being told And it's only this big so's you can connect things to it; I feel the same Primive's awe-ful excitement about this flying, rechargeble triple-A, mr phantom.
Fucked if I know, how to develop it, mirrors, maybe, in orbit, that's for lonesome engineers to sort out, but if we can fly a man across the Pacific on sunlight, then that's a tight connection to my heart, and to the Ancients, builders of stone circles and pyramids.
It's an impressive demonstration of how far solar technology has progressed but we need something cheap and reliable to exploit the millions of square miles of sun-baked desert that are available.
Perovskite cells look interesting because it might be possible to use roll-to-roll manufacturing to produce them on the scale of newsprint.
That's right, mr bhs, I have heard of that, come to think of it. Sort that, sort the population crisis and sort the speed of light barrier to stellar travel and Professor Cox will be wetting himself, atop some dusty mountain. We're the Fishmen and the Sea-Apes, Evolution up the slopes of the sea.........
In a world which contains Michael Gove, these Sun-surfing Frenchmen make me smile.
I'm on the cusp of installing solar. There's an increasing uptake, down here, and I'm at 33 deg south with average 5 hours sun a day. According to calculations, a 5KW system will pay for itself in under 5 years. There is currently a generous subsidy and a feed in tarrif for unused electricity back into the grid. And commercial electricity is only going to get more expensive.
I read that part of the problem in Europe, apart from the latitude in the north, is that the Germans have insisted on banning the cheap Chinese solar panels because they are undercutting their manufacturers. Ironic, n'est pas? The greenies stifling the uptake of green energy.
Living, mr mike, seems easier down there, from what I've seen. I mean the physical stuff, homes and land and roads. I watched oine of those Grand Design Down Under shows and stuff that wouild have you tearing your hair out, here, just didn't seem to exist, neighbours, bureaucracy, costs, those sorts of things. I am often envious. This show was about a seventy-plus widower building a home, round your way, I think, some miles from anywhere, in the vernacular style of sheep-shearing sheds; he and his nephew did most of it, with some parts prefabbed and trucked-in, cost him a half a million dollars but what a place to die. And live meantime. And half a million bucks is not half a million pounds, is it.
My proposed conversion to wind would have cost nearly a hundred grand, that's an awful lot of oil and conventional electricity and as the phantom mongoose remarks, those fucking windmills, they're fucking evil.
I never even bother trying to figure out the Hermanns, people who poke and prod at their stools, of a morning, are beyond my ken.I wionder, in passing, if King Nigel is a convert, via his own hausfrau, to turd-prodding; I think we should be told. Not to mention their concentration camp habits, the Hermanns.
When does the campaign trail commence?
Off in 3 weeks, Mr I. Have been catching up with your friend Mr Bean by way of historical preparation. Hope to send the odd despatch from the trenches when the wife is taking her ablutions.
By the way, for your information a 5KW solar system installed is under $10k (incl subsidy). And its 2 dollars to the pound at present.
It is the systems of subsidies, cross-subsidies, taxes, cross-taxes, grants, feed-in tariffs and carbon levies, and all the other sundry shite that obscures the truth of any of it. The only truth to solar energy is how much is a square metre of solar panel from, say, alibaba and how much electricity will a set produce over a twelve month cycle such as can be expected in Orkney, or Bandit Country or Oz. Multiply out your numbers and see where you are.
Yes, there are all sorts of different panels and efficiency improves daily but you'll only get a proper price if you go direct to China and make like you're buying a T-shirt in a Hanoi market. It is true about the ongoing German fiasco btw. And one of the largest panel factories in China turned out the other day not to be a factory at all. So we must take care when dealing with thieves and hucksters.
The real buy/sell values of electricity is so obscurely a conjured pair of numbers that you'll not know the truth of that either. So while expecting to be stiffed for anything you sell back to the grid, that number will be a tad closer to a real value than any other. It is all a corrupt game of keep the people confused and poor, and some of them dead.
The alert will have noticed the wailing as renewable subsidies start to come under pressure. The game now is to shout that the carbon fuels must "pay the full cost" of what the believers say they have done to us all. Which is made us all immeasurably richer, healthier, and longer-living. Oops.
Ouch. Wish you'd come and talk to ky neighbour, 'cross the bay, Shotgun Johnny. the windmiller whose eco-conscience is so refined he threatens lawful walkers with his twelve bore. I hate those windmilling arseholes.
That's really cruel, mr mike, five grand.
I sometimes feel a passing fondness for the starry-eyed poetry of pseudoscience and one such is the notion that electromagnetic radiation from the sun (especially its flare-ups) can resonate with human consciousness, interact with it somehow. Whatever - as you suggest, the ancients probably had it right, and if anything's worth worshipping it's Big Bulb.
verge.//
If I had a fire I'd throw another coal on it, so I would...
And the stones, here and elsewhere, rings or pyramids, East or West, do indicate a knowledge almost incomprehensibly sophisticated, numerical and technological for a stone age; a specialised and hitherto unkown preoccupation with Above and Beyond, a caste of Knowers, priests by another name. I, too, mr verge, have always thought that if Worship was necessary, then the Sun, which giveth our daily breath, is the most worthy object of a-theistic veneration. Here, in the North, we miss Helios more, during his absence, than do those in the Southlands, and rejoice the more, at his return.
Make a fire, mr sg, in the garden, or in a wild place, and sit around it, maybe with beer or sipping whisky, and watch it spark, flare, blaze and die. The outdoor bonfire, for a succession of which I am always collecting fuel and preparing tinder, is a meditation of my later life, eventually a piece of performance art, only deemed successful if, the next morning there remains only a perfect circle of the finest ash.
Mr Verge: I watch the sun rise every morning over the sea as I play golf. At this time of year, entering our winter, the sun rise is magnificent - if there is a little cloud, the sky is blood red and intense orange, Turneresque.
It was chilly at 6.30 this morning, but once the sun came up it warmed the blood.
Within the confines of the course there are Aboriginal sites and carvings.
Its easy to understand those who worshiped the sun, truly the giver of life in the literal sense.
Sounds right, Mr Mike - so much for a good walk wasted...
verge.//
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