From: Extropian Agro Forestry Ventures Inc. (megao@sk.sympatico.ca)
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 15:21:49 MST
Just a quick off the cuff quip.
What I see as the really limiting factor would be water.
Water has agricultural, residential competing uses.
Land usage for towers is not an issue as there are always scrap,
orphaned sites the size of a big house, which is all a tower really
needs.
Tower alignment to allow minimum interference with crop dusting planes
is alos an issue.
However, waste water from dehydrating agricultural produce, dewatering
sewage and other industrial use water would make excellent feedstock for
hydrogen production.
I see on site electricity as a real asset to the agricultural community
with only excess production put back into the grid.
..MJ
Gary Miller wrote:
> >> Moreover, wind farms are incredibly land intensive. Three newly
> proposed wind farms in West Virginia would occupy 30 to 40 square
> miles but would produce slightly less electricity than a new 265 MW
> gas-fired combined-cycle generating plant, which would occupy a few
> acres. Sallie Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
> Astrophysics, estimates, using very conservative assumptions, that
> producing enough hydrogen with wind power to replace just one-third of
> the vehicles on the road today would require 210,000 square miles. In
> reality, that number would likely be much higher.>> Couldn't these be
> built in the desert where the land has limited use for anything
> else?Couldn't solar arrays be place between the wind mills to increase
> the energy output per acre?Even geothermal could be colocated in the
> same area.All these forms of energy generation could use much of the
> same infrastructure.Plants farther away on the power grid near
> plentiful water could generate the hydrogen.Also isn't the oxygen
> produced as a byproduct by the process also useful in other forms of
> energy production such as the incineration of waste at high
> temperature?Colocation of multiple forms of power generation should
> reduce the cost of each! -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org] On Behalf Of Spudboy100@aol.com
> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 11:54 AM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: Hydrogen as SCAM?
>
>
> http://nationalreview.com/comment/comment-georgia013103.asp
>
> <<The "hydrogen economy" has been promoted for years by
> environmental activists and alternative-energy gurus like
> Amory Lovins. But hydrogen is not a source of energy,
> something which hydrogen advocates either don't understand
> or refuse to acknowledge. Since hydrogen does not exist in
> geological reservoirs it must be extracted from fossil-fuel
> feedstocks or water. The process of extracting hydrogen uses
> energy, which means that using hydrogen is less efficient
> that burning fossil fuels. And if you're worried about
> global warming you certainly don't want to go that route. As
> a recent energy-technology review in Science magazine
> pointed out last November, "Per unit of heat generated, more
> CO2 is produced by making H2 [hydrogen] from fossil fuel
> than by burning the fossil fuel directly." >>
>
>
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