If wind energy is relatively cheap, but providing reliable power with wind is crushingly expensive, then don’t compete against reliable grid power. Instead, come up with a novel use of unreliable power.

How about propelling an icebreaker?

One would not want to ride a sail-propelled icebreaker, but a modern wind turbine could have a pretty good chance of keeping the passengers comfortable, with a ballast of lead-acid batteries, even in prolonged calms. And if a gale blew up — not too hard — the thrusters could be powered, and through the ice we go.

The outfit named on that page’s masthead — hey, “mast” — did go to another power source, but it was, of course, not wind.

If wind energy is relatively cheap, but providing reliable power with wind is crushingly expensive, then don’t compete against reliable grid power. Instead, come up with a novel use of unreliable power.

The problem with this approach is that the capital cost of whatever equipment you need has to be really low and the value of what you make has to be almost as high as products of reliable energy. I’m drawing a blank on possible applications.

I think you are saying that there could be a niche market for “renewable” mechanical and electric power. Perhaps. But that might bring us back to conflict over public resources. Water power was great if you were running a mill. But not so great if you lived near the same river and wanted electricity. Those in the latter category were more numerous; hence the electric grid.

Renewables, even though they are often more expensive than their alternatives (coal, gas, nuclear, hydro), are actually relatively cheap compared to what they would be if they were more prevalent, precisely because they are usually a small proportion of the electricity grids, and don’t have too worry much about the myriad issues entwined with their intermittancy.

The renewables industry might grow faster if they were applied efficiently: towards novel applications that can efficiently use the discontinuous and highly variable electricity or mechanical power they provide. Right now, renewables industries, if not digging their own graves, then are selling their technological potential short, by near-exclusively pushing the industry towards electrical grid connectivity; an application towards they are less well-suited than nuclear and much of the current competition (coal, gas or hydro).

Too little research is done towards novel uses of the power and electricity provided by renewables. Too much effort is spent trying to push renewables onto the grid.

And this is understandable too: the economic incentives provided by governments are ever-more steering the renewables industry into this less effective direction of grid power generation.

We have nuclear-powered probes examining the outer planets, and yet somehow it’s not the future. Well, there were supposed to be people on board.

Is Europa bigger than Rhea? I’ll have to crack my old astronomy textbooks!

James Greenidge

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/sizing-up-health-impacts-a-year-after-fukushima/?ref=japan

“The panel discussion, at the National Press Club in Washington, is one in a series of events timed to the first anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident at the nuclear plant in March 2011. While the quake and tsunami killed an estimated 20,000 people, radiation has not killed anyone so far, and members of the Health Physics Society, drawn from academia, medicine and the nuclear industry, suggested that the doses were too small to have much effect”.