Best Way to Generate Electricity We are beginning to see wind turbines in a lot of different places and in a lot of different countries. The turbines are massive even though from a distance they look small. A normal wind turbine blade is 120 feet long. To accommodate the blades the height of the structure has to be at least 380 feet high or about the height of a 32 story building. Now I am going to tell you something strange. Some startup companies say they can make these devices without blades and it doesn’t matter if the wind blows or not. One Spanish company states they can build these generators without blades, but still need the wind. It is said the devices contain slender wobbling cylinders which do the generation and it is said these devices are less harmful to wildlife and don’t look as bad. There is another perk which seems strange given the blades are missing. The cost to generate electricity is said to be 30 percent less. Here is the killer part of the Spanish device, it has no gears, brakes, bearings or shafts and never needs lubrication. Lastly it is much easier to anchor to the ground without the force of the blades and is far lighter. One company in Germany seems to be going back to the Middle Ages for a solution. They claim they had been able to build special kites which will fly as high as 400 meters, which is 1310 feet high. Personally, I don’t like the idea of filling the sky with hazards to aviation. One drawback is the amount of electricity the kite can generate but the company hopes to improve that. Benjamin Franklin would be very proud of them. We are a water world, even if we don’t realize it, and as such we have the opportunity to use our oceans to generate electricity and I have always believed this was the best type of renewable energy. It doesn’t require huge towers and blades and not even solar cells. Scientists are saying if we set aside 2 percent of the world’s coastlines for ocean generation, we could provide 15 to 20 percent of all the world’s electricity needs today, but there are many companies working on different methods to use the oceans to generate electricity. Ocean water is not the only water which can provide electricity. We get some of our electricity from generators in dams. The problem is only 3 percent of the dams in the United States have electrical generators. All that water power is wasted. That mere 3 percent generates 12 percent of all the power used in the United States. Perhaps if we had generators on all the dams, we could get at least close to 100 percent. If we couldn’t we could make the rest up by using the ocean. What does this show you? I think there is a message here and that is no one is really serious in solving the renewable energy problem. Water power doesn’t produce any toxins and are not like coal burning plants or even those pesky nuclear power plants with their deadly waste products. So why haven’t we done more to create more power generation from dams? It has been said we have about 84,000 of them all over the country. They vary in size of course, so some may not be suitable, but a heck of a lot more would be. We do a lot of things because of politics and sometimes avoiding something which would be helpful for people is done as a political favor to a lobbying company, or to enrich some politician. Building nuclear plants is expensive. The estimated cost for a one gigawatt plant today is about one billion dollars. It is strange but it is very hard to find a comparison between the cost of hydropower and any other power. It is almost like it is a secret. The most I could find without investing all day searching was a statement that hydropower was not only the cheapest but the least polluting and the only drawbacks were it might affect some plants and fish. It was also said it was a very simple way to generate electricity and had the advantage of a compact location. It went on to say it was relatively maintenance free. What more could one want from a power generating plant? Cheap, compact and almost maintenance free sound good to me and again makes me wonder why this avenue had not been pursued further. The power of ocean tides is being wasted. There are plenty of devices for generating electricity which could take advantage of the motion of the oceans. They can be installed away from beaches so swimmers would not have to worry about getting a body part caught in some device. As I said between this and the hydroelectric power generated if we had generators on all or at least most of the dams plus harnessing the tides might just be enough to power this country. Some day every home will be able to generate it own power, but that day is not here yet. There are a few homes today which can do this but they have to rely on solar cells and batteries for storage during the dark hours. While this might work, it is not really ideal. There is some work being done on solar cells to make them able to store energy at night. I know this sounds impossible but the companies involved in developing them claim there is still radiant energy around in the nighttime hours. While it looks today as if solar power will be the way individual home power will go, who knows what technology will come about in the future. The way I see it, it will be important to get off the electrical grid. It is too big a target in war. Nuclear bombs are no longer needed to destroy a country, just some bombs which produce an electromagnetic pulse. These take out all electronics and nothing electronic will work such as your cars, your electric generating stations, and all electronic devices in your home. Aside from this no one would be hurt, but eventually they would suffer and die from lack of food, heat and probably water. I am convinced we are not using our resources in the most efficient manner. If the president is really into green power generation, put more generating stations in the dams which exist. They only depend on the flow of water, the cheapest and most safe way to generate electricity.
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